Interview with Alessandro Baldasseroni
Hi could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background in CG and are you self taught or taken some training?
 I`m a 35 years old self taught artist . I was born and grown in Milan (Italy). I started more or less dealing with 3D 12 years ago employed as a CAD operator in a telecommunication company . So I started playing with the 3d functions of AutoCAD and I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to learn by myself the fundamentals of 3d. So I practiced by myself with the early release of 3D studio max (1.0) and after one year I already had some kind of portfolio. In late 2000 I decided to make a living for my passion for 3d art, so I submitted my portfolio to Milestone (a game developer company) , and luckily they hired me in charge of 3d artist. In these period I had the chance to evolve my knowledge about 3d and develop my style, and after a few years I started to freelance occasionally for worldwide known studios, last of which Blur. After a while Blur decided to hire me full time, and so I moved here to Venice CA. I`ve been professionally in CG since 2001 and currently employed as a senior character artist at Blur Studio.
Please tell us what is the nature of job of the Character Artist and how this different from modeler?
Well , I can`t generalize and say that the same word has the same meaning for all the companies, but a modeler is usually something more generic which doesn`t necessarily have to deal only with characters. Often a modeler, in a lot of company doesn`t even deal with texturing or surfacing. A character artist is more specific, our set of skills in blur covers a wider range of skills related to the creations of "characters", concept interpretation, modeling, UV editing, texturing, lighting, surfacing and we always deal with almost every aspect of the character visual development except concepting...even though, more than often, a certain artistic sensibility in covering some gaps of concepting is requested.
Please share your experiences as working as Character Artist in Blur Studio.
It`s though, but quite rewarding in the end. Pipeline has been optimized through the years to cut every angle of time wasting and keeping the quality extremely high. It all starts from a concept delivered from the concept art department or directly from the client, few directions from the project supervisor and here we go ! Schedules are pretty tight , but most of the times we are able to make it in time with good compromises in terms of quality. And of course, during the creation process, we have to deal with some intermediate technical milestones which are necessary to guarantee the smoothness of the pipeline.
Please tell us about your work in the Terminator Salvation cinematic.
I was responsible for modeling, texturing and surfacing John Connor for the Terminator Salvation game cinematic. Client requested a very specific face different from the movie actor, provided photo references... and so we did. The mocap team, riggers and animator made him alive :)
Please tell us in detail about your work “Halowars”, what problems you encountered in creation?
I did that model while I was still a freelancer for Blur in Italy, so I couldn`t see very much of some kind of in depth problems related to that model...except that as often happen in these cases, the bulky armor and his shoulder pads were immediately spotted as a potential rigging problems and we had to do some adjustments in the geometry of some parts. Being Halo a very popular and iconic brand the client also wanted an extreme fidelity to the concept. After a while I decided to do a personal artwork with that model...I wanted it to be something iconic, but pretty different from every other kind of halo representation. Most of the halo illustrations I saw depict the spartans in some sort of macho action pose with the guns or rifles . Well, I wanted something more in repose, maybe showing some fragility, some inner humanity, that`s why the character is in that kneeling pose, almost like he`s getting up after being beaten badly. I had to export the T posed mesh of the Spartan from max to ZBrush, pose it with Transpose and export back to max as a morph target to put on top of the T posed mesh. I did the same process for the soldiers in the background. After that I did some sculpting in ZBrush for the snowy elements of the background, while the far mountains and sky have been painted. The rendering has been done in Mental ray, with a simple MR sun+sky system and the final compositing has been done in Photoshop.
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