archviz office redesign/renovation competition project and general discussion

[greysheep5]

hello forum!

this is a project we did for an interior design firm a few weeks back....

we are a small and newly found architectural visualization company from austria, consisting of two people. as always, how could it other be with architects, this project went with a tight deadline. everything modeled and rendered in the week before the architects deadline for the competition entry.

feedback from other people in the archviz field, and of course from everyone else, very welcome! for the other archviz people out there i have a few special questions though...

how tight are your deadlines for example? and is the budget the driving force behind the detail grade/realism/artism for you or is it the other way round? are you guys working mostly on hourly paid basis or for a fixed quote (as we do, most of the time) negotiated in advance? i guess this depends further on if you are working in/owning companies or working as a freelancer? how is the general situation in your countries? and if you want to talk about it, how long do you work on projects like this? the ratio between time invested and output seen is something that i find is missing a bit in the work i see around the web. especially if you are kinda young and unexperienced and want to look around where you stand in between all this amazing visualization stuff thats around here.

would be interesting for us to hear your take or some thoughts on the topics mentioned...

with greetings from vienna,

christoph.

www.cy-architecture.com

[greysheep5]

well... image upload went not as expected, sorry!

the rest of the images...





..gotta find out how to do this image uploading better! how do you guys do it, i am puzzled?

[thablanch]

The style I see in the images is a little different from what we usualle see on this forum. I did look at the images before reading your text, and first thing I taught was: looks like some contest images from architecture students or somethin'...

Here is my very personal oppinion, as you did ask. I like illustrative images, I also like realisim in images.. where it bugs me a little, is when we, or the people we are working for, are trying to merge both styles.. wich is a little what you did over here. My explanation on that is: a Picasso is beautiful, and a Rembrandt is beautiful... ( illustrative and realisim) but if you try to mix them together, is the mix happy?

I think your style is really nice, but I would rather go a little more illustrative, like most of the stuff on your website...

But then again, this is just one me, there is hundreds of other oppinions on how to present stuff...( we do argue about this every day....)

For the workflow / business questions:
Deadlines anywhere in between in 4 hours, cause we are meeting this afternoon, or in 2 months. But I would say normal deadline is about 3 to 4 days for the kind of work we are usually doing.
Hour or fixed.. depends who you are working for.. a mix of both.
Time vs Quality is a factor... that's why it is so nice to see work on the forums instead of on plain on a website.. sometimes you see something you can find quite average, but after that, you read that the whole thing was put up together really quick, or under some special conditions, and you see the work on an other angle.

[greysheep5]

good to hear your point of view! thanks, very appreciated! well i guess you don´t really like the style of french firms like labtop, luxigon, asylum oder maybe even artefactory then? at least it sounds a bit like that when you talk what seems to be a bit degrading about "some students competition" style of work?

or this is maybe more about our stuff, hehe. but it´s ok, discussion and critique is what i wanted, no offence taken! maybe i will post some more pictures later on from other projects...

i would never ever even compare our work to theirs, but i guess it counts as some influence. but like you said, there are many ways to present things. and those offices definitly know how to present and sell stuff, otherwise they wouldn´t be comissioned by the likes of rem koolhaas/oma and such... do you mean the forum is more for the totally photorealistic kind of stuff? well it seems at least, like you noted, that most of the stuff here goes into that direction.

with best regards,

christoph.

[plastic_]

Good images! IMO, the best series of pics on your webpage yet, generally I greatly prefer your indoor pics to the exteriors.

About abstraction and illustration vs realism, I think the balance here is very good, considering where such images come from. Architects want to capture the "mood" without having to show too much detail about the construction (to avoid getting trapped with false promises, or because they just dont know yet how it wil really turn out in the end). They want over-the-top stylishness, but still enough realism to allow the viewer to understand how the design works, how humans can interact with the place, etc.

So you need props for the "human dimension", some familar elements as a guide for scale and function. The question is, how can you abstract a chair or an imac? I think you can't. You can abstract humans by turning them to shades or contours, I'm doing that sometimes, but I can't say that it makes more sense for consistency than using bitmap people.

[thablanch]

good to hear your point of view! thanks, very appreciated! well i guess you don´t really like the style of french firms like labtop, luxigon, asylum oder maybe even artefactory then? at least it sounds a bit like that when you talk what seems to be a bit degrading about "some students competition" style of work?

Nothing degradating... that is not what I ment..
Usually, in charette or competition, the style is more abstract.. mixed mediums, exactly cause , as Plastic_ said, you do not want to show too much.. So that is what I am refering to as some student competition look.... Nothing degradating about that.. just an other look...not illustrative, not realist..

[greysheep5]

but so to speak, nobody usually posts here this kind of images??? competitions and stuff i mean?

kind of amazes me because it´s such a big part of the daily life of an archviz guy/firm. well, or at least it is in my part of the world. and as far as i know it´s the same with colleagues around here, not only my personal subjective perception of the business. the kind of "architectural visualization" you see on sites like cgtalk or at the cg-architect awards is drifting apart more and more from what i see as real work of architectural visualization, do you ever wonder?