Activating this blog again.

I has been almost 4 years since my last post on this blog. Although I have been away from public CG activity, I'm still rockin' hard on the backstage. 

It's almost time for me to celebrate 30 years of involvement in Computer Graphics production. From the most artistic end to the other extreme of scientific visualization. Swapping from one end to another kept me motivated whenever I felt tired or lost during different stages of my life all these years.

In these last 4 years that I have not updated anything on this blog, I had the chance to spend some more time abroad. And all the extra activities involved into living in foreign countries besides the new workplace kept me so busy that I just did not have the time to keep it up.

After finish my work for Andrew Price at Blender Guru's Architectural Academy, I moved to Vienna, the capital of Austria, to work on the production of a CG animated series called Talking Tom and Friends. A really cool (and successful) production that is up to the third season by now and with some episodes achieving more than 30 million views. It started out as an YouTube only show but eventually it made to some TV stations and currently is being shown in Netflix but I'm not sure if it is world wide.

In this production I acted as the Lead Lighting and Rendering Artists, where I was responsible for:

• supervising other artists on my department;
• preparing lighting keys following guides from art directors and concept artists;
• lighting and rendering sequences;
• negotiating workflows and deliveries with other departments and directors.

The main production tool in our department was SideFX Houdini and Mantra, its internal renderer. We received our scenes data from the Animation department as Alembic files.

From our department, we would send the rendered images as multi-layered EXR files to the Compositing team together with a slap comps for their reference.

I had the opportunity to meet many new artists, old colleagues, and CG veteran legends like Ron Thornton. Vienna is an amazing city that just breathes art on every little corner. And it is of an inclusive type, where just like the Habsburg ideal where it should be accessible for all, from the royalty to the peasants, there was not a single day on that city where you could not get in contact and live its artistic spirit.

To visit Vienna one day was one of my dreams and I will be forever grateful for the opportunity that I had to live in this city for almost two years.

Blender 101: The Modifier Encyclopedia

Yay! My very first article at Blender Guru.

Take a look at every single Modifier in Blender with a brief explanation, ideas for usage and an animated example.

http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/blender-101-modifier-encyclopedia/

The Architecture Academy v1.5

After 7 months of a lot of work, The Architecture Academy v1.5 is about to start. Andrew Price just posted a teaser trailer.

Just like last time, my duties were to model furniture that will be used throughout the workshop and will be available for download so subscribers can use them in their own projects.

Together with Reynante Martinez, a fellow furniture modeler and Rob Garlington our supervisor and also plant modeler, we've made more than 100 new models and even went back to update/fix a few models from v1.0 that needed an uplift.

I hope you enjoy them.

Animation for the Marista Group.

This was a test animation I made for the Marista Group while I worked for them. It was supposed to be used at their planetarium at PUCPR university.

Unfortunately I never got the chance to show anyone there besides my work colleagues.

Furniture animation from The Architecture Academy - Blender Guru

Andrew Price from Blender Guru just made a really nice animation of some of the furniture models I showed on my previous post.

Rob Garlington was the other artist that worked with me on the creation of this model pack. Some of the furniture are his and many (or all) of the trees on the pack. Some of them can be seen on his website.

Models made for The Architecture Academy - Blender Guru

Last year Andrew Price from Blender Guru, hired me to make some models for The Architecture Academy that just opened up this week.

The Architecture Academy is an online training portal packed with training videos, models and texture banks, ebooks and a forum ran by Andrew and is all related to the creation of architectural imaging.  Topics such as modeling, texturing, interior and exterior design principles, scene and cameras setup, artificial and natural lighting and setups for Blender's Cycles rendering engine will be covered.

Below are some of the models I did for this workshop and that the attendees will be able to download and use.

All of the models were done entirely in Blender and the textures were painted in Blender and Gimp. They are both open source software and really capable of doing a professional job.

Human organs - test render from Maya

After finishing the modeling and texture painting in Blender, I imported the model in Maya via .FBX file format. The mesh looks great without flaws, even the materials names and basic settings were imported correctly.

Below is a preliminary test of the materials and lighting done in Maya.The next steps would be:

• Animate the heart and maybe lungs;
• Add particles simulation to show the flow of blood and malaria parasites entering the heart and flowing to the liver;
• Animate the camera.

I haven't figure out yet a few things regarding the particles animation, I could either look for realistic blood flow in sync to the heart beat, but the speed would turn out to be to fast and not really didactic. I could opt for just a steady flow, so its more understandable where the parasites are coming from and where they are heading.

Another issue that I will have to deal with it's the actual scale of the parasites and blood cells  I will have to greatly exaggerate them so the viewer can recognize the liver and the actual parasites in the same shot.

I'll first try to pin down a camera animation with the voice over recording, and from there I'll try different scales for them and see what they look like in the final rendered image.

Human organs - Heart and liver texture painting

After the modeling and sculpting, I painted the textures for the heart and liver. The textures on the lungs, stomach and intestines are just procedural textures that I just made up for this rendering.

