During this week I prepared all the latest sculpting files for the cloud since all character sculpts are now final and approved. More tweaks and updates were made to the comparative expression sheets to put a final stamp on them as well and have everything ready for further tests in the animation. Most of the week I worked on the animal lineup by blocking the first iterations of them so that the general proportions and design can be judged and approved before moving on to sculpt them in detail.

Hair! Rex is our first character to be completely modeled, so this week my task was to start styling his hair. After wrapping up some environment modeling tasks, I also worked on the look development lighting setup we can use to compare and unify the characters' shading.

Last week I revisited the animation dialogue test I started a while ago with Rex. Now that the facial rig is in a solid state I was able to animate the facial features including lipsync and expressions. This is a great way to explore Rex's personality and test if the rig is production ready. This will also give us insights on whether to animate the shots on 1s or 2s. Which version do you prefer?

Completed retopology of Ellie's hair, body, trousers. Added 'iris grow' and 'iris shrink' shape keys to Rex's eyes and Ellie's eyes. Retopology of remaining clothing pieces in progress.

One post-final round of polish for Rex at the start of the week before diving into rigging the freshly retopo'd face of Ellie! Starting with some long-overdue scripting to make my life easier.

This week I mostly spent integrating the grooming file into our character pipeline to allow Andy to smoothly start his work on grooming Rex's hair. Check out the video where I explain and demo this process further.

This week was entirely dedicated to this concept painting of the kids meeting elder sprite exploring color contrast, light and shading both of the kids and the forest assets.