colinsmith

I shoot dslr timelapse seqeunces, so in that real world case..... My final playrate is 25fps. Shooting rate for "normal" timelapse cloud movements is about 1 frame every 1 to 5 seconds - it really depends on how fast things in the shot are moving, wide angle shots go better with slower shooting rates, telephots need a faster rate. Cinematic convention would keep the shutter angle at 180degrees, a motion blur time of 50% of the frame rate. So normal shooting is 25fps with 1/50s exposure. To get the same look in a timelapse shot, you need to keep the ratio.... if you shoot at 1 frame each 4 seconds, then the same look will need a 2 second exposure. When the sequence is played back at 25fps, the motion will look "cinematic".... no jerky, stepped movements, 180 degree shutter. Simple changes in light can be faked with gradual transitions between a few shots, but anything with movemtn in it (clouds, sun, people) go with duplicating the real timelapse rates.

Yeah, quote them a price that makes it clear it is for the mesh you modeled only and no further support, and make sure the price is enough to make you feel good about the deal, whatever else happens after that. Then they take it or they don't and you don't care. I don't think selling the mesh is any big deal, as long as the price is right. Even if that means future business with a company puts you as a "modeler only".... as long as the price is right......

Some discussion of computer programming now attracting sales tax in Maryland. Slashdot

For accurate modeling I use Rhino, with the benefits of CAD accuracy, but actually designed to 3d model in ;-) Well, new versions of AutoCAD might be better now than they used to be, but Rhino is still really nice. Of course even going that way you are adding a little complication if the architect is going to be sending you revisions as CAD drawings each day. All about getting the best workflow for the particular job.

I think for calls, just have one phrase ready at all times - "..... and it will not cost all that much extra" - to be added at the end of your reply as a pre-emptive measure every time the client asks for anything ;-) "not all that much" can then be translated to whatever % is needed when you have some time to think about it. If you really have NO idea how much extra it will cost to do what they want, just switch over to "....and I will get you a quote for the extras before the end of the day" The short version, do not say "yes" or "no", always say "Yes of course, but..." and make sure the "but" covers whatever is needed to make you feel happy about doing the work.

Florian has it right, you CAN do the same stuff in both, but Premiere is a lot easier to cut and edit fotage in, where After Effects is a lot more powerfull for compositing, colour correction or just about anything else. The nice thing is that if you have both, you can edit in premiere, save the project, and then open it in After Effects with no render requried. With the CS3 editions that integration moves on even more. That really works well.

No, but there is less sense in spending a long time burning out grain, only to add a similar effect in post. If a slightly grainy render matches the photo.... then there is no problem, no? The noise in the photo will also give you a good idea of what to aim for, as it is the standard the 3d will be judged against. Noise also looks "worse" on screen, and when you print to photo paper I find it becomes less of a worry.

Sounds like the CAD survey is on it's own grid, the co-ordinates from the client sound like national grid numbers, while the development ones are not. Maybe see if the surveyor can give you national grid cooridnates for his stations? Otherwise I would guess you are looking at pulling grids from OS maps for a few building corners (survey grid might be rotated too) and fitting as best you can.

I think it would be worthwhile to have a close up look at a large resolution digital photo. Even a clean one has a lot of noise. Generally matching a render to a photo means various combinations of adding noise and bluring.....

Not sure on the MAX side of things, but had a bit of a look at the OpenEXR plugins for a project I'll be doing. In this case it turned out we won't go that way, so for now... I know very little on the practicalities. I did buy a Lightwave plugin that supports all the EXR channels though, and got the OpenEXR plugin that works under After Effects CS3, and that should give you free range on which channels you want to keep seperate.... some day I will have time to play with them a bit ;-)

I think MicroDem will open native csv style xyz tiles, but I can't find a list of it's supported formats here. The one I used was Global Mapper, which certainly had no problem at all with the UK Nextmap xyzs I had to use, just that they are quite a lot of data.... needed maybe 10 minutes to open a tile on my old P4. It exports nice quad meshes though, in lots of formats.

As a rough rough starting point I'd charge about twice as much per hour as I wanted to paymyself. If I want $20 per hour in wages, I'd need to charge $40. That might vary (a lot) depending if you need anything specific to the job, but in the long term I think that's a figure that works. Of course, now you need to figure out how many hours work is in volved.... and it will be more than you expect. I'd try to fix the client on how many changes you will make for free at an easly stage too. I have done projects where we just agreed an hourly rate and the client was free to change as much as they wanted, so it can work ok that way too - I did give them a good estimate for the total in the start though, and was able to keep pretty close to that.

Be aware that you need to have the same pixel aspect ratio in the render set up as in premiere - to do as suggested above, 720x480 par 1.2, you need to render to the same settings. The par of 1.2 is saying the pixels in the render are not square, but are 1.2 times wider than a square pixel would be. The 3d camera needs to allow for that. If you set the camera to 720x480 square pixel that is not the right aspect ratio, and changing the par in Premiere will stretch the picture horizontally, out of shape. Set everything to a NTSC widescreen dafault of 720x480, par 1.2 and things will go smooth.

Decent looking breaking waves are a very hard thing to do. If you really have to do them I would look at shooting video and compositing it, or if it has to be 3d, then really trying to keep it as a small background element.

If I'm understanding you correctly, then you would be better doing your renders to a non-lossy codec, editing those in Premiere and then compressing the whole demo to one compact file. Taking in a compressed Sorenson, editing it and then compressing the edit to something else would be dropping quality.... compressing compressed footage.