Alessandro: Well, my first stable job in the CG industry was 7 years ago at Milestone S.r.L , an Italian game developer situated in Milan, my home town. I was hired on board as a 3D generalist.

Alessandro: I got a ‘Science of Information’ diploma in 1989. Those were the years of boom for “Science of Information “ in Italy, similar to the ‘Information Technology’ you have here in North America. So against my real passion for visual arts, I attended this school -- which turned out to be very technical. I was originally supposed to be a programmer, but sadly there were no chance of getting hired after school with only one diploma. So after getting the diploma, I attended university and majored in the Faculty of Mathematics. I was not such a brilliant student and after three years, I had to interrupt the studies to complete the one year mandatory military service. When I came back, I was no longer motivated to continue the studies.... so I found a job as a CAD operator in a telecommunications company in Milan.

Alessandro: I clearly remember that it was Christmas time of 1996 and as you may know, sometimes employees make funny greeting cards to fight the boredom...so I started playing around with the 3D capabilities of AutoCAD 14. I was just a 2D operator and had never played with 3D before, but I wanted to represent a damned Christmas tree with coloured balls and a star at the top…so I did exactly that. I remember I spent more than a week stealing work time and trying hard not to be seen by supervisors so that I could complete this special creation of mine – and I did it. I made a horrible tree, but I was so proud of it and was so excited from this new toy, I think everything started from there. In the months that followed, I got more and more interested in 3D, downloading 3D tutorials of every kind on the net and practicing...a lot. Most of them were done in Max 1.0, so I happened upon it and start playing with it -- it was much more fun than AutoCAD 14 for sure in terms of 3D!!!!

I was so excited about what was going on onscreen in terms of 3D, that I spent entire working days just doing nothing else at work except my personal 3D experimentations. Yes, I was not exactly the model employee, but I pretty good at not attracting too much attention from people ;)

Alessandro: Oh God.... it was probably a Pentium 2. Can’t say about the monitor but, it was SO gigantic and warm!

Alessandro: I clearly remember that I dedicated a 3D artwork to my best friend who has the passion for speed and cars, and that picture of a cheesy Formula1 car ideally driven by my friend with his engine on flames won an award and was displayed in the gallery of 3DCafe.com . I was at work when it happened -- overexcited as I was – I started to show it to my uninterested coworkers the gallery of that website with my picture in it. It’s nothing if we compare this event to nowadays, where every kind of image from thousands of artists is displayed in hundreds of CG websites all round the world...but in 1997, CG was not so popular like it is now , so you can imagine how proud I was. This was the very moment that made me seriously think about continuing...I wanted to have that kind of appreciation again, and possibly to make a living from this passion of mine.

Alessandro: Let’s say that Milestone is a game company by tradition, and that it’s specialized in racing games. During my years there I mainly worked on modeling and texturing every possible kind of 3D racing asset which means track environments, track objects, cars and bikes. But being a generalist like the most of the employees there, I also had to work especially at the beginning on creating 2D user interfaces (things like menus, icons, dealing mostly in Photoshop). It was mainly a low polygon modeling job for real time engines, just on rare occasions did I have the chance to work on some hi-res assets.

Alessandro: Well, honestly I have to explain that I was freelancing AND working at Milestone full time....I never had a period of pure freelancing. I wish I had though ;) Truth is that besides my Milestone daily activities, I always worked on my personal "high end" projects at home in my spare time. And I was also pretty active in online 3D communities. I loved to receive feedback about my 3D artworks, and that made me popular enough internationally to be noticed by some important studios, and after a while I received job offers and a lot of freelancing opportunities. Sometimes I found myself in the incapacity to get commission because of my full time job, but for some studios I wanted so badly to work with them on cool projects that I made a lot of sacrifices to get that work done -- and luckily I did it without getting stressed too much. I can say that I haven’t freelanced much regularly over the last three years. Making most of my spare time here and there to work on those projects I really liked, I was in the condition to quit my day job at any time because the extra freelancing was sufficient. I kept working for those studios because the projects were so much more interesting compared to the day job.

Alessandro: I freelanced for some covers of 3D World magazine, made a bunch of 3D assets for Massive Black Inc. including marketing artworks for the game "Gun" published by Activision, some 3D character assets on the marketing illustration for the game "Hellgate London" by Flagship Studio , a bunch of 3D hi-res character models for various cinematics done by Blur Studio , including Hellgate London, Warhammer Online, Conan, Tabula Rasa, Halowars, Frontlines , Marvel Ultimate Alliance and last but not least, the NFL on Fox TV spot.

