 | | | When I did the character called Legionary for the Machine Flesh challenge on CGTalk, the back story was this android, half mechanical and half human, that was a special operations soldier. But he was to the point that he had taken so many lives that he was tired of it. The situation that I portrayed was after the kill. He kneels and he is holding his gun, and looking down in this moment of regret. It helps a lot to set the mood of the whole thing.”
De Martini loves detail, and attempts to incorporate a rich tapestry of polys, textures, and emotion into his work. Trying to come up with a fresh design is one of his challenges. “I think my inspiration went through a period of evolution. When I began working in 3D I would be inspired by other artists work, but after I joined Blizzard, I started looking at real reference like human anatomy for characters, and when I work in my high tech designs, I’m constantly looking at real mechanical and industrial design. Of course I still look at other artists work for inspiration but for overall direction of design, not so much for the nuts and bolts and things like that. I realize that when you start looking too much at other artists work you start getting a translation that they were inspired by. When you translate that onto your own work you start to lose a little bit of what the design was based on.” | | |  | | |  |
| | | He is currently working on Starcraft II, a project de Martini considers “really amazing, really ambitious. We are changing to pipeline from 3ds Max and Brazil to Maya and Renderman to be able to achieve all the quality we want. We are working on the teaser and other cinematics right now,” describing the pipeline process as similar to what a big CG house would do for feature film, but smaller and with less minutes. As with the film pipeline, the process starts with story, goes to story boards, then on to 3D animatics with the cameras, before the low and high poly modeling, texturing, and lighting begins. It’s been a successful endeavor. “The cinematics department expanded from 25 to 95 people because we are working on multiple projects at the same time. The pipeline is more and more complex, especially now with Maya and RenderMan in the pipeline.” Yet he continues his personal concept work in the evenings whenever he can.
Philosophies
As does every artist, de Martini has set himself some challenging guidelines and goals, trying to raise the bar with each design. Researching the internet and sourcing ideas from film, he attempts to match or beat the best of what he finds. “I like to do something that has meaning behind it, so I think about a little story before I do the character. I think that is pretty important, you are thinking about his background, his history, and implement that because you start to carry that over to the concept and it makes the piece stronger.
| | |  | | | | Inspired by the work of artists like Steven Stahlberg and Dusso, de Martini finds his niche in Sci-Fi and mechanical modeling while he pushes his organic modeling to the same level. He enjoys doing both human and creature designs, humans for the challenge of replicating something so familiar and creatures for the creative freedom. “When I started I wanted to do everything, wanted to learn all the parts of 3D from animation, rendering, to compositing. With the last five years I’ve started to narrow that down a little. The part I enjoy most right now is characters, but I also like overall art direction and design, environments or characters. I can say that is the kind of work I like the most, what is related to overall shapes, design and anatomy, and working in the direction of the whole piece.” | | |  | | | | De Martini uses the Wacom Cintiq 21 to sketch out loose concept in Photoshop, creating lots of thumbnails to get a good silhouette before refining the designs. Lately, he has been creating low poly cages for the silhouette and using Photoshop to add the detail. “This is helpful to get me half way with what I want for the overall mass of the character.” From there he creates the high poly model, using Mudbox, 3ds Max, Brazil, and Mental Ray. Working in his spare time, it’s tough to judge how long it takes him to finish a piece, but he estimates a bust with textures and lighting might take him about a month, but if it’s a full time project, he can complete a full body character in roughly that same amount of time, depending on the level of detail required. The marine he did for Blizzard had many intricacies and details, so required a longer period of time. |
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| | | In an Industry Far, Far Away…
“The big challenge for me as an artist is trying to do something that is going to be very fun to work on, pleasing, and with the ability to sell. I’m very fortunate to work here at Blizzard, we like to polish and make the game really good and fun to play instead of trying to rush to sell it. One thing that concerns me, mainly in CG feature films, is the tendency of a lot of studios to find a theme that is selling, like talking animals.
To me, I think there are so many more creative things that we could be doing. Look at the Japanese or Chinese entertainment industry. They have a lot of Manga and interesting characters and stories that could create very powerful work, but our tendency is to reuse the same ideas.” De Martini wonders what happened to the days when films like Aliens or Blade Runner, or even as recently as The Matrix created new languages and were embraced and encouraged.
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The Right Path
While the path to de Martini’s career may have appeared crooked from a first person point of view, when viewed from overhead it has very few detours. Growing up, he had many interests, and studied each one thoroughly. When astronomy caught his eye, he bought a telescope and all the books he could read. When he considered becoming a doctor, he learned about anatomy and the human body. He would like to be a jet fighter at some point and has studied aspects of that too. “I guess that helped me in being an artist because I had a lot of different backgrounds of interest.”
Was this the right career choice for Fausto de Martini? “I think, overall, my work is a big part of my life. When I became an artist, it represented me as a person. I really want to try to do something better, every time, all the time. I devote a lot of my life to it and am always expecting that people can see that through my work, the passion and dedication.
Astronomy goes into space, and has this whole high-tech vibe, the jet fighters, it’s all been building up to help me with what I do now. Even as a kid and having other interests, I was always drawing and making little clay models, building maquettes. I think it would be hard to not do what I do nowadays. I think I was born to do what I do.” | | | | |
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