markparsons

Mate, your work is good you should be charging double this as a minimum. I'm not knocking your process but for a render similar to your exterior the going rate in Australia/Canada and Sweden is anywhere from 2500 - 4000 euro.

Guerra may have a contract or agreement with his publishers about what he can do with his own work. Maybe he only releases certain images after the publication run is finished (in cases of short runs like Dwell, etc) His stuff is all over the place in print including countless books and features in magazines. Books can be ridiculously profitable. He's also got product tie-ins with a camera accessory line so I'm sure he just has fingers in a lot of different pots, I suppose. Either that or Siza and Marcio Kogan pay very, very well, hahaha.

By far one of the best resources I've ever used for grasshopper is Prof Nick Senske from UNC Charlotte. He's got a Masters of Science in Architectural Studies in Design Computation from MIT and speaks so plainly and logically it's hard to miss what he's saying. Check out his videos here: https://www.youtube.com/user/nsenske

This is a good point. As someone who has only been doing visualisation work for 2 years or so while studying I had a very hard time coming up with a number to assign to my own perceived value as a visualiser/architect. Looking back, some of my first jobs were ridiculously cheap for the client and I could tell they thought they were getting away with murder. As I became a little better, a little wiser, my price range increased but the same regular clients didn't seem to mind as my work reflected my increase in experience and they were happier and happier with the end result. Everybody wins. Breaking the $1000.00 mark is still kind of scary for me. I don't know if I'm really good enough to charge that amount. Some potential clients have been scared away by that price. I'm not sure if that's indicative of them as shitty clients or me not being worth it. With time maybe I'll have a better understanding of my own value. I still undercharge, I think for the most part but I have a pretty cushy studio job starting in november so I'll probably freelance around the same rate and increase my pricing in order to reflect my experience. To answer the original question, I started charging around 200 per image in late 2012, about 600 in 2013 and now ask for anywhere between 800-1000 per image not including modeling which I charge an hourly rate for. I don't really see what the big deal is with keeping these things secretive. How else am I supposed to know what to charge a client if I can't contrast and compare it with other artists/architects similar to me?

Yeah well Guerra is just in a league of his own in general. It doesn't surprise me at all that he'd take this stance. I'm sick to death of shitty res photographs that you can tell are absolutely beautifully shot on a large format camera and reproduced for web at 800x600 because of the insecurity that someone somewhere online might love their work enough to share it. I'm sure you've experienced this to a greater degree Juraj, but when my personal work pops up on designspiration or tumblr or something similar I feel that it reinforces my work and I feel grateful that someone SOMEWHERE cared enough to share it with someone else as a representation of their own aesthetics. It makes me happy as a designer and as someone who is generally pretty nerdy about design maybe because I'm always eager to show people here at uni awesome architects or sweet designers. There's nothing better than finding someone who is so much better than you at something that you obsess over their work. Maybe that's just me. I'm not sure where this secretive, stone-age mentality comes from but photographers are notorious for hiding secrets. It might just be because in cg we're all so used to the greatest people taking the greatest effort to share their knowledge. Who knows. Anyway! Thought I'd share a dude whose work I've been digging a lot lately and he's a fellow Canadian. http://adrienwilliams.com/portfolio/alain-carle-les-marais/

There are varying degrees of skill within this industry. I think it's wholly admirable to want and attempt to teach yourself advanced poly modelling, but I personally buy 3d models from DesignConnected several times a month and love using and reverse engineering them so that I learn more about the process. I'd say about 90% of the time I end up at the very least rebuilding some or most of the shaders and have been pleased with the speed and results of not being forced to model small accessories. With that being said, I often freeform model in Rhino/Grasshopper and after designing a building have very little time to start poly modelling Hans Wegner chairs. I personally have bought many of Bertrand Benoit's scenes and models so that I can see how he creates his shaders and how beautifully economic each model is in terms of polys. Using great stock models can help you create your own and I recently started modelling photoreal beds for sale as I've found most of the stock bed models are very lacking in quality As stated, one can also download models from manufacturers and rebuild them; that has taught me a lot about proper poly modelling as well. Hay and AndTradition are good examples. I don't think it's as black and white as everyone is saying. Do I use them often? Absolutely? Does that mean that using them excludes me from being capable of polymodeling myself? No. Why would it? I'd love to be a whiz with Zbrush and am quickly learning because some of those sculpt jobs look so fun to do, but I like to learn things as they come and fundamentally understand them and helping out another artist by buying their turbosquid work so you can eventually figure out how to make something as good or better isn't in any way a negative thing. In an ideal world I'd love for every job I have to be a passion project but it's very rarely like that.

I'm often on the go while working and am forced to use my laptop (I know...) I always try my best to send prelims to my tablet/phone, etc to test what the output looks like but it always ends up looking shit. I used to have one of the Cinema Displays and it was calibrated and everything turned out great, but now I'm using an LG that is such a pain in the ass to calibrate I'm considering just getting a physical calibrator so I don't have the headache. Proper calibration is one of the things I think that has been hardest for me to remain consistent with due to hardware limitations. If you look at my work the colours are always a bit wonky. Juraj is right, though, the upper Dell models are properly calibrated from what I've seen and look great.

