pitch project.. hope cilent will like it

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61

I just downloaded vray 6.0 from bit torrent… seems legit to me. :slight_smile:

I was actually talking to a client that owed us money the other day… I say “owed” because he finally paid me for my foot brush model I did… He has been sending all of his stuff overseas for a couple of other products I was SUPPOSE to do, but he told me I was just too expensive… But then he backtracked… I am not expensive, they are just WAY too cheap… I explained the piracy thing and he basically said he didnt care… We are talking I did a job for 2800 and he can get it done for under 400… He showed me a couple of the jobs, the one looked decent, but the other looked like a bad autocad rendering from version 10. lol… But in the end, it just comes down to the client I guess… He wont buy anything but american made cars, but can stiff me on the renderings… lol

62

greed has I lot to do with it, I suppose. I had an overseas company reach out to me the other day. The email said that they can do my modeling for me, for ten cents on the dollar. If I were greedy, it would be a win-win, but I am not greedy. Now, if everyone else is doing it, except for me, I couldn’t compete. If this company had licensed software, and they paid their employees a fair wage, it would make sense. I am not to concerned about sending money oversees. We buy Fords, because it’s an American maker, but they have factories oversees; it’s all subjective.

63

Lots of great ideas i like the idea of the blacklist idea. Make sure you disclaim it correctly, we dont want any lawsuits coming your way… lol
I to have several clients that have dissapeared and walk around saying they have investments and crap and they end up screwing Arch, eng, lawyers and myself at the end.

As far as the official Vray thing i would imagine Chaosgroup would have to release some official logo, no ?

64

Well Bobby…
I think you may be surprised at how wide spread this is in Arch Viz. Many Many Many big name house do it this way. I dont know if its greed as much as the efficient business (I am sure people could argue both are the same).

I worked on one job where the whole house was being remodeled and very high end panels with gilded molding all over every surface - something like this:

http://www.beaux-artes.com/products/products\_arch\_panels.html

But the designer had a company in China doing the fabrication. Basically it was going to cost them more to hire me to do the renderings than it would be to build it. And one of the main things they wanted to use the renderings for was to explain to the Chinese company how to build it. That was not a good business model - haha.

65

I think the greed is hiring someone when they know the software is stolen, or they are using slave labor.

66

All good points - and you can still hire reputable companies overseas that use legit software and charge pennies to our dollar. When I was first looking into this issue I really thought it was very black and white. I have talked to others on the other side of this issue (mostly the US based companies that use overseas talent) and they made it sound much more complex and not quite so Dickenesque. I mean this isnt something I want to argue on the side of overseas labor. But I know I was amazed once I found out all the places that do use overseas talent and that it works - keeps their overhead low (though many still charged more per hour than I did) and they insure that the overseas companies do use legit software and make good money.

67

My last employer outsourced, and after several projects, it started to work. Things do get complicated, when you add layers, and it’s our reputation on the line. I would hate to be hired, based on being local, and then send things overseas. Maybe, when the client is money driven, outsourcing makes sense.

68

I have heard of much more places where it didnt work and went horribly wrong than it working. And most of the places where I heard it working there was a US team that would travel to South America, Easter Europe, India or wherever many times a year to set up the company, teach standards - probably build the computers… all that stuff.

69

I remember, several years ago, getting an email asking if I wanted to open a store front. This overseas company wanted an American presence, but everything would sent over there. They wanted me to pay the rent, make the sales, and I would get half. I probably sent them a very nice, no thank you, email.

70

Just how good are these outsourcing companies? If I don’t model something myself, I find it usually takes just as long for me to correct/polish the model to my liking as if I had modeled it myself. Plus, modeling is one stage of the process that I really enjoy and find necessary (to understand the project fully).

71

I agree with you. If I don’t do the modeling, then I have a hard time understanding the project.

72

I’ve been wanting to undercut the indian competition for a while now, but i can only do it if i start working for free. Well, besides sharing all my knowledge that took me 10 years to gather, i’ve modeled something for free for a random guy on cgarchitect. He just came there and asked how would one model a particular detail, and i wrote an in depth explanation and provided an actual model. Who knows, maybe if i run into him someday maybe he will give me his leftover lunch. Nothing beats someone elses half-eaten sandwitch!

No one ever gave me their recipe when i went to a restaurant, nor do i see professional chefs frequenting all the recipe sites or forums, but they should start learning from us. 3d should be free for everyone. Our clients hardly make millions any more, their profits are mostly in the hundreds of thousands, they shouldn’t be paying for our services.

73

Oh trust me, with all the stuff available on your blog, i’m sure that they can (if they havent already) become really good.

Plus, i work for peanuts or for free (as stated above) and i think i know a thing or two about modeling.

74

Between the ages of 4-9 i used to play on my mom’s brand machines. An ibm 286, a 386 with an eizo screen back in '90 or '91… i haven’t been able to afford a monitor like that ever since nor do i think i will be. From my first computer, up to this date, i haven’t owned a single brand name or pre-assembled computer. I know quite a few really good 3d artists back home in Serbia, that set up their own rigs.

Although, back in the day of single CPUs, dual socket rigs were very very exotic and extremely expensive. I got myself involved into building a dual opteron machine, but by the time i was able to find some super expensive RAM, dual cores came out and were far cheaper and actually faster than what i was building. Fortunately i was able to get rid of the TYAN motherboard, and the cpus, i’ve no idea what did the guy who bought them do, but i know for sure it wasnt 3d.

I was always amazed by how some people can afford to buy $10k + workstations, and than do pretty average work, while someone can do amazing stuff with low end consumer rigs.

75

pailhead… I’m not sure what is your point? Can you explain it in one sentence?

76

Every now and then a 10+ page thread appears where people bitch and moan about piracy, india, china, world conspiracies etc. My point is that it’s pointless, and that everyone is pretty much contributing to it, even if it’s in a very small way. No offense to Peter Guthrie, i consider him to be one of the top 3d arch viz artists, but i think that things like his blog contribute greatly to this state of affairs. Us helping eachother here on the forum, also does that, but in a far smaller scale due to the nature of this particular forum where you need to be legit to even access it - which in turn leads to somewhat loyal competition.

While i did learn a lot from other people on the forums and through tutorials, the situation has changed drastically compared to the early 2000s, the field has become super saturated, and it doesn’t really make that much sense to be so generous, unless it’s a closed community such as this one. I don’t see a point of sharing your secrets. You don’t even have to send someone overseas to train the cheap workforce that runs on a bowl of rice a day. All they need is internet, everything is already available on it.

I don’t think i’ve seen a single realistic lawn in a rendering until PG posted his tutorial. Now, there are hundreds posted every day using the exact same technique. So if you go to evermotion, you’ll find loads of really good renderings, coming from all these 3rd world places that you’re bashing so much in this thread. Nothing personal, but most of them are way better than what i see here.

Icube guys used to post on evermotion, they used to post here back when they were “dva na kub” or something like that, but they never, EVER, shared any detail about any aspect of their work. Which i actually respect. For a long long while, i think they were the only ones that could produce very convincing, or at least eye pleasing greenery out of 3d elements.

Zuliban also never shared anything, and on one occasion when he did, i think he gave fake settings. What people did not know was that he took months to produce a set of images, which is totally unacceptable in a professional environment. But it raised the bar and gave homework to a lot of people. The thing is, they found ways to reproduce that quality and actually apply it in the field, but they probably valued all the time invested into learning that.

Once you serve everything on a silver platter, it loses value.

I don’t hate anything in this world (and i’ve lived through a war) but i do hate evermotion. Doing arch viz and 3d graphics in general is fun, but evermotion ruined it for everyone except the people in india, and greedy developers/architects.

77

We are all freaking out, but the digital camera didn’t get rid of the photographers. I emailed my office a pencil sketch I did of my daughter. Everyone was amazed, and astonished, at this God given gift that they thought I had. Hog-wash! I practiced sketching, my whole life, and got good. I could teach them the basic rules of drawing in ten minutes, and if they practiced, they could do the same thing. Digital work isn’t any different, except people don’t appreciate digital art, as an art, as they should. Anyone who works in the industry appreciates good work, but other people, even the people who hire us, think we just press render. I personally think when companies start to buy software, hardware, and hire jockey’s, they’ll realize that it takes more than that.

One architect I do work for purchased 3DS MAX, Photoshop, a computer, and hired a cad tech to replace my services. The architect thought he could save a bunch of money if he could have his cad tech do his renderings, but he quickly found out that he was wrong. I have since completed several renders for him, and his cad tech is happy drawing plans.

I think our jobs are just as secure as the traditional illustrators jobs are. Have you ever seen the pencil sketches by Darrell Tank? Why would someone pay someone else thousands to draw a picture that looks just as real as a photo? If we can make people understand the time and skill it takes to do a good render, we’ll be valued.

Okay… I am babbling! Hopefully I am making sense to someone :slight_smile:

78

SO basically, the internet killed us. I was in I.T. for many years, and managed a large architectural firm in Chicago. I spent day-and-night troubleshooting things that are now a Google search away. Today, almost anyone, can manage I.T.

79

Oh it’s way different. I’ve had to pass a free-hand drawing exam in order to enroll into arch school. I’ve graduated since. I’ve been doing 3d for 10 years, but i can’t sketch anything unless it’s deconstructive architecture. This is not exactly something that you can learn, you can practice a lot and get better at it, but you need to be born with a talent. It’s somewhat similar with 3d, since you do need to understand space. But then again it’s much easier.

A 3d model of a building always goes towards one point - a perfect representation of what’s been put into line drawings, or for that matter, even something that’s in the architects head. It can be either right, or wrong, there is no 3rd outcome. It can be efficient or inefficient in terms of how many hours did it take one person to achieve the very same result. There are a few tricks as to knowing how to achieve something like a soft edge, will it be a chamfer, a fillet or vray-edge, but that can all be either learned or figured out, or just picked up on a forum like this. It doesnt take a whole lot of practice or intelligence to do it, unless people kept their secrets for themselves.

80

Honestly, i wouldnt rely on google to solve something thats holding back $1000 an hour worth of architects in my office. But a rendering thats a fairly trivial matter, to which a 10 year old autocad rendering would suffice, i probably wouldnt care less about, the cheaper it’s done, the better.