Latest on Wing It!

Apart from still wrapping up my work on the hair nodes release of Blender 3.5 I jumped back into the visual development of Pets. I mainly focused on the outline rendering for the props/environments and how we can set that up in the most flexible way.

I helped out with the robot arm assets and interior design of the rocket by providing paintings and drawovers for Beau and Julien and then also started exploring the look of the clouds. A quick paintover exploration based on Pablico's dog expression provided a nice break from lever and chainsaw re-re-rearrangements.

The modeling stage for the rocket interior is almost done. I'm organizing the file into collections, renaming, and unwrapping the set for Demeter to rig. After I'm done, I'll continue with the exterior/wings.

Worked on more previs/layout shots.

I started helping out the project this week to get the lighting pipeline more fleshed out. For this purpose I set up a simple shot to get the hang of the style.

This week animation team continued working on the seq 020 and also continue testing the facial rig to improve it

The focus this week was getting the interior of the rocket into a good shape. Adding the interior with lighting and shading from Simon to generate thumbnails for Vivien to do paintovers on. Wednesday I reorganized the SVN to match Kitsu with the help of Fiona.

More shots got a layout treatment. Since there are some assets that we still don't have ready, I had to create my own mockup version of them as a proof-of-concept for the shots.

I focused on helping out with the look of the rocket interior and creating a painted reference for lighting and shading based on a layout frame.

Non-stop face rigging iterations & feedback.

During this week animation team continue working on seq 020, also I worked on facial testing and giving feedback on the face rig, and I worked on a hand pose library to be used in production

Here is a dog walk cycle animation for shot 020_0160 that I'm currently working on.

To make sure we had a cleaner basis for the next step, we went over the breakdown of the film again and re-organized our assets. That way, things are all in place, and we made sure we didn't forget any prop in the process. Also, it was important to show all the info in Kitsu, on the Shots page, so it is easily accessible for the artists.

I worked mainly on the visual development of the environment and interaction with the characters, as well as the tech we need to achieve what we want. This will continue in the coming weeks.

Spent the majority of the week modeling the interior of the rocket based on concepts from Vivien and directions from Rik.

The dog has an actually arguably usable face rig for the first time! Now it's time to do the same on the cat, while also iterating.

I focused on defining the colors and light in the cockpit further and did some paintovers to inform shading.

This week animation team continue working on the seq 020 and also testing the character rigs

This week I spent most of my time working on Blender development in form of a Geometry Nodes workshop we had in person here in the Blender headquarters. Other than that I spent a little bit of time integrating my previous work into the pipeline and rendering out comparisons to have a better view on the animation style.

Set up multiple shots for layout and did a mockup for the Barn scene.

This week was all about setting up the interior for layout. so no final design, but mockup of buttons, levers and machinery that would be interacted with. I also want to do some slight changes to the rocket design to fit the newest version of the story better.

My first week on “Pet Projects” I spent time familiarizing myself with the rigs, brushing up on the pipeline and doing a couple of fun test shots with Dog and Cat.

This week animation team started to animate seq 020, rig still are WIP mostly on the facial part, so the face expressions are still off