Introduction

Hi everyone, my name is Giorgio Palombi and i'm from a beautiful little town in the center of Italy, called Comunanza.

I'm really proud to be here to show you my works, so firstly i want to say a big THANK YOU to Steven the MD and the Letterbox Animation Studios team for giving me this amazing opportunity.

Special thanks also go to:
My personal mentor Terry Jones for giving me the help, the suggestions and the strength to succeed in this first official portfolio... thank you Mr. T ;-)
My big friend, flatmate and colleague Daniele Angelozzi for his continue assistance and help, i will never forget...

Thank you again guys, let's start with...

A little about me:

Giorgio Palombi
email contact: giorgio.palombi@gmail.com

After my studies at the University of Bologna, where i achieved the Degree in TLC engineering, i worked for 3 years in a big television industry, until my real passion for traditional and digital art made me decide to leave the engineer's career and become a digital artist.

I love video games and comics, so i fell really happy when i can work as concept artist combining fantasy with my classical and digital skills. I use to sketch my characters directly with the tablet using Flash, because i like working with vectorial project and i find very inspiring the black brush simulating the comic one. Photoshop, 3d applications like Zbrush and XSI complete my tools to study and to bring life to characters and environments.

During the mentoring at Letterbox Animation Studios i also learned how to export low poly meshes, normal maps and textures to a game engine, and how to use After Effect to create video presentations and trailers. How to model Sub-D objects, improve my sculpting skills and painting skills and of course integrate all of these tools to create the best possible imagery.

Clash of titans: the Medusa

On the occasion of the announced remake of the 1981 movie "clash of the titans", the guys from Letterbox Animation Studios decided to use this fact to get me to create a simple and fun teaser trailer of the event and asked me to realize the restyling of some characters, so i chose the Medusa.. enjoy the video :-)

Trailer

Concept design
I wanted to do something "different" from the old film character, and so the goal here was to create a sexy and attractive character, who uses her magnetic curves and shapes to confuse men just before she turns them to stone.

The image in my mind was like a beautiful woman sitting in a throne made of snakes, simply waiting for her victims.
The first thing i did was a concept on paper trying to create a good and realistic pose for her long legs, then i used Flash to draw and composite different versions.
Once i found the right pose, i used Zbrush to modify a base human mesh maintaining the symmetry for the upper torso, then i sculpted all using Move, Clay and Standard brushes.

modeling and sculpting
The base mesh was modeled in xsi and i used Zbrush to add almost all the details.
I used retopology in Zbrush to create the light armour parts on her neck and arms, then i exported in XSI and added some details in, maintaining the original shape of the body.

Putting the images together in the trailer was a great team work involving Terry and Daniele: once we decided a good angle, i used different matcaps combined together in Photoshop to create the final scene, Terry and Daniele helped me a lot in titles creation and music synchronization... Thank you guys :-).
I used stencils, alphas and single layer brush to add details in the 2.5d canvas such as skin pores, wrinkles and chair relief.

Turntable

Fast sculpting heads

Letterbox Animation Studios asked me to model a Lee Marvin look-alike head with only a youtube video as reference material! Never one to hand out the easy jobs, the managed to convince me that i could do it, and that's what i loved about my time, that it made me try things I never would have thought of, and it made me think my workflow's depending on the specific projects. With that i just used one old interview i found at you tube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI1qBAVrjIs) and i began to sculpt..to my surprise it took only 4 hours and I had a lot of fun !

Turntable

I really like to sculpt heads in Zbrush, so i was really happy when Letterbox Animation Studios asked me to make another one and to use a more traditional workflow, so this time i used a photo reference, an the "image plane" plug-in for Zbrush to place the reference in the canvas.

Turntable

Perseo

This is the first model i made for Letterbox Animation Studios, and probably it suggested the idea of the Medusa concept. I used XSI to create the base mesh for helmet, sword and little wings.

Turntable

Death's Head II

This is an old character from Marvel comics, it was later redesigned and relaunched as Death's Head II, acting as one of the flagship characters for Marvel UK's 1990s expansion.

Since i'm a great comics lover i wanted to try to model a whole figure that keeps the shapes and the strength of a real comic hero. I hope you like the result!
I used the same techniques: Zbrush for the organic parts, retopology to keep the shape of the armour and "cloths" and XSI to add major topological detailing. The "hair" was made using Zsphere, some of the cable was made in XSI to hallow me to quickly modify the topology.

Turntable

Miscellaneous

This is an overview of some of my concepts, all made from my own sketches, i model them for comics, illustrations and video games. Enjoy :-)

XSI-Cyborg

I wanted to create something similar to the Borg race from Start Trek, so i began with a study on paper and then in Zbrush.
The XSI version is under construction, but the image can show you some of the basic form that i will export and detail in Zbrush.

XSI-Monster

This was my first model in XSI.. i placed one of my sketch in the view port using rotoscope, then i created it using a poly by poly method.
I exported the obj in Zbrush and added some details.

Unreal Editor
Lastly, i'd like to share with you some screen shots taken from the Unreal Editor.
It was a nice team this time just me with Terry: With some low poly meshes created; i then moved on to deal with UV mapping, normal mapping and exporting to the Unreal Editor.
We were really happy to see how the meshes worked in real time and populated a map in this awesome video game, so we called this test map "Terminator 2 playground"...a homage to the Linda Hamilton T2 scene, but with little ducks for humour and loss of innocence. What was nice about Letterbox Animation Studios was that even though I know i am not a super shader creator, they did not let this effect me from creating the main core of the work. I now realize i need more experience in this area and or a good shader partner to work with, sometimes you can't do it all. The next step will be to create bigger textures, more complex meshes and a playable map, so stay tuned .. :-)

Subd modeling in XSI

One of the big things i learned at Letterbox Animation Studios is subdivision modeling using XSI.
Now I do simple models, so there is enough detail in them to successfully transfer them for sculpting (which is always my main goal) and creating normal/displacement maps and texturing.

Conclusion

It's not so easy for me to make a good recap of these three months working at Letterbox Animation Studios without getting emotional, so again i can only say thanks again to LBX and to you, for watching this page: i hope you enjoyed the show!

Please fell free to mail me for any questions\crits and job offers!

Again my mail skills are Concept drawings, Sculpting and modeling specifically for Film and Games. I am available as either freelance or permanent and I am willing to relocate. Contact me at giorgio.palombi@gmail.com

Cu soon,
Giorgio "Fracture" Palombi