Are the two pictures in your Art Gallery completely CG as well?

Yes, they are good examples of how good the LightWave render engine can be in areas like global illumination, texturing or large scene management. Someday I will replace "strange things" with organic sculptures or something like that to complete the images and make new ones...

Do you use SkyTracer for the backgrounds or are the skies image maps?

I always use image maps for backgrounds... most of them are taken by myself in the actual locations of the project to show its environment. Here in Spain, the light is wonderful to photograph... sky tracer does provide incredible images, but photos are faster and provide more realism.

In some animations I use video footage from a library to simulate animated cloud movement and night fading into dawn, but it is real video footage - no sky tracer. This limits camera movement, but works fine and it is fast to layout and render.

Why do you work at print resolution? Is it for architects that don't want to pay for the animations? :)

The final destination of my work is usually the construction company who wants make publicity in press and other printed media ...of course everybody wants animations, but they don't all want to pay for it :-(

What's the architectural visualisation market like in Spain?

I don't know what the visualisation market is like in other countries, but here in Spain it is the most important market in CG, after games I suppose.

LightWave is probably the most complete software for this kind of work. I see the workflow of other professionals and companies using other packages and it is by far more complex and less flexible than me using LightWave. Out of the box it is the most complete and balanced CG software today and it has the fastest workflow for visualisation projects by far.

We've put together a teaser of Juan's animations here (14MB), but you should really go to his website and at least download the Ría Avilés video to see how amazing Juan's work is.