For the past few months I've been doing very regular live streams on the Blender Studio channel and I am enjoying it a lot!
So here's a little update on the creation process of "Snow". Tomorrow there's the next live stream at 16pm CET, like every week :)

Before the shading I wrapped up the retopology live. Here I tried to keep the topology as low as needed, making an efficient polycount as opposed to a generically safe one like I did with other characters.
Here are the results of that:

There have also been a few UV unwrapping live streams in preparation to the shading.

The character will be made freely available when finished under the CC-BY licence for anyone to use.
Until then I hope you will join me in creating this character :D
  

Hey people!
While the film Sprite Fright is going into full on production I get to still do a weekly live stream on creating the character Snow. And he's coming along really well.
The retopology of the head is already done with only minor tweaks planned ^-^
If you haven'y seen it yet, here's the stream:

The current result looks like this.
I marked some edges red as a reminder for myself where the major patches and articulation loops are. The blue edges are creases that always have 2 proximity loops around them.
It's a good way of reminding myself to keep certain loops clean and where they need to be.

Tomorrow I'll continue with the retopology of the other head elements like the hair, eyes, tongue, teeth and eyebrows, which shouldn't take too long.
Then I'll dive into the body topology!

A lot of tips and info on the overall workflow can also be found on the Stylized Character Workflow series on the Blender Cloud.
If you want to directly support the Blender Studio head on over there <3

See ya!

Snow is still being developed right now with the sculpting and general design done. I already recorded all of this and it can be accessed on the Cloud, including WIP material and .blend files :D

The fun part begins now! I will continue to live stream every Thursday at 16:00 CET to finish the creation of Snow with all of you together!
This is currently starting with the retopology and will expand with UV mapping, shading and more.

I'm looking forward to the next stream.
Cheers!

The last character of the teenagers to show is Jay!
He is the most WIP out of all of them with only a final design & sculpt and some first animation & shader tests.
But he, or rather his boombox, was the first big influence on how exaggerated the 3D design should become.

This final design by Ricky Nierva is a simplified version of the above with the more final colors.

The sculpt changed a lot as well. One big thing that changed a lot is how thin the limbs and small the elements of this character are.
After a while we decided to heavily chunkify his proportions to fit his height more and bring him closer towards the Muppet-like look that we gravitated towards over time.

I love these early pose exploration sketches by Vivien Lulkowski! They really sell the character for some key moments of the movie.
This also heavily influence the proportion changes.

The expression sculpts I made soon after were also directly influenced by that concept and other moments from the storyboard.

The shading by Simon Thommes didn't go that far but it gets some of the material better across, like the 80s Kangol inspired hat but instead with a llama logo ;)

As always there is plenty more on the Blender Cloud with production files, WIP shot animation and production lessons from the team :D
Support us in making films for testing the latest versions of Blender and making them even better :3

There are also more live streams, regularly on Thursdays. The sculpting of this character is almost wrapped up and might very likely continue with streams on shading & texturing!

See you soon with more! Thanks for reading <3

Victoria from Sprite Fright is much more WIP than he other characters I've showed but she went through some heavy transformations just like Ellie.
The original concepts from Ricky Nierva were very exaggerated and difficult to translate to 3D in comparison to the rest of the cast.

Eventually, just like with everything else, we simplified and chunkiness the concept. The character personality changed from an american valley girl type, to a British overly fashion-aware teen that  overcompensates.
There are many 80s fashion elements that went into her design. This concept from Vivien Lulkowski is pretty spot on.

Just like with the other characters I went through expression tests with the design. She probably got the highest amount of facial tests just because the design is so fun :D

Plenty of animation tests are also done by Rik but I won't show some of the more refined ones because they are much too spoilery. 

But if you are interested anyway check out the Blender Cloud as always for more WIP material, animations, renders, breakdowns and the files.

See ya next week for more!

So before sharing more work on the movie Sprite Fright and its characters I wanted to mention that I am working on some more content to watch.
First of all there are the live streams over on the Blender Studio YouTube channel, which I hope I can continue regularly, showing some of the work I am doing for the film assets.

Before that I already went ahead and made a small video series on the animal characters in general and the process of sculpting and retopologizing the snail. It's a simple character in comparison to the humans but I still get to share a lot of production insights.

The file for this render of Ellie and the Sprite is also finally available to download and experiment with.
Huge thanks to Andy Goralczyk for preparing the file, the amazing lighting & environment work & more!

See ya next week for more and I hope to also meet you live :3

There are dozens of drawings from Ricky Nierva but this was part of the approved 2D design, defining the shape language and general goal.

Here is the sculpt in comparison. It was an interesting challenge to make his proportions work for animation and his hair both simple and stylised but also messy.

The final sculpt had the face a bit flatter but overall it's the same.

The expression sculpts were a lot of fun and informed the style further early on. 

When I worked on the pose sculpt we also made the decision to go for very loose, cartoony mouth shapes with a cutout on the side opposite to the camera.
It looks super weird when rotating around but for the camera perspective it makes it look more hand-drawn :D

As always, check out the files, creation history and more on the Blender Cloud.
Support the us and our projects so that we get to stress test Blender and support the development of the software further :3

See you next time with more characters!

The next character to introduce and the one that is currently closest to being completed is Rex!
His design was one of the most straight forward but also the most exaggerated to put into 3D. I love his bucket head design, simple shape language and attitude.
There have been a lot of sketches and concepts by Ricky Nierva but this one is the closest one to final and the 3D version:

Here's a WIP render that shows a direct comparison quite nicely. Great shading work by Simon Thommes!

Rex was among the first characters to have his 3D design final and approved so he was the first to get the expression testing treatment.

I love how Rik Schutte interpreted and took the expressions even further in these animation tests.

Andy Goralczyk is also using the animation tests of Rex for lighting experiments and tests

As always, the files and full creation history is available on the Blender Cloud.
Support us in making movies and testing the latest Blender features ^^

See ye next week with more content!

The main character of our short film Sprite Fright is called Ellie. Without a doubt she is the one that went through the most amount of changes (story and design) during the pre-production.
Check out more on the Blender Cloud!

There are more sketches and exploration sketches from Ricky Nierva than I can count but this was the first approved one.
Back then her personality and dynamic with the rest of the cast of characters was different, as well as her name "Emily".

Over time we strayed further away from the punk-girl with crazy hair and more towards the awkward nature loving girl that she is now.
Here's a bunch of expressions that were sculpted early on to explore her emotional range.

During the creation proces there was a constant back & forth between me, Vivien (Concept Art), Ricky (Production Designer) and more.

The retopology and rig have also progressed far enough at this point that the animators are starting to push the expressions and animation style further.

You can of course find all of this and more on the Blender Cloud, as well as a full timeline the production files & WIP material and commentary on everything while we are making the film


See ya next week for more :D

For the coming weeks I want to recap some of the work that was already done for the movie.
So I'll introduce the lineup of characters one by one.
If you want to know know about the character creation & process much more in detail and even download the assets & production files then check out the Blender Cloud and support us and Blender development in general :3

The first and most important one is the Sprite!
These little creatures creatures are the heart of the movie. Smurf-like gnomes that take care of the forest.
In their final sculpting iteration this is how they look like. More details like the white spots on the caps will happen in shading ;)

Around 7 months ago when the project started into pre-production this was much different.
The character had a long road of adjustments and tweaking so that they fit the style of the film just right, be more simplified & chunkified
and come across as cute and innocent as possible.

Of course Sprite Fright is a horror-comedy, so things are a bit different than how they seem ;)
More to follow soon!