What sort of machine are you using it on at the moment?

I am using a Dual Xeon 3.0 GHz with 2GB of RAM and Quadro graphics as my main workstation. I also have a Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop for home work and a render farm with about 15 computers with a mix of Athlon and Pentium IV processors all with 1GB of RAM, all connected with a 1000 MB switch network.

Are there any plug-ins you wouldn't be without?

I don't use a lot of plug-ins, but I can't live without HD-Instance from Happy Digital, which allows me to visualise complex scenes using instances, and FPrime from Worley Labs, to previsualise all material and illumination setups. But the plug-ins I use every day I write myself, especially "one-touch" object and light editors that are available freely to the community here.

In your opinion, should LightWave 3D stay separated or become integrated?

For technical modelling I love that Modeler and Layout are two separated applications, where you can modify one model of a project and this change can be visualised in all scenes without any more work, but I must say that integrated application could have a lot of advantages, like the possibility to animate modelling operations.

Tell me about the Balagares project?

This is a heavy-duty visualisation project for a residential complex with golf course. It has about 600 houses in more than 10 configurations. It is in a beautiful location in Asturias near a lake and the surrounding environment had to be visualised with the project. From the beginning, I decided that the whole project should be completed just using digital information, so I needed to create a digital terrain model, get aerial photographs and join them together, model all the urbanisation and houses and finally put it all together in complete scenes to render final sequences, in day and night lighting.

How did you get the job?

I got this job directly from one of my clients, Rafael Beca, an architect that has worked with my models for years. He recommended me to the publicity agency to do the work.

Tell me about the work you did in LightWave?

Everything you see in this animation is 3D - no live footage was taken for the project. All modelling, texturing and rendering work was done with LightWave using only one plug-in, HD-Instance, to put native rendering of instances into LightWave. A lot of miscellaneous elements were made with LightWave also, but some comes from libraries or other vegetation modelling programs.

How long did it take in total?

I spent about three or four weeks of personal work, and about two weeks of rendering on my 15-machine render farm.

How many people worked on the project?

Hehehe... I am sure that I should sleep more, but I worked on this project alone - everything was made by just one person. Perhaps this is a good example of how powerful LightWave can be for small- and medium-sized studios, where more complex software can make workflow slow and hard.

Your scenes must be very polygon-heavy, how many are typically used?

I usually create scenes from two to four millions of polygons, without the use of the instancing plug-in... all this information can be easy managed by LightWave with one gigabyte of RAM. HD-Instance can multiply this number by 10 or 100 without slowing down.