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Viewconference 2013, program of talks

As every year, Turin (Italy) is preparing to host Viewconference, the most important event in Italy on computer graphics and special effects, probably one of the largest in Europe, due for the number of professionals and experts in those fields who participate every year.

Looking for an high resolution map of Venice? Try this vector map!

As you probably know, in these last years I used some of my time to drawing city vector maps, at hte beginning because I like traveling (some years ago I developed come city travel guides for Symbian smartphones and I made maps of these cities to avoid any copyright problems that I would had using Google Maps APIs).

Now you can post your comments on this website

You can now add your comment to many pages of the website. Yes I know this feature is widespread in many websites and blogs, but only today I finally implemented on my (this) website, because - as some of you know - it's not made ​​with an open source CMS such as Wordpress or Joomla! but it has been developed entirely by myself.

Flash Game: Breakoid

Breakoid is a Flash game developed with Adobe Flash CS3 and coded in Action Script 2.

Anime Robots in 3d

In this page I have collected the galleries with the renderings of 3d models Anime Robots I made in the past years.
Many of them are my first experiments with 3D modeling, some were created between 1996 and 1998, the last about in 2004.

Isometric games : 3d character animation test

In the past week I produced a simple animation to test with an isometric style game. My goal is replace my static characters in Metalwarriors with those that includes animations.

Modeling your first Anime Robot in 3d, part 4/4

4. Posing your 3d model and final rendering

4.1
First of all save all settings.
Press Enter to create a new keyframe; on the keyframes panel leave zero on keyframe number, then select "All Items" as "For:" values; in this way we saved on frame 0 a keyframe for all object included in you scene.

You can use this frame zero to back to the default settings, if you want to restart with posing your 3d robot.

To arrange a pose for our 3d robot, we'll use a new frame: because our goal is creating a static rendering (not an animation...), no matter what frame we'll use to set the pose for our robot: for this purpose, we'll use frame 10th.

We have to copy all the settings from frame zero to frame #10: select frame zero (use timeline to do this) and press Enter, a panel opens: in "Create key at" field insert 10, and select "All Items" in "For" field. We just created a new keyframe at frame #10 for all object included in the scene.

Now we can move at frame #10 and start with moveing our robot.
Don't forget to save sometimes your project...

4.2
To select each object we'll use Schematic View prepared previously; to move each object we'll use only their rotation properties H, P, B (heading, pitch e bank).

Select the waist, and rotate it (just some degree!) forward (use its PITCH property); now select the chest and rotate it backward (still using P property)... this to simulate "Stomach in, chest out" pose...;-) rotation values for the chest must be some degree greater than value used to rotate the waist.

Modeling your first Anime Robot in 3d, part 3/4

In this third part, we will setup the scene for the final rendering.

Modeling your first Anime Robot in 3d, part 2/4

On Modeler, click the icon on the top-right of the screen, next to the layer selector, then click on "Send object to Layout".

In this way Lightwave Layout will be automatically open and your model loaded.

2. Lightwave 3d Layout: hierarchy setup and the Schematic Panel.

2.1.
In this section of the tutorial we set the objects hierarchy so each part of our Robot will be connected to another; at the end of this process we'll rotate each object to set in pose our Robot in 3d.
First of all, we have to complete with loading of all object we need, adding a background object. You can load it directly from one of these two links:

Into Layout, select Load Object (Ctrl+o) and select the object now loaded.
In fig. 15 you can see a layout screenshot with all objects: our robot and the background.

Add a Null Object (Ctrl+n) and name it as "null_Robot".

Modeling your first Anime Robot in 3d, part 1/4

1. Lightwave 3d Modeler: a simplified robot 3d modeling

Please remember this is a basic tutorial for low experienced users.
This tutorial is based on Newtek Lightwave 3d, but if many concepts end techniques can be used also on many other 3d software, as 3D Studio Max, Maya, XSI, modo, cinema 4d, etc.

As our first step, we model a simple humanoid figure in 3d: it will be our first anime robot and our "guide" to model new and more complex models.

Each limb will be created as simply boxes, and each limb/box will be placed in a different layer: in a next tutorial, we discuss how to replace these simple forms with other, more complex.

After modeled this "dummy" robot, we import the entire 3d model into Lightwave Layout, setting hieranchy chains.

After this, we add a ground to place our robot, then we set lights and Global Illumination properties, Camera and so on to obtain a rendering in radiosity.

The final image will be similar to that you can see on the left: a simple 3d model similar to Commander (Convoy), taken from Transformers series.

Before starting: don't fonrget to save your project periodically...