For me this week was quite productive: Both Jerrica and Florent visited our studio, so we had a lot of time to discuss aspects of our brush rendering style as well as character design decisions. I worked mainly on the brush details on the Mikassa test. We really wanted to push the detail further along to get a better idea of how much detail we can put into the models.

The main chunk of my week was taken up by the Geometry Nodes workshop that was happening, since this was the week that both Jacques and Hans were with us at the HQ in Amsterdam. Other than that it was also the week that Florent was here and Jerrica for part of it. So it was busy just in terms of meetings. But I did manage to also squeeze in some time for RnD on the brush strokes, testing additional texturing, trying them out on an existing animation test and experimenting with fake specular highlights.

This week I've been working on storyboarding seq 14 and 16, giving them a clean pass and getting them ready to be used in the edit

This week I've been tasked to start thumbnailing the opening scene of the movie. This has been changed quite a bit since the beginning and it was useful to see the sequence visualized for the first time. Next to that i also wrapped sequence 12, which contains Mikassa struggling upwards to leave her abyss. This is still an ongoing conversation since the role of the whale in this version is debatable.

Continued wrapping up the sculpting while the essential body retopology is being done.

Updated the previs/storyboard for scenes 15 and 17.

This week I continued storyboarding for Gold, visualizing the ideas from Jerrica and hand them over to her in order to put them into the edit. This sequence is called 'rock bottom' where Mikassa has hit literally rock bottom, but gets inspired by the whale to lift herself up again and put her broken pieces back together.