Week 13: Environments, and a Little of Everything

This past week has been a *bit* of a mishmash (hence the title). I submitted my latest items for my milestone on Tuesday, which was a good deal of work! One of the main things included in that milestone (which wasn't layouts and clothes creation) was rough layout paintings for the backgrounds of my main shots! Since my environments are going to be 2D, with the 3D characters incorporated into them, I kept the environments greyscaled for the moment to get a feel for depth and shading first, and then to decide on final colors and lighting for the environment. Working on drawing 2D environments after working in 3D for so long was a bit of a transition, but it was actually pretty relaxing and I picked up some new techniques for drawing the environments that I'm very pleased with! I used my proxy environments as a base to know how the characters would interact with the environment, but hand-painting the environments ensures I can give the film a much more painterly look overall.

Aside from getting environment paintings ironed out, I've continued making layout animations this past week, along with beginning to make the skinned rigs for Arne and Signe with their clothes! There have been definite technical challenges with some of these animations and the rigs, such as how to make the clothes deform properly without having to use cloth simming (which unfortunately would have taken too much time to complete with the time and resources I have left to make this film), but it has been very interesting figuring out how to resolve these technical challenges and reworking things as best as I can! This sort of problem-solving definitely makes the process interesting (if not frustrating at times), but figuring it out is very satisfying, so I'm going to keep it up and figure out how to deform clothes properly with the skinned rigs! I'm hoping to complete as much as possible over the next few days before Thanksgiving since the holidays are sure to put a stop to my production for a little while. However, I've maintained a good pace up until now, so I'm feeling rather good about where I am so far!

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/20f116_d649f73e5cad4bf28651b344fc24c872/1080p/mp4/file.mp4