Grave of the Fireflies: Sprint 10

 During this sprint, I created and finished the swing rig. I created it using IK Spline handles in the ropes and a controller leading clusters that deform the curves. The simple control set makes animating the swing fast and easy.

Screenshot of swing rig

I problem-solved in integrating the post-process toon material into the scene. The toon lines were appearing through additive/translucent elements such as the fire and the fireflies. I created a translucent sprite render material for the fire to pair with the additive sprite render, with custom depth writes checked. I switched the fireflies to a masked material. In the scene, I checked to allow custom depth writes on the fire and fireflies and then updated the post-process material so that it uses the custom depth pass to mask out the toon lines.

Before, toon lines penetrate fire

After

Allow Custom Depth writes

Custom Depth Pass

Addition to the post-process material

Additionally, I added the credits plane into the level sequencer so that it plays.

Media track added to sequencer

Grave of the Fireflies: Sprint 9

 In this sprint, I set up the master material for the characters, with parameters to control the dissolve effect for the characters appearing/disappearing for each memory. I created a dissolve material function used in the effect, that can be animated using the Dissolve Amount parameter so characters dissolve in from the bottom up, and dissolve out from the head down. With the parameters set up and grouped, the material is now ready to be animated within the level sequencer.

Example of how the dissolve will work.

The dissolve material function.

The character master material.

Additionally, this sprint I created a Ghibli style wood smart material in Substance Painter. The smart material is 100% procedural, using color fill layers, and generators, texture fills, and filters to generate the masks. I followed the wood color palette set up by the art lead, Vanna Yang.

The wood smart material demoed on a sample asset.