Anyone for 5 to 11 June 2016? Then let’s!

As of last week’s blog drop, I had done first pass layout of 42 shots
out of 80. I’ve now roughed out 55 shots out of 78. (Turns out I’d cut some shots from editorial but not the shot list.) I can watch the film from
almost at the end of Scene 1 all the way to the end credits without
seeing any placeholder drawings. Mint!

A few of this week’s shots needed rough effects work on top of animation –
smoke and lightning, mainly. After mucking around with the proper smoke
simulator for a while and getting nowhere, I went for a metaball-based solution.
It looks passable in viewport and kind of OK in Cycles:

Not
realistic, sure, but I neither need nor want complete realism here. This lumpy smoke looks like a good direction and it’ll get more tweaking before final render.

I also reworked Gronky’s final render shaders to add some subtle glossiness.

Here is the node setup for Gronky’s skin for people who care about such things. Not shown: Blender Internal tweakery.

Five of the shots
left to do are ident/credits and eighteen shots are narrative. There’s a short mid-credits
scene and all but three shots of Scene 1. I’ll get the rest of the layout to 100% coverage with at least first draft quality in time for June even if I knock over one shot every day between now and then.

Thanks for reading and I hope to see you next week!