Tell me more about the Ria Aviles project?

Ria Aviles is a very complex project because it recreates an actual city that is well-known here, so the level of detail and its reality must be by far more complex than a project that doesn't exist in reality. When people who are actually living there see images and video they think that the video is real footage with digital effects to make the river project... no-one thinks that what they are watching is 100% CG.

All my projects are 100% CG. I create all the models in Modeler from several sources: maps, project cad data, etc. These are then textured from aerial and ground photographs and animated in Layout. I only use the HDInstance plug-in to clone the trees. This scene in particular has about three million polygons and 5,000 trees of about 8,000 polygons each, HDInstance manages it without problems... :-)

The buildings are all modelled too, and they are very close to the reality in this city. There are about 3,000 buildings, all textured from generic photographs of the city. The near terrain texture has about 8000 x 8000 pixels applied to a model of about 200 kpolys, and the high altitude terrain is textured from a series of aerial photographs at 4000 x 4000 pixels.

I think that LW is perfect software for this kind of visualisation project. No other package has the flexibility to manage this large a scene. The project took about five weeks of hard work by my large team which consists of myself... and nobody else ;-)

Work on the Ria Aviles project starts this month for real.

How did you achieve the zoom from high altitude into the city in the Ria Aviles video?

There is only one step. The high altitude texture is a 2.5 meters/pixel view of the zone, the near texture is at 0.5 meters/pixel to achieve better detail. To effect the transition I changed one texture to the other, using fast movement and motion blur to avoid the "step" effect.

Are you examining organic modelling to incorporate people and animals into your architectural renderings?

This is a good question. One of most difficult steps in realism in architecture visualisation is people... but architecture firms don't always want to pay for the extra work to incorporate real organic elements in projects. In my free time I am introducing these elements to this kind of work. I don't know if I can incorporate it in commercial work, but it is very interesting.

My first steps using subdivision modelling into LW Modeler are very pleasing, perhaps I can made some demo work stuff this year.

Why don't the cars move in your animations?

Hehehe another good question... there is no problem in LW to move cars - the only problem is the time to make the projects. Sometimes there are only one or two weeks to do all the work, usually for print, so animation is only a secondary product of a complete job.

Can you tell me more about the archaeological scenes?

The ability to show archaeological reconstruction scenes in computer graphics is incredible, however, here in Spain the market is too small, because archaeologists don't know these possibilities, but I think that things could change. This sector could be another use of CG, and as with any other visualization work, LightWave is a great package to explore in this field. Using CG an archaeologist could visualize all his work in terrain excavations, and reconstruct a real approach of site... in photorealistic views or in a graphic diagram to expose the whole project.