Introduction

First of all i'd like to put this top note to express my gratitude to Steven the MD and the whole Letterbox Animation Studios team (with my mentor TJ= Jedi Master Terry Jones first on the line) for giving me this chance to work on some of their projects, and of course for all the effort and time put to make me a better "superhero apprentice". I could spend lot of words on this, but the concept is already crystal clear and one of the first lessons learned at Letterbox Animation Studios is that a straightforward statement is better then a 10000-words-panegyric: thank you very much. period.

After this, a little about me:

Daniele Angelozzi
email contact: daniele.angelozzi@tin.it

Coming from a little town of the centre of Italy, always been very interested in all kinds of creative activities, ranging from simple drawing (though i should really put some effort to power up my sketching abilities) embracing all visual arts, far away to music composition. After a brilliant study course ended with a PhD in applied biotechnologies (??), eventually due to some overexposure to toxic agents or to the awakening of a strangely mutated gene, turned mad and decided to leave the scientist's career and try to make my passion for 3d and digital art become the work of my life. Please excuse my English; I hope you understand everything you read.


During the internship at Letterbox Animation Studios I acted mainly as modeler and sculptor, developed some simple XSI scripts, but have good general knowledges even of animation, rigging, compositing, video editing, photo-retouching, web design. Softwares i usually utilize for my works are XSI, Zbrush, almost all the Adobe Creative Suite.

I am currently available for hire either as freelancer level and for permanent positions.

Clash of titans: the Kraken


On the occasion of the announced remake of the 1981 movie "clash of the titans", the guys from Letterbox Animation Studios decided to create a teaser of the event and asked me to realize the restyling of the kraken character.

Concept design
The design stage was a really hard task, i knew i wanted to end up with a great character (note: pretty obvious, who wants to realize a poor one?), something more-then-huge, half wild half evil, a sea monster that fills souls of humans with terror and the feeling of an unavoidable fate. Beside of this, the design could take endless directions, the "kraken" is a concept coming from Norway and Iceland mythology, probably originated from sightings of real giant squids (thx wikipedia). Movies, videogames and fantasy literature show different interpretations of the kraken (two of the most famous being the one appeared in the "pirates of the Carribean" trilogy and the Gods of war fish-tentacled-face), and almost all present this guy with features deriving from squids or octopuses. The clash of the titans one looks more like a giant sea king kong, mainly because, beside the name given in the movie, the "kraken" doesn't exist in greek mythology. In fact, making the right question to the great google oracle is easy to discover that the creature defeated by Perseus is a sea monster very fish-like named Cetus.

So, starting form the original concept, after a zillion of designs and variations i decided to give him a brand new look, because i wanted to stress the monstrous aspect of him.


Even if not proud of my sketching abilities, show in this image some of the drawings made in flash (note: flash is simply great for this kind of things, letting you rapidly cut/paste/resize parts of the drawings to adapt them to variants).

For my purposes of going to a "very scary" direction, i needed a creature not resembling any type of human-like traits or forms, no eyes (or optionally plenty of them), big and bad mouth filled with evil looking teeth, a face very similar to lampreys' ones. for his body, i decided to cut the 4 human like arms in favour of squid pads, no tail but a full set of eight tentacles borrowed from octopuses (self reminder: sculpting a long tail is always faster then 4 pairs of tentacles...remember for next sea monster).

modeling and sculpting
The base mesh was modeled in xsi and uved giving to the main sections of the body (mouth interior, body, arms and tentacles) different uvspace, so that once imported in zb i could easily make uv groups to work on the parts.



The sculpt was made in a Zack Petroc-esque fashion (one of my favourite artists), starting defining the major forms at lower subds and progressively going up for finer detailing. at lower subdivisions i abuse of transpose, move, standard and inflate brush, once fixed the major forms i switch to clay brush and flatten brush to bettter divide areas in planes (with brush mod set to 10-20), pinch brush and the dam-standard brush (downloadable at zbrushcentral.com) to make cuts and recesses and on the higher subds i activate the power of the claytubes, playing with the alphas, brush mod and intensity settings it gives a wide range of texture effects. this general workflow changes in relation to special needs, i often like to play with all the gamma of brushes and options depending on what i want to achieve, and on the final stage of high frequency detailing i obviously load tons of alphas to use them as stencils or brush modifiers.