Hey Eric, I'm a Canadian architecture student/3d visualiser. I've never really looked for work in Perth as I'm pretty busy with school, but am about to start looking relatively soon as I've gotten a lot of experience in the last year or so (on Team Australia for the Venice Biennale as well as being nominated for best commissioned image in this year's 3dAwards.) If you're keen I'd be interested in meeting up and chatting - at the very least I can show you around the city. M

I've met both. One was a highly-academic type who thought that speculative (i.e. heavily photoshopped) renderings or traditional drawings were better because you can already tell it isn't real and therefore appreciate the architecture for what it is. This may be true sometimes but a lot of speculative work is complicated intentionally, I think to add layers and confusion to the image in order to appreciate it as something that took a great deal of time to accomplish. Therefore adding to its value. This is one of her renderings done in 2011. I find it not only boring, but unnecessarily complicated, although I should state that she is incredible at hand drawing and drew this over top of a clay rhino rendering. Other professors that I have and a few clients all really respect photoreal renderings and don't degrade it in any capacity. I even had to teach a graduate advanced computing class last semester despite the fact that I am an undergraduate student. With that being said, though, I'm sure everyone here has had clients or profs who have no understanding of the process and ask for tiny changes and become upset when you inform them that these changes require an entirely new rendering. If people realized how much pedantic time-wasting it took to create a lot of cg work, I feel like they would immediately appreciate it a lot more. That will never happen, though - especially with publications like this taking some sort of condescending tone towards this work EVEN though an increasing amount of 'intellectual' firms like Preston Scott Cohen's are hiring people to create high-quality renderings despite thinking of it as sort of an aside to architecture. I think there are a lot of bad visualization firms, but at least these things aren't built like 90% of the garbage we are forced to look at and live in in the built environment. In an ideal world, we'd have good quality architecture and viz work like the collaboration between William O'Brien Jr and Peter Guthrie. That doesn't mean speculative renderings don't work but there is definitely a place for photorealistic work.

Yeah. Glad this thread is still kicking. I recently went out and bought the fuji x100s because I wanted to have the feeling of a 35mm to snap stuff I see when outside. Especially in the winter right now with killer overcast days. I read through the thread again, and maybe I glossed over, but I don't think I mentioned this guy, Valentin Jarek who takes some incredible shots for AFGH from Switzerland. http://www.jeck.ch/ Marcus Hasart from Germany is also a guy I go to very often for inspiration in lighting, texture and composition. Guy kills it. http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcushasart/ Also, he's not an architectural photographer, but I love the work of Loic Le Quéré His stuff in Iceland is something I come back and look at time and time again. http://www.loiclequere.com/iceland Keep it going.

I love this topic. I think this is a pretty positive aspect in creative thinking. The more you toil over something, the more flaws you see in it. This is why it's often very important to remove yourself from your work for a little bit; to usher in some fresh perspective. I feel like one should always be a little neurotic and critical about past work. It's one of the easiest ways to learn. I'm sure everyone here can look at work they've done in the past and cringe. That's important. That's progress.

Yes, exactly. MIR, and lately Peter Guthrie (Thomas Phifer project) have tapped into something that seems really lost on a lot of people, which is atmosphere. Zumthor has a publication that deals with this which sums up these qualities. There's a reason why cg that is shoved in your face with hard shadows, tons of awkward people and royal blue skies never look great; there is nothing for the viewer to find out Zumthor says in the aforementioned book "Hospitals corridors are all about directing people, for example, but there is also the gentler art of seduction, of getting people to let go, to saunter, and that lies within the powers of an architect." Photographers and cg artists who capture those moments are the ones we inevitably end up admiring.

Yeah. I've tried to turn towards creating work that evokes that look in some of more recent stuff. I was pretty pleased with the results. Plus, it allows you to kind of embrace noise in your imagery and use it to your advantage. Faster render times as well. I'm from Northern Canada originally so stark, bleak and overcast imagery is something I've always loved, and Norlander captures atmosphere like that perfectly.

Rasmus Norlander is my current favourite. If anyone hasn't seen it, I'd definitely recommend Visual Acoustics which is about Julius Schulman who pretty much invented what we now recognize as architectural photography. He photographed a lot of Neutra's work as well as countless others. He was also a very, very funny and inspiring person and the documentary captures him right before he died aged 98.

As someone who went to school for/often works as a graphic designer in addition to architecture, please just read a few rules or books about typography (i.e. typographic hierarchy). Avoid logos unless you need a mark that absolutely represents what you do. Others have mentioned this, but a fine typeface can go a long way. Here is some nice type: http://www.saunders.no/ (Bold, and then Light. The font is Gotham which is an excellent choice) http://www.septemberindustry.co.uk/madebysix/ Collection of somewhat-recent work by firm MadebySix http://www.anagrama.com/ Tons of amazing work. DO NOT use sites like logotype creator. If you really need the help I can help you design one for free if it means one less shitty logotype in the world.