This week I'm filling up my sprint to be on expectation, then working to empty the sprint for the rest of the year. I will have to work over time a bit this week. Then I can rest. I worked hard on trying to push forward a priority client, but it looks like my planning was poor since there was a lot of testing and investigation.

Performance

My performance this week was abyssmal, maybe because the holiday anticipation and end of year pressure for Christmas was happening, but that doesn't mean I still didn't work! I had a lot of hours pushed into the project, but because my organization was about testing and exploration, my points based predicitons were terrible. I probably should plan my testing better, and think about milestones and predictability a bit more before planning my work this week. I also spent time to fill my tracker with my end of year expectations, which now is drawing near to 3 weeks left, then a well deserved holiday. A mix of all those factors put my sprint productivity down pretty low. Hopefully I can pick up a little right after Christmas family dinners and social aspects - including some fun donations, cooking and more. Gotta keep the social, community and family life alive with all the work!

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The Painterly Project Updates

This week had focus on this project - to push forward some video loops for the client. This had a look at making assets, mostly neon signs and city building generators with Geometry nodes, including a crazy AI printed 3D bridge and towers. I also worked on animating some rough city scapes and slums with the painterly effect. This proved to be somehwhat problematic, because the 2D post-processing over the 3D camera movement broke the illusion as there was no temporal nor spacial coherence. The brush on the objects has spacial coherence, but not the canvas. So.. I have to think outside the box here. But the colours and general speed to prototype the shots has proven to be quick, including quick relighting to be super effective. I am quite excited to work this project. So... I managed to get some camera animations out, as tests (which proved the "Shower Door" issue, my paintelry nemesis!). The tests proved I would need to tackle one more problem before I have a coherent 3D painterly style in viewport ready for production.

So.. where does this project stand this week?‍

• City generation systems are ready to be used for set dressing
• Slum generationsystems are ready to use for set dressing also
• A traffic system with random looping of fixed instances is sorted for drone traffic
• Framerate tests were done with traffic and some other renders, concluding that the animation should be around 15fps, but camera at 30fps - with characters blocked out with variable framerate.
• The painterly "shower door" effect with jitter is not a good solution, so must be fixed somehow.
• Colour palette is looking rustic but fun to use, with reds and blues and yellow.
• Neon sign library is created

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Bforartists Development

This week also found some progress with reports to help improve the layout of the Bforartists geometry nodes custom attributes in the stack, also reports and refinement for scene management directly in the outliner (super handy when it comes to rendering!). I also got some updates with Iyad to improve the new dynamic brush system and custom brushes. This will come as an addon for Bforartists built into the new tabbed toolshelf - and this adds the feature to access all brush presets, default and custom, directly in a top level brush panel for one click brush swapping. The old method required using a drop down, pie menu (no custom brushes) or other grid based drop down menus to change brushes quickly - it was driving me insane since I would have to repeat the zigzag grid browsing for brushes over and over and over and over again on a simple task like weight painting. I am happy Iyad has found a way to make it work from a GUi at top level - can't wait to share it with the world!

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Other Projects

Unfortunately, I could not advance the other projects so much this week - but fortunately one of these clients was ready to put the website on standby, adding in an email redirect in the forms. They were going on holiday. The other project I couldn't put my mind to since I had invested a lot of creative and mental effort in the first painterly project - and I had some milestones I wanted to reach before working the other client. We will see if we can make it the rest of the year! The rush is on - Decembers have traditionally been crunch times.