Latest on Sprite Fright

The last character tasks for me were wrapped up. I did and finished the sculpt and retopology of the chunky snail live on YouTube. The rest of the animal characters were retopologized as well and are ready for further rigging & shading. To put a nice bow on top I am also uploading all the .blend files for the characters that I created.

The work on the "Whack-a-mole" set continues. I detailed the tree trunks and joined the roots to them. The trees are now set up with branches and a lower canopy (only modeled what is seen from the camera perspective). Some assets have already been scattered and there is preliminary shading, but that's the plan for the coming week(s)!

I worked on designing the spider webs and the general mood and composition of the set.

Continuing the previous week's timelapse of Sprite's head and torso, and Sprite's eyes the week before last, this week concludes Sprite's retopology with a 9-part timelapse series finale.

This week I integrated the color library I showed last week into the shaders of the characters, did a first shading pass on our snail character and rendered out Rik's pose for Ellie. Other than that I also spent some time on fixing some pipeline related issues and finishing up a nice sample file for geometry nodes.

Last week I started on a test shot with Ellie. This shot will ultimately end up in the movie, however the voice of Ellie is still a temporary one. But in order to find her character I found it's a good time to see her moving and acting so we all get a sense of who she is and who she could be. Next to that I tested a bunch of animal rigs, including the spider that will be cute in the beginning and evil towards the end.

this week I worked on some bird shots, trying to define the movement

This week was full of miscellanea like some snail feedback, vicky hair particle troubleshooting, pipeline addon troubleshooting, boring paperwork and other fun stuff, but most importantly, I rigged a li'l Spider!

For this week I sculpted the rest of the animals. Only very little work needs to be done anymore so most of the animals can go into retopology. I also made a first stream on Thursday to show my sculpting process and a bit of behind the scenes on the production.

I've been working on the sprite village concept, finally moving into color and tested how we can make our very green sprites stand out in a very green setting.

This week I started blocking out the set for the showdown between Rex, Victoria and the Sprites and rendered the sculpted and simulated sire tests.

Sprite retopology in progress, completed head and torso, includes a timelapse.

Besides some technical problem solving regarding facial rigs, I had time to test the 'Yellow Wagtail'. A beautiful bird that can be found in the southern parts of England and also happens to have caught a significant role in the film ;). Then lastly I posed some characters for promotion material.

Last week I was wrapping up transferring all the temporary shading to the new Ellie topology, as there was still some geometry to UV unwrap. Also I extended our color library for all the character's colors and some new features.

The most important character gets a rig: Mister Snail. I can't wait to see what sort of adventures he will get up to in this beautiful snail-based shortfilm about a snail.

Mainly I worked on the retopology of the snail this week but I also spent a lot of time editing and rendering out more walkthrough videos from working on the Snail.

This week I jumped back and forth between scattering assets inside the mushroom grove set and fire tests.

This week I could finally focus some time on actually transferring the shading data on Ellie's new topology. There is still some more work to do wrap her shading up, because there were also a bunch of other things popping up. For example, I made some general shader tweaks for Eevee, particle hair and helped Rik more with his sculpted fire tests.

Completed eyes on both Sprite and Elder Sprite (includes a timelapse). Sprite's retopology in progress. Addressed request on Ellie’s fannypack. Deleted hidden inner geometry on Ellie’s jacket, boots, and handkerchief.

During this week I had to make an animation to try the different fire effect in movement, so we went for a Sprite dancing

I started the week by adding poses of Rex to the library. Next to that we continued exploring the possibilities of 'stylized' fire. In this case I was asked to animate 'drawn' fire and attach it to the animation test made by Pablo Fournier. Check the progress here of what steps I took to create the fire.

Ellie's rig got a lot of bells and whistles this week. Their sound really won't help with hiding from those little green dudes.

This week in rigging: Implemented first round of feedback on Ellie's body, some potentially final improvements to Rex's face rig, and got started on the Bird!

This week for me was a bunch of putting out fires in terms of pipeline, but also putting on fires to render out the fire tests we worked on in the previous week to have a comparative preview, together with Andy. Other than that there was some more Ellie shading going on in the background and a bit of geometry nodes for me, as always.

For the sculpting process of the snail I took the time to record and commentate the entire process to give more insight into my workflow and some behind the scenes on the creation process of the snail, the animal character lineup and previous finished characters in general. The .blend file and final results can also be found on the Asset Progression folders as always.

I spend most of the week setting up the fire comparisons together with Simon. Much of the work was debugging why files don't work on the farm and transferring the fire simulation into a setting which let's us compare the different techniques and make a judgement on which animation and effects style we will go for in this film.

Last week I continued to work on Ellie's facial expressions while going back and forth together with the rigging department improving the rigs where needed. Next to that I did some adjustments to the 'camping test shot' by blocking out the other characters. I'll revisit that shot once we have some proper rig updates on Jay, Victoria and Phil.

Revised collar on denim jacket, created two versions of her fannypack, retopologized her alternate hair cut, and created iris perspective corrective shapes. Ellie is finalized and ready for the next steps; rigging, surfacing, grooming.

This week I kept exploring sprite village after we decided to give the sprites a bit more craftiness and then I switched to designing versions of our characters beaten up by the environment.