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What is your least favorite aspect of this biz?


RyanSpaulding
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I have 2...one for the biz, and one element I hate...

 

1. Architects. Good god. They are a print shop nightmare. If our print from our 8.5x11 epson doesnt totally match the 3'x2' board, some throw hissies. I even had it once where only the sky color changed in hue and I had to rework it. Color gamut issues people. These were VERY minor hue changes.

 

2. RPC. What crappy technology (sorry vizmasters). Insanely hard on a cpu (I find moreso than an actual 3d tree), the shading is poor, support is poor, doesn't react to light, and there's a $400 lock on creating 3d RPCs.

 

What are some of the things you HATE doing?

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This is a slam dunk for me. Working with indecisive designers. Now if I were freelancing it would be a different issue (I would simply charge for changes), but I'm speaking about a few people who work in the same company as me. Lets say we have two weeks to make a deadline. I'll start on massing designs with said designer, he will mull over it for about 1 week and 6 days and give it to me to finish the day of the presentation and then piss about how it doesn't look quite right. Does this sound familiar to anyone else?

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Cool topic :cool:

 

My initial thought was...i hate nothing. I really love my job...!

 

If there's one minor thing that is somewhat annoying, that would be the underdog position you're always in. Especially with younger architects since they are in the same boat > their clients, and they piss you off as a sinister sort of therapy to heal their cracked little ego...:D

 

There are also cool architects, those are mostly the older, wiser ones.

 

I don't care...I love my job.

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This is a slam dunk for me. Working with indecisive designers. Now if I were freelancing it would be a different issue (I would simply charge for changes), but I'm speaking about a few people who work in the same company as me. Lets say we have two weeks to make a deadline. I'll start on massing designs with said designer, he will mull over it for about 1 week and 6 days and give it to me to finish the day of the presentation and then piss about how it doesn't look quite right. Does this sound familiar to anyone else?
I totally agree with you Brian. Don't u just love it when they come to and say: "Move this over an inch, no 2 inches, no make that 4, no go back to an inch. While your at it, I want a print of each"

Another thing: Don't you just dread when you get a project that is horrific in design, and no matter how pretty you try to make it, it still turns out like crap. Sometimes there's a project where I just can get motivated enough to put fourth the effort as I do other projects.

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mine is really close to brian's, only when you add to it the occasion when not even half the project has been designed. not even sketches. when they just expect you to fill in all the blanks. when you tell them they need to get with you to do some even rough sketches so you know a slight concept of what your going to do, and they never make themselves available. even worse, you do all that for a 250 room retirement home and then they want to try a whole new look for the outside and it all starts over again. or even worse, they find out the ideas they had are like $15million over budget and they still expect you to have the whole thing done so they can propose it to the city. they have expected me to model these changes in 2 days when their team of 4 drafters can't even finish half the changes in 2d.sadly that one project has been the only thing i have hated about my job. it was funny a few weeks ago when the architect said "tim, how's crestwood nursing going?" and i said, "it's not, at least not until you finish designing it." okay i'm done.

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2. RPC. What crappy technology (sorry vizmasters). Insanely hard on a cpu (I find moreso than an actual 3d tree), the shading is poor, support is poor, doesn't react to light, and there's a $400 lock on creating 3d RPCs.

 

RPCs...

 

After being totally frustrated one time by the $400 per tree / person price, I called them up and asked them how much it would be for a copy of them all...

 

Are you sitting down...

 

No kidding...

 

$15,000 U.S. (Not pesos, dollars)...

 

Seriously -- I miss the days when you could buy a entourage book for $100 and get thousands of items.

 

The technology is o.k. but the pricing is completely confiscatory...

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1 not getting paid on time

2 on a couple of project redesigns despite assurances the drawings were still miles away from a cohesive design (fortunatly i had the ear of the developer so i could short circuit the designer and tell them this is as good as the design gets)

3 being used as a design tool but with no credit ££$$ wise (as one gets older and wiser this does not happen as much) if clients want the rabbit froma hat they pay for these days

4 printing - so these days i don't - end of story clients get a disc and let them fathom it out

5 send a dvd to a client and they come back wanting uncompressed quicktime edits " for internal purposes" - so most architects have a avid sustem back of house these days

6 rpc i hate them but on occasions - very rare i will pop a couple of people in from files i picked up over the years but the colour correction neede to get them singing

 

most of the time i still enjoy work - i am my own boss but it stopped being a paying hobby and became a business and i miss the hobby side - i just don't get the urge at the moment to jump on and create for the fun of it

maybe after christmas...............

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another thing i hate -

 

you get a fantastic job land on your desk, something you can potentially make a master piece of, then your boss says he wants it delivered in like 3 days flat, so you frustratingly have to rush it and get out a final set of renderings you know you could have made look so much more beautiful given a bit more time.

