ArchVis Buisness models with a large firm....

[BrianKitts]

I'm currently looking into revamping the way visualization is handled within our company. We are a large firm out in 5 offices, and are considering developing a visualization group that is dedicated to the company.

 

The idea is that historically any high profile projects have been outsourced for final renderings, however I'm currently working on training a handful of individuals to a quality level such that we would be able to establish a group from within, in the end outsourcing any high end renderings from all of the offices.... not overseas, but to our own group.

 

The big question though is how to handle it from a business standpoint. I'm looking to see how other large firms tend to manage visualization. In the past I've been part of a group who jump from project to project and eat up the hours dedicated to the architectural fee for billing. However, I've also found a few other companies that manage their visualization as an additional service offered to the client and billed separately. The second scenario is more in line with the model that we are thinking of converting to.

 

I would love to hear if anyone has opinions to share regarding how they work, or if they have any experience changing over from one scenario to the other and the benefits of each practice.

 

thanks!

[alias_marks]

We haven't much experience with this either, and are a bit smaller than your setup (about 120 people over 2 offices). For the most part we have rolled our 3d viz fees into the design progress but a couple times we have billed it separately. It really has just depended on the project so far.

 

At the most basic level...

 

Smaller scale projects > get viz services billed separately

Large scale projects > rolled into architects fee

 

Interested to hear what others are doing as well, great question.

[Dave Buchhofer]

The second scenario is more in line with the model that we are thinking of converting to.

 

Until very recently we were Classified as your Second scenario, and it worked fairly well in terms of getting reimbursed from end clients for our 3D work. It also seemed to push our services more for use as end fundraising tools more so than as a design facilitator, while also helped to keep life somewhat interesting with about equal parts work from outside the 'firm' as inside. and work from outside is almost always easier in terms of startup 'costs' due to the fact that the designer isn't 300' away with the mindset of 'I can give it to him later'

 

Now though it appears that they're writing renderings of one sort or another into the contracts and being billed as hourly to the projects.

 

I'm not sure which I prefer yet

[kainoa]

I don't believe it should be handled only one way or the other as renderings serve different purposes, project scopes are different, clients are different, etc. At our firm we need to do ALL OF THE ABOVE. We're a very small studio by comparison, 45 employees over 3 studios.

 

Bill as an Add. Service:

This type of service is typically geared toward producing marketing renderings for sales, or anything that serves our clients own needs. This is the method we prefer as the scope and fees are clearly outlined in a separate contract.

 

Billed into Arch. Fees:

We'll do this when producing renderings for the sole purpose of communicating design intent, or anything that serves our needs for communication (public hearings, presentations, etc).

 

Outsourcing:

As stated above, we're a very small studio by comparison to the others here. Thus we need to be very efficient with our time to cover the work load. We'll typically outsource when timing is critical and spread the work over several private studios in Virginia, Toronto, and California. The billings are then handled by either situation listed above.

[Devin Johnston]

My firm is about 125 people and we have done it both ways, I think it would be hard to move to a system where we only adopted one of these methods. Mainly because we have always worked along side the design department and as a result are considered part of it. All of our projects have a built in fee for doing a certain number of renderings/animations, the only time we would charge an additional fee would be if the client want's something that we wouldn’t normally do as a part of our usual design process.

 

I've thought about how it would be if the Viz department was completely separate and billed the firm for the work we would be doing. The only good reason to do it like this is if you were working with companies outside of your firm and needed to present your self as a separate and unique entity. It really makes things more difficult when dealing with your firm and could potentially backfire if too much time and money was spent in the wrong place. It places a magnifying glass on you and would force you into a situation where your “company” would have to be profitable. If you fall behind or don’t meet projections then things could get bad.

[Dave Buchhofer]

I've thought about how it would be if the Viz department was completely separate and billed the firm for the work we would be doing. The only good reason to do it like this is if you were working with companies outside of your firm and needed to present your self as a separate and unique entity. It really makes things more difficult when dealing with your firm and could potentially backfire if too much time and money was spent in the wrong place. It places a magnifying glass on you and would force you into a situation where your “company” would have to be profitable. If you fall behind or don’t meet projections then things could get bad.