Alessandro: If I have to think back at those glorious days when I was used to spend a lot of time doing 3D just for the fun, I clearly remember that one of my first goals was to achieve a general flow of modeling which could be applied to basically every kind of surface. Poly modeling was my choice and I never felt that I had to specialize in doing hard surfaces instead of characters or vice versa. I always thought of the 3D process in terms of a medium to express myself through illustration, so it was really pointless to specify whether it was going to be a realistic environment, a vehicle or a portrait -- the idea had always been to represent something I liked, with nice composition and palette. That said, I probably enjoy dealing more with a figurative thing, say a character because of the variety of situations a life form can express. But it’s not that immediate; while realizing a CG environment is something that still doesn’t cause me any particular difficulty and doesn’t involve me emotionally more than on a certain level, doing characters has always been more or less a challenge because it implies that you are exposed to the severe task of doing something that has "life" inside. And that’s a pretty big burden for an artist, but so much rewarding at the same time. I always feel scared, to this day, to get the armory in correct proportions , shapes and volumes for characters -- because a subtle variation in form for figurative art can have much more dramatic consequences than the same variation for an environment. That’s at least the most noticeable difference to me between the two areas, so we can say it’s more a difference in approach and emotional involvement than technique.

Alessandro: Hugo Martin did the concept at Blur Studio, after receiving approval from Flagship Studio of course. I didn’t use any kind of specific reference for the gear body armour..the concept was self-explanatory enough in terms of structure, I just had some fun with filling in details like custom cuts and bolts and some scratches here and there. That model was also for the game cinematic, so basically it was modeled completely in high poly with just the most superficial details done through the use of normal maps.

Alessandro: Hunters are one of the playable class characters, he’s an elite soldier specialized in covert operations and snipering.

Alessandro: For the model itself which was a Blur freelance job, around 12 days for modeling and texturing. The illustration took me around one month in spare time.

Alessandro: It’s a Karnagor, a daemon creature present in the game...another 3D asset I did for Massive Black/Flagship Studio as a freelancer.

Alessandro: Being that it was a Blur project, I used Brazil, as I have done in most of my past and recent projects. Though I’m slowly moving towards mental ray mainly for job related reasons.

Alessandro: That was the marvelous restyling of a classic of Marvel’s villains by Chuck Wojtkiewicz, the Concept Artist Supervisor at Blur. I tried to stay close to his marvelous and hyper detailed restyling. Basically it was a Blur freelance job that lasted for something like 12 days of modeling and texturing. It has been used into the cinematic of Marvel Ultimate Alliance. I have since made a couple of illustrations for my own fun.

Alessandro: Yes, usually as long as I stay "close" to the color scheme/palette of the concept art, I’m quite free to experiment a lot with textures and shaders.

Alessandro: They were super fun projects lead by the artistic direction of Jason Manley and based on Massive Black concepts (marketing posters for the game Gun) , while Maya was for the game "Red Star", based on the comic.

Alessandro: It was an environment made for the Code Guardian animated short by Marco Spitoni, an former co-worker of mine

Alessandro: Well, let’s say it was something related to that....a Massive Black commission, but nothing followed afterwards, and I had clearance to publish that freely on my website. I’m still working on that, part of the texturing has been made by another former co-worker of mine, Riccardo Minervino.

Alessandro: It’s a chance for sure, but I’m happy with what I’m doing so far. For some reason, I believe that I’m experimenting with a lot more variety of different projects working on cinematics than I could do with movies, where the deadlines are more extreme.

Alessandro: I’ve been working at Blur on site for 5 months now, but I freelanced for them when I was in Italy for over a year. When comparing the CG industry here and the one in Italy, the most evident difference to me is that there is much more organization and in general, a career in the CG industry is considered normal and well respected.

Alessandro: I dunno -- things are moving so fast, definitely everything will be even more and more oriented to ease the process of creation, reduce the technical aspect to the minimum.

Alessandro: Practice a lot...school is great to learn , but put a lot of extra passion in it ;)

Alessandro: Ideally a Ferrari of your choice....but realistically a Mini Cooper ;)

Alessandro: Immanuel Casto - Che bella la cappella

Alessandro: Being a movie lover I have dozens, but probably one of the movies that I always rewatch with immutate joy is "Amadeus" by Milos Forman.

Alessandro: Artists: Michelangelo, Justin Sweet and Jason Manley; person: my grandmother.

Alessandro: Pastime ? ;)

Alessandro: Ciao, and thanks for the interview !