What is a good price for exterior animations? Is $.65 per second the going rate?
…Per second of rendertime? If not, that works out to around $120 for 3 minutes of animation, so no, not at all.
Someone else will be able to give you better ballparks, but it depends on amount of work needed on the model, time spent in post, number of revisions you allow for and the output resolution/delivery media. And then youve got the rendering time to factor in too, which can be a serious bottleneck for any other jobs youve got on, even if youve got a renderfarm.
Umm…you’d do a 10 minute animation for $390?
Need a job? We’d pay you double that 
Animation
I guess I mean after everything is modeled and textured. I have a client who is paying for the rendering and would also like me to fly around it.
Rendering farms
What do rendering farms charge? I guess that would answer my question.
Re: Animation
Hard to say without knowing the complexity of the shot, the rendering time per frame, any editing, etc, etc. A simple guess is probably more like $.65 per frame or about $20/second but there’s a huge range depending on the variables above. DON’T just get a quote from the rendering farm and assume that’s what you should charge. You’ll have a lot of camera setup time, testing, prerendering of irr. map, compiling it into a movie, etc., etc… It all adds up. As CG said above, $120 for a 3 minute animation is waaayy too cheap, I routinely charge 3-5 times that just for another still of areas that are already modeled and textured and that’s actually kind of fair when you consider I have to adjust the new camera, prepare test shots for approval, render out the shot, do a little photshop work, etc.
Animation
I re-adjusted my thought. How does $65.00 per second sound? so a 15 second animation would be $975.00. They are already paying 1 exterior view so a lot will already be built. Isn’t any of this stuff documented someplace?
$15,000 per minute…the client pays for the rendering not for the model…the model is yours, so in theory you should charge a full fee without any discount…find a reasonable fee but don’t be cheap.
Animation
You mean I am allowed to make money doing this :lol: $15,000 seems correct when you punch in numbers, but not for the small architects I do work for. Maybe when I do the quality you guys do… for now I am just trying to build a reputation and obtain some good business relationships.
it takes a lot more time than doing a still - you’ll want to render half size tests to see if the camera path is just right (can be done quicker at half the frame rate as well) - and a flypast can expose unexpected texture mapping (and other) issues
And then the edit: titles? pauses at begining and end? music?
then you’ll need to generate the file format they want - Flash video? dvd? quicktime?
just allow plenty of time for fine tuning even if your price has to be low - but not too low - what happens if they like it so much they want another at the same too low price?
it kind of depends per job really as others have said.
don’t go too cheap or they’ll expect the same price every time.
for example - imagine you charge them a minimal amount and they come back and ask you to do changes which they think are small but in reality require hours of additional moddeling time + re-rendering.
you subsequently bill them for your time and they hit the roof asking why you’ve just charged five times the amout to make ‘simple’ amends to something you’ve already done…
Take a look at these pages:
http://www.cgarchitect.com/upclose/DW/default.asp
There’s a lot of good info in there that might help you get a proper perspective on what you are offering versus what you are charging. It’s not so much the actual dollar amount that you charge as it is the consistency and predictability of your charges.
Most of our clients complain when they get their first bill, but once we explain it to them and they start using our product and see the value, they constantly come back and usually spend even more money on subsequent projects. Just that first project is usually the tough one.