Latest on Wing It!

Worked on the main character retopology. The dog is relatively finished and the cat is clsoe to follow. The .blend files are accessible now for download.

During this weeks I worked on some grease pencil vfx, just to check if it is a possibility to use them on the pets project, in this case I animated some smoke and dust

This week we explored various design aspects of the rocket. The placement of the hatches, the use of pipes inside and the windshield design. Also added more props using geo nodes to create more variations.

This week I was fully focused on story-boarding and enhancing the story from beginning to end. Adding new boards, alternative beats that improve or disrupt the story. Its a puzzle that we try to solve as good as possible. Here's a little snippet of the current beginning (no audio included at this point).

I did one final GeoNode experiment before getting an early model of the Dog character and slapping a rig on it as quick as possible so animators can start playing with something. I also worked a bit on CloudRig, and on the asset pipeline, to make it not fail with errors due to recent Blender changes.

Based on the early sculpting and design work, I continued to polish the dog sculpt for retopology and initial rigging tests.

This week I made a first cut of the movie through storyboarding. We are still connecting the right puzzle pieces to make the story more solid, but either way I'd like to show a bit of storyboarding using the addon 'Story Pencil'. I used 2d and 3d elements combined to take best of both worlds for telling the story. The characters are drawn as they need a wide range of expressions, while the rocket can be a rigid 3d object that is consistent in shape.

This work is a combination of two weeks spending time on the rocket design together with Rick and Vivien. Also creating props to be placed in the rocket, some of them with geometry nodes for quick variations.

In this first production log, I've included all of the R&D I was doing while simultaneously learning Geometry Nodes throughout the past couple of months, trying to find ways to use GeoNodes in the context of character rigging, ie. to deform meshes in certain ways. It's been a great experience to learn GeoNodes, and a lot of these experiments are very promising!