Andréa Senise

1st RealFlow test \o/

2011-10-24T10:50:00.000-07:00

really low quality render and weird meshes.... but it was my 1st try. RF Is really fun to play with XD

1st RF test from Andrea Senise on Vimeo.

Lado Nix :D

2011-10-16T09:15:00.000-07:00

Lado Nix (Nix Side, in English) is the webseries we're making at Mambo Jack Studios. It'll be up on oct 27 (yayyyyy excited excited excited!)

It's been a fun project to work on. Really challenging, great direction, awesome team... and I could have the chance to work on tons VFX. Learning a LOT!

here's the trailer... (don''t forget to turn on CC for subtitles)

Can't wait for the next season!! :D

Risqué

2011-10-03T17:30:00.000-07:00

Work that I've done with the guys from Comunica ;)

http://youtu.be/z4UbtnNcDbo

yeah.... no embed for the video... not my fault!

Links to stuff I've done

2011-06-07T18:09:00.000-07:00

don't know why I just thought of posting it here right now O_o

there will be more to come ;) Ah! and a couple rigs as well!

Boticario Tathy Princess from renatofujie on Vimeo.

back to Brasil!

2011-06-05T21:26:00.000-07:00

Yesssss I'm back!

It's been a long time since my last post. I've been working a LOT with tons of different stuff.... will start posting it slowly, I promise!

During all this time I've been working a lot with rigging in Afx, stereo 3D in Afx, crazy camera rigs and scripting, particles in Afx, tons of C4D and some Maya, just 'cause I love him S2. It was a lot of learning!! I hope to post here some of the rigs and some of the work my clients allow me to.

For now, I've got a virus. Just a quick C4D model for my Dad's class, nothing fancy. And the frame rate is low 'cause what he really needs is an animated gif o_o . This guy down here is a Hepatitis C virus, beware!

Hepatitis C virus from Andrea Senise on Vimeo.

La Bluaform Kanto!

2010-06-26T10:36:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since my last post, and at that time I was going crazy with the production of my short movie. Maybe that's why I completely forgot about the blog.

Well, a couple months passed by, I graduated (yayyy :D) and now I'm looking for a job.

As I really like the idea of sharing knowledge and news, I want to keep updating the blog with stuff that I'm working on. I don't think I'll remember to update it every week, but I'll do my best to drop here any interesting info about what's going on :]

For those who haven't seen it yet, here's my movie, "La Bluaform Kanto". Enjoy ^^

La Bluaform Kanto from Andrea Senise on Vimeo.

I'm still alive!!!!!

2010-03-05T19:30:00.000-08:00

and rigging again, almost on the last week!!!!

So I'm distorting LCs little body to make his transformation into music shapes, the blue swirls. I'm still not sure if it'll work, but anything is better than the version that I have now. And the lattice + clusters on the lattice points + locators attached to a curve just took me 4 hours to set up and notice that it wouldn't work =/

so I'm trying now with some nonlinear deformers, and good luck for us! (me and LC heheh)

the whale is sleeping!

2009-11-18T15:20:00.000-08:00

like a donnut!

heheheh

guess who is my inspiration ;)

eeeevil ladybug >=D

2009-11-11T19:57:00.000-08:00

yayyy ^^

2009-10-29T15:18:00.001-07:00

Referencing discovery ^^

2009-10-19T14:17:00.000-07:00

As you guys know, my project scenes are huge, because of the great number of polygons, milions of cubes, references and particles. As I was setting up the files for the renderfarm, I was fixing the links for the referenced scenes ( deleting everything that comes before "scene" - that crazy path full of /mydocuments, //user, C: and similar codes) so they could keep working on any other machine. Well in some scene, Maya would simply crash, as many times as I tried, as soon as I would change the path. Well, The file needed to be changed somehow.... so I tried to open the .ma file on text edit to see if I could find where the linked files were on the code. I could find them right on the beginning of the document, I've changed them on text edit and ta-daaaaaa! It worked!!! =D much faster and much lighter than doing it on Maya ;)

AO batch render bug!