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My must be quite similar to a lot of these most noticably the architects...arrrghhhh. the one that hasn't been mention tho is to get the dwg's, start working thro them and building the model to find it doesn't work, go and tell the architects the fact it doesn't work, spend half an hour being laughed at, sneared at and sworen at with the fact that THEY are the architects and IT WORKS.........a week later, a day before the deadline, oh we've realised it doesn't work this way, can you massacre the file and fudge everything back together so it looks perfect and we'll have 150 A1 prints by dinner time tomorrow!.........idiots, one day they'll realise....i hope!!

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it's also a universally know fact that architects just cant draw in cad either. they think they can, and they give you their 2d cad drawing ready for you to make your 3d out of, and they're dead proud of it, but you ALWAYS end up swearing and cursing at them and more or less re-drawing the crap they've just done because their draftsmans skills stink. :p

 

that above statement isn't intended at all architects, just the ones i've ever dealt with :)

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another thing i hate -

 

you get a fantastic job land on your desk, something you can potentially make a master piece of, then your boss says he wants it delivered in like 3 days flat, so you frustratingly have to rush it and get out a final set of renderings you know you could have made look so much more beautiful given a bit more time.

 

i totally agree with you strat....

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the one that hasn't been mention tho is to get the dwg's, start working thro them and building the model to find it doesn't work, go and tell the architects the fact it doesn't work, spend half an hour being laughed at, sneared at and sworen at with the fact that THEY are the architects and IT WORKS......../QUOTE]

 

That's disgusting! As modellers it becomes clear VERY quickly if it works or not. I can usually tell just by studying the drawings before hand. I usually don't tell them bluntly that their work is wrong, I simply ask if they want me to go with the plans or the elevations.

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when i first started 3d modelling it was a brand new concept to every one.

 

one example of how dangerous it can be -

 

about 15 years ago my local town council approached me to computer model a new building they had their architects design. it was basically a civic exhibition center. huge it was, and was meant as the town council's pride and joy at the time.

 

this scheme i was given to model was in it's latter stages. the design was final, the figures had been run and the whole construction process had been well set into motion.

 

the council wanted me (doing this new fan-dangled 3d computer graphics) to render up some visuals for public display and marketing purposes. so i did. i spent 2 weeks faithfully modelling and rendering the architect's scheme i'd been given.

 

when we submitted it to the council, they went beserk. they were outraged. up until now they'd only seen pretty coloured elevs the architects had given them. now here was i giving them a virtual full 3d model of the scheme. something they totally weren't expecting. they hated the scheme completely. didnt realise what it was actually going to look like. they sacked their architects, and got it redesigned radically. the architects were well pissed off with me i can tell you :o

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Yes there are those Architects that drive you crazy, but most where I work are pretty cool. If I see something they design and it looks disgusting, I will tell him that it "Sucks" and they don't get offended. Sometimes you're so use to making changes for them that you can make the design changes on your own. That's probably one of the better things; not being an Architect, but being able to design.

Also no matter how much you tell them, they still don't understand how long this stuff takes to do. They think you can just stretch everything like Autocad. Sorry but it's not that easy

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"Just model everything - we can decide the view later."

 

Sending off a draft saying it's a draft. Then having someone say basically "Well this isn't done".

 

E-mailing it and getting back a comment like " the red is too pink" and not knowing if it their monitor or the color. It sure didn't look pink to me.

 

Cold calling.

 

Architects redesining on the fly.

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I work in house.

 

I think what i dislike the most is being removed from design and detailing. Traditional rendering/modeling is a removed process. There's no backward flexibility, so when i get to a point where I'm detailing a staircase in 3D and need to update drawing. I have to redraw everything in AutoCAD end up working 80 hour weeks so that I can detail.

 

In addition when you're thinking about modeling and rendering you're not thinking about design problems. Often times I get asked "how would you do that" and my mind is in the "where the hell are those coincident planes" limbo and my response isn't so great b/c I'm jolted back to the world of architecture.

 

On the flipside I love my office and think it's an amazing place with amazing people. I just have had to fight to get myself on a path to getting licensed. As a warning to interns, who want to get licensed, make sure that you don't get in a rendering pigeon hole. It takes a lot to get out.

 

Going to be working a Revit project through with an outside consultant dealing with the main rendering work. So far Revit seems to make sense.

 

-Joe

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So far I'm feeling pretty good that I'm not the only one with the exact same problems!

 

Here's a few more that irritate me that I'm sure you all have experienced:

 

1) Client sending back mark-ups as a fax (nice black blob?)

2) Architects/Designers using words like "activate" and "energize" for comments on drafts.

3) pushover project managers that say yes to anything the client asks for but don't renegotiate the budget or schedule.

4) Pompus architects and/or design visualization people.

5) That I don't have the "Make cheap, fast, textured and animated 3D model" filter like the client think I have.

 

I'm sure there are more, but I don't want to whine (too much).

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