Latest on Project Gold

My goal for this week was to adjust all the lighting of scene 100_transfomed and do a first crappy pass of 030_sinking.

Last week was mainly spent again on making the shards work properly. We moved to the final setup, so that needed some shuffling around, but also means now almost everything is set.

This week I worked on the corals and sponges to be placed in the environment. Some of them will probably need adjustments for better balancing and optimization.

Made an updated proposal for the climbing sequence.

I continued with the shading of Mikassa, baking normals, filling up the remaining areas with brush strokes, adding in some detail on the clothing and making sure the brush strokes can deform properly. There still is lots to be done in terms of texture painting and creating different levels of detail, but this will be the highest LOD that we need for her full body.

This week I started creating kelp assets based on a crazy amount of brush scans from Vivien. I continued improving the Previz Camera Importer add-on and blocked out the lighting on our first test shot.

This week all of the fish and seagull are retopologized and ready for shading.

This week i worked mainly on the edit, also I did a hand test to check the deformations and will help with the cracking. Also I'm starting to do a animation test to try how will be the final look on a shot in the movie, I manage to do a layout/first really rough blocking to expose some animation beats.

My week has been focused on building files for lighting of 040_sinking and 100_transformed. Both sequences have been pushed forward into layout - they also contain Mikassa which is a great chance to finally test the character shading in the actual shot scenarios.

This week we officially started layout for a bunch of sequences. Creating layout files means we are using the actual assets to build shots and get the shots ready for animation and lighting. Previsualized shots are still using temp geometry and rigs that won't be used for production. Therefore it's necessary to recreate shots within the pipeline. Once they are approved, we can start animating the shots.

This week I worked on some more technical setups that we would need in the shots that we are now starting to work on. Besides that I looked more closely into how we can make the broken version of Mikassa work with the individual shards, that Julien was working on, together with Pablo for the test animation.

During this week I mostly worked on making a layout/first blocking on seq 100, like this lighting can start to work on production shots

This week I worked on set dressing, preliminary shading and lighting on the underwater set - specifically the upper reef part. This scenery is supposed to be lush and lively, so I spent most of the week creating the various scattering setups for kelp and carefully placing individual corals on the rocks.

Besides dealing with more technical hurdles, last week I finally got to do a basic texture painting pass over Mikassa and give some more attention to her face specifically.

The sculpting of the Return set is basically done. Further Cracking tests were also done over the week.