| |
|
3DTotal : Hello Juan and thanks for taking the time to be interviewed. You state in your biography that you got involved with CG back in 1994. What is it about this medium that interests you particularly?
Juan :
I actually started in CG in 1994 thanks to the impact that an Atari st software called CAD3D
gave me, which was programmed by Tom Hudson (who later was the creator of 3DStudio with Dan
Silva). I didn’t touch upon the topic again until 2000 when I came back to CG, being helped by the huge amount of information in this matter that I found on the Internet. I think that what made an impact on me concerning this medium was that it married two of my biggest passions in a single activity. On one hand the technology and the contact with computers and on the other hand the Art, with powerful tools that allowed me to create any imaginable thing emulating the real and natural creation. By that I mean that if you move a light source the shadows will act in consequence; you locate your camera in the place that you want, you add volumetric effects and you even recreate complex physical behaviours, such as gravity, wind, cloths, collisions etc. and all that with an absolutely intuitive and not very technical method.
3DTotal : What is it about the relationship between technology and art that fascinates you so much?
Juan : There is nothing special about it but it just so happens that CG combines two tasks that have always interested me. Imagine being a young boy - fascinated by dinosaurs & aeroplanes (two very common likings in 8-year-old boys!). When you have a little money, you don’t know whether to spend it on a Diplodocus book or a scale model of a Spitfire?! When you grow up, someone offers you a job in which you have to fly an aeroplane to study a group of dinosaurs. It’s not an objective relationship between the two things, but you get to enjoy them both at the same time.. .boy - fascinated by dinosaurs & aeroplanes (two very common likings in 8-year-old boys!). When you
|
|
| |
|
have a little money, you don’t know whether to spend it on a Diplodocus book or a scale model of a Spitfire?! When you grow up, someone offers you a job in which you have to fly an aeroplane to study a group of dinosaurs. It’s not an objective relationship between the two things, but you get to enjoy them both at the same time..
3DTotal : Much of your work composes of simple architectural scenes with an attention to detail. Can you explain your interest in this subject and the significance of light?
Juan : When we talk about architectural scenes I think about the pre-visualization pieces that the promoters use to sell their buildings. What I do is very different; I use big old houses as an excuse to express an artistic restlessness. On the other hand, those big houses have always been very interesting to me because, not only do they show their original beauty but also the marks and pathologies that time has left in their walls.
|
 |
 |
| |
|
Those marks grant a quality that make them original and irreplaceable and they communicate a homely sensation that Viz, with its cleanness and order, cannot show. The light that wraps the big houses can also reinforce that sensation and at the most magical moment in the day when the sun is hidden, the contrasts are somehow accentuated and the colours are saturated. In Spain, those colours are especially beautiful and I think you would have to actually see it with your own eyes to know what I mean.
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
3DTotal : Having looked at your renders I feel there is sympathy between your 3D work and the work of the American painter Edward Hopper with the exception that your scenes do not contain any characters. Do you think this is a fair comparison?
Juan : Hopper liked very stable compositions based on buildings and he used the light like an important aesthetic agent in the search of the formal balance in his work and in that sense I believe that it is an accurate comparison. However, Hopper goes much further than me when granting his work with an absolutely overwhelming peculiarity, reflecting the inner life and the most secret thoughts of the characters in those pictures. I don’t even dare still to introduce the human being in my work and I hope to grow enough as “Cger” to make it some day.
|
|
|
 |
 |
3DTotal : You seem to have been very successful at implementing light in your scenes. Could you talk us through the way you approach this and any relevant techniques you use, most notably setups and renderers?
Juan : I believe that it is enough with having some understanding on how light behaves in real life, because to apply it in a 3D
scene is relatively simple. The sky is a
huge blue area of light that illuminates
the objects that are directly below it and
also those that are in the shade, and in CG we usually call this Global illumination, or GI.
| |
|
| |
The very diffused shade that generates this enormouslight produces an effect among objects
that we call Ambient occlusion or AAOO.I usually give this huge area of light a very intense blueish colour to cause a strong contrast with the direct light of the orange sun. That dance of complementary colours produces vibrations in the image that move it away from realism but brings it nearer to a version of reality that is more surreal and personal. It is also important to work the illumination in connection with the shader construction and with the texturing because they are elements that are interrelated. Many times when we are dealing with a lighting problem what we have to correct is simply the shader or a dark or too saturated texture.
3DTotal : Do the scenes represent real places that mean something to you or are they purely imaginative?
Juan : Many of my scenes are real places but I have always modified them to filter the elements that I don’t like or to change them for others that reinforce the general mood of the work. For that reason I don’t need to visit magnificent tourist sites to find architectural beauty since these can exist in any corner of my modest city witch I just have to interpret with my own style.
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
