The scary, ominous square-shaped deadline looms as the team focuses their efforts on painting backdrops, designing effects and polishing shots.
I worked on revamping the backgrounds of the beginning sequences. I also cleaned up Vivien's watercolor texture scans to create assets that can be used throughout the shots to add more depth. I also kept adjusting and finalizing the lighting in scenes 020_ice, 030_panic and 040_edge.
This week was mostly about going into previous shots and addressing feedback. Most prominent thing was probably the addition of Critter's feet and ears lighting up when he's eating or swimming.
This week was not very productive on my end, since there were many other things to do. I mainly worked on laying the foundation to work on the energy FX in the time I had left. This will continue more extensively in the next week!
This week I finally finished the shot 0090 from the seq 050 and with that all my shots are done for the movie, next week I will be helping with whatever is needed
We are starting work on the final animation shots and creature crowd animations. The final environments are being made.
Most of my time I spent working on the One transformation, adding more brushstokes to all elements. The rest was spent on background concept art and paintovers.
Was unfortunately sick for most of this week but I managed to insert and adjust the "creature blob" into two shots. Will add it to the rest of the required shots next week.
This week I spent all my time on sequence 050 shot 0090, after some feedback sessions I refined more the beginning of the shot adding more poses
This week I continued to light various sequences (it's a blur really!) and put together the "Creature Blob" asset that enables the animators to animate a mass of creatures for the ending of the film). You might notice some slight difference in the colors of the renders, that's because we ditched the Kronos PBR neutral EOTF for a custom setup that gives us more control over the final colors and enables us to better output HDR frames.
This week I wrapped up the initial shading pass and finally started on some of the crucial FX that we have in the film.
We are making progress! Simon completed a rough shading pass of all the creatures, which means that lighting can move forward in more detail. Julien and Vivien have dedicated themselves to push the ending of the film closer to final! Rik, Pablico and Hjalti are are feverishly completing the climax of the film and picking up shot CBB's ("could-be-better"-notes) along the way!
This week I continued pre-lighting all the animated shots with Simon's shading. The shots are still in a pretty rough state, readability is still all over the place. I also added background creature swarms all over the film to give us a better idea of all the space life in the film. Moving along... moving along!
More work for the underwater set. This still needs a bunch of work and elements to really make it painterly
This week the focus was to get as far as possible with sequence 080. I'm still working on 080_0050 which is the biggest and longest shot. I hopefully finish this next week. We had to try a few different alts before we landed on something that feels right, and we're almost there!
This week I finally managed to start doing some initial shading on our other characters of the film. That being the side-cast of various other critters, but most importantly also the giant space jellyfish 'One'. That's besides several other smaller fixes and experiments with brushstrokes.
I spent most of the week so, but I managed to do some work on shot 0050_0090, mostly trying to convey the ideas on the previz pass
This week I did some fx design and I was preparing reference art for the timelapse of One's transformation, which I'm gonna start in Blender with our beloved Brushstroke Tools next week.
Mostly worked on finishing shots, adjusting the animation based on feedback or animating extra little "creatures" in the background of shots.
As the month of October is finally upon us, we finally get serious about rendering. About 34 of our 58 shots received a first temp lighting to help us improve character shading and start thinking about the effects. Animation made big strides as well: There are only about a handful of shots with Critter left to animate (Of course there's plenty of background animation and effects missing!).
I've created lighting files for the entire first half of the film. This is mostly to preview the ongoing shading of the characters, as there's a lot of inconsistencies in the lighting itself. These will be ironed out in the coming month. I also had first conversations with our sound effects team and our composer who should start replacing our temp audio tracks hopefully very soon!
Full on animation for this week! Dealt with a bunch of shots simultaniously where some of them required some feedback to be addressed and others just to start with. For the two sequences that got some new animation, sequence 070 and 080 were being worked on. I'll continue on 080 and add some animation there. But we're getting there, slowly but steadily.
This week I focus on finishing the shots I was working on the week before
This week was mostly about finally getting the "tendril" prop into shots, setting up new shots with it and addressing feedback on the climatic shot.
There are still various small tasks for the film production that I am helping out with. These mostly relate to the ending so spoilers ;)