Costing of a project

[fixeighted]

I have a client that is questioning my costing of a project and so I'd welcome any input as to whether you agree/disagree with what I have proposed.
I believe, based on experience, that it is valid but as a favour to them I thought I would offer them second opinion confirmation

It is a car configurator for which I have to build the vehicle, with 4 unique wheel types (no interior as yet needed).
The output consists of 96 turntable animations of 50 frames each, plus stills covering the various permutations required.
I costed it as follows:

Car basic model £3500
Wheel types extra x 3 @ £60 £180
360 turntable animation x 96 @ £40 £3820
Static frame for each permutation x96 @ £5 £480

Now I personally think this is very reasonable and that they simply do not understand the work involved. I have actually already built the vehicle in advance, so I know how long it took.
Also I have calculated the render time for a farm, though plan to do them locally to keep control and avoid errors. Farm costs are less of course, plus quicker and so I have factored that in
as a possible reduction, though the costs are not all that different.

[Neilg]

I think it's insanely low unless you already have scripts to automatically generate all images and animations.

[fixeighted]

Thanks for the comment - it's comforting

The costs for the animations/stills I based on the frame times firstly, then setup costs based on days and which would include purchase of probably Renderstacks to automate the process.
That should make it far simpler is the plan.
A farm would charge around £15 per sequence (the main benefit is speed) but then that does not include the organisational setup, so that is factored in.

I'll not move from my quote on this occasion, as I reckon it's fair. If they do agree to it then I will know how close I was on completion, so I'll post that as an update.
I doubt they will go for it however, as they have said their client's budget is tight.
It's odd that they sell pimped up conversions of collector cars, selling for a great deal of money - but they don't have a budget for the marketing. Makes me laugh really.
Their call anyway

[super gnu]

woah thats really, really cheap! id certainly not let anyone talk you down.. id have come in at least 5x higher

[fixeighted]

LOL that would be a bit steep I reckon. Thanks for that though
I base everything on my daily rate, or where applicable an hourly one.
I've only seen that rate go down over the years, whilst the quality has gone up.
I have been considering upping that rate, so this may well be the last I do at that price.

[squintnic]

way too cheap lol
i would automate as much of this process as possible to get the best margin possible from the job (even using renderstacks) and then up the price by 5x

[fixeighted]

Thanks for the comments so far - much food for thought, to be sure.

I wish I could charge those numbers but it would mean upping my daily to almost 1k, which my clients would not understand and
unfortunately would mean no business
Is anyone really charging these amounts? Seems a bit excessive in this particular case

I figured that as it's only a very simple rotation, then all I need to do is set up the swaps and press render.
So at 15 quid each on a farm I calculated that upping it to 40 would cover the setup, which is only a few clicks per version and a pretty fair mark-up.

Thinking about Renderstacks, I'm not even sure that a renderfarm will work with that. I don't have it as yet so have not tested. I have asked the maker but so far have had no response from him.
Although, I am now considering that in the time it takes to set up 96 variations in Renderstacks, I could just do them one by one and save on that time.

[piotrus3333]

Thinking about Renderstacks, I'm not even sure that a renderfarm will work with that. I don't have it as yet so have not tested. I have asked the maker but so far have had no response from him.
Although, I am now considering that in the time it takes to set up 96 variations in Renderstacks, I could just do them one by one and save on that time.

wouldn’t state sets be enough for setting this up?

[fixeighted]

Hmm...I always hated state sets - never seemed to work properly and messed things up, so I ditched its use ages ago.
Did they fix it?

[bildform]

Check out the pulze scene manager. That might cover your needs.

[piotrus3333]

no idea how they compare to ages ago. my bulletproof setup was always scene states changing only layer visibility (archviz and years of working with random freelancers) but few times that i tried they worked ok. just reconnecting some noodles to create current variation instead of changing things manually.