Latest on Sprite Fright

I made some more updates to the plant and fungi assets and updated the moss for the sprite village set. More set work will follow.

More Sprite shots! Since animation is progressing at quite a fast pace, the lighting for the new shots was also blocked out. The snails got multiple color makeovers. We first tried purple to set them apart from the background (and the sprites), but since then we decided to go back to a greenish hue to make them more slimy and gross.

I spent the week mostly on more environment shading and elements for the rextoria sequence. Finishing up webbing the set, adding and fixing details for the slingshot tree, prop shading for the thorn weapons and going back to the snail system with actual animated snails.

This week animation team continue working on their shot on the rextoria sequence

A little catch up from the week before, I established some of the different runs and walks we're gonna implement for the Sprites throughout the movie. These will function as a base for animators to jumpstart their shots and making sure the speed and style are consistent. Apart from that I animated the slingshot shots in the edit, which you can see in Pablo's production log.

Started Jay retopology. Completed the head, separating it at the neck from the rest of the body hidden underneath clothing. Also completed the eyes and the teeth with its alternate 'square' teeth shape key.

Last week I got Victoria's face and the spiderweb rig to a testable state, and this week I implemented a huge amount of feedback on them and put out some fires!

This week I mainly worked on the Sprite Village Set. The general blocking is done with some adjustments to existing assets and now it gets more into making the assets work better together and working out the ground.

Completed retopology on Elder Sprite. Maintained some consistency within the Sprite species. Finalized head, beard, teeth, inner mouth, eyebrows, mustache, and rig helpers. Ready for the next steps.

Since animation ramps up pretty soon, three new sets are being prepared for the following scenes: 060_scratch, 070_homerun and 100_haircut. In addition to that, I continued rendering shots from 110_rextoria as animation gets updated and did a few random lookdev tests!

This week animation team continue working on their shot on the rextoria sequence

I spent last week mostly animating shots on the rextoria sequence, you can check them out on Pablo's post. But i managed to squeeze out a quick walkcycle of the spider and sprite together inbetween.

I added a new feature to the `Grease to Mesh` addon that we need for the smear frames and started covering the whackamole set in spiderwebs.Otherwise I was quite busy with other things outside the project that were popping up this week, like Blender development and a promotional render for the announcement of Cycles X.

This week was mostly spent on getting started with Victoria's face rig, but beside that I did some health check-ups across production files such as cleaning up orphan data and library override leftovers and also testing viewport performance. There were also some minor tweaks and fixes to the Sprite's rig.

This week I was wrapping up work on the sleeping bags. These are modeled directly into shape for the shots where they are needed, with additional shapes to alternate between. The backpack also got a small update with the latest sleeping bags added to it.

Started Elder Sprite retopology. Focused on mesh re-use of the already corrected Sprite meshes and transformed them into Elder Sprite for modeling, rigging, surfacing efficiency and consistency.

This week I started shading on the new Victoria model by quickly transferring the temporary shading to have a simple basis for rendering. Other than that I gave the outdated ground shading on the whackamole set some love, investigated some rendering issues. And at the end of the week I turned the script that I made to convert grease pencil strokes into mesh sequences into an addon, so that we can use it in production.

I continued to light shots on the 110_rextoria scene. In addition to that I started preparing the set for 070_homerun so we can start animation as soon as possible!

This week I spend more time on various assets but mainly the backpack and sleeping bags. I will be able to show more next week.

This week animation team continue working on their shot on the rextoria sequence

This is already the second week of rough lighting on the rextoria scene. Since the animation of these shots is progressing and the sets are being built, we can already start setting up the scene for lighting. Right now I'm focusing on overall mood and style - trying to interpret the color script as good as possible.

A short week with only 3 days for me, and even a solid half of that I spent with poking developers about making Blender gooder, but in the other half worked a bit on Victoria and learned a bunch about the Override system so I can better understand how to troubleshoot and give feedback on it.

This week I did another pass over the spiderweb shading, adjusted some general shading as a result from Andy's shot renderings and did a first test to cover Rex in snails with geometry nodes.

Completed Victoria for the Rextoria sequence push. Ready for the next steps; rigging, surfacing, grooming. Finalized her upper body, head, eyebrows, eyelashes, teeth, tongue, and rig helper face mesh.

Last week I worked mostly on the rextoria sequence, finishing up some shots and starting new ones. These can be found in Pablo's log. Next to other things I also made sure the sprites poses are holding up well when animating.