2009-10-03T19:00:00.001-07:00

When I batch render the AO pass of my scene it render 1 layer (it takes sthg around 3minutes)... and then it waits for about 1 hour to start rendering the next frame!!!!!
Have you ever seen this before? will I have to manually change the start frame number and redo the batch render for all the 60 frames?
Weeeeeiiiiiiiirdddd!!!! O_o

music shapes in Maya!!!! =D

2009-09-23T11:29:00.000-07:00

Yeeeessss its true!!! Believe it or not, this is Maya!!!! After days of trials, finally it works! And as sending cameras from Maya to C4d is hard as e hell, maybe I'll stick to this solution on the animated camera/character scenes, so my life will probably be easier. Ok, achieving this moving shape was not the most simple thing in the world, but as my history is still all there, I can tweak the CVs and still have the animation!!! so I'll just have to remodel the curves and maybe create a couple more deformers to stick the beginning to the mush flute.

Now I can believe things will work anyway ;)

I cannot render!!! O_o

2009-09-21T13:56:00.001-07:00

whyyy??? It's everythg soooo weird!

why it takes soooo long to render?? =/

2009-09-16T11:35:00.001-07:00

without ao!!! =O

+ light in the flute hills

2009-09-16T11:31:00.001-07:00

lighting test for falli giant cubes scene

2009-09-15T07:28:00.000-07:00

lc w/ his 1st flute

2009-09-11T15:53:00.001-07:00

mushroom field

2009-09-11T12:35:00.001-07:00

thats what was in my head =D

Now I just need to do the plants with the little mushrooms growing up!

AO working on batch ^^

2009-09-05T04:58:00.000-07:00

at least on the pass contribution mode. on the layer override I still get the renders that take forever. have no idea why!! O_o

anyway, here it is ^^

LC sliding test animation

2009-09-05T04:55:00.000-07:00

ok ok LC looks like crap, but it was a preview render and i didnt even remember about turning on the lights heheheh so just did a color overlay for him to look bluish. But the idea is the animation. and to see that C4D and Maya are working together ;)

cam from C4D to Maya

2009-09-05T02:43:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to share a discovery that made me really happy! I had this scene in Maya in which I had imported a camera+target from C4D. everythg gets humongous, so I made an empty group, put everythg inside it and resized it to 0.01. Everythg working perfectly, I noticed that I hadto adjust the camera movement. So I opened the original file in C4D, made the tweaks I had to and exported another fbx (without changing the names of the cam and target).

My surprise was on Maya, when I just imported the new fbx scene and ta-daaa ... it replaced the old one!!! beautiful! working perfectly =D

Ah! Just do not forget to smooth the curves on the graph editor... they're stepped by default! ;)

the lost reflection

2009-09-04T14:06:00.000-07:00

when I separated the render layers in foreground and background and rendered them w/ the batch render, I cannot see the tree reflected by the cubes of the city. It does make sense, as the trees are not in the same render layer. But how can I make this happen?

AO issues #2

2009-09-04T14:02:00.000-07:00

why the AO renders fast when I render 1 frame in the render window, but it takes about 1hour to render with the batch render???

AO issues #1

2009-09-04T14:00:00.000-07:00

why my AO renders have sometimes a white background and sometimes a grey background?? O_o

my graph editor

2009-09-03T17:19:00.001-07:00

this is the animated camera and aim I brought in from C4D ^^

LC is playing the flute ^^

2009-09-02T14:22:00.001-07:00

wiuhuhuhhhhhh

2009-09-01T20:08:00.001-07:00

Now my tree has a beautiful stretchy arm =D

OMG rigging is really fun ^^

ocean shader fixed! =D

2009-09-01T02:40:00.000-07:00

Better resolution and faster render! Thanks Andrew!!

lifting LC

2009-08-31T17:40:00.001-07:00

eh... blend shapes are off but I'll find a way of fixing it!

and... I think I need some motion blur! A Lot, actually!!

ocean shader squares??

2009-08-31T16:00:00.001-07:00

ehhh.... They made my moving ocean look like a low res jpeg ocean! So I tried to tweak all the parameters of the ocean shader, and still I couldnt figure out where's the issue. So I noticed that the smaller I make the ocean shader scale, the subtler the tiles get. The thing is that now I have a scale of 0.001 and still there are some tiles, that I'm afraid get visible when the shader's moving. What can I do to fix that??

don't know what 2 do with all this reflectivity!! O_o

2009-08-31T11:54:00.000-07:00

OMG what's worse?!?!?

the oposite of my cubes....

