| |
|
3DTotal: Hello Carles, could you introduce yourself to our readers, please?
Carles: I’m a CG artist from Valencia, Spain. I was born in the same year that man first put foot on the moon, so I’m currently almost 38 years old; married with two children. I was a professional musician and graphic designer before getting into 3D and it has been many years since 3D techniques caught my full attention.
3DTotal: Could you tell us a bit about your education, please?
Carles: My single, official education came from music school. Regarding graphics, I learnt everything myself. I had no real chance of learning CG graphics because, in those days, CG schools didn’t exist in Spain and I had no money to pay for any of the courses. So for leaning the technical side, magazines where my main source of education, and later on the |
|
| |
|
Internet arrived making it easier and cheaper to learn. As for art, I mostly learnt by observing the paintings of the Dutch, Italian and Spanish classic masters.
3DTotal: What first got you started in 3D?
Carles: It was more than 12 years ago when a friend of mine showed me software able to run on my 486 with 4 Mb of Ram using MS-Dos (3DStudio 3). I was very impressed by the “realism”, so even if I didn’t spend time too much in those first years, I was very curious about testing all the 3D software available (and there were not that many, by the way). Some years later, I started an insane self career focused mostly on natural light simulation. Global Illumination didn’t exist at that time, so I had tonnes of fun doing that. |
 |
 |
 |
 |
3DTotal: With the amount of resources available for training nowadays, it’s very easy for artists coming into the field today to quickly pick up the latest 3D software. How did you find learning 3D back in the days when resources were very limited?
Carles: It was quite hard from the technical side because the best system was simply trial-and-error, which is very time consuming. Also, 3D packages are currently quite similar, but a decade ago we found huge differences between packages, and so you could spend a couple hours trying to find a particular feature (navigating on completely different interfaces) and realising later that it didn’t exist in the program you were trying to learn... So learning was slow and chaotic. On the other hand, in my case, the artistic side was very funny. Most packages didn’t support advanced rendering features such as GI, so I had tonnes of fun trying to “paint with lights” to emulate colour bleeding and global lighting and shadows, so it was a very creative training process. Currently it’s really easy to create a photo-realistic scene, but also a lot of control and creativity is involved in such an automated process. I think it was not a bad time, just very different.
3DTotal: You worked on Dear Anne with a host of other talented artists. Could you tell us what sort of experiences you gathered from your time there?
Carles: Indeed, tonnes and tonnes of experience was gathered in almost three years of working there. Of course, I learnt a lot on the technical side and |
|
|
| |
production itself since I was deeply involved in that project (I did the visual research and database creation for 6 months, supervised the environment team for about 1.5 years, and worked as a shading/lighting artist and art director for more than one year), but my memories bring me more of a feeling of high motivation from being surrounded by those artists, and especially nice moments from the human side of things.
3DTotal: With the amount of work that must have gone into Dear Anne, were you a bit upset to find out that the project was cancelled?
Carles: Well, “a bit upset” may be not be the most appropriate expression to define my feeling - it was much worse. I got into a deep depression and an intense anxiety crisis. Suddenly (it was the worst thing - no time for planning anything), I saw how the universe in which you’ve worked night and day for three years, pass away forever. I had to move back to another country with hundreds of objects, my children had to leave their Italian school unfinished, and my wife and I had to leave friends and memories with no time for thinking about what had happened... It was really hard in all aspects, not only the project itself, but... yes, losing the project was the hardest part to me. Everybody expected a big delay in the film release, but it was never expected that it would be left to die.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