For this particular model, i wanted to give to the bottom part of the body the same feeling of octopus skin, ie big fleshy masses but hinting at large, powerful muscles contracting below, and as no alpha gave me the desired effect i made all the detailing by hand with standard brush and claytubes.


For the tentacles suckers i used layer brush to pull out the cylindrical masses and then smoothed/detailed to give them their organic look. on the upper part of the body i avoided too much detailing, this to maintain the chimeric nature of the creature even for what concerns the transition from smooth squid-like skin of the upper part and the heavily wrinkled one of the lower.


For mouth details i played masking areas and pulling out the masses with clay brush. To give to this huge character a good level of detail i ended up with a 10 million poly model (thx to my 4 gigs of dedicated memory the pc didn't blow up, but had really hard times).


the props
TJ liked the model so much that thought it would have been a pity not giving him something to feed with and a cool scene to show, so we decided that the final shot had to show him merging from waters in the act of tasting the Perseus' beloved Andromeda.


As time was short i started the female character adapting to my needs a previously made female model, avoiding sculpting parts that would not be visible in the final comp (this explaining why in the images feet are never shown ;P). I built the dress base meshes with the zb topology tool (that besides some minor problems is really cool and fast method to obtain meshes "as you want") and sculpted the draping and wrinkles using mainly a combination of flatten brush with brush mod set to 20 (very good to pull up dress masses), pinch, standard and inflat brush to better define recesses and overlaps. The hair mass was sculpted starting from a polysphere using mainly rake and claytubes brushes. I added little props from zb primitives to make the dress rope and the armband, the chain was built rapidly in xsi using a little java script I've written some time ago to automate the process of building all kinds of objects made of repeated and concatenated props (i abuse it whenever i need chains, necklaces, jewels, robotic or high tech parts...if someone would find it useful for some project feel free to contact me, always happy to share stuff). The elements on the scene were the great funny stuff: i love to sculpt rocks and terrains, it's all frestyle, I started from the highest subd (forgive me, god Petroc!) and messed with rake brush, claytubes with high brush mod settings, ram brush for major cracks and recesses, switching progressively to minor brush dimensions/intensities for the smaller details. the final pass was covering all the mass with standard brush + cracked alphas (most of them available for download at the pixologic.com alpha library) in drag rect mode. For the sea i pulled out weavy masses using masks and snake hook brush (great for fast pullup of surfaces, i didn't care about great mesh distortions for this), adding some style to the water mass with spatters extracted from the main mesh and smoothed.


the final compositions

The turntable

Lobo "the Main Man"

I have to admit it, i am really superfan of this dc character, who would not love him, he is huge, he has big muscles, he likes heavy metal so much that he has a radio implanted in his head playing always the same song, he wears cool dresses and he is sooo good guy (well, at least not considering that he has exterminated all the inhabitants of his planet, defeated crowds of gods, devils and demigods gaining immortality, killed all his bastard childs, killed santa...thinking about it, he kills everything that moves near him). In addition, for what i can remember nobody ever gave him a 3d form, so i decided to use him on a "little" personal project that (in theory and having time) will end up with a small animation of him blowing up someone or something (that would even serve as cool animation and AE compositing exercise). Having this goal in mind i started modeling this character from a very basic mesh (downloadable for free at www.gnomonology.com), defined the major forms and the style i wanted to give him. in the end i tried to go with a "less comic" look in favour of a more realistic one (not too straight lines and smooth, not cutting out masses).

I built the retopologized obj for the upper part of the body (the one not covered by dresses) in XSI, and used the base mesh as a guide to make low polys for the dresses and the many props of the Main Man (boots, boot strips, knee pads, skulls, hook, gloves etc) for a total of 20 different subtools. the sculpting followed a standard workflow, i played a lot with custom alphas to realize the stitches, zips, laces and buttons on the dresses.