2009-08-25T12:56:00.000-07:00

take a look at that!! Greeeeat animation!

http://vimeo.com/4870899

test render for LC breaking through the labirynth

2009-08-25T01:45:00.000-07:00

Ok.... a lot of little issues, I know..... but thats what tests are made for =) and I'm really happy w/ the result!

LC breaking through 1st render test from Andrea Senise on Vimeo.

animated song shape touching the fence

2009-08-25T01:42:00.000-07:00

1st test afteranimating the CVs on C4D. was quite complicated to figure out how to animate the CVs, as it's not as visible as in Maya. But after some research, everythg always works heheh

song shapes touching the fence from Andrea Senise on Vimeo.

er... shader for music shape?

2009-08-24T00:19:00.001-07:00

looking solid. but still too weird??

slide scene

2009-08-23T21:09:00.001-07:00

I have already the camera! Just need the soundtrack to adjust the timing and send it to Maya, so I can animate the cube sliding down. They're not gonna be that colored though, it was just a map shader so I could recognize more easily each swirl.

slide scene camera animation from Andrea Senise on Vimeo.

falling rubber cubes

2009-08-23T17:20:00.000-07:00

I was having soooo many problems to simulate these falling rubber cubes with maya and nCloth that I decided to try the same in C4D, as it's faster and lighter for so many things.

It kinda worked but it was so much more complicated and nonsense for setting up the dynamics, and the simulation was soooo much more heavy that I decided to go back to Maya. The difference is that C4D gave me the idea that I

needed to make things work on Maya. Here are the tests!

falling rubber cube in C4D from Andrea Senise on Vimeo.

Falling rubber cube with Maya nCloth from Andrea Senise on Vimeo.

Result: faster and better result in Maya, but only if you use the right geometry! Here's why it was taking me so long to calculate nCloth:

"fake" subdivision works better than high poly objs. Good to know ;)

The mushrooms are melting =D

2009-08-23T16:31:00.000-07:00

it's popping a little bit... don't know why!!!! but this scene seems possible now =D

AO working ;)

2009-08-22T20:57:00.001-07:00

Cameras for Afx

2009-08-19T06:00:00.000-07:00

OK. Everybody's talking to everybody now.

Finally I could fix all the bugs and make it work on Afx.

I know that it seems really easy to export C4D cameras to Afx, but GOD, it took me a while to find out that the plugin that needs to be installed on Afx is not available for download.... it actually comes inside the C4D application folder!!! Why nobody talks about that on the forums?!?!?! Well, once it's installed, it works. or kind of works, cause I've got a bug a couple times, in which Afx wouldnt import any camera keyframes (!!!) and then I just did everythg again about 5 times (I didn't believe it was not working...) and suddenly it worked!!! (?) yeh, it makes no sense at all....

... and with Maya everythg was soooo much easier!!! Afx reads .ma files, so that was just importing the .ma file and it was working beautifully!!! and the best thg is that we get a clean timeline =D

I just need to do the tests now to see if everythg matches, but I'll think about it after, it's already too late now. or too early... O_o

camera from Maya

camera from C4D

Camera export from C4D to Maya

2009-08-19T05:15:00.001-07:00

... and now from Maya to C4D too!!!!

It took me a while to figure out how to make the cameras from C4D work on Maya. Everythg that comes from C4D is HUGE, and it doesnt matter to change the scale when u're importing, its always the same. So I've tried to create 2 empty groups, inside one of them I put the animated camera from C4D (it automatically gets baked when exporting to fbx) and inside the other one I put the obj from C4D, to be used as a reference (as its almost impossible to simply bake mograph stuff). Then, I just scaled down both the groups and "Ta-daaaaaa" (heahheah) it worked perfectly!!!

