Finalized Environment & Space Hero Updates (Patreon)

Here's a look at the finalized forest environment for the Encounter Halloween special! The animation will play out at two different times of day, starting with a blue hour twilight-style lighting that you get just before nightfall. I do remember being in a forest with friends during this kind of time and it always had something slightly foreboding and unsettling to it for me, which is why I always wanted to replicate this kind of mood in an animation! Luckily with this was a lot easier with Redshift due it utilizing real path tracing. I admittedly tried to fake diffuse lighting scenarios in previous animations with the old renderer, but they admittedly never came out this good.

This lighting mood will remain for the first few opening scenes before skipping to night time, which will show Space Hero attempting to make a fire at what seems to be a bit of a dead end. From here he'll run into Bunsen, who will mostly be lit by the nearby campfire and moonlight. The lighting for the later part is admittedly not 100% final, but I'm slowly getting there! Note that I've already started animating the first scene, so it's likely I'll be posting a first animation test as well towards the end of the month!

There's still a few things I need to tweak, such as some trees looking a bit copypasted, but I'd say the environment coming along extremely well! This is partly also due to me now working natively in Maya 2022, which comes with features that significantly speed up the environment creation. One of them would be MASH, which allowed me to scatter and paint background foliage, as well as little details such as fallen leafs on the ground. All these things are instanced, so the scene size remains quite small. All trees and bushes in the foreground as still hand-placed since I need to keep some form of freedom over where these trees are located, then everything from the third row of trees uses procedural scattering to fill out the background. Despite the scene rocking tens of millions of polygons, the rendering is quite fast due to the instancing. It's actually a bit faster than the Encounter 2 environment even!

Space Hero Updates

While Space Hero had already received a few upgrades in the last Encounter episodes, I still wasn't quite happy with his face, which basically just used a base human default head with no rigging at all. I decided to finally tackle this issue and make improvements to his face, so it wouldn't have to be obscured by his visor anymore.

I've first of all given him the same eye models I had made for Zoe and made some slight adjustments to them. I then redid his facial proportions to be more in line with the Pixar aesthetics, which included remodeling his eyes, nose and mouth to be a bit more stylized. Of course his mouth won't be visible, but who knows! Maybe I'll do a full facial reveal of him in the final Encounter episode since he's actually handsome now! :D

His skin shader was also remade and now has some proper SSS applied to it! I then wrapped it by making some hair for him as well, which admittedly makes him look a tiny bit like Hiccup from HTTYD! At least if you only see the upper part of his face, haha! I've made a fully functioning facial rig for him as well now, so his face will finally be animated and not static like in the last Encounter episode, oh dear!

That's it for the mid-monthly update! Note that by now Acidic has already made some decent progress on the Zoe remodel, so it's not unlikely we'll have some updates to show on her by this weekend! Then by the end of the month I should already be able to show the first playblast of some WIP animation! (: