Visual Impact Studies - job for you?

[Virgil Johnson]

Hello,

I am new to this forum and glad to be here.

I apologize if this is not the correct place to post this note - but since many people are looking to find work I thought I would share what my business does thinking perhaps you would like to try the same thing for yourself.

(I am not offering work but rather an idea for you.)

My name is Virgil Johnson and my company is Virtually Real, Inc. We are located in Stone Ridge, NY (90 miles north of NYC) and we make visualizations for visual impact studies.
In the past 14 years we have done more than 800 projects including cell phone towers, water towers, municipal buildings, bridges, mines, residential and commercial developments, and more.

What makes this business different is that is legal work. Not only do the visualizations have to look good but the drawing must be absolutely accurate.
Things must look as they will when built.
(Knowledge of AutoCAD is a must.)

You can count on your projects being reviewed by experts (I have had cases reviewed in the NY and Vermont courts) and you must be prepared to document and explain your work.
You will have to appear at public hearings. Expect your name and your work to appear in publications.

The current demand is $3 million in liability insurance in NY.

You will often meet intense deadlines. (There is too much at stake for anyone to miss scheduled hearings.)
You must also work with architects, engineers, and attorneys to come up with ideas to mitigate visual impact.
(Experience in these fields is important.)

You will always have to have the latest and greatest of software - it appears in the documentation that accompanies all your work.

The upside is that there is there more work than you can do. And the pay is much higher than in most fields of visualization. You get repeat work so no need to generate new leads.

If you find you would like this field I think you would have great fun.

I wish you all success.

Virgil

[Devin Johnston]

Virgil,
Man I really respect you for doing this kind of work; I can't imagine how stressful it must be. Since you brought up the subject let me ask you how you "know" that your renderings are absolutely correct and if there not how much liability to you have to take on? I know from past experiences that when I try and do a camera match on something it hardly ever works, I usually wind up moving the model to match the photograph and I use my eye to determine when it looks right. How do you do the perspective match so that you know it's correct?

[Virgil Johnson]

Well, Maxer,

I did not expect so much response to my posting. Several PMs and a couple of phone calls.

Tell you what. Let me have a breather tonight and I will post information tomorrow in an effort to answer as many questions for everyone that I can.

I will address your issue since it is critical to visual impact studies.
No guess work allowed in that world.

And yes there is an answer. - perhaps one of the hardest lessons to learn for visual impact studies.

Stay tuned.

v

[Mark Miles]

Hi All

My company works with an environmental impact agency, before I did this I worked on multimedia or completely CGI Images, in all honesty I fell into this through a friend of a friend who knew I did 3d, my client now has produced work for over 120 clients ranging from developers, councils, and other local and national authorities, I had to produce a document on the subject so that my client could explain the process we used and how we arrived at the render. the images have to be exact because in the UK if a case should not get thrown out at the first hearing then eventually it could end up on the desk of the secetary of state (or thats what my client tells me)

You are right to say that there is so much work in this field, but is there a common practice that people follow?, I cannot imagine that every 3d artist has a different way of producing exact images as we all work with the same material, such as ASCI, TOPO, Site plans etc, that said we somtimes get so overwhelmed by work that we somtimes have a need to hand out camera matching to freelancers, and its the above question that worries me about doing this as I would not want to receive somthing back that could not be verified, using a different technique than what we use. I guess its because I only know myself and my collegue who do this type of work but I would like to hear from other freelancers in the UK who do this type of work, as I would like to have a few more freelancers on the books as there is more and more of this coming in every month.

Does anyone know any material on this subject other than Max's camera matcher, I mean would a court throw out a render at planning because Max's camera match was used!!

Kind Regards
Mark Miles

[S E H]

See this is a very interesting thread. For quite some time I have thought about getting into accident reconstruction or other litigation simulation, in which this seems would be right in that field.

My whole background has been extremely exacting work - started off in the engineering department doing CAD drawings of aerospace and semiconductor equipment parts many years ago, and through many twists and turns got involved in furniture drawing and design and now involved in exhibit design... so suffice it to say that precise detail - large and small, is not a problem for me. I just have never known where to start, in all honesty. Would finding a contact within a law office be the way to go? I am sure that there are many avenues into this field, but it isn't exactly the type of work that you find in the 'help wanted' ads. LOL

I could picture NY having a huge market for this type of work, but living in CT, I could imagine that while the work itself would be much smaller, I would also think that the number of people capable of doing the work is much less also.