On the opposite direction (from Maya to C4D), things work in a similar way if u export the scene to fbx. The only thg I've noticed is that if you do not check the option box for "baking animation" (inside the animation + tab) on Maya Fbx export window, C4D does not understand the animation data. And back to C4D, stuff from Maya works great! =D

tests for rendering the cubees

2009-08-18T08:40:00.000-07:00

eh.... I cannot get rid of the green.... =/ even if I turn off the reflectivity the FG still makes it green O_o

Flying Cubees!!! =D

2009-08-14T17:26:00.000-07:00

Dont u get high after some time looking at this?!? aehaeheaheaheahh

sry for not hidding the locators... but Maya understands them as particles, so even if I hide everythg we keep seeing these guys O_o

gelly ground color tests

2009-08-12T09:30:00.000-07:00

Opinions are welcome!!!

My favorites are the white and green ones....

E sou palmeirense meeeeeeesmo! huahuahuahuaahuhh

Lets melt the cube!

2009-08-12T08:19:00.000-07:00

I needed to have some fun!

scene w/ everythg at the same time

2009-08-11T08:36:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple screenshots.

It still looks like snow, but I've been working on the ink splats. I've made some poly planes, turned them into ncloth and dropped them on the ground, so they got a similar shape. Then, I assigned the ink splat textures. For it not to get a terrible black shadow, I assigned a white image to the shadow shader, but it still doesn't look right and I don't know why! It seems that the ink splats are not as bright as everything else? I don't know.

Anyway, maybe some more on the borders would make it look less like snow.

Ah! Still tweaking the lights. for a million days. And it never seems to get allright =/

3d pixelated FIRE!! =D

2009-08-07T06:01:00.000-07:00

I've tried form 1st.... and then I noticed that the particles are not 3D =/ tsc tsc tsc it's so frustrating to work only w/ Afx O_o

Ok, then I moved to C4D and everythg was done in 10' !!

love mograph heheheh

All the world together!

2009-08-04T07:41:00.001-07:00

Yeah... I crashed Maya a couple times before get this done..... but I still couldn't make this lightning work well. And maybe I still need some more trees? or bushes? or animals? or stained glass trees??? O_o

1 more animation started

2009-07-31T17:48:00.000-07:00

Rig for the alarm fence - done!

2009-07-31T10:24:00.000-07:00

yeeeeahhhh! Finally I could link the color of the shader to the set driven key!!! I couldn't do it with the surface shader, because it didn't had out values as simple as color R color G color B. So I've tried to attach a ramp to it, and I still couldn't make it work. probably I've keyed the wrong attributes.... Anyway, some research later I found out that the lambert keyable attributes are really simple, so I linked the lambert to the surface shader's out color (because I was lazy to load the quick select set and apply the lambert to it) and did the set driven key on the lambert Color and incandescence RGB!!! And it's working nice ;) ufffzzzzz

rendering tests w/ area light

2009-07-31T01:36:00.001-07:00

run run run run, don't miss the next bart!

2009-07-30T22:11:00.000-07:00

heheh I'll double the time later on Afx

1st scene of the cube up in the tree

2009-07-30T22:10:00.000-07:00

less shadow in the 1st cube scene

2009-07-30T10:36:00.000-07:00

just used an ambient light

Allarm fence

2009-07-30T10:34:00.000-07:00

these red-blue cubes are supposed to come ou from the regular cube, as the soundshapes touch it

ruuuuuuun forrest

2009-07-29T23:10:00.001-07:00

1st scene of the cube in the city

2009-07-29T10:18:00.000-07:00

my poor cube is in the shadow!

2009-07-28T21:13:00.001-07:00

cube city . Done!!

2009-07-28T14:53:00.000-07:00

cubic sun

2009-07-28T08:46:00.000-07:00

I don't think I'll use it.... But I tried anyway.

cubic clouds ^^

2009-07-28T08:41:00.001-07:00

cube city

2009-07-28T08:39:00.001-07:00

alpha tests

2009-07-28T08:36:00.000-07:00

tests with mental ray with the permultiply turned off and the phong on the giant leafs........ er... didn't really work! but It's Ok, as it seems to work really well w/ the MIA Mat

pattern in the city

2009-07-21T14:37:00.001-07:00

er... I don't think the checker pattern is so clear because of the roads...

ufz! plan for the 1st city piece

2009-07-21T13:59:00.000-07:00

doesn't it look like tetris?? haeheahaeheheah love it!

fighting against the alpha

2009-07-21T08:54:00.001-07:00

tests w/ alpha, without alpha, with 2 domes, one for gi other for the alpha, change of transparency, change from phong to MIA (mixture of plastic and glass)... ah! and with a directional light, not the ohysical sun&sky, because with just the light, the shadow and the FG on I have more control over what's going on.

