Today I saw at Cartoon Brew something that really made my jaw drop:

The promo videos for the game Team Fortress 2 made by Valve Software. Although I'm not a gamer (and those videos are probably around the net for a while without I got to know about it), these are some of the most entertaining animated shorts I saw in a while.

Be sure to check this making of video out, which talks about the visual concepts for the game.

IMHO, the best promo videos are these, with the best dialogues, scripts and wonderful character animation:

http://www.teamfortress.com/spyupdate/

http://www.teamfortress.com/sniper.htm

http://www.teamfortress.com/engineer.htm

A comment in the Brew's post is somewhat profetic:

"The next golden age of animation will not be in theaters."

Maybe it will, maybe not. But despite that, I think Valve's team deserves kudos for putting some brilliant pieces of animation out.

When reading an article on the UP premiere in Cannes, I noticed a piece of information I thought it was wrong: the Brazilian release date.

I went as quickly as I can type to Disney Brasil website to check it out and almost fell from my chair when I read: SEPTEMBER?!?!

What is in the heads of those executives at Disney Brasil? In times like these, a delay of a long awaited movie without a good reason (all previous Pixar movies had the same release date as in the U.S.) serves only to push the numbers of illegal downloads to a higher level.

Quite hard to understand what's in those executive's minds.

Do you remember Orange, Peach and Apricot, right? Now there is another fruit in da house: Durian - the new Blender Foundation's Open Movie Project - has its website up.

This project will be a great test for the upcoming Blender 2.5, and I believe it will make some noise in the CG community. Even more than Big Buck Bunny did, IMHO, since it will also show the power of the awaited new Blender 2.5. :)

Blender Foundation will receive portfolios from artists around the world and chose a few (about 6) to work on this. Who's gonna try? ;)

It is available on magazine stores and at Editora Europa's website the first Brazilian edition of 3D World magazine.

It features a tutorial I wrote on how to use Blender's Fluid Simulation tools to achieve a "splash" effect, commonly used in advertising. I also did the translation of the other tools' tutorials to Portuguese.

It was a very pleasant experience, and I hope I can take part on the next issues. :)

I found it very impressive this O3D API by Google. You can change and create 3D objects in your browser with Javascript code.

There are plugins for various browsers (Windows and Mac by now). I will have to compile it in order to run the samples on my Ubuntu, and I want to do it soon. :)

I'm looking forward to see its applications' speed and size, but it pretty looks good and fast on YouTube. The technical details mention the import process of COLLADA files, and points to some 3D apps capable of exporting files to this format. I don't know why they didn't mention Blender, since it has a COLLADA exporter for a very good while.