Production Logs

This was the final week for us working on the movie and I actually spent only Monday fixing some of the leftover issues we had in individual shots to get rid of popping lines and artifacts. Final polishing only! Other than that I spent a lot of time together with Demeter and Nick at a whiteboard in the workshop to improve our asset pipeline.

This week I've mostly focused on bringing the final render sequences (which previously were only accessible in mp4 video form for faster playback) into the edit. Simon and I re-rendered many shots which got animation tweaks from Rik and Pablo and fixed numerous small errors. The sequences you see here are all rendered from the final EXR output. It's a wrap!

The biggest change that happened this week was in scene 050_improvise: We decided to add a reflection of the red blinking lights to the windshield (to make the blue of the sky blend more into the shot) This meant augmenting and re-rendering over 10 shots! We also did numerous very small tweaks and fixes in the entire movie. A lot of shots have more painted detail in them, lighting continuity is much better, animation got tweaked and hopefully there are less errors in the movie!

This week I wrapped up my tasks that were left to do for FX and addressed a bunch of smaller improvements and fixes that there wasn't any time for previously. Now we are in a pretty good spot to just do some final polishing and call the visual side of things done next week!

(written by Fiona) As Vivien's week was short before going on vacation, she focused her efforts in giving final notes on the lighting, with multiple paintovers to help. With Rik they also worked on the title design.

Lighting is nearing completion, so this week we spent all our effort on finishing scenes 050, 060 and 070!

My final full week on Pet Projects! Most of it was spent working on the title card, paintovers for lighting and also wrapping up all the cloud matte paintings and gathering all the little nitpicks for the Could-Be-Better list.

I spent most of the week on adding more of the FX. This time it was mostly the dust/smoke FX for the ending scene with the crash.

The first two scenes are wrapped, so we started moving our efforts into finalizing 030_launch and 040_downwards as well. I managed to address some very small notes here and there and even found the time to add some scribble detail in some of the closeups (when the dog is pulling strings) in 050_improvise. It's slowly coming together!

This week I fixed some issues and addressed feedback on the matte painting setups. The cloud for transitioning between two ealy shots is also done and works.

Most of this week I spent on finally finalizing a bunch of FX shots with the exhaust smoke of the rocket. Other than that the rocket's improvised wings needed a shading pass and a whole bunch of smaller things needed to be fixed or adjusted.

well! animation is almost finish!!! we are wrapping up seq 050 and 060

We're hard at work completing and refine shots/assets at this stage of the production.

This week I continued to light shots in 040_downward and 050_improvise. To finalize 010_intro, Vivien provided the final clipboard drawing which I integrated into the prop rig. For 050, the blinking red lights could finally be animated, Beau set up a bone in the rocket interior rig, which can be animated and in turn can be set up to drive all the lights in the shot files. I also went into the set to define the material and outline colors of the light bulbs and have them properly switched by the rig.

This week I wrapped up my work on the sky sets and matte painting 3D setups. All shots that need clouds do now have them.

And we are back! Animation team had some holiday (except Mack Bo) for the past weeks, but we came back full of energy to continue animating. All sequences have already animated shots and we only have a few left to finish all!!!!! Also this last week was the last for Mack Bo, was super to have him working with us and I hope we will have him on board soon! From now on is just Rik and me animating, so wish us luck!!!!

In the beginning of the week I wrapped up my work on the material for the Blender 3.6 release with an introduction video and some small demo files. Then I did a bunch of fixes and small adjustments in shading and jumped back into FX. The smoke FX are further along, but do need a bit more work next week.

This week I continued work on the cloud matte paintings, some smaller ones even got wrapped up. Other than that I finally got around to the clipboard drawings and as usual some paintover for lighting and fx and a final one for the wingcolors of the rocket. Not much left to do on this one!