The cubecity's been planned

2009-07-21T08:42:00.000-07:00

but OMG it's sooooo hard to plan a city! specially if u need to have sliders going through the hole city..... the pink and blue cubes are just a mark, so I can make all the pinks taller and all the blues shorter, so I'm gonna get a checker pattern in the heights when the city's seen from far away.

The pattern was perfect before I adjust it to the rails I had, but it's impossible to make everythg fit perfectly when overlapped. So instead of keeping the pattern perfect I decided not to touch the rails. But I still think the effect's gonna work

my cube on the treeeeeeee =D

2009-07-20T18:04:00.000-07:00

yuhuhuhhhhh starting to animate the 1st scene =D

Basket animal

2009-07-19T03:01:00.000-07:00

The deformations are blend shapes ^^

Test layout for the cube city?

2009-07-18T16:47:00.001-07:00

Dynamics in Maya and C4D

2009-07-16T15:13:00.000-07:00

Here is my homework... the mouse trap ... Talanta trap, in this case... done in Maya. Still no texturing or lighting, but the dynamics are working well. Here you can have all the options ever, but I noticed that the rigid bodies have a terrible tendency to interpenetrate each other, so they get stuck together and behave just as they were 1 object. This issue has driving me crazy for some years, and still I do not know what to do to avoid these guys to overlap =/

And here I have some balls falling on the disk, from Nick's tutorial at GSG. Great stuff here! For sure it's impossible to compare the complexity of both, particles for maya and C4D. The way C4D thinks is a little bit different... we need to kinda buffer the dynamics before... really weird... but it seems much lighter too! The center of the disk gets sticky somehow, and I still couldn't figure out how to make the balls jump more, specially if the ground surface is flat.... but what made me really happy is that the little balls REALLY COLLIDE, they do not overlap or interpenetrate!!!! Isn't it amazing?

That's it! I'll keep working on both of them, to discover which tool is better for each specific situation ;)

More render.....

2009-07-15T17:48:00.000-07:00

I'm still messing around with these lights and lenses....

This is what I've got without the lens in the camera. Got back the color in my sky, but everythg is ultra mega master blaster over exposed.....

... and then I deleted the physical sun and sky and I got this only with the FG that remained. It took 22 min on the ultramacs at the lab! Yes, I definitely need some light in this scene.....

Rendering tests for my tree!!!

2009-07-14T17:37:00.000-07:00

Yessss this is the one ^^ w/ the old leafs that I was missing, that are gonna be beautiful in the closer shots.

And take a look at the rendering times!!! Isn't it magic?!? THANK YOU GUYS for the new machines on our lab!!!!! =D

SSs of the rigs

2009-06-17T13:50:00.000-07:00

rig test animation

2009-06-17T13:25:00.000-07:00

just a poor animation, to see if the rig was working, and to chock the paint weights on the legs - which were a nightmare! Pw done only in component editor =O

+ tree tests

2009-06-16T17:32:00.001-07:00

still as not colored shadows as I wanted, but I'd better keep trying at home!

problems w/ the permultiplying in the alpha channel

2009-06-16T13:18:00.000-07:00

is it possible to create an alpha channel in maya without permultiplying it w/ any color?? just the way after fx does?

mooooore tree tests

2009-06-16T13:14:00.000-07:00

the white test is because I think it was getting toooooooo much colorfull.... But I like it though!

cube people

2009-06-16T03:22:00.001-07:00

hehehe

this was funny

one more

2009-06-15T03:17:00.000-07:00

Thaaaanks for the idea, Andrew! Here it is, the test with only one colored glass egg. Seeing this one so colored alone makes me think that when I have all of them full of colors placed on the tree it's going to be a carnaval! So I'd better think more carefully about the colors and saturations.

And I know that it is a little bit outside the context, but i L.O.V.E.D the typetree!!! do you really think it does not make sense?