 

Exactly. having it set up that way worked great as a means towards bringing in extra revenue to the firm overall by being structured essentially as a separate company for external work, but it also had the disadvantage of causing a fair amount of artificial sense of separation while doing internal design/communication based work by way of fee structuring.

 

The basic gist of it was to try and move away from the intern working all night to do the renderings and the documents and doing both poorly while getting paid for half of the actual work done, and it worked good for those aims to an extent, while also giving us a revenue based reason to help push quality levels and techs.. and also helped fuel some interesting non-architectural projects

 

And to expand a little more, the whole 'completely separate' company thing, so as to be able to market to non-competing architectural firms hasn't panned out as easy (politically) to do as planned, only nabbed a few jobs for competing arch firms before that getting axed by the company-at-large lol.

[EddieLeon]

I'm currently looking into revamping the way visualization is handled within our company. We are a large firm with 500+ spread out in 6 offices, and are considering developing a visualization group that is dedicated to the company.

 

The evolution of 3d departments within large architecture firms is an excellent topic. I'm not sure if anyone has figured out the correct formula yet, but it's definitely worth trying. IMO, I think the Viz Group will need to be treated as a separate company in order to be successful and self-sustaining.

 

I am assuming that your goal is to create high-level Arch Viz for marketing. If so, this will cause priority issues with the mother company since they will want your team to be subservient to what I call the "design vortex". This is when the designers want you to do endless edits and change everything the day before the renderings are due.

 

To further illustrate my point about Arch Firm priorities, I once had a negative experience at a large arch firm when I took it upon myself to do a nighttime version of a rendering for a supermarket. I was only asked to do a day version, but I wanted to learn something new and created a night scene. Needless to say, when I proudly showed the designer both versions he freaked out because he believed that the extra bit of time I spent on the night version was not "billable". My desire and need to improve my skills was secondary to his desire to keep his project on budget. Today, I encourage my artists to spend a portion of their time experimenting and learning...

 

One option you may consider to compensate for diverging priorities is to have 2 distinct teams in your group. A and B teams. The newbies can come into the B team and pay their dues, while the A team focuses their creative energies on producing top notch work.

 

Good Luck and keep us posted on your progress!

[jhiler]

Brian,

 

I don't visit the forums as often as I should, but saw this and wanted to share my experiences.

 

I worked with a Vis Studio group for about 4 years in a firm of about 1300 people. We started as a small group of about 8 (when I joined) and grew to about 20 full time people and 10 contract employees. the studio has been trimmed down some now and i've moved into more of a design support role rather than pure visualization role.

 

Typically we had a few people that worked close with designers and modeled everything and every option that was wanted. This caused problems because while we were modeling/texturing/lighting until 2-3am sometimes the quality would suffer to get everything done in time for an 8am meeting. this was also good because we were responding to our 'clients' (designers) needs as quick as we could and not charging extra fees to do so.

 

There were times that we would get big animation projects and would set up timelines and deadlines and have everything mapped out to produce a good quality product, but there was always that last design change or this other option that would absolutely be needed and things would go downhill from that point. It seems that internal groups (from my experience) have trouble being able to set the hard deadlines that pure production studios or contractors can set and live by.

 

So in summary it really depends on how your group is set up and if the people you work with respect what you produce and understand/respect how it gets done. If they don't respect it or try to undermine you every time you produce something for them it becomes a hard battle. One succesful group that I know of that has evolved from just Arch/Vis is Corgan Media Lab. They started out doing Arch/Vis for Corgan Architects and have now branched into TV, games and movies. I'm sure there are some other succesful groups that have evolved but as some people said Arch/Vis is tough to survive in because of the constant changes and evolution of designs and buildings. It becomes necessary to have other aspects of Visualization to be able to branch into to keep things flowing.

