This week in rigging: Implemented first round of feedback on Ellie's body, some potentially final improvements to Rex's face rig, and got started on the Bird!

This week for me was a bunch of putting out fires in terms of pipeline, but also putting on fires to render out the fire tests we worked on in the previous week to have a comparative preview, together with Andy. Other than that there was some more Ellie shading going on in the background and a bit of geometry nodes for me, as always.

For the sculpting process of the snail I took the time to record and commentate the entire process to give more insight into my workflow and some behind the scenes on the creation process of the snail, the animal character lineup and previous finished characters in general. The .blend file and final results can also be found on the Asset Progression folders as always.

I spend most of the week setting up the fire comparisons together with Simon. Much of the work was debugging why files don't work on the farm and transferring the fire simulation into a setting which let's us compare the different techniques and make a judgement on which animation and effects style we will go for in this film.

Last week I continued to work on Ellie's facial expressions while going back and forth together with the rigging department improving the rigs where needed. Next to that I did some adjustments to the 'camping test shot' by blocking out the other characters. I'll revisit that shot once we have some proper rig updates on Jay, Victoria and Phil.

Revised collar on denim jacket, created two versions of her fannypack, retopologized her alternate hair cut, and created iris perspective corrective shapes. Ellie is finalized and ready for the next steps; rigging, surfacing, grooming.

This week I kept exploring sprite village after we decided to give the sprites a bit more craftiness and then I switched to designing versions of our characters beaten up by the environment.