Iuri Araujo sent me this link to a petition for the release of a Portuguese version of Richard Williams The Animators Survival Kit.

I have this book, and I can say it is really fantastic. It will be great for the Brazilian animation students (and other Portuguese speakers too) if that great resource gets released in our native language. If you support this cause, go there and sign it. =)

Nothing here for quite a long time, huh? Oh my... =P

First there was my arm injury. Because of that, lots of work were put on hold and that line kept growing every day. When my arm got OK, I had to run to get most of those things done. Add to that a couple times I had to travel for work reasons and you have and idea of what kept me away from blogging.

Thanks for everyone who wrote kind comments during that time (I'm not talking about you, spammers) and kept visiting this humble website. :D

Some good news is that I am starting this week the Animation Personal Trainer program, with the great Keith Lango! Yay! Great expectations for this month! =)

That's right...

The great (haha) soccer player here got injuried this weekend. Since my arm is with an orthopedic cast, I will be a bit away from posting for some days.

To quote the Terminator: "I'll be back". =D

Just knew about Pidgeon Impossible project today, by reading BlenderNation.

I must say I'm really impressed. Not only by the quality of what has been produced until now, but also by the altruistic initiative of the creator Lucas Martell.

He has been producing a weekly podcast about the making of this short movie. Besides being pretty funny, they also bring very valuable information for the ones who want to make an animated short: from how to work efficiently with lights and render passes to best ways of creating convincing eyes and correcting artifacts by using camera projected textures (in Blender, it is the UVProject modifier).

In my humble opinion, this is a goldmine: this guy is producing his short for about 4 years (FOUR YEARS, MAN!!!) and has been learning a lot from his mistakes. Fortunately he is not afraid of sharing what he discovered and learned with his podcasts.

Instead of taking another 4 years making a personal project to learn all those things you can just go to his page and watch the podcasts. =)

He is using XSI as his 3D app, and I must say I liked a lot some things I could see about this app. The interface seems to be very fluid and comfortable to work with, and it doesn't seem too far from what I'm used to see in Blender. There are also some very cool things, like the ability to record your action and save them as a script (which I know is being planned for the upcoming Blender 2.5).

The 8 ones that are on the site by the time of writing this are already on my hard drive. =)

An Argentinian BlenderArtists.org user known as cesio has made a very cool script to make things more intuitive in Blender rigs.

In this thread he presents the simple and efficient idea: the script allows you to move your character by selecting the affected mesh area. Basically is like the shape of the bone gets a custom form of the vertex group affected by it, making it seamless to the animator.

What makes it extremely cool is that the animator have a very intuitive way to move the character, without lots of controllers. It makes 3D animation be a lot more like the stop motion proccess.

Take a quick look on how it works:

You can download this .blend file with the script. It is still in development, so you'd better check the forum regularly for updates.

Because it's a script, it is pretty slower than regular rigs. I believe this approach is interesting enough to be implemented in the main Blender code.

With this, GreasePencil and other animation goodies being developed for Blender, this great app starts to be one of the best available for animators. =D