Latest on Project Gold

This week I spent more time on experimenting with the different ways of implementing some additional brush stroke jittering to add more life to the picture and merge the style better with the ocean. This needed to be implemented in all the assets and shots and can now be tweaked on different levels for each individual shot.

Most of my time this week was spent on setting up a workflow that lets us paint over every single render with the geo nodes brush stroke tools AND in a non-destructive way. I made a bunch of scripts and a hook for our shot builder to enable this process. I've also uploaded a render of all the sequences with Simon's brush jittering effects.

The last week before going to Annecy for the film festival was all about wrapping up shots, so most of my work was about doing final fixes and polishing. Besides that there was a more major part of the FX work missing, which was doing another pass on the waves rolling onto the beach in the last shot.

The week after Annecy! The past weeks we scrambled to get as many final renders together as possible to showcase on the Blender booth. As for lighting: all the scenes got updates, tweaks and fixes. This week I separated out the comp from each lighting file and created all the comp files for the whole showcase. In the case of 230_sinking and some other sequences I even managed to do a first comp refinement pass. More to come!

This was a short week for me, but I managed to finalize some more clouds and create some paintovers for the sailing sequence and for the lighting in the Abyss.

Since we want to get a short edit of shots done for the Annecy Festival, I did a lot of small lighting passes to get things as final as possible. The biggest chunk of the week was spent on polishing the set/ground for the abyss.

This week I mainly worked on finalizing the ocean FX in the storm sequence, which you can see in Andy's production log. One big part of that was adding water spray to the wave crests in the direction of the wind, which adds a lot to the look of the stormy ocean. Other than that I was putting out a lot of fires in back and forth with the developers and setup up tests for moving brush strokes to emphasize the painterly look.

This week I kept working the sailing sequence skies, added some more simple animations to the clouds.

I tried polishing most of 260_return this week: The floating water particles finally got separated into their own render pass to allow for camera motion blur. I also added painterly light streaks to break up the CG smoothness of the volumetric beams. The sailing shots from the beginning and the storm sequence got some minor updates to bring them closer to the finish line!

I spent most of my time this week going over all the shots that need some ocean FX for the interaction with the boat and additional foam on the surface. There is some more iteration that needs to be done and a a few shots that are still missing, but it's getting there!