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Scott Schroeder

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Scott Schroeder last won the day on August 3 2023

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    VelvetElvis
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  1. Revit is for data, not for beauty or full interactivity. You need to keep the Revit file clear of all extra bloat/junk so you can make sure that your construction docs are nice and clean. We're already seeing bloated and corrupted Revit files with users trying to do too much in Enscape, let alone interactive walk throughs. Revit is not meant to be used double duty like this, it's always had a rendering engine glued onto it with cheap knock-off brand stick glue. Then you have the Revit material editor, which takes a lot more time to create materials that almost every other tool we have. This really isn't an untapped area because it doesn't align with the core functionality of Revit, which is data and documentation. Enscape already fills 80% of this need anyways. If you need something more than Enscape, you need to get out of Revit as well.
  2. If she held onto those initial 500 shares, yeah, she'd have about $4 million. The day she got the 500 shares in 1983, they were worth 17 cents per share, or $85 bucks in total.
  3. Even the Carolyn Davidson who created the Nike Swoosh wasn't ever paid on commission. She was paid $35 at the time of the creation. Granted, Phil Knight gave her a more generous gift later on, she doesn't make a cent from any Nike product sold. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swoosh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolyn_Davidson_(graphic_designer)
  4. You'll never find a place to agree to a price point like this. It's absurd at all levels. The images you produce are not the reason people buy real estate. The images you produce merely help and therefore are not commission friendly. You do zero work in the actual sales center. You have zero interaction with the buyer. You have zero claim to a commission. I can find some kid right out of school and pay them $500 to produce crap visuals and the real estate will sell just as fine if we go to a high end place that charges $50,000. Ultimately the demand is solely within the demand for physical housing, not what render company did the visuals. Do construction workers, plumbers, painters, and electricians charge based on commission for the work they did in these spaces? No! They merely provide a service and therefore charge on a fee based system. Heck, even architects/engineers do not bill on a commission based system. On top of this, your system assumes way to much financial risk for the visualization studio. Let's say you do $100,00 worth of work at Phase 2. The project now goes on hold for 6 moths to well over a year. Maybe the project ultimately gets cancelled, which happens from time to time. How do you recoup your money? How do you pay your artists and all of your business expenses in the meantime while you wait for the project to go live in the developers sales center? What if the project is slow to sell? It's far easier and less risk to get paid a % of the fee up front as a security cost and then receive final payment at the delivery date of the visuals.
  5. Renderpeople has a 4D library, but I'm not sure it's at the quality of Anima. I'd say they are 90-95% the quality. Outside of them, I don't think anyone else has the scale of libraries as Renderpeople or Anima.
  6. Are there any updates? How has it felt getting back into the industry after your break?
  7. I purchased Matt's tutorial series and while it is indeed a game changer, the AI 15 finger issue persists for me. Over the years we have a fully curated library of cutout people ready to go, so the time it takes for me to fix AI's issues with the human form is still much too long compared to pulling from a great library of ready made cutouts. However, I don't think the AI human form issue will last for long. I think the next batch of learning models that it pulls from will help solve what hands are supposed to look like. The repose plugin for Stable Diffusion in Photoshop is crazy helpfull though. As you said, put 3D people in your scene and no matter how goofy their pose is you can repose and rework them using AI to get excellent results.
  8. Look into the Gartner Hype-Cycle. We're quickly approaching the peak of inflated expectations and heading into the trough of disillusionment. We too are facing a few leadership people claiming "This is the end of Photoshopping people as we know it!" Everything is going to be super-duper easy. Then they get into Stable Diffusion, spend 6 hours getting prompts right, then another 8 hours correcting the 15 finger hands, and somehow still think the current AI generative fill options are somehow faster than inserting high-quality cut out people. It's architecture, so they are always looking for the next easy button only to reverse course in a few years because they've lost their look and everything they produce looks like everyone else that is constantly seeking the same easy button. The funny thing is that AI, in the current form, is a lot like Enscape. It has a distinctive look to it, mostly hyper abuse of the orange-teal color scheme. So it's incredibly clear who is using AI and of course, everything looks the same. Where AI is becoming useful is generating options for exterior views and quickly changing seasons or lighting conditions. I've found it incredibly useful to create mood boards to then go back into the old-timey way of rendering to produce much higher fidelity visuals than AI currently can. This is where AI is going to break a ton of ground but it will not replace traditional visualization anytime soon. The studios that are seeking to use this as a flat out replacement will find themselves far behind the studios that understand that AI is a useful addition to the toolkit, but you are not going to use it as a sole replacement for any one process. I'm entering my 21st year doing visualization. Like the grizzled old salt smoking a cigar in the back of a dimly lit room, I've seen them come and I've seen them go. AI is going to stick around with us for a while and I am looking forward to integrating it into my workflow, at least until the lawsuits start getting ruled on and completely change the landscape of the current models of AI. If Stable Diffusion were to lose against Getty, that will set AI back years. I don't see it happening, but the laws are a little gray on how they can use the data scrapped from the internet and copyrights.
