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After some weeks of absence I am working on wrapping up the last tasks of Einar. The retopology is finished and the last design sculpts have been completed for baking. Facial shapes and clothing shapes are in full progress and being polished for rigging & shading.

The last couple of weeks I've been working on a mix of hair styling for Einar and detailing the body of the security robot. To test the look and feel of the film (and also eevee) I made a quick and dirty test render of one of the opening shots.

This week I started doing a shading pass on the robot arm. Nothing is quite final yet, but I added the base shading setup, created some tilable textures and utility nodegroups, baked down a bunch of the base maps and started texture painting. There need to be more details and signs of wear/age but it's getting there.

this week i worked on some shots on the sequence 060 fight

This week was mostly about preparing the scrapyard and hut files for shading. Things like removing old models, checking the topology/modifier stack, and eventually unwrapping. And Einar can sit now with this folding chair!

I started finally doing actually shading work for Heist. For a start I did shading for Einar's pipe wrench and spanner props to figure out/get used to the proper shading pipeline I will use. I also started preparing the geometry of Einar's robot arm for shading which I will start with the coming week.

This week I gave the first sequence a second pass on animation trying to define it more, also I made a hand animation test to check the deformation of the mesh

I went further in retopologizing the key body objects and reprojecting sculpted details onto them.

This week I did a quick test groom using the new hair tools. I also started modeling the security door that Einar pries open with the car jack and also the outside fence of the factory that appears in two shots. The robotic arm is now finally part of the Einar character file.

I took Rik's blinking test animation and made it ready for rendering using the shading test and Andy's groom from a while ago.

This week I mainly focused on wrapping up the lowest detail outfit sculpting necessary for a retopology. Some details still need to be worked out but it's overall done.

This week was about creating candles for Einar's hut to be scattered around. Also continuing on the ceiling and walls, thinking about the construction and how Einar could have built this using various materials.

This week I worked on Einar's eyes.

This week was about experimenting with photogrammetry workflow and working on the roof and interior of Einar's hut. Setting up an improvised photo studio in the recording room to scan props. The initial idea was to add a turntable setup for efficient and consistent results. For this technique you need to mask the background so that the algorithm can reconstruct the 3D model better. Or walk around the subject, which can be tricky due to the lack of space and variance in light/shadow. The turntable method requires a tweak in the metadata exported from Blender to possibly work. I chose the "walking around the subject with a tripod" technique to create a data set which worked, as seen in the images.

This week I implemented the system I prepared for the displacement of Einar's face to blend the right shapes according to the shapekey system. So now it's actually being used by the rig and functional.

There have been a few additions and adjustments to the retopology. This called for an update to the facial shapes and UV map as well.