From all the shorts screened on AnimaMundi this year, Skhizein, by Jeremy Clapin was the one which really got me.

A truly excelent short that went officially online just recently, as I found at Cartoon Brew. It is really worth watching:

Skhizein from Josef K. on Vimeo.

I know that probably everyone had watched this short before, but I think it deserves to me mentioned here. ;)

Distraxion, by Mike Stern, is one of the best shorts made by a Animation Mentor student, IMHO. I found it just hilarious.

You probably know PSYOP. At least you have seen some of their awesome productions.

Yesterday I got a great tip from Marck. PSYOP holds a Vimeo channel to show their behind-the-scenes videos.

There you can watch some jaw-dropping videos like this:

Man... I've spent hours watching those videos again and again.

After I saw the news that the rendering optimizations made by the user known as Jaguarandi were merged into the trunk branch of Blender 2.5, I decided to make a little experiment:

Using the file provided by the well known Blender Render Benchmark, I've compared the rendering speeds of the current 2.49b and 2.5 (svn revision 23930). Obviously the speed of two instances of Blender rendering the same scene while recording it in HD resolution isn't the most ideal environment. But still, blender 2.5 was able to render the scene twice before 2.49b could finish the first one.

In normal conditions (without resource hungry processes in parallel and with 2 dedicated threads), the render time using version 2.49b was 01m03s, while 2.50 finished it in amazing 25s! :)

This new Blender is getting more exciting each day. I would like to thank and give my kudos to all the developers!

For those curious, my system is a Core2Duo 2.53 GHz, using Ubuntu 9.04 64 bit. Video recorded with RecordMyDesktop and edited with Blender.

Yeah... time to take the dust off this blog! :)

Lots of work (combined with a little indiscipline) made that I went away from writing here, but I'll try my best with this post. ;)

The video we made for the song My Favorite Way was nominated Video of the year on MTV! We didn't win that, but I see this nomination as a prize in itself. :)

Speaking of prizes... I'm humbled and extremely happy to know I won "Best Character Animation" at Blender Pro (Brazilian Blender Conference)! :D

The piece that won this prize was "Monster":

Thank you very much to everyone who voted for this piece, and my kudos to all winners and everyone who helped make another successful Blender Pro! :)

One more thing... I just want to say that I'm working in a completely new version of my rig Otto. And I mean completely:

I've been studying various rigging approaches, from Blender and other apps. I'm going to try some cool things I've found, bringing the best I see on those rigs.

With the upcoming Blender 2.5, it doesn't make much sense to release a final version now. So the actual release will be only after the final 2.5.

And that's all, folks! ;)