Week 31: Animations Galore

It has been a very busy few weeks (as evidenced by the fact that I haven't been able to post here much!) but it's been for good reason- I've been working on implementing my skinned rigs into my layout animations and polishing them all up! Since I last checked in, I've actually finished the main polish for the majority of shots in my film! A few of them still need to be touched up a bit and have transitions between them cleaned up (especially the shots I've reanimated based on recent critiques, and the brand-new shot I've added at the end), but for the most part, my 3D animations are largely done!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svPEVfT2c1E

Since I largely focused on getting all of those animations polished, I did end up neglecting other areas of the film I'd planned on working on simultaneously with those polishes, like some VFX tests and environment work. However, I've been flexible and updated my plan going forward in order to account for my render timing, by holding off on the VFX until I finish my environments and start rendering out shots. I can then work on the 2D VFX separately in After Effects while the 3D shots are being rendered out (which should take around 2 weeks, give or take), and then add them to those 3D shots in the compositing stage.

However, this means that my new priority at the moment (aside from polishing up some of these animations a little bit more), is to resolve my environment! I've changed up my plans for my environment from my original plan, which was to draw entirely 2D environments and implement those with my 3D scenes either in Cinema 4D or through compositing. However, with the amount of shots and scenes I have, drawing those all out and implementing them isn't quite feasible anymore, though I've found a bit of a creative solution. First, I'll be retexturing the rocks in some of my scenes rather than doing a camera projection to make them look more painterly, to save time and processing power. I also found a lovely geometry-node-generated painterly tree file in Blender (created by Cody Gindy on Instagram) that would fit my art style rather well and could be easily subbed in for the low-poly proxy trees I have now. However, the new challenge is to bake the textures on the tree (since it's all procedurally generated), and then export it from Blender to use in C4D. However, once this is done, I'll be able to cut down on my environment paintings by just creating a few backmost paintings to help provide a backdrop to this more 3D-based environment.

Part of what's been taking up my time as well was creating my film's one sheet for FUSE! It was actually a lot of fun creating the illustration for the one sheet, and it was a bit of a nice break to be able to work on a quick little illustration for this that wasn't too intensive!

Things have really started to progress, and by the end of the month I should have all of my 3D environments and shots done, so I can start rendering and compositing soon!