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Alex York

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  1. Hey, I've not posted in here in years but this thread caught my eye. Some interesting thoughts. "I work for an Architectural firm, we are about 400 employees with two Viz artist LOL, I am the Sr Viz person, my boss, creative director, anyone else are designers, architects that also do renderings. " I think all that there spells it out, really. Working in-house at an architects practice is extremely limiting in terms of one's creative or even technical freedom. I would suppose that most of the time you're being asked to visualise someone's evolving design, constantly make changes and... that's where it ends usually, I guess? It's a VERY different beast to being a visualiser in a visualisation studio, especially one that focuses on marketing. In many ways it's almost a completely different industry. Producing visuals for marketing is VERY different to producing visuals for planning. And both are drastically different to producing visuals for internal design development approval. I think you might be focusing on the wrong thing. Instead of being concerned about software and technological change leaving you by and where the industry is going, perhaps you should look at your end goal - where you personally are going. Who and what are you producing your images for? What do you get out of it? What can you bring to the industry? Keeping up with tech change is essential, totally, but in the end the tools are not the critical thing. Pile-em-high-stack-em-cheap will reap the benefits of real-time as they can *** out a load of basic visuals in no time at all for a decent short-term profit - more power to them! The industry absolutely NEEDS those companies to allow the higher end outfits to shine through. The trick is to compete at the right level. It's the age-old problem of commercial arch-viz. We're all artists, yes, but we're producing commercial work for corporate clients in the end (mostly). It's not just a free-for-all splurge of unbridled creativity and narrative and wild experimentation and R&D into new software and techniques. Finding an environment where you can apply some of those things, or maybe even all of them, even in a small way in your daily work, yet in a commercially viable way - that's the dream, I think... We come across a great many young artists who are fiercely hungry to unleash their creativity but struggle with the commercial side of the industry. It's hard! And it takes most people years to find the right balance that satisfies the artist, their employer and their clients. And I'm not just talking about in-house artists but creative leads, freelancers, studio founders - all of us. From a business POV, competing at the low end is easy - being cheap you're always going to be busy. Competing in the middle is VERY tough, as it's extremely hard to differentiate and offer something unique to clients. Competing at the higher end is therefore somewhat easier, counter to what most people might imagine. When you're not really competing on price any more it's all about service, connections and offering something unique to the client - why come to you instead of these other guys? Style choice is one major element, and that relies on super strong and confident art direction and a really, really solid studio culture. That takes time to nurture too. And when you look at the leading respected studios around the world, they are NOT alike. The work they produce is unique to them, their workflows aren't the same, their people/attitudes/studio life is not the same, their clients are not the same.. it's a very interesting time for the industry, in a good way. There's a lot of innovation happening, a lot of looking back too - overlooked techniques and styles are coming back into fashion (as Art Maknev said) - lots of opportunities. The most successful artists and studios will be the ones who can leverage that while remaining commercially viable.
  2. A lot of the projects I work on are fairly sensitive, such as planning applications for controversial proposals, competitions and that sort of thing. Typically those projects take years before they filter through into the public domain. I always ask permission as soon as a job is signed off but never show anything unless I've either had permission or it's already out in the PD, then it's a go of course. I've had to sit on really great images for literally years because of this, but my clients always appreciate that we take confidentiality very seriously. It can be hugely damaging for you and your client if you "leak" an image of a sensitive project before the client has chosen to release it themselves. I don't insist upon being able to publish work in contracts because of this - I'd say maybe 30% or so of our work will either not be seen for years or will never be seen by anyone outside my office.
  3. Thanks! I figured as much... had a bad feeling when we received the images.
  4. Hi folks, I have a set of photos of various sculptures, all shot from the same position with the object rotating on the spot. Autodesk ReCap Photo doesn't work with shots from the same spot, 123D Catch doesn't work at all for some reason. Any recommendations for other photo modelling software that will work with shots from the same position? Models will need to be generated in a format that will play nicely with max. Cheers,
  5. Excellent rundown of the main features. The only other things that might have been good to touch on would be visibility limits (cameras etc.) and maybe lighting etc. But great rundown.
  6. They've implemented a lot of fixes and tweaks we've all been calling for, it seems. At least, that's how it appears so far from the relatively tiny amount of info we have on 2014. If anyone has tried that "leaked" trial, I would LOVE to know if they finally fixed the Nitrous viewport background image map resolution issues. Can anyone confirm? I've been told "yes" but until someone can try it out it's just speculation. I want to roll out 2014 as soon as possible if this issue is sorted. Alignments in 2013 has been painful in the extreme...
  7. I have to +1 all of this. It's incredibly irritating. I'm sure some clever script writer can modify their legacy script to make this work? Anyone? I'd actually pay for it...
  8. I would imagine this is perfectly acceptable, given that you're not producing content for sale or license. But to be safe you could always contact AD or your reseller directly who will give you an answer quickly, I'm sure.
