Client demands

V-Ray V-Ray Common Off-topic
1

I’m all for clients. I mean really, the good ones ask for things, can be dicks, but they work out. I always work with the general philosophy that you’re there to provide a solution for them. Want things done above and beyond the original agreement? Sure. This is how much it’ll cost and when it can be done.

But then there’s another type of client. This client has dealt with his industry and appropriate marketing facilities before (including 3D), and expects an inferior product with insane timelines. So ok, this type of work isn’t good for the soul but it pays the bills, however, the instructions from the client are in a constant state of flux, and the end product takes 3 times as long as it should. The logical argument is that had it been done properly, to a certain quality, it would only have to have been done once, and not taken quite as long as the “working mess” version. But to explain this to a client who is so used to working in such a way is almost impossible. The downside is it makes me look semi-retarded/unprofessional and will quite possibly never see them again.

I don’t have a question, i’m just using outletting :wink:

2

Been dealing with some of that recently, drawings changing close to a deadline and comments on animation paths 2 nights before. It’s grim, but it’s got to be done.

Some clients just want a good image that makes the space look cool (the best ones) and others want it to be perfectly accurate down to the mm of a drawing that hasnt even been drawn up yet.

3

I use to work for a place where they were confused about 3d artists, illustrators, and designers. As a result a typical bedroom which normally will take from a few hours to maybe 2 days max, took between 1 and 3 weeks. Ever stared at the same picture for 3 weeks only to re-render 1000 times just for a different carpet or door texture?

4

been there done that - this was a while ago..
told manager we had to have agreement on all tweaks end of Wednesday for delivery Monday morning (40 second walkthrough)
(knowing client would push till Thursday as they think its more fun to not make their mind up)

Saturday they are still making changes - I tell manager to tell client he wont get job - “but he’s the CLIENT , it must be done”
deadline gets extended to midday Monday - render goes off Sunday at midnight
jobs come off farm all screwed up

Manager goes in to client with a dvd full of weird misaligned irradiance mapping
Manager doesnt do arch vis any more, he drives taxis

(damn it still makes me angry, writing this..)

5

I concur…

Never enough time to do it right, always enough time to do it again…

By the way, nice to see someone else ‘suffering’, it gets a bit lonely when you are the only visualiser amongst 100 architects who assume there is simply a button you press for any effect, texture etc.
Looks like fun times ahead as architects are grappling with BIM, now I will be surrounded by 3D experts, after one days training!
Probably will seriously impact on my already patchy workload, but hey ‘we still pay you don’t we’…

laters

spike

6

Wow. Boy do I feel better now haha. The architects here are pretty creative and place the art of architecture pretty high up there, so we all feel it when we have to cut corners. I also get “less insane” deadlines than I used to - you know, before when they thought it was a button press. The husband of a senior architect here used to be in the field of visual effects/3D stuff, so she knows and points out some of the more reasonable timelines and things that affect it.

We are however, facing a particular crowd during this big dip. Buy cheap, make cheap, sell for decent money when things pick up and construction is complete, so no-one will be winning any awards this year I don’t think.

7

I had that recently where the client gave me 4 hours of changes when there was 1.5 hours left to the deadline and at least 1 hour of rendering to be done !

I mentioned this and was instructed to do what I could so, I hit render !

I haven’t heard from that client since.

8

yep…

World weary…jaded…cynical…

all the above, I was warned about working with architects!

Thank goodness for the VRay forum, always brightens my day up, cheers lads and any ladettes!

laters

spike

9

Yeah it’s very difficult to not become jaded and cynical yourself when you’re around it! I guess you just have to hang on to the fact that you’re creating an artistic vision in such a short time, and by God i love it.

10

I never forget being asked to make an image 20% “better” …

11

I’ve been asked to make a render look more “special”…

:smile:

12

I am currently working at a place where I have been told not to make it “look good - we dont charge for the renderings so we dont want to spend any time on it”.

13

That sounds great for the soul. Maybe they should, you know, charge for them. Dorks.

Also, I was once asked to produce a simple massing (which I put a bit of effort into - realistic roads, grass, foliage and cardboard model style buildings), but then wait - add more “sparkle” to it. To this day I have no idea what that means.

