Latest on Wing It!

More iterating on the body rigs of the main characters, and progress on the facial deformation tech.

I wrapped up some work on props and various small adjustments for the characters. There's also an article in the works on the sculpting and design process of this project.

This week was about creating more props and working on the barn set.

during this week I almost finished the animation test with the dog jumping over the chair, I will return to it when I will have the facial rig

Last week (or actually the week before, as I was sick in bed last week) I worked more on the technical implementation of the shading and the basic texturing blocking for the dog. I also made a first rendering test of the animation test that Pablico has been working on.

I worked on polishing the body rigs and testing some of the tech we want to use for deforming the characters' mouths.

Created a mockup interior rocket set and mocked up some of the shots, using the characters (with preliminary rigs).

This week I had more time to work on Pet Projects with a focus on the improvised wings together with Vivien and Rik. After several iterations we felt like the base construction should be functional for modeling and animation and test different setups.

This week I mostly churned out prop designs and drawovers, because we got Beau and Julien working on modeling those. Creating some guides for edges and where colored lines go is important now because some props might not get a detailed design before I leave for a longer vacation.

I've been chipping away making storyboards for the film. It's a continuous loop of drawing drawing and more drawing, putting it into the edit, refining refining refining and concluding that it works or it simply doesn't. Here you'll find some snapshots of the movie in storyboard format.

During this week I've been working on giving feedback to the different character rigs and models, also because the dog rig was kinda ready I started to do some animation test based on a shot of the movie

I wrapped up more work on the main characters modeling. I worked further on prop modeling and size relationships.

During this weeks I've been working on giving feedback on the rigs of the characters, for that I did a lot of poses trying to "break" the rig, also I did a small run test.

This week I focused on helping further with poses and had meetings about the character models, layout and shading. Other than that I explored the wings of our space shuttle that get created on the fly (ha).

I finally also joined the team to work on pet projects at the end of the week! I started out with doing some shading tests, specifically looking into how we could handle outlines in a good way. This will continue in the next week as well.

I worked on retopology and cleanup for all the characters to hand over my work to rigging and shading completely. This involved going through some animation feedback and tricky design decisions.

I spent most of the week refactoring our Asset Pipeline Config, which is the code responsible for merging various blend file data from different files to create our final, merged character files. Beside that, I made sure the ShotBuilder add-on works with our production and iterated more on the dog and cat rigs with constant feedback from Pablo.

I continued to address feedback on the main characters retopology. Apart from that I started working on the chicken character. (Also many many meetings :D)

This was a jolly good, mixed bag of a week! There was some drawings to further define the chicken's design and expressions, some prop designs, some dog poses to figure out how he and his costume should behave themselves in animation and also we finally got some layout tests that I did drawovers for.

A lot of iteration on the dog rig (particularly the spine), some fixing of the asset pipeline, added new features to CloudRig, and made an initial rig of the cat. And took a couple days off for a long weekend! :3