Production Logs

I worked on polishing the body rigs and testing some of the tech we want to use for deforming the characters' mouths.

Created a mockup interior rocket set and mocked up some of the shots, using the characters (with preliminary rigs).

This week I had more time to work on Pet Projects with a focus on the improvised wings together with Vivien and Rik. After several iterations we felt like the base construction should be functional for modeling and animation and test different setups.

This week I mostly churned out prop designs and drawovers, because we got Beau and Julien working on modeling those. Creating some guides for edges and where colored lines go is important now because some props might not get a detailed design before I leave for a longer vacation.

I've been chipping away making storyboards for the film. It's a continuous loop of drawing drawing and more drawing, putting it into the edit, refining refining refining and concluding that it works or it simply doesn't. Here you'll find some snapshots of the movie in storyboard format.

During this week I've been working on giving feedback to the different character rigs and models, also because the dog rig was kinda ready I started to do some animation test based on a shot of the movie

I wrapped up more work on the main characters modeling. I worked further on prop modeling and size relationships.

During this weeks I've been working on giving feedback on the rigs of the characters, for that I did a lot of poses trying to "break" the rig, also I did a small run test.

This week I focused on helping further with poses and had meetings about the character models, layout and shading. Other than that I explored the wings of our space shuttle that get created on the fly (ha).

I finally also joined the team to work on pet projects at the end of the week! I started out with doing some shading tests, specifically looking into how we could handle outlines in a good way. This will continue in the next week as well.

I worked on retopology and cleanup for all the characters to hand over my work to rigging and shading completely. This involved going through some animation feedback and tricky design decisions.

I spent most of the week refactoring our Asset Pipeline Config, which is the code responsible for merging various blend file data from different files to create our final, merged character files. Beside that, I made sure the ShotBuilder add-on works with our production and iterated more on the dog and cat rigs with constant feedback from Pablo.

I continued to address feedback on the main characters retopology. Apart from that I started working on the chicken character. (Also many many meetings :D)

This was a jolly good, mixed bag of a week! There was some drawings to further define the chicken's design and expressions, some prop designs, some dog poses to figure out how he and his costume should behave themselves in animation and also we finally got some layout tests that I did drawovers for.

A lot of iteration on the dog rig (particularly the spine), some fixing of the asset pipeline, added new features to CloudRig, and made an initial rig of the cat. And took a couple days off for a long weekend! :3

Worked on the main character retopology. The dog is relatively finished and the cat is clsoe to follow. The .blend files are accessible now for download.

During this weeks I worked on some grease pencil vfx, just to check if it is a possibility to use them on the pets project, in this case I animated some smoke and dust

This week we explored various design aspects of the rocket. The placement of the hatches, the use of pipes inside and the windshield design. Also added more props using geo nodes to create more variations.

This week I was fully focused on story-boarding and enhancing the story from beginning to end. Adding new boards, alternative beats that improve or disrupt the story. Its a puzzle that we try to solve as good as possible. Here's a little snippet of the current beginning (no audio included at this point).

I did one final GeoNode experiment before getting an early model of the Dog character and slapping a rig on it as quick as possible so animators can start playing with something. I also worked a bit on CloudRig, and on the asset pipeline, to make it not fail with errors due to recent Blender changes.