About Me

My photo
Born in Milan, Italy, he moved to the U.S. in order to study animation at Ringling College of Art and Design. After a brief experience in Pixar and Dreamworks he graduated and started working at Blue Sky Animation Studios where he currently helps making movies. He is often found doodling or otherwise painting.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Simple Animation Test



Here's a quick animation test me and Brendan worked on..


I was responsible for the animation on Ragu'(the kid) and the Lighting & Compositing.
Brendan animated Bobo (the monkey) and Joe.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Eye Shading and Rigging - Video Tutorial



Hi guys, I made a video tutorial that describes in detail how I usually create the eye shaders for my CG characters.


The scene file includes the final rig that allows to move the specular highlights around independently from the eyes position. By scaling the main controls it's also possible to increase or decrease the intensity of the specular highlights and by scaling the secondary controls it's possible to control the blurriness of the highlights.

enjoy!

movie

scene files and textures

An outer NURBS sphere is mapped on the transparency with a ramp.
The sphere is mapped on the incandescence with a highlight texture (a white dot on a black background) mapped with 3d projection (set to either sphere or ball).
The 3d texture can be rotated to rotate the specular highlights around.
Inside the sphere I placed polygonal mesh with a custom shader assigned to it.
The shader consists in a layered texture that combines a hand painted texture with a maya ramp.
The maya ramp is mapped in the color offset with the out color of a ramp shader set to normalized brightness.
The ramp shader's purpose is to add a little bit of color variation on the brighter side of the iris.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Dynamic Joints - Video Tutorial

hello guys, I recorded a demo about creating dynamic joints.. this is a cool technique that allows to create automatic overlap on any type of mesh..

bobo_test.mov

if you have antennas, hats, or whatever thing you can come up with, and you want to be able to overlap it by hand (using joints) but you also want to be able to get some automatic overlap.. you might love this.


dynamicJoints.mov

Monday, September 7, 2009

Ncloth Video Tutorial

Covering:

Modeling tips for good simulation
Creation of a cloth
Creation of collision objects
Collision Layers
Constraints
Quality settings
Simulation settings
Setting an initial state
Caching

Ncloth Video Tutorial

Thursday, June 18, 2009