Tree tests

2009-06-14T21:49:00.000-07:00

leafs? eggs? type? heeeeeeelllpppp!!!!

tree + animals + clouds + red sky

2009-06-09T11:05:00.000-07:00

just a test.

the permultiplied black is driving me crazy!!!! I miss so much Afx when I'm working w/ photoshop hahahh

tree + animals

2009-06-09T10:41:00.000-07:00

I've done some planes w/ watercolor textures to put on the ground. Now I think it's too tinny, but as it always takes forever to render, I really don't feel like rendering again right now.

Even after a couple of tests, I still think the sun is too bright, it is overexposing everythg! I had already changed its angle several times, but it doesnt seem to be enough. Is there a way of making lights a little bit more dull??

Ah! And it's better for me to rush to composite this w/ clouds here, because it took me about 30h to do it at the school because photoshop was almost dying to handle my file...... and it was just a low res picture, 720x480px!!!! Can you believe it?!?!?!!? O_o

flying whale + texture

2009-06-09T10:37:00.000-07:00

one more pet for the tree world heheheheh OMG seriously, I could do this forever!!! The problem is that if I was to rig all of these guys it would take me 10 years to finish the short heheheh

anyway, they can be beautiful helping the composition in the background.

now the tree has all the leafs!!!

2009-06-09T10:33:00.001-07:00

If I use the leafs without the "3" subdivision mode, the render time goes about 10' down!!!!!

Btw, do you think that my leafs are too tinny?? Do you think that my tree is too bald?!?

Texture 4 the spider

2009-06-09T10:32:00.001-07:00

texture for the caracol

2009-06-09T10:31:00.001-07:00

ufffzzzz!!!!

2009-06-07T02:58:00.001-07:00

Nothing new to show.

This one is just to celebrate the paint weights. after 10h of painting weights nonstop I had to show a picture of him now, almost alive =D Does he seem more happy or I'm reeeeeally too tired?? Omg this guy's already talking to me!

Now I just need 2 do the blend shapes ;)

rigging test for the tail of the beanbug

2009-06-03T15:16:00.000-07:00

I couldn't still figure out how to make the [helice] rotate in the right axis... O_o ... and I know it must be some stupid simple twist... Ok, let's wait til mon, so we can meet Irene =D

more rendering tests

2009-06-03T13:20:00.000-07:00

the whole tree with a white lambert in the trunk -> 31' 35" a couple of branches with the watercolor texture applied -> 33' 07"

a couple of branches with a white lambert as texture-> 28' 22"

compositing

2009-06-02T13:27:00.000-07:00

the tree + a sky + C4D clouds.... testing the colors!

the shot from the branch

2009-06-02T13:10:00.000-07:00

it's taking foreeeeeever to render! + - 40' w/ sunlight!!!! O_o

+ rendering tests

2009-06-02T13:08:00.001-07:00

... with the dds (is it the name?? heheh I forgot ) files

city layout tests

2009-05-27T10:49:00.001-07:00

I intend to do more, this is what I've done just fooling around in 10 mins w/ mograph. the more I use mograph the more I love it hehehh

I know the circular layout is impossible 4 me to use, because it cannot have trails. I was just testing and I think it came out really interesting

I still think it's better to do the city and do the bevel in the cubes later on Maya, because I'm still too newbie in C4d and there are some stupid things that I still don't know how to do.

Anyway, It'll be much faster to test crazy layouts ;)

new shader for 2 headeddog-ferret-snail

2009-05-25T23:44:00.000-07:00

more watercolor ^^

cubecity

2009-05-25T21:57:00.001-07:00

... hummmm..... I'm not sure if I'll have to make it round later on to fit the little world.....

blend shapes!

2009-05-25T03:10:00.001-07:00

Now I can change my mind later ..... and he can too! =D

Square eyes for the cube + rendering issues! O_o

2009-05-24T02:00:00.000-07:00

yayyy!!! square eyes for my char in the 1st phase =D

the problem is that I can no longer render his arms!!! I've tried to separate the geometry, to apply only one shader to everything, to do an automatic mapping but anything worked! What can I do?!?!?!?

... while I wait for the render ...

2009-05-24T00:54:00.001-07:00