About Me

Hi there!

My name is Alessandro (Alex) Martinelli. I'm an italian professionist software developer with a great experience in Computer Graphics, living and working in Milan. I'm also an independent researcher studying computer graphics software and techniques and I've been teaching for years Computer Graphics and Software Development at Pavia University.

Contacts

About my Projects

After my PhD (2005-2008), I started working for companies and teaching, while keeping a little space for myself in order to go on my researches on Surface Modeling and Real Time Rendering, which are the two things I love the most. At the end of 2009 i started developing a complex (and open source) software platform I named the Shadow Framework, whose objective was to bring novelty and innovation in the development of web based computer graphics applications. Indeed, I was trying to outclass some of the limits of famous applications like Second Life. At the time, it was clear to me that if we could find a way to describe 3D contents with a cheaper amount of bytes, it would have been much more easy to share contents on the web and in this way Computer Graphics Applications would have prosperred much more.

The ShadowFramework was originally designed to be a whole framework, a complete rendering engine based on OpenGL, and in version 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 it had experimental components designed to solve many issues related to shading (this is where the name 'Shadow' came), texturing and surface modeling. However, 4 years ago I slowly changed my mind because other companies were working with similar goals around the world, and it was definitely clear to me that I had to stop working on an autonomous framework, in order to move to an integrated solution. I decided to focus on Curved Polygons Nets, the Surface Modeling solution which was one of the core feature of my framework, and definitely the most important thing I have ever researched about, and started integrated it with Unity and other Computer Graphics platform.

2015 was the year when I started developing Curved Poly. Curved Poly is a complete set of tools made in Unity, running in the Unity Editor you can use to create models made of Curved Polygons Nets. This has been very hard in the beginning, but now Curved Poly starts running smoothly and I got comfortable with the idea to share it with people. The interesting fact is that, once a model made with Curved Poly is ready, it can be exported (from Unity) and rendered on other platforms with the ShadowFramework, which is Open Source (so: if you don't find a version of the Framework ready for your platform, you can take the code and make a port. It should be easy, and you will find all the documentation you need on ShadowFramework site).

In 2016, I started dreaming about Mushrooms Labs. The mushroom was the first model ever made with the ShadowFramework, I've used it hundres of times to make experiments and now i consider it an icon of the project (like the Utah Teapot or my Suzanne, if you know what i mean). More recently, I decided to give life to the mushroom and started to work on the Mushrooms of Mushrooms Labs project. The goal here is to attract people towards my solutions. My 9 little virtual assistants are modelled with Curved Poly and shaped and cut from the original mushroom geometry, so, let me say, they are all born from the same wish. They will help me show you what you can do with Curved Poly since they are involved in a growing group of Demo Applications I'm going to release on the site for free in order to make things clear.

Everything is set now and I'm ready to go. If you think you want to support me because you like what I'm working on, please, know that I'm grateful in advance. Next step is to move to the Contacts page on Mushrooms Labs and choose your path.

Alessandro Martinelli, owner of MushroomsLabs