For the hairs, i started defining a general form with a polysphere, then used it as a guide to build a plot of topology lines. Then i used the "convert to main" feature of the topology palette to obtain strands of polyspheres from the topolines, and then making adaptative skin of this. To make the covering denser, cloned the hair system obtained in this way, appended as subtool and used move brush with large radii to randomize positions of the different strands.

Texturing
All the props (exception for hairs, if i will ever manage to render it in XSI i will go with its hair system) were exported at their lower subd and properly uved, for the texturing i used a mixed approach depending on the subtool. the skin base was polypainted in ZB, then modified in ps to add more contrast and little details and imperfections.

for non organic stuff i worked mainly in PS, using a layered approach with tons of textures, custom grungy brushes, and placing the displacement maps (previously made in zb) with different fusion methods to pull out details, self shadowing and to obtain a fast fake ambient occlusion effect.



Posing and composition

the pose was made into xsi, building a simple custom rig and using it to envelope the exported low res meshes from zb. i prefer this approach instead of the transpose master when my model is made up of lot of little, interpenetrating subtools. In addition, as i still have in mind the idea of animating this dude i have saved some time for the next weeks (or months....or years? :P). Once defined the major pose i reimported the low res objs on zb for every subtool, fixed the parts that resulted distorted in the posing process (time was getting short so for the pose i didn't waste too much time on weighting of the bones to the envelope).

For the composition i set up lighting with a main light from the top left, a rim light orange colored from the bottom/back and a point light in front of his head to lighten his face regardless of the illumination. Took different renders from zb, i generally play with 5 main passes all built up modifying a simple basic material. For this workflow i set up the position of the model, set a marker so that i could reload modified or differently coloured versions in the same position (tip: if working on big canvases go to preferences>markers and turn the marker dimension all up, this will avoid spendind hours to find a little spot in a 4k document)


1 beauty pass of textured model, with diffuse set to 100, no ambience no specular, shadows turned off
2 specular pass, with only specular turned on and curve adjusted to have a wider falloff, shadows turned off
3 back pass or sss, with diffuse turned on and curve inverted and tweaked to gain the desired effect, shadows turned off
4 shadow pass, diffuse set to 100 and curve flattened all way up (image), turning on shadows. if, like in this case, i have different lights casting shadows i like to take a shot with all the lights turned on and one for each single light (to have the possibility of selectively adjust different shadow contributions)
5 mattes pass, i fill the different subtools with the flat material and different colors, render made with shadows turned off
same process made for the background elements, rapidly built up from zb primitives placed accordingly to the main model perspective.


On ps, i set the beauty pass as the base, then added an amount of specular layers (screen mode) equal to the different materials of my model (skin, leather, metal, denim jeans, skull). then used the mattes pass to extract selections of these areas (magic wand tool) and use them to mask the different layers. in this way i could change spec values indipendently (using levels, opacity, exposure filter and even changing fusion mode).


the shadow pass was added on top in multiply mode, opacity set accordingly.
the sss with a mask corresponding to the skin matte, screen mode and colorized to match the sss effect i wanted to obtain (bluish tint for this character)

other layers were used to add details like hair (for the image i wanted to avoid the mesh look of the zb hair systems), more dirt or textures, glows for the eyes and for metal (duplicate specular, blur the layer and set opacity), rim light coming from flames on the background.


on top of the composited layer i created an exposure level, set exposure to a high value, masked the whole layer and painted on the mask with white (brush with very low flow values) to push up contrast on areas of bevels and high spec values, giving in this way a more vibrant look to the image.

same layered approach for the background, the final touches were the addition of flames , of a cool heavymetal looking frame made in zb using some cylinders and the same skull and chains of the lobo model (cool to reuse already made props), frame sprayed in 2.5 mode (subtract mode) to give some corroded look to the metal, and a broken glass on the frame built up in ps.

the turntable

Mr America


This is the 3d version of one of the statues exposed in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, started modeling it from pictures found around the web (few references, not a lot of Vespucci's fans on the net), planning to take a visit to Florence to have stronger references for the final details. The journey to Florence suffered some posticipations due to snow (two times i had to come back cause roads were filled with ice) so in the end i finalized the model before having the possibility to look at it with my eyes.

The workflow was very straightforward, i made a base mesh in xsi and cut pieces corresponding to different areas of the model, i didn't sculpt it in a single mesh cause wanted to have the possibility to raise up polycount on areas of the draping without any worry.

I modeled it looking continuosly at references, the only exception made for the reptile laying under mr America.

For this i didn't have good shots so made it looking at real iguana pictures, constructed the base mesh from zspheres and modified it in xsi to fix problems on the hands (hands+zspheres=headache). i used a couple of stencil made from alphas of reptile scales to give him the scaly skin look (only to discover, once taken the trip to florence, that the original one has not scales on it but a texture more similar to a brickwall), then use the transpose tool to place it in the composition. Making this sculpture was really great exercise and everybody should try at least once to copy an existing piece of art, creating custom characters can be a more sexy thing, surely it gives more freedom in defining forms and poses, but having to recreate an exact look forces you to observe with extreme attention how things goes and how others solve forms and give particular styles to different parts.

the turntable

Subd modeling
ZB is a great toy, quite easy to use (even if hard to master), very very funny, extremely satisfactory when after a bunch of ctrl+d, an alpha mport and few strokes you can see superdetails raising (or recessing) on an otherwise amorphous mesh.

 

sometimes i think that Pixologic is devil, it haunted lot of people with this little software miracle (now that i think about it, even my love for 3d started from it, and if i would have not known about it, maybe, i would nowaday live a present in which i am a famous and of course more-rich-then-now biologist...think that guys at pixologic will always have my gratitude, better a poor pseudoartist that a sad and unhappy scientist :D). By the way, while being a great tool, zb can't do everything needed in a pipeline, or anyhow there are things that other software can do better. period.

pause.

having said that, let's talk about subd modeling
this is what i use to call an obvious-not-so-obvious-thing (adapted english translation for the way i say in italian), because quiet often i read/listen to people saying that when you have the possibility to use zillions of polygons there is no need to open another sw and start extruding faces, beveling edges, defining good topologies. Of course, true if you only need a cool looking sculpt that has not to move, not to deform, not to be managed nor rigged nor rendered in external applications. knowing the basis for a good low-medium poly modeling is always good thing, and I have to thank once more my mentor TJ for having helped me make lots of low polys during these 3 months, committing all find of objects, airplanes, cars, props, chairs, characters, giving me hints to refine my modeling abilities and to speed up things.

Here I show only part of the models realized (cause think that showing chairs and stuff would be not so sexy like a super zb detailed model and because, really, TJ made me do tooons of them ;D).

Conclusion

so this is the not fast recap of these three months working as intern for LBX animation studios, and is good thing to find some time to express my gratitude to people who supported me during this great_but_very_hard period, tolerating and encouraging me in moments of bad feelings. My family, my friends, my girlfriend, my special (girl)friends :D, every people that loves me but even my enemies, cause they feed me the right anger to face life challenges.

My housemate and collaborator Giorgio (me being named Daniele, together we formed the D&G team) for these 3 months passed together sharing ideas, suggestions, techniques, sleepless nights (due to work issues!!) and good and bad moments.

All the artists, companies, people that are source of inspiration and manage to share thoughts and techniques with common mortals: Zack Petroc, Meats Meyer, Ryan Kingslien, Aaron Sims, Pixologic, Adobe, the great Autodesk family (who has adopted even us XSI users), of course Letterbox Animation Studios. And many many many many others...

Last but absolutely the first, God for donating me not only good but even bad things, these are the ones that make a person stronger and more mature. Before leaving wanted to suggest a toast in honour of this collaboration, with the picture thanks to which this adventure started, when some months ago, Letterbox Animation Studios & I met on the xsibase forum they suggested a glass configuration, the results; this nice glass setup.


Cheers

Daniele "Danko" Angelozzi