Fee for service

[glorybound]

I recently got an email for some possible work. Below is a mantel rendering that the designer commissioned someone to do, which was made in V-Ray, and to me is nice. He has many more and he is looking for a fee. He'll provide the SketchUp mantel, and I would do the creative. So, let me put it out there, what would you charge? I get a lot of these fictitious projects, which are people just phishing for numbers, so I thought I would open up some honest communication.

Like I said, I think it is nicely done. He also wanted my to critique the rendering, but I told him that if I did it would just by hypercritical, so I did not. If I were to have completed the below project, I would need 1-2 days, and if I charge $400 -$500 a day, it will be a $400 to $1,000 rendering. I can only imagine the more I worked with him, the easier the process would be. He has 30 mantel designs and he wants 4 different views of each.



So, what do you think? What would make it worth your while? From experience, I don't mix quantity with fee structure, because that's the oldest trick in the book to get the lowest price. So, no discount because there are a lot of them.

[joconnell]

If you did get something like this, as an aside, get yourself a license of RP manager and automate the lot for yourself - similar lighting and multiple cameras, you could ideally build it up into a process that'd take a bit of setup time but then leave go on a farm for a few days.

[glorybound]

I have been hearing about RP Manager a lot recently; I'll have to look into it. I assumed it was like PSD Manager, which I have.

If you did get something like this, as an aside, get yourself a license of RP manager and automate the lot for yourself - similar lighting and multiple cameras, you could ideally build it up into a process that'd take a bit of setup time but then leave go on a farm for a few days.

[joconnell]

It's more for automating multiple render setups within the same file so if you had a collection of objects that you wanted to render individually, say for example a product collection, but they all use the same lighting and backdrop, you can use rpmanager to organise and automate this.

[glorybound]

Doesn't 3DSMAX have Scene Sets for that? Which I have never used.

It's more for automating multiple render setups within the same file so if you had a collection of objects that you wanted to render individually, say for example a product collection, but they all use the same lighting and backdrop, you can use rpmanager to organise and automate this.

[joconnell]

Yeah you're right, with the general rule that anything autodesk does is normally awful though, it's worth a look.

[glorybound]

I will look into it, thanks.

Yeah you're right, with the general rule that anything autodesk does is normally awful though, it's worth a look.

[Neilg]

Charge an initial setup to build the scene (which is your 1-2 day, and covers the bg, lighting, bg photoshop) and then charge an amount for every 10 variations of mantel - because you should be able to do a fair few a day. With a pass manager you'll be rendering each mantel on it's own as an object pass and placing it over the top of the pre-photoshopped base image.

I'd use something like fusion and run it like an animation with each mantel on it's own frame. would take no time at all to do 30 variants.