Dec 18, 2017 - Light Saber updates, Ferdinand, Getting Over It

Ferdinand

Last week was a pretty busy week with Jury Duty and I also attended the wrap party for the release of Ferdinand which is the last film I worked on before leaving Blue Sky Studios, back in July 2017.  It's possibly the best film I got to work on and I'm pretty happy with it.  Too bad it was released simultaneously with a certain Star Wars film which dominated the weekend box office.  I worked in the Fur and Materials departments on Ferdinand. I'm happiest about the fur groom on Lupe, the "calming goat" voiced by Kate McKinnon.

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Light Saber Dev

So, I managed to do some shader work on the lightsaber energy trail which now has smooth-ish geometry, well, it's 3 or 4 quads instead of one giant quad.
I have to admit that writing that algorithm freehand from scratch was one of the hardest things I've done in a long time.  I'm still kind of new to the procedural mesh thing but I love it so far.
The new mesh also has good uvs so I was able to put a uv map on it to give it a softer edge:

here's the map:

Here's a screen capture of the new blade trail:

I also tried adding some dithered noise to the edge instead of a grad but what I got instead was a waffle pattern but it's growing on me. I like that it kind of looks like crosshatching. I suppose I should rotate it 45 degrees...:

I spent about a day working on a high res blade (instead of a stretched out capsule) but I failed miserably... I mean, the blade was fine but the displacement shader did not translate well. I need to rethink that...

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What I'm watching/playing:

So, I was watching Markiplier play a game called "Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy" on Youtube and I just had to buy it. I've never laughed so hard at myself failing miserably at a game before.  There's something about it. I find it absolutely hilarious!