Apart from some followup tasks on the animal characters I mainly worked on the environment assets for the Slingshot tree. Starting with Thursday I live streamed and further worked on the plants assets, stylising the work of Andy further and creating more variations to scatter around in the sets.

I had time and space to (pretty much) fully work on the test shot with Ellie: 'Bird Spotting'. This test shot has been made for exploration purposes of Ellie, but will also end up in the actual movie. It is, in fact the first time we see Ellie act and speak. How do her expressions hold up in an performance piece? This shot also had a great shift in emotion, where there's a great opportunity to push for cartoony 'smears'. Ellie's rig is easy to work with and this will show us how Ellie can be portrayed as the protagonist of the movie.

The "whack-a-mole" set was the main focus for me this week. The spiderweb which captures Victoria has been started. Further, additional trees were added in the near background behind the characters. The set now awaits proper UV unwrapping of the trees, more spider webs and better materials.

Started Victoria retopology, following the high priority items requested for the Rextoria sequence, completed boots and legs.

This week was spent on prop design. All the salty snacks and small assets like the beer and hair spray can got a fake brand name and a first design pass.

This week I finished the shading of the snail addressing the remaining notes that I had. I also finalized the whole color library setup for the characters and prepared shading on the spider by including the color palette for the animals in the library. Other than that I did a quick shading transfer to the updated Sprite character and worked on some exciting new things for geometry nodes.

An unusually focused week where I managed to mostly finish the initial body+face rig our new retopo'd Sprite.