what do you think the coolest thing you got to work on in the new spiderverse was? or was there anything you were completely geeked to work on/with?
definitely the coolest thing shot-wise that i got to work on was pavitr's entrance, i animated everything from when we first see him to when the camera zooms in on his face going into his comicbook backstory (this one!)
i helped with a couple aspects of pav's overall animation: his hair, his eye shapes, and playing with how he uses his bracelets in combination with his webs!
his hair is geo, meaning it doesn't get simmed by cfx because the directors wanted it to keep its graphic shape. so i designed some different hair blendshapes for modelling to create for us and worked with rigging on how to best incorporate the different shapes into the rig, then animated wind cycles for other animators to drop into their scenes. animating hair is not normally something that animators are expected to do in feature animation
his mask eyes, by default, came into shots looking very smooth and rounded. i referenced art done by one of the concept artists to give him "diamond shaped" eyes with more nicely weighted lines, along with several other library poses for animators to use so that they don't have to do all the shaping themselves (it took a long time because it required moving literally almost a hundred controls on each eye haha)
and finally, pavitr uses his webs with his bracelets to fight and get around! he uses his bracelet sort of like a spin top, keeping it spinning on his webs while standing still. i animated this first shot of him flicking it off his wrist:
my first pass on this didn't have that close up of the bracelet at first and our anim director, bob persichetti felt like we couldn't read it well enough and mentioned trying some crazier slow motion stuff like in RRR. so i went and watched RRR and immediately understood what i needed to do lol. i asked rohini kumar, another supervising animator on the movie, for some hindi onomatopoeia and she gave me this one, 'tadaak' which i'm told is sort of like a whack or pop!
