Latest on Sprite Fright

This week I wrapped up the sculpting of the bird by addressing last feedback notes and testing the wing shapes and placement. Afterwards I retopologized the bird which is almost done. Next week I'll be able to move on to other animals.

It was finally time for Ellie's hair to be groomed. I transferred the hairdo from the 3D World Cover we did a while ago to her new geometry. After that I filled the missing pieces and continued with the 'cut' variant of her hair. I also managed to do some proof of concept smoke sim.

I've been going a bit back and forth with testing rigs, blocking some shots, revisiting old shots etc. Ellie's facial rig was ready for testing and it is working very well. Rex had some iterations I'm going to test this week. Next to that, I spend an afternoon exploring 'fire' by using the KeyMesh add-on to create a stylized 'sculpted' fire that could blend well with the design of the movie.

Most of the week was focused on Ellie's denim jacket with added collar. Collar silhouette is not final. A shape key was added as the solution to keep the collar hidden and out of the way when Ellie wears her neck handkerchief for most of the movie. Ellie's fanny pack is in progress. And Rex's eyes received iris perspective corrective shapes.

This week I dedicated some more time outside to the Geometry node project and specifically worked on some of the use-cases that we are going to use for the short directly. But I was also doing a bunch of technical tests of creating fire effects with mostly procedural methods and started transferring Ellie's shading to the new topology.

Ellie hair, Ellie face, Ellie body, with so much more Ellie on the horizon!

During this week I continued working on the logbridge shot, I added the other characters and started to work on Ellie's performance

This week I started out with finishing up some leftover shading tasks and general polishing on Rex. Then I picked up the Bird character for some initial shading tests.

Beside some maintenance work on all characters, this week Ellie's face rig is "finished" and ready for feedback.

This week I kept exploring sprite village and how sprites live and influence nature around them with a little bit of gardening. Also I explored how salt melts sprite faces off!

This week I continued set dressing the Mushroom Grove set, cleaning up the arrangement, colors and scattering of nature assets.

Updated Rex with new eyeball geometry, reshaped Rex's shoes, Ellie eyebrows topology addressed, Ellie clothing retopology in progress.

I spend a couple days on other tasks like Blender Feedback and uploading Blender Cloud content but the rest of the time I sculpted the bird to a state that its pretty much final and can go into retopology. This also included an alternative shape with the wings closed and some basic expressions we need for the film. These sculpts and expressions were then used for discussions between me and Simon & Met for how to solve shading, grooming and rigging issues.

During this week I mostly work on the animation on Rex walking over the log

At the start of the week I cleaned up and shared more production files, in this case the expression test sculpting files. Apart from that I got accustomed to and started working on the environment asset library and one of our first sets, the mushroom grove. The main focus here was to simplify the plants we already have, polish them up and create more variations to use for set dressing.

This week I mainly worked on figuring out the skin shading for our characters. I also looked into other shading details like adding displacement to Rex's sweater vest. A bit more of my time was dedicated to the geometry nodes project that I am also involved in.

My week was split halfway between setting up the rendering for our Rex animation tests and more hair grooming on Rex. Since the set-up of shots is slightly different using the new override system, it posed its own unique challenges that needed to be sorted out.

Reviewed all character eyes and implemented a standard. Ellie's clothing in progress. Retopologized the sole.

Last week I started animating on the very first production shot of the movie :D !! It's exciting to getting started on a fairly simple shot, but at the same time challenging to push the facial expressions of Rex burping. I've got to admit, I had to drink a few beers to dive into the character and make sure these burps are accurately represented. :P

What happens to a butterfly when it flies over a BBQ grill? Concept art! And some explorations of sprite village and elder sprite's tree.

A huge chunk of this week was spent troubleshooting a wide variety of things on Rex, CloudRig, even Blender itself. But the main goal was to make progress on Ellie's face rig, which is getting there!

During these last weeks I worked on a small animation trying to introduce Rex

During this week I prepared all the latest sculpting files for the cloud since all character sculpts are now final and approved. More tweaks and updates were made to the comparative expression sheets to put a final stamp on them as well and have everything ready for further tests in the animation. Most of the week I worked on the animal lineup by blocking the first iterations of them so that the general proportions and design can be judged and approved before moving on to sculpt them in detail.

Hair! Rex is our first character to be completely modeled, so this week my task was to start styling his hair. After wrapping up some environment modeling tasks, I also worked on the look development lighting setup we can use to compare and unify the characters' shading.

Last week I revisited the animation dialogue test I started a while ago with Rex. Now that the facial rig is in a solid state I was able to animate the facial features including lipsync and expressions. This is a great way to explore Rex's personality and test if the rig is production ready. This will also give us insights on whether to animate the shots on 1s or 2s. Which version do you prefer?

Completed retopology of Ellie's hair, body, trousers. Added 'iris grow' and 'iris shrink' shape keys to Rex's eyes and Ellie's eyes. Retopology of remaining clothing pieces in progress.

One post-final round of polish for Rex at the start of the week before diving into rigging the freshly retopo'd face of Ellie! Starting with some long-overdue scripting to make my life easier.

This week I mostly spent integrating the grooming file into our character pipeline to allow Andy to smoothly start his work on grooming Rex's hair. Check out the video where I explain and demo this process further.

This week was entirely dedicated to this concept painting of the kids meeting elder sprite exploring color contrast, light and shading both of the kids and the forest assets.