Long time

Hi everybody. Back after a very loooong time.
I've been in US for three weeks and came back with lot of nice photos of textures that I'll be publishing in a few days. Then I worked for some other multicamera editings.. too much boring to do this again in a future so I've decided to quit this business.

Now, I'm planning some real serious studyings for the next weeks and I'd like to share with u some titles I recently discovered and, in some cases, even bought :)

First of all:
- Maya Studio Projects: Dynamics, Todd Palamar. Bought. Seems really interesting. I'll tell u how it is in a few days.
- The VES handbook (...). Bought. It's huge.. and seems awesome!! But I'll need a longer time to read it XD
And last but not least:
- Introduction to Maya Fluid Effect (DVD), Wayne Hollingsworth from Gnomon Workshop. I don't have this one, but saw some works of the author and seems really interesting.


So. Stay tuned.

Dof

Dof: depth of field.

The very first tool that photographers have to drive the attention where they want this to be in an image.

I think it even is a fisiological feature of the sight: it is impossible to look at something blurred without feeling strange and, sometimes, even feel some kind of pain.

This way, the photographer forces the audience to look where he wants them to.

This very simple video uses the Dof to drive the attention and through this read a little poetry.

First real script

Hi everybody!!
Finally I made it! I've just wrote my firts script with his own very little UI!  :)
The script is able to create a custom locator that comes without any of the standard attributes and with some attributes copied from the default particleEmitter. Then it goes on linking those attributes to the same attributes of all the emitter you select in your scene. In this way you can easily change just one value to change every emitter you have previously selected: one "locator" to rule them all.. :)

I'll be showing as soon as possibile some images where I used this script.
See u soon!

R4 concept

Hi there! After the last job and becouse of the really boring lessons (see the previous post) I've been thinking to something to not just waste my time.. so I ended up thinking about this robot and a whole story connected to him.

Here's the first concept for R4.. the texturing is made as a "matte painting", so it still isn't part of the model itself (I still have to prepare the UVs), but up to now it's enough to understand which will be the next improvements needed. As Giulio suggested, I'll have to work on the details of the rust, especially along edges.. hope bumps will help :)

I will be posting some news about this guy soon.
Hope you enjoy!

P.S: Don't be shy. Every comment is welcome!

Boring lesson

 Have you ever had to follow a really really boring lesson knowing that the only reason why you are there is becouse you simply HAVE TO?
Is it boring, isn't it?
Well, since you cannot run away (you HAVE TO stay there) the only way not to go crazy is freeing your mind. And this is where my mind went just yesterday..

A really boring Patology lesson.. :)
Hope you enjoy the Medieval style!!

La strada

Hi everybody. Today we're gonna talk about the making of the videos for the ArteDanza's show "la strada".
The video were supposed to be used as background to the dancers, but they had to be sincronized with the coreographies in a dynamic way becouse of some live instruments playing.
Speaking about the style, everything should have had a futuristic style, so we started searching for some Boccioni's pictures and other artist of the beginning of the '900.
Once we decided the style, the coreographer lined out the backgrounds:
1. Dawn
2. Bus stop
3. Amusement park

Dawn
 

For this shot it was asked to create a whole city, with a main street in the middle of the picture. Since the making of the street wasn't such a great challenge, we'll talk a little bit more about the city.
There are three ways to create a city: buy a very expansive software to procedurally create it, model and place every single building hoping that your client won't ever think about move anything or the way used for this shot.
Everything starts with deciding where to place the buildings and this is made creating multiple particles grid. Every particle will be randomly assigned of an ID from 0 to 12.
12 is the total number of the buildings that were modeled and from the ones the script could choose.
After the assignment it was asked to create a dawn effect (about the one we won't talk since is a little boring, in my opinion).
To finish the shot were rendered three passes: AO, used as beauty, a matte used to isolate and reproduce the city and hide the horizon line on the sides, and the zDepht, to reproduce the smog.
We won't talk about this, but it was asked a last pass that was created separatly and was the same city at night (created with a matte panting like way).

Bus stop

I know.. the composition is not correct, but this is what was asked, since this image should be projected behind the dancers.

In the background you can see the city we talk about before.

I'll just say this, since I consider it funny. The trees as are shown were created almost by mistake. Searching a way to stylize them we (me and my brother, who was suggesting me during the modeling) watched the scene in wireframe and noticed that they were better without any texture for the leaves.. so that's it!

Amusement Park


Here's the last shot. This was the most challenging one since it had to be all animated (in sinc with a music track, Tosca, "Il terzo fuochista").
At first the client asked for a video where only lights could be seen, but in this way it became too hard to understand what was happening and where the action took place, so the surfaces where added. Now, this is something I will talk about becouse I consider it very important.
The video is based on three different render passes: the glows, the solid structures and the sky. At first, I did this way just to make some experiments with the rendering passes becouse there wasn't a really need for this, but suddenly, when it was too late to start a new rendering of the sequence, the client asked for a brighter scene. If it weren't made a different pass for the solids, this request would have been impossibile to satisfy. But we did it. So..
In the video is shown only the first part of the sequence.

Hope you enjoy this article and the images.
See you soon!

2 new DVDs

Hi everybody!
Here there are my latest works, both filmed in June and both edited in August (almost).

 

and

They are two dance assay for the end of the schools, filmed in multicamera.
Thanks to the camera operators: Giulio and Ermanno!