Actually in the final animation, only the liver will be visible as a normal shading mode, the other organs will be rendered with transparencies. This project is about the life cycle of Malaria in the human body and in the mosquito. So in this case, with the semi-transparent organs, the camera will be showing the Malaria parasite flowing through the circulatory system into the liver.

Human organs - Modeling stages

This is just a quick post about today's work. About 4 hours of planing, searching for references and modeling in Blender. It is not anatomically correct but it will work for what I need.

The next step will be painting the textures which I'll use Blender again. The materials will have to be made in Maya for the final rendering.

Turma Cósmica - Online multiplayer games.

To finalize the production of the Turma Cósmica series,  I'd like to present some details on the latest games that we produced.

Although they are only mini-games, they can be considered as the latest technology for us at the time. Instead of a physical media these are all played online on a web browser using Unity 3D engine and are multiplayer. For modeling and animation we used Blender, a free opensource graphics software. Many of the textures were painted in Blender as well and finalized in Photoshop.

Next, are some concepts I made before the actual production.

First, I was just exploring the concept of a 3D board game, how it would look like in perspective, trying to find out problems that I could face later on like confused path, or things hidden form the viewer. I had to always keep in mind that these were for young children.

Next I was looking for how much I could push complexity on the path and amount of "houses" (landing places) for the board.  My intention was to also use dices, because that is also part of the math subject that the student would be learning in class at this period. At this stage you can also see that I started to use some type of color identification on each house. These would represent the type of question the student would be asked. 

So here is how the challenge would be presented. Instead of just adding up (math) the amount acquired of the 3 dices, the student would chose the sequence he would use the 3 dices. For example, the student threw the dices and got 3,2 and 2. If he has more ability in sciences, the could chose to use first one of the dices that had the value of 2 if that will help him to land on a house that is represented by the color of sciences. Later he can chose if it will use the dice of 2 again or the 3 and so on. So there is also strategy that will be used during the game play. On the final version of the game, there were also black colored houses that would be a surprise subject.

On the following image I represented the final look and feel of the game. You can see I chose the theme and the color pallet. Sketches like these were not supposed to look exactly like the final game just a general idea. Since I did at least 10 different variations of these in one day, not much care was used in the perspective or texture details, they should be done really fast. The first two images above were done in Blender, although it is a 3D software, it is amazingly fast to model, so for just basic layout, trying out different points of view it is a indispensable tool.

These sketches now are for the sand tracks race.  Since these were all 3d games, I used Blender again to try out how the track would look in a perspective, its width, how the user would perceive it all.

This sketch I called something like high tech track, who knows, maybe this classic game here in Brazil should look more futuristic... how would kids from the future play this on a Space Station ? Maybe they could even have Storm Troopers uniforms for school? :-)

Actually the test was for trying out if I could just model some basic building blocks and make many different tracks from these. Who knows? Maybe even a procedural build track, that a new one could be generated on every game play?

Then I got melodramatic and decided to go back to the old sand box style track. Remember, the time to get crazy idea is now, when you're just doing concepts. It is better to try something silly and then give up on it now than later on the production process when there is not a whole team working in it. Specially if there are programmers involved, they hate changes :-).

Now I went to sketches in Photoshop where I'm starting to define color pallets and some basic GUI  (graphical user interface ) layout.

The more refined and revised GUI layout. You can see on this one that I had also checked to see how the GUI would adjust to different screen aspect ratios, that is what the subtle darker bands are for on each side of the image. The smaller area is a 4:3 (letter box) aspect ratio found on older TVs and computer monitors and the wider one is 16:9 (HD video standard) found on more modern LCD monitors or some smart phones and tablets.

Turma Cósmica volumes 3 and 4

Before writing in-depth about my current works, I'd like to post here some images from our last two games that were produced for Windows and Linux (under wine).

Turma Cósimica Vol. 3

- Rumo ao planeta Antiqua - 

(Heading to planet Antiqua)

Trailer

Turma Cósimica Vol. 4

- Reconquistando o Brasil - 

(Reconquering Brazil)

Trailer and Game Play

These games were produced almost 4 years ago with Torque Game Engine. The 2D elements were done in Adobe Photoshop and the 3D was done in Autodesk 3DS Max.

Another tool that I used indirectly on Volume 4 was Adobe Flash. I did many animated concepts, game play development and even some coding in Action Script and presented them to the programming team to be implemented in Torque.

Since hardware and software progresses at an amazing rate, the game play and graphics quality in these games are a bit outdated already specially Volume 3, but I still consider them to be of great value to be used in schools or at home following the same curriculum used in a normal class room. These two games were developed for kids in 3rd and 4th grades.

Mouth shapes study.

These are some mouths shapes studies I did for a mockup introductory alphabet lessons for preschool kids. They are supposed to show the differences between vows and consonants.  Where, in the vows pronunciation, the air flows out from the mouth without any obstruction.

While consonants, when pronounced are obstructed by lips, tongue or teeth.

The animations were accomplished with vertex groups and morph targets in Blender and Photoshop later on.