  9. Exactly, the ability comes from the user and not the engine. I too would use Blender if I wasn't down the 25 year path with Autodesk products. I would suggest looking into Blender as it's free and it's a great software that has a ton of development support from the community. Lumion can get pricy if you are just starting out. Twinmotion is good and for a decent price. Blender + Cycles can to some pretty nice visuals as well. Learn modeling skills. But more importantly, learn lighting, materials, and composition. I've see far too many perfectly created models ruined by poor choices with lighting, materials, and composition.
  10. It's poor form from the client, but sometimes things fall through the crack and responses can be delayed or lost. If I had a client that went silent and only to return months later to start the job, I'd agree with work with them but make them pay 50% of the budget up front to prove that they are indeed serious. Up front payments are a great way to filter out the the clients we are going to be hard to get to pay at the end.
  11. I usually run on a 2 year cycle where I work, unless there are some really important updates then I'll upgrade every year. Though it should be said that I'm working for a firm, so I'm not responsible for my license costs. Depending on which version you are on, making an upgrade may be super beneficial. For us, since we use a lot of scripts, getting this upgrade for Max went a long way as now we don't have to push scripts to users anymore and we can just store them on a network drive. https://cganimator.com/how-to-manage-tools-part-2-plugins-featuring-new-pipeline-integration/ Max 2023's retopology tools are also quite useful if you need to quickly remesh a client supplied or downloaded model. If you don't have a version of Max that supports open subdiv, that can also be a useful tool over turbosmooth for getting nice creases in furniture models. But in the end, if your business is thriving and your clients are happy then do you really need to upgrade? That's
  12. This is a tricky subject and take what I write with the fact that I'm only well versed in Bird Law. The general answer is no, they can't necessarily prevent you from modeling it and selling it. However, where it gets into the legal gray area is on things like company logos or iconic designs within the model, like a car's headlights for example. This is precisely the area where BMW sued TurboSquid over the use of selling BMW cars on their site. They specifically mentioned in the lawsuit the use of BMW's logos and copyrighted designs of the grills and headlamps. As far as architectural models for exterior and interior, no they can't necessarily stop you either as long as you use the building in a normal way. Most architecture is considered public realm. This year's Call of Duty release got into hot water over a museum map that was a little too close to the real life one and had to take that map down as the actual museum didn't approve of the use of it. I believe they also created some controversy with the hotel map that was nearly an exact copy of a real life hotel as well, but that map is still in the game. Both the above examples are multi-million to billion dollar companies, so I think just your normal 3D person won't ever be bothered too much. I highly doubt that Davis Design is concerned about the few bucks you might make selling their furniture on 3Dsky or smilar.
  13. You may also be getting too deep into the weeds on hyper accurate texturing. Sometimes it just needs to pass the smell test and you move on to bigger things. Also, are your dimensions of the wall to the outside of the frame or the brick? Many times the dimensions are to the outside of the frame and the masons can take one look at the wall and know exactly how to lay the bricks out to make it look correct. The masons I've worked with in the States when I was a residential framer back in the day, they are so good at what they do they can score and chop a whole pallet of bricks before you could even ask them how they do it. You are also assuming that in a pallet of bricks they are all the same size, which they are not and the good masons can spot these irregular sized bricks and know how to use them to make up odd dimensions here and there. Plus most masons have apprentices which those are the poor sods who have to do all of the hard cuts. The master mason just hands the apprentice the cut sheet, gives a good slap on the back, and walks away laughing. The issue arises in the CG world where our textures are indeed perfectly sized bricks with perfectly space grout and that just doesn't really happen in the real world. There are subtle differences that most people will never be able to tell unless you use a laser to measure, but those differences mean that they can make the bricks fit odd dimensions a lot easier than us using our perfect textures.
  14. No, there would need to be a material conversion. Though with the Vray scene converter, this can be accomplished pretty easily. Though, Revit materials are almost always low quality, so I don't think you'd want to use them with a straight conversion. Pretty soon, it looks like Vray and Enscape are going to be cross compatible now that they are both one company. I believe they made an announcement about cross compatibility with Rhino, so Revit should just be around the corner.
  15. I think it really depends on where you work and what you consider BIM modelers to be. From my experience working at architecture firms, unless you are on the path to become a licensed architect, your role as a BIM modeler would very much be a CAD monkey. You'd be doing bathroom layouts for most of your day and anything cool would be done by the folks on the licensure path. If you consider Rhino/Grasshopper BIM modeling, then you could expand a bit more as many of those roles may or may not be on the licensed architecture path. In the end, what you are asking for is a definition for an extremely broad term that can vary from all places of employment. It is kind of like asking to describe a hamburger.
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