 

Just my $.02 worth. (a long $.02, but it still is really $.02)

 

-jerry

[Charles Gaushell]

Actually had this very conversation this morning with a large architectural firm. They have decided to do exactly what I would have recommended:

 

1. they are ramping up to have 3-5 arch viz guys to support

 

2. they will only work on internal projects for use as a design tool and for preliminary presentations

 

3. they do not plan to create large animations or become a marketing tool for their clients as they see this as conflicting with more pressing issues and too hard to maintain a talent pool and skill set to develop such. so they will work with companies like ours to outsource/joint venture

 

It is really difficult to create a clean revenue stream and not run into prioritizing issues between internal presentations and outside marketing needs. Likewise, you limit your potential clients - similar to an architectural/engineering firm where many architects and engineers won't hire the a/e firm (even if better qualified) for consulting services because they would be helping a competitor indirectly.

 

 

So for whatever that is worth. Good luck.

[blowback]

Sorry to drop in late,

 

I just wanted to relay my current experiance.

 

I head up a small 3d group in a 120+ architectural firm. I am experiancing many of the opposing forces that two buisnesses and buisness models create when they linked together. What the firm wants and does with there 3d artists is usually diffrent than what the department wants. Feeling sort of lost and at the mercy of the mother ship sucks. Who's kidding who?

 

Cleary defining roles, work flows and revenue streams, imho are really important in truly establishing an Arch Viz buisness in a larger firm.

 

I think the model will somehow incorporat a lot more of BIM, not just imaging.

[Ernest Burden III]

I am assuming that your goal is to create high-level Arch Viz for marketing. If so, this will cause priority issues with the mother company since they will want your team to be subservient to what I call the "design vortex".

 

It is really difficult to create a clean revenue stream and not run into prioritizing issues between internal presentations and outside marketing needs.

 

There are plenty of good reasons for large design practices to add in-house rendering. Marketing the project may not be one of them. Marketing the design firm, yes. I say this because I often observe a battle between designers and property developers/owners where they are at odds over how to show the project. As the outside renderer, I have to pay attention to who's going to sign my check and listen primarily to that party. I've had calls from whichever one I'm not working for where they tell me to do something completely different from my approved brief. I've had a designer tell me I'm not to talk to the owner, even though the owner is paying me.

 

So its possible for an in-house rendering studio to actually increase tensions with owners and outside marketing companies because their work will be driven by the designers, who have a strong interest in how their design work is presented. Billing those services separately suggests that control should be given to the paying client, not the design firm. Once you get to that point, what is the reasoning for having the studio in-house, vs. using outside studios?

 

I'm not saying its a bad idea. It's not a new idea, either. 100 years ago, all architects were trained to draw and paint, and the profession of 'freelance renderer' didn't really exist. I have a monograph on McKim Mead and White, and in it there is a plan layout of their office, and there is an area set aside called 'rendering'.

 

The practice of mechanical perspective projection was invented about 600 years ago when architectural projects became big business, and patrons were no longer willing to simply trust their artist/architects with vast sums of money. The first project to utilize perspective and even VR (a door with a small viewing window that looked to a projected view of the un-built space) was Florence's Duomo. And look how well that turned out!

[Devin Johnston]

My firm is currently in a state of growth, we've grown from 99 people to about 130 over the last year and we may add another 30 depending on how much work comes in this year. For a while I was the only 3D guy but last year I had to hire someone else to help because I had a 3 month backlog of work and people were getting mad. I've been wondering ever since if there is a formula for the ideal number of viz people to designers. Right now we're at 65 designers to 1 viz guy, should we have more or less or is it just right? I realize it depends on how much rendering work is needed so that may make such a calculation imposable to determine.

[jhiler]

I think that is something very hard to calculate. As I said earlier when I started with our Vis group (in an Arch. firm) we had about 8 people. It grew up to about 25-30 people before it was trimmed down. During that time more and more of the designers started hiring their own 3D people because the group I was part of became too busy or in some cases somewhat difficult to work with. It was the designer wanting changes at the last second and the studio saying it isn't possible to do that and give you the same quality... so the designer went out and hired someone to do their 3D work for them.

 

The # really depends on how you work with the designers. If you are taking 3D models or plans and creating final images without having to deal with a whole slew of changes then the # can be greater than someone who works almost hand-in-hand with designers. But calculating a # is very difficult to do IMO.