  9. Hi folks, Object Isolation is a complete joke of a mess in 2013. I found the legacy Isolation script that AD released themselves (here) which goes some way to addressing the recursive element that was removed, and brings the button back, which is great, but we're still left with the frankly major headache issue of the viewport being switched to a Perspective view when you come back out of Isolation, and the view automatically does a "Zoom Extents" to the remaining selected objects, which makes picking objects very tricky and very often I end up rendering a Persp view by mistake instead of my camera view, because it looks identical but obviously isn't.... queue rage mode... Does anyone have a workaround or script that fixes this? I'm seriously considering going back to 2012 if I can't sort this. Running the latest PU (6) by the way, on Design 2013. Cheers,
  10. Some very interesting insights, here, thanks all, and keep them coming! Looks like materials and other tweaks like modifiers etc. that deal with geometry are a problem. This is the bulk of what we do to models, of course, so rather a serious shortcoming. So far I did test it with Vray materials being preserved in the max file when Reloading and it seemed to work just fine. But if I move an object at all and Reload the RVT then the moved object remains moved, rather than resetting. I think we need an option in the Link Manager to be able to respect/preserve translations. This would deal with that problem nicely. So not ideal but certainly usable. I think for a project that doesn't require a huge amount of tweaking to the geometry, or ideally any at all, and where we know the architects will be updating the model several times, this could be a good setup.
  11. Hi folks, Is anyone else using Revit Link within 3ds max to maintain the original RVT/FBX so their architect clients can update the model as needed and you can work with it in a live state within max? I have several clients who model within Revit and supply me with their model, and updates on a regular basis. Being able to just hit Reload seems like a very efficient workflow. I've only just started looking into this and it seems as though you can do all sorts of things like move objects around, assign new materials to them and preserve all of these changes within max while Reloading the model once a new revision is supplied by the client. I would guess that the only obvious issue would be when you need to heavily modify a particular part of the model and you don't want to lose it when a new revision is supplied and it's time to Reload. It would, I think, be a case of keeping your customized local version of that part of the model separate and then Reload and delete the parts it will replace. A little fiddly... Is anyone else using this workflow? Any tips for streamlining it? Any issues you've come across? I think it's something we're going to be seeing a lot more of in the coming years with BIM making such a huge leap lately, even among smaller practices. I look forward to your thoughts.
  12. Diego - major push there - congratulations. But to my eyes some of them draw too much attention. That could be fine for many uses, I'm sure, but I think in most arch-viz animations people are looking for subtlety in the people - they need to add motion and activity without drawing the eye too much or even at all. It's often that we just want to fill spaces with life but still have the architecture as the focus. I would encourage you to produce very subtle animations/mocap for this reason. As for the issue in general: The problem is not just poor quality models visually from most companies but also their animation is usually choppy or sloppy or stiff, or just awkward and unrealistic. If there was a company out there releasing photo-realistic vray/mr/mw-ready silky-smooth animated people walking around, standing and talking, going up and down stairs etc. at a reasonable price, with characters that can be very easily and quickly guided around a space, then they would be in serious business. And that doesn't address the issue that, as artists, we usually want to control even the smallest details such as the colour of someone's hair, to make them sit nicely within the image/shot. We'll need to be able to do that as well. Big ask... I think if/when someone creates such a thing then we'll see a huge jump in quality in what we do and I think it could open up a lot of possibilities for our industry, in the same way that super high-detail, realistic veg/trees and proxies with scattering tools has done for us already recently. That was the last big leap for us and I think people will/should be next - but it's a far bigger challenge.
  13. Hi folks, Found this chump using some of my work on his website in order to drum up business. Thought you should all know so you can have a look through and see if anything of yours is up there. http://www.agcaddesigns.com ANDREW GARCIA Creative Designer I look forward to hearing from you. Located in: Orange County TEL: (562) 449-3575 CELL: (310) 431-7860 *TEXT ME ANY QUICK QUESTIONS. E-MAIL: andrew@agcaddesigns.com Web: http://www.agcaddesigns.com Have a look across the whole website - lots of other pages with plenty of CGIs on them. I sent the guy an angry email and he's pulled mine already but not had an apology yet and I think it's safe to assume that nothing on that site is his, or very little indeed... Interestingly I found out about this simply by doing an image search of one of my images and up popped his website... good old Google! I'm going to start doing this more often... I've had my work stolen before several times but the thieves are usually a little better at covering their tracks!
  14. Thanks! Of course not, no. It was billed on a job-to-job basis, so done in phases. Rwande - the client actually owns all of the artwork and sculptures in the piece. And the cars...! mattPesquet - thanks. as I mentioned before, and in the "making-of" article, the brief from the client was not to produce a nice architectural "film", but to produce an explanatory "A-to-B" piece, showing what each space looks like and how to get from space to space, so interesting camera moves and motion blur etc. were not an option for us this time. Hopefully in the next project!
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