14

We were also recently asked for our sketchup model so the project management company could overshore the 3D rendering for marketing. I had some reasonably “robust” words to say about this, and we sent them a price to do it ourselves, or just the model, which was about 60% of the cost of the whole lot. Obviously they thought “well hey this isn’t going to be that cheap to get the model”, and asked us to quote on the rest of the marketing stuff, which looks like it will go through.

Diplomacy in action.

15

Ok, here’s another good one, and it’s a problem some of us have probably faced: The visually impaired and imagination less.

A “friend of mine” may or may not have a client who has buckets of money but doesn’t understand plans or 3D or anything - he must have a physical cardboard model. Even then, it’s hard to convey that no, the terrain will not be “all steppy”. Something that made me laugh was an example where he was shown a floorplan of the house, with the home theatre room (underground) shown off to the side. He was all like “But it’s not on my land! People will bump into it? Do they walk through it?”. You’d think he wasn’t told that this was an underground room, but no, he was told this, but the concept that a drawing of the room was not physically in the right place just baffled him. I asked if I could assist with some 3D, but no, that would make it worse, because he’d think the trees were growing on the roof of the house and the sky was sitting on top of all that and he’d get even more confused. I thought about it a bit - maybe you could show him the floorplans on transparent sheets so you could sit them on top of each other, but he’d wonder why the floor-to-ceiling was non-existent.

Ok so i’m the friend.

16

Cathartic

Good to see everyone else gets the same s**t as me, make it 20% better, I hear you!

SketchUp is the bane of my life, architects dabble and find they can push and pull faces, awesome, then when thay can’t actually do the same finished image as me, ‘Oh we didn’t want a realistic feel’, what had they been struggling on for a week then?

Two most used words in architecture, unresolved and in abeyance, still need an image by end of play…

I had to create a staircase, with Max I did it in approx 20 mins, FFD 2x2x2 to stretch it and hey presto, it fits, the architect behind me was aghast, one of his companions had struggled with it in another 3D package (not SketchUp) for 2 days! But they were on another floor, out of sight…

Doing 5 colour options with 3 varieties in each, x15 images! in an hour please!

Given x number of options an architect will always pick between several and ask for a percentage of each, then the client picks a colour based on a logo he just saw, not even thought about in the original brief.

Anyway best not to bite the hand that feeds me and most architects do realise what they are asking, I usually tell them even if they don’t and its hilarious when other architects start bitchin’ about each other, worse than 14 year old teenagers. I am also sure that architects have as many ‘gripes’ about visualisers, a bit like men and women, it did create the best type of music though, Blues…

Just to finish off, I once saw a review of a film based around an architect, it stated that it was better than usual as the architect wasn’t portrayed as a control freak or, wait for it, a dandy narcissist!

Longest post ever for me.

laters

spike

17

Don’t even get me started on this one…

Here’s a clip that says it all really:

http://typophile.com/node/58578

b

18

VRay forum rules…

Reminds me of a joke…a man is charged for incidentals on his hotel bill, ‘what are these’ he asks, ‘mini-bar, peanuts, phone in the room’, but I never used any of these.

Suddenly he replies, I want 20% percent knocked off the bill as you had sex with my wife, the receptionist replies ‘I certainly did not, SIR!’

yeah, but she was available…

and there’s more, as my old friend Paul said, if a plumber turns up and quotes $250 on a job, you don’t say, well I only have $150, could you do $150 worth of the job!

Like I was asked many times when I was a commercial airbrush artist, eons ago, happy days!

laters

spike

19

Try this:
“The image is too realistic, we are not trying to create a photo here”

Oh really? Then why you having me render the same image 50 times just to move a tree 1cm to the left, or because the wall textutre is too rough, or because the cream wall needs to be more cream. Just how cream can a cream wall get then?

20

goddamn, not exactly on topic but I just had my client over looking at some work… he prodded my screen at a few points and now he’s left I’ve noticed my screen’s got a bit yellow stripe up the middle of it…
NICE ONE!!!

£300 out the window if my warranty doesn’t do the trick…

:0