About 80 ago the most famous company of the cartooniverse was born: ACME Corporation

I've found a couple of interesting sites about this company some days ago, and I thought it would be cool to share:

• a list with 10 of the most hilarious products (with videos of them)
• a website that aims to be a catalogue of everything ever produced by ACME! :)

Hands can talk. They are so expressive that one can write a book on it.

Blue Sky Studios animator Nick Bruno put a large and cool collection of them on his blog. Great reference. :)

Wow... 20 days without posting. Sorry for that, but I swear I can explain. ;)

I've been pretty busy lately, and one of those things that has been keeping me away from blogging is the AnimaTV program. It is a governmental program to help the development of Brazilian animated series. We (me, Suryara and Jovan) are working hard to make a good project.

If we succeed, there will be some money to produce 13 episodes. The 3D will be done in Blender, of course. ;)

This week I'm in a workshop with script writer Rodrigo John, to help refine our project. He's a great guy, and with a great knowledge of animation history.

I can't give you further details on our plot for obvious reasons, but I think there is no problem in showing one of the studies I made for this project.

It is important to notice that this image does NOT represent the final look at all. There are lots of studies on that particular subject, made by all three of us. There is a chance of one or two elements of this particular image get into the final look, but that's it: just a possibility.

There are some better images, but they are not suitable for showing here by basically two reasons: some of them shows plot details and some are not made by me, but by Suryara and Jovan. So I don't think it's fair to post them here now.

Cross your fingers for us! ;)

Wow. Really... take a look at this:

The great Daniel Martinez Lara strikes again, now with an awesome method to refine our animations.

This technique, which he called AniSculp, is pretty simple and uses Blender sculpt tools in top of a baked animation:

This is an excellent method for adjusting our poses and improving overlaps and follow through. Although it is not exactly the same technique, it reminded me a lot this approach developed Bernhard Haux to be used with XSI.

In the current Blender stage, we need to bake the bones animation in "vertex cache", because there are some inconsistencies among the modifiers. But this should be corrected soon, because there are some development being made on it.

It is very cool to see an experienced and creative animator like him using and innovating with Blender. This great app still faces a some resistance and prejudice among a lot of professionals. I believe that most of that prejudice should be gone with cool things like that coming more often. :)