As a good start for our week, now everyone go to Enrico Casarosa's website.

That guy is great. I think I don't need to be much verbose here, as his works speak very loud for themselves. =)

Animation Mentor has been producing some very cool "webinars".

The best of all is that they are recorded and everyone is allowed to watch them afterwards. Therefore, if you can't attend to it (be it by the requirement of using Windows or any other reason) you can watch (and re-watch) the presentation later.

The latest one was with the great Carlos Baena, where he gives a very good presentation on how to prepare a Demo Reel.

If you didn't know about those webinars, be sure not to miss the previous ones. =)

Begins today the 16th AnimaMundi, the biggest animation festival in Latin America.

It happens in two places: from today (July, 7th) to 20th in Rio de Janeiro and from July 23th to 27th in São Paulo. If you have the chance to go there, don't miss it at all. Check here the full schedule of events and screenings. =)

Unfortunately I won't go this year because of my job, but I went in a past edition and I don't want to miss the next year.

UPDATE:

For Portuguese speakers, there is this very cool article on the festival

Finally a new work online, huh? =)

This is a TV ad I animated to celebrate the 18th Anniversary of Brazilian Children and Teenagers' Statute (also known here as ECA):

In this project, I was responsible for animation, models, rigs and lights. The backgrounds and paintings were created by Jovan de Melo, the soundtrack composed by Carlos Bêla from Lobo and the direction and final composition by Marck Al, from NitrocorpZ studio.

The advertising agency for this was Pagú Propaganda.

The basic idea of the script is that the children and teenagers were considered like objects by the Brazilian Law before the creation of that Statute. After its creation they became to be seen as real individuals, with rights and obligations. In the video, the doll is pulled by the book (Statute) to be transformed into a real boy. (Pinocchio?)

It was a fun project to do and I think the results were pretty good, considering the deadlines. =)

One thing that I found interesting is that the final composition was not done in Blender. It was made in After Effects, and we needed a quick way to render everything in different passes: Ambient Occlusion, diffuse lights, flat colors, motion blur, lines, shadows and reflections.

The cool thing is that the "File Output" node in Blender allows us to save different files simoutaneously at each render. This is really useful and quick to get different passes rendered. Hooray for Blender devs! =)

I'm making a short video to explain that better, but for now I give you two pre-production files: a turnaround on the boy's model and an animation test for the mechanical claw.

This weekend I knew about this great new feature being developed by Alligorith: Greasepencil.

But... what does is do?

It allows us to directly draw into the 3D view, making it possible to sketch our posing and acting ideas right into Blender. The first time I heard about such feature was when Pixar made it in order to allow the director Brad Bird to draw on top of what the animators showed him, so he could visually explain what he wanted. You can here more on this PDF.

Alligorith has been publishing new versions of his patch on this thread at BlenderArtists. There are even some ready to go builds available on GraphicAll.org.

And what if you want to make your own build with the latest patch without waiting for one to make and upload one?

If you are on Windows, Macouno has made a pretty cool compiling tutorial on his site. To apply the patch you can use Patch for Windows, which I guess that is used the exact same way that the Unix version shown below.

If you are using Ubuntu Linux as I am, do the following:

• Open a terminal;

• Create a folder where you will put the Blender source.
  

   Ex: mkdir /home/your_username/blender

• Enter into that folder:
  

   cd /home/your_username/blender

• Install the packages required to build Blender (depending on what you already have installed, it may take a while):
  

   sudo apt-get build-dep blender

• Download the latest source code from SVN (it also may take a while):
  

   svn checkout https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/trunk/blender

• After it has finished, enter into blender directory:
  

  cd blender

• Download the patch (as I write this, the latest version is the 13th):
  

   wget http://aligorith.googlepages.com/greasepencil_13.patch

• Apply the patch (which is basically modifications on the original code):
  

   patch -p0 ‹greasepencil_13.patch

• Now you are ready to compile:
  

   scons

• Wait another while until it's finished and, if you don't get any errors, you will have the new folder /home/your_username/install/linux2. Get into it:
  

  cd /home/your_username/install/linux2

• Now you can enjoy it:
  

  ./blender

"Ok, nice... now I have already compiled/downloaded that Greasepencil version. How do I use it?"

Well... since you have already opened Blender:

• Go to the 3D view menu and select "Grease Pencil..."
  
  
  
• Click "Use Grease Pencil"
  
  
  
• Click "Add New" and adjust the settings like color and thickness
  
  
  
• Notice that will be created a new mode for the 3D view called "Grease Pencil". Select it.
  
  
  
• Voilá! You are ready to draw on the screen =D