Interview with Alvaro Arroyo, Creating a Melancholic Atmosphere in ArchViz

Exclusive interview about 2019 ARCHITECTURAL 3D AWARDS

After reading 2 interviews with the winner and nominee for the 2019 Architectural 3D Awards, you must have been amazed by their great ideas and persistence in their ArchViz career. Today, we go on our exploration in the creation of ArchViz by talking to Mr. Alvaro Arroyo, nominee for Student Image category.

• Alvaro Arroyo
• From: Spain
• 3D Artist
• School: School-ing

CREDITS:

• School-ing
• Adán Martín
• Eduardo Rodríguez
• All of the School-ing students
• 3D Collective

Alvaro’s work delivers a sense of melancholic atmosphere while the composition is with coherent layers. The moment he created this artwork, he was still a student, however, he has already stepped into the ArchViz industry and put his whole heart in it currently. Let’s read the interview to know more about the creation of the nominated work, and how he sees the shift in his life.

Fox Renderfarm: Hi, Alvaro, would you please give a brief introduction about yourself?

Alvaro: Hi, my name is Alvaro Arroyo Cerdá, a 27-year-old 3D Artist from Valencia (Spain). I´m an architect from the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) and now I´m working full time in the architectural visualization industry.

Polytechnic University of Valencia

Fox Renderfarm: How do you feel about being nominated in The CGarchitect Architectural 3D Awards?

Alvaro: It is definitely a great honour. Just the fact of having my work recognised in the world's most important awards of the industry is an amazing feeling. A few months ago I couldn't imagine all these things were going to happen.

Fox Renderfarm: What’s your inspiration for this amazing project? Why did you select this artwork to participate in the competition?

Alvaro: This image is part of a project that I was working on in the school, so besides this one, more images have been made. Each one has the architecture as the base, and then I tried to experiment (with) different moods for all of them, creating atmospheres that fit my purpose.

Other 2 pictures for the same project

In this artwork, I had the idea of creating a melancholic atmosphere where nature and modern architecture might get together. I added some women playing music inside the house just to emphasize that idea.

Fox Renderfarm: Could you introduce the light design and the composition of this project?

Alvaro: The light design is just based on a foggy HDRI, and I used the Vray environmental fog to mitigate the light and exposure of that HDRI. In terms of composition, I had a clear idea of having the house entry in the center of the image, and for that, the shape of the building was so helpful. I had the forest and nature on the foreground, just playing with its colours and wildness, and introduced those broken branches on the right to avoid a flat image. The road on the left was a great element to avoid it as well. Finally, I placed some forest on the background to make them disappear in the foggy day.

Fox Renderfarm: How long did it take you to finish the work?

Alvaro: Probably it took between two and three weeks to do that image, but it's hard to tell because it was part of a bigger project, so modeling the architecture and texturing were the longer parts.

Clay render

Fox Renderfarm: What’s the most unforgettable and interesting part of the creation process?

Alvaro: Maybe the most interesting part was when I was trying to achieve the mood that I had in my head for this image. As I saw the first results, my idea was to place myself inside that environment to keep improving all the details and have a humid atmosphere like the one we have when just stopped raining.

Fox Renderfarm: Did you meet any difficulties when creating this work? And how did you solve it?

Alvaro: Of course, I think is part of the process and in my case as a beginner, I had much more difficulties. The hardest part was to recreate a realistic wild forest because it was so close to the camera, and I solved it working a lot in the vegetation materials and placing the nature elements very carefully in the scene.

Fox Renderfarm: How long have you been in the architectural visualization career? And how did you make the decision to step into this career?

Alvaro: I have been actively learning from January of this current year, so just ten months. They have been really intense months as you can imagine. I made the decision when I realized that the part of the architectural work that made me happier was to visualize unbuilt architecture and where I can use more of my creativity.

Fox Renderfarm: Who or what project inspires you most in this industry?

Alvaro: Well, Adán Martín has been the real inspiration for me in this industry. In fact, studying and learning from him in School-ing has been the best decision I could have made to start in Archviz. Maybe Csaba Banati, Karim Moussa or Thomas Dubois are artists that inspire and motivate me because their creative mindset of facing new challenges representing the unbuilt is just awesome.

Fox Renderfarm: As an outstanding architectural visualization artist, what do you think are the qualities that will make a great artist greater? And what do you do to enhance your professional skills?

Alvaro: I think that in an industry like this, always changing, is so important to have a learning attitude towards everything. Use our creativity to solve our working problems will make an artist much better. In my short experience, I have been trying to make works where I can always learn some new things, to have my mind active.

Fox Renderfarm: What’s your next step?

Alvaro: As I said before, keep learning every day new techniques, new software and the best visualizer I can be to fulfill all my expectations that are coming. Now, I am focused on my new job as a Junior 3D Artist at Kilograph and that is where my mind is.

Fox Renderfarm: Have you ever used Fox Renderfarm cloud rendering services previously? If yes, how do you feel about it?

Alvaro: Not really because I didn't have the chance to use them because my short career in the Archviz industry, but definitely I´m going to do it from now on.

Fox Renderfarm: Any other things you want to share with CG enthusiasts?

Alvaro: Well, just encourage people that are starting in the industry, like me, to work with passion and determination to create great illustrations. I will be happy to keep meeting people of this industry because is always a pleasure for me to meet such talented people, so feel free to contact me on social media to share thoughts about our works. And finally, I hope you saw the rabbit in my image, did you?

Alvaro’s Instagram @arc.alvaro