OVERGROWN - Production Log #4
- Update
- 5 August
- 3 min read
Other Authors
One month left before the OVERGROWN teaser premiere. As more pieces reach their finished stage, it's getting harder to talk about progress while preserving the element of surprise. Let's have a quick spoiler-free look.
Crafting the First Impression
The teaser's opening seconds carry the weight of the whole piece: it's the moment the audience decides whether to keep watching. We stick true to ourselves, once again betting on craftsmanship over clickbait. Here's Rik, who animated the first shot, on how it came together.
Rik Schutte:
The main challenge was transitioning both characters from walking on four feet to walking on two, while making sure it felt organic.
To pull this off, we scaled down the front legs and adjusted the shoulder positions for the four-legged walk, then subtly shifted the proportions and shoulder placement during the stand-up transition so the two-legged pose would read as natural. This switch should be barely noticeable to the average viewer.
Another challenge was the fact that we were working with scratch voices, recorded by Hjalti at the beginning of the project. This let me rough out blocking and timing for both characters, but I could only finalize the shots once the final dialogue voices came in. Ideally, you would get the final voices beforehand, but in this case we did not have time to find the right voices before starting animation. In the end, it all worked out and it turned out great!
Fur, Finished
Both protagonists now have full shading and grooming from Simon, ready for the teaser's rendered shots. We've examined the intricacies of the Hedgehog's coat in the previous production logs, so now it's time to have a closer look at the Raccoon dad.
Simon Thommes:
Both characters have a full groom using Blenders built-in hair tools. The twist here is that the hair curves are converted into mesh cards for rendering. These cards receive the surface normal of their attachment point, creating a painterly effect.
The groom itself was done with a manual base pass and a geonodes system that sits on top and adds some frizz and variation. This way it was quite easy to get an initial result and iterate without losing any work.
The shading of the cards is a simple procedural mask on the base color texture with some subtle color variation. The new-ish 'Thin Wall' shading comes in handy for the backfacing hair cards to look nice with translucency as well.
Painterly Shadows
While working on tiny details that make a huge difference to the final output, Simon built this amazing setup that adds brushstroke treatment to the shadows.
It's another use case of the well-loved Brushstroke Tools add-on from Blender Studio Tools, as the keen eye might have guessed. Simon's currently writing a how-to article on the specifics of the technique, which we'll publish later. Stay tuned!
That's it for now. Thank you for supporting OVERGROWN. We will be back next week with more news regarding the project!
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