“The Serial” is a low budget film produced by ” Zero Project “ dating back to 2005

The film is about a group of boys who discover a game that can kill.
In some scenes, some boys gone literally in the game.
The play area and the virtual characters were completely modeled in Blender.
Instead the animations were made in Poser, the right choice for the speed with which you can make long runs.
Once finished the movie, the studio has sought funds for distribution, but unfortunately the time passed and these funds did not arrive.
Now, Zero project  has decided to release it and I have the opportunity to correct the final scene of the explosion.
In this scene I could experience how convenient to have a compositing tool fully integrated in a suite 3d.
Prepare a tutorial on this and thanks to Zero Project perhaps there will be other surprises related to the blender and “the serial”.
Stay tuned.

Fernando Luceri

Adjust the following parameters on the materials panel (F5) for a better result.
[texture size] in [map imput] for the scale of the sketch (more or less thin)

[ref] and [size] diffuse parameter in the panel [shader] to enlarge or reduce the area of shadow
[smoth] in the same panel for the contrast between bright and dark areas
Activate the , color band in the [rampshader] as in the material 3 for a variable edge
Activate the , color band in the [rampshader] as in the material 5 for color the sketch
Activate the option [edge] in the panel [output] of the rendering. Here a fast example of application

download: sketch shader (1.65MB) added: 18/07/2010 clicks: 275 description: material for blender

Another excerpt from work is the “Annunciation”
in fact even this had to be a simple photo slide show, but the beauty of the works  has led me to create something special that I am pleased to show you.

Fernando Luceri

This will immediately clear if the loops are correct and sufficiently “flowing”.
Loops generally should always be present in places where skin folds and if possible should follow the anatomical lines defined by bones and muscles.
Another thing to avoid are the triangles in areas that will bend. triangles tend to distort the natural flow of the deformation of the skin, like an old scar.
Here illustrates the steps performed

1: removed triangles in areas animated by
2: correction of the nose’s loop ( start from above the nostrils, not below)
3: loop’s eye and lip
4: loops contour the face and front
5: Addition expression’s loops
5b: The good of the flowing loops is that often you can delete them without ruining the shape and topology.

Fernando Luceri

.1) The loop follows its natural path

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. 2) Select the face of the intersection and turns it into two triangles (CTRL T)

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. 3) Select the edge central  and subdivide (w> Subdivide)
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. 4) Select two triangular faces and merge, repeat with the other two faces  (F)
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. 5) Now I have two faces that seem triangular but are square. move towards the inner corner the central vertex.
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. 6) Now the loop turns magically in the desidered direction
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. 7) I can add many loops as i want , at the end I can merge the subdivided vertex with the vertex in the angle and merge the two triangular faces in a square.

Fernando Luceri

Fantastic experience!
On 20 and 21 May I gave it two lessons on blender and animation at the Assembly Hall , Department of Mathematics and informatics, University of Catania.
The great hall was crowded and the course was followed both by informatic students who already knew blender and art students who first approached the computer graphics.

The first day we talked about the secrets of good posing and classical principles of animation, while the second day we saw how you can apply these principles in blender 2.5.

This trip to Catania gave me the opportunity to meet people absolutely fantastic first Professor Giovanni Gallo thank you for the wonderful hospitality and then the boys and the girls of Reibe studios with whom we have also made a jaunt to see the wonderful Sicilian landscape.

Fernando Luceri

3d  3days  3events in 3cusped island

From 20 May, in the splendid backdrop of Sicily,  are going to be held
a series of Events which Computer Graphics theme will be.

The second edition of

Hot Flowing Pixel Festival

a festival of short animated movies created by Giovanni Gallo, Professor of Computer Graphics at the University of Catania, organised by the not for profit association Erbematte together with Federico Lupo of Galleria Zelle in Palermo

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During the evenings, the short 3D animated movie

froggy is back

from the reibe studio, will be presented.
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It also proposes a seminar and CG workshops entitled:

“Animation: principles and practice in Blender 2.5″

by Fernando Luceri
two lessons at the Assembly Hall , Department of Mathematics and informatics, University of Catania which incorporates and expands on the ideas expressed in the workshop in Turin
see you at the foot of the volcano!

Fernando Luceri

Futuro?

future? is a short film of 2000 that won the 2001 edition of the

international award “tdk imageplasma hi digital animation pro”.
It’s made with poser and 3D Studio 4 for DOS.

Nathan Never

“Nathan Never” is a no profit fan-made films of 2002. It’s only a tribute to a great comic of science fiction. Still poser and 3d studio 4 for DOS. For this short-film I gave voice to all males and my wife gave voice to women. I also composed and played with my korg 01 the original music (beginning and end).

one last thing, much less professional,

Shana

it’s my first animation, dating back to 1992 and was made with 3d studio 2 for dos. I found the file “.fli” (one for each scene) 320×200 resolution with 256 colors (optimized palette) 15 frames per second (about one hour to render a frame on a 80286 with math coprocessor 12 MB of RAM  hard drive 80 MB paid £8.500.000!!!) Now I have joined the various segments and added the music (composed and produced by www.hartwigmedia.com ) for present to you.

revising them I noticed a curiosity, in the movie of 1992 you can be seen a spaceship and a brunette, with different resolution the same ship the same woman reappeared in the movie of 2002. Now in “progetto verde” still the ship but she is turning blue! I’m telling the same story since 20 years!

Fernando Luceri

Usually i dedicate a directory to temporary work files and one to the finished works. Thus, once a job finished, i transfer the results to the “finished” directory and delete the “temporary” directory. The other night, because of weariness, I made a fatal mistake! My fingers moved mechanically when I realized that I was deleting the “finished” directory (18 GB of my blood!). I was still and silent for several minutes looking at the monitor.
Fortunately there are some OS programs that have helped me at that time.
I used NTFS undelete, an open source tool that lets you recover accidentally deleted files, but this is an operation that often does not give the expected results.
Therefore It is crucial to make a backup!
however, for not having problems then you should make a backup at least every hour.
Cobian is right for us.
Cobian is an open source program that can be used to schedule and backup, at desidered interval of time,  your files and directories from their original location to other directories/drives in the same computer or other computer in your network. FTP backup is also supported in both directions (download and upload).
ten minutes to download and set it and we can sleep soundly.

thanks to franx from kino3d for reporting

Fernando Luceri

fat man Very fat man

Fernando Luceri