3DTotal: Which of all of your characters is your favorite and what is the story behind their creation?
Eduardo: My favorite characters are the Mexican wrestler and the cowboy. They are also the newest ones, so they are the ones I’m most proud of at the moment. The first one is one of the few characters in my career without a specific story behind him. As I mentioned before, when I finished the short film I felt a little bit outdated, so I started to work on the wrestler mainly as a excuse for testing the new mental ray features and to free my mind of those little kids from the short film who had been in my head for such a long time. The cowboy was created, once again, as the main character for a short film. As you can see my career has always been linked to the storytelling. Unfortunately doing a short film is extremely heavy and doing it alone even more so. The script is already written, but I would like to do it properly, with great artists working on those areas where I have less experience. After finishing Valle Paraiso, I had the feeling the film was just “fine” in relation to the 3D. Actually at certain point during the production I realized that I needed to keep the film balanced because it was going to be impossible to work on every shot to fine-tune it. Although the animation is quite poor in general, I think nothing is especially good or bad in the film. If I ever do the cowboy film, I want to do it properly so I’ve decided to put it on hold until I can get the right people in place.

3DTotal: Now that you are specializing in lighting and compositing, are you still learning new things every day? Are there any particular recent discoveries that have helped your workflow?
Eduardo: Some of my greatest discoveries in this job have come from the compositing of 3D shots and how both lighting and compositing ties together. In the past I had always been compositing in an amateurish way. It’s been at Ilion that I’ve discovered how much good compositing can add to your lighting. I have started working with the different elements that comprise an image (diffuse, GI, reflections) as well as render the lights as separate passes so you have a huge amount of control over your final frames.

3DTotal: Which other artists have inspired you throughout your career?
Eduardo: It may sound clichéd, but Pixar is one of the companies who continue to inspire me with every new film. Not only for the amazing 3D that they show in their films, but also because they are always one step ahead of the other companies. I can see all the other big studios trying to copy them, while they are only worried about facing new challenges and creating memorable films. 
In terms of inspiring individual artists, I can mention a few whose work I really admire. My friend Enrique Fernandez (http://enriquefernandez0.blogspot.com/), Adria Garcia and Victor Maldonado from Headless (http://www.headless.es), Alex Huget (http://metamesh.cgsociety.org/gallery/), JJ Palomo (http://www.biglazyrobot.com), Daniel Martinez Lara (http://www.pepe-school-land.com) to mention a few Spanish fellows. Internationally speaking Marek Denko (http://marekdenko.net/), Antropus (http://antropus.cgsociety.org/gallery/), Michael Sormann (http://www.sormann3d.com/), Lauren Pierlot (http://sato.cgsociety.org/gallery/) and many others that I’m forgetting.

3DTotal: That’s a great bunch of artists you’ve listed there, Eduardo. I’ve also interviewed some of them myself and I’m sure the readers will recognize many of the names too. Any final piece of advice you would like to offer to our student readers to round things off?
Eduardo: Be humble about your work. I’ve seen too many people who have just come out of school, talking as if they’re masters of 3D - when in fact the work they are producing are far from being master pieces. Be honest with yourself and compare your work with the stuff shown on the net. Criticize your own work as if it were somebody else’s: is my work better than the average, or worse? Try to find why other people’s work is better than yours. 

Another important thing is to always be willing to share. The more you share your knowledge, the most you’ll get from the people around you. It’s a kind of an action-reaction basis. It’s funny to see how it’s the artist who are famous worldwide that are the most accessible and humble guys in the industry. They don’t mind sharing whatever they know or learn, and they are always trying to learn more because they know that there is a lot still to discover.

The last thing bit of advice would be: work hard and keep your dream alive. Try to aim for reasonable milestones and once you achieve one, move on to a harder one. And of course, enjoy the ride!