senrikyu

As someone who's been in this profession for almost 20 years, I also have to look at the business aspects. Making your clients happy is not pandering to them- it's insuring you get repeat business. Of course, you have to be very careful with scaling. Just light lighting, it can be tweaked to make things better or it can get out of control. In my case, no one had any idea that I faked things a bit. It looked spot on because I did it carefully.

I choose to make the client happy- which entails making their shacks look good. The shacks in question were small and extremely expensive. Again, different jobs entail different responsibilities. EIS photo-sims must be perfect. If they look like crap, so be it. The point of a photo-sim is to show exactly what it's going to look like, and if done correctly, it's bulletproof in court. The point of an interior rendering is not to be exact. It's to sell. It's to make something mundane look beautiful. Everyone in the marketing and advertising fields fakes the truth. How many product shots (photos, not renderings) of food have been retouched? All of them. How many magazine covers with beautiful women on them have been retouched (usually heavily) in Photoshop? All of them. If you were a photographer, would you tell your clients they are not allowed to fix up shots of cardboard-like burgers and fries. If you did, you would have zero clients very quickly. As a professional, my job is to make my clients' marketing pieces look as good as possible. For sure, if it was a photo of an interior instead of a rendering, some Photoshopper would do everything in his or her power to make it look bigger. Try telling your rendering clients "it will look exactly like it does in the real world, good or bad" and see how many you have left.

Again, I've had situations where the client told me the room looked too small with the furniture they picked out. I informed the client that both the furniture and the room were to scale and that was exactly how it would look in real life. Client then said to shrink the furniture slightly. Tony, you're going to tell me that you're going to refuse a client's request in such a situation? So would you refuse to work with a client who asked you do fake things a little to make them look better? Again, these are not photo-sims for environmental impact statements- they're representations of interiors. By the way, no one ever knew by looking at the renderngs. And it's true- the rooms looked a lot better. Client's choice, not mine.

I agree- it's not a nice thing to do, but if your client tells you to shrink the furniture, you shrink it. Otherwise, you will lose the client and job. All the real estate clients I've had put a disclaimer beneath the renderings that said the renderings were an artists interpretation and not necessarily what the final product will look like. But ultimately, they are the ones responsible for misrepresentation.

I have had the comment from clients before that once their interiors were populated with furniture, the room looked too small. In a very tactful way, I let them know that was because their rooms were very small. After showing them various camera options (which of course can get very distorted), I offered to downsize the furniture by about 10%- the same percentage you mentioned. Usually they were okay with it and no one had a problem later on. I think it's a fair move- usually, visualization is about marketing something and marketing involves a bit of smoke and mirrors. Now, if this was for a photo-simulation with legal ramifications, it definitely would not be a good idea.

I had a similar situation a few years ago: a guy sent me his portfolio and he had some of MY work in it. I totally went off on him and he claimed it was a "mistake". A year later, he sent me the same portfolio again (stupidly forgot he'd already sent it to me) and again it had my work in it. I threatened legal action. I also had a client of mine (an ad agency) put my work on their site and claim they did it- even though my contract with the stated that I owned all portfolio rights and copyrights. The problem in both cases was that to pursue any legal action against them would have been very costly. $10,000 to $25,000 just to begin litigation. And lawyers typically don't want to just write scary letters if you have zero intention of taking action. So, even a scary letter requires research time, etc, on the part of the lawyer. Is it worth$10,000 to pursue something that will probably not even end up in court? Of course not. Slimebags like this guy are aware that they can get away with a lot. He'll probably sucker some poor client with his fake portfolio, but it will eventually catch up with him. What a loser that guy is!

I would be careful with that tutorial in the sense that compositing is definitely not something you can base on a recipe that works the exact same on every image. I think if you follow "rules" like this exactly, you might overlook a lot of opportunities for bringing out different aspects of different images. For instance, the shot might be a dark room or it might be a huge glass space flooded with light. Compositing the two images the exact same way might not yield good results.

Hey Guys, Thanks for the answers. Rick, I'll definitely check out Peter's blog. It's so interesting to note that there is no "definite" answer as to which is better- just whatever works for the particular situation. Chris

Great! I'm glad that helped.

I think the problem is because VRay Camera has exposure turned to ON by default. If you turn that off, you will probably see it renders correctly, but of course, you will have to adjust your lights down to compensate. In contrast, you might be able to adjust the self illumination values of the RPC's upward without having to turn off the exposure.

Thanks Dave, Glad to hear that you think there is some value to HDRI still. So, that raises two more questions: 1. Are there any images out there that show a comparison between the two? 2. What do you look for in a "good" HDRI? I'm still using a set of spherical HDRI's just show a dark ground plane with some texture and sky with clouds and a sun or lightsource. Senrikyu

Hi All, I have a question regarding using using VRay's VRaySun and VRaySky system versus using an HDRI in the environment and reflection (and refraction if need be) slots. Several people have told me that I would get more consistant results and better control using the VRaySun/Sky option than if i choose my own HDRI. In essence, they are saying that using HDRI is obsolete, as the procedural VRay system can do all that HDRI does and more. I have found the opposite, however- after I set up the VRaySun/Sky system, I like to choose my own spherical HDRI from a collection. I find that the images are more subtle and vibrant. It takes a lot more tweaking and trial and error, but I find that a good HDRI can really make an exterior scene "pop". Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Perhaps I am just of an "old school" VRay sentiment- in this case, Old School being because I learned from the Gnomen lighting tutorials (pre-VRay Sun/Sky) and it's always worked well for me. Thanks! Senrikyu

Well, it gets worse. The last time I bid with this ad firm, they came back and claimed that they had found another company that was willing to do the project for 25% of what I bid, at in 1/4th the time I quoted. The could have been bluffing, but the bottom line is that I did not get the project. So, here they are using my company's work and claiming they did it, and then not even passing the work on to us! (Unless I bid it at negative profit margins!) How fair is that?! Of course, you get what you pay for, and they could come running back to us begging us to take more projects. However, without that assurance, our work in their portfolio is a hard (if not impossible) pill to swallow.

I had an interesting experience talking to a local renderer who has done some gorgeous images with just Revit and Photoshop. I asked him what the polygon count was on one of his models, and he replied, "What's a polygon?" Wow! It made me wonder how long it will be until anyone can create super realistic images and animations by hitting a few buttons. Knowing about things like polygons, mapping coordinates, textures/materials, etc. will be redundant one day. Luckily, we're not there yet- at least for a few more months!

Hi James, Not a bad idea, but hope it doesn't come to that. I actually do have the work on my company's website, but for now I'm taking the high road and just claiming respponsibility for what we did. Still interested in knowing if other people have had similar experiences. ~CAE