Who are the best Visulisation studios?

[Dragonearl]

Hey Guys,

 

So i was thinking we have the Architectural awards to tell us a little about who the best companies are but there are so many good companies out there!

 

Im just wondering it would be interesting to see what you guys think on who are the best or who are your favourites for inspiration or what companie do you aspire to one day work at?

 

Ill start this one off and say one of many but

 

DBOX

 

They really do some of the most amazing work ive seen

[STRAT]

i dont like to say 'the best', but i do like to take inspiration. here's a few in my favs list -

 

http://neoscape.com/

http://www.uniform.net/

http://www.squintopera.com/

http://www.spine3d.com/

http://www.icube.ru/

http://vyonyx.co.uk/

http://www.luxigon.com/images

http://www.thirdseventh.com/

 

lol, and of course

 

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[kippu]

http://forums.cgarchitect.com/27360-list-top-arch-viz-studios-individuals.html

[mattclinch]

i'd add

 

http://mir.no

http://www.purerender.com

http://www.visualisationone.com/

http://www.hayesdavidson.com

[TheAllusionisst]

Don't think I knew about MIR (so many out there, a guy can forget a few), but I have to say they impressed me as they have a good "vRayish" style to their work that has a touch of signature style to it. Of course the other studios listed are great, I just like to see studios that have a pretty cohesive style to their work and not just photorealistic.Thanks for sharing that link.

[BrianKitts]

http://forums.cgarchitect.com/27360-list-top-arch-viz-studios-individuals.html#post186566

[wasteland giant]

I quite like Luxigon because of the NPR craziness but yeah, this list here is pretty good. Bookmarked for future ref!

 

[alias_marks]

one that doesn't come up over here a lot is tronic studio. They don't really have any stills but I really enjoy the libeskind and herzog animations they've done.

 

http://www.tronicstudio.com/

[einstain]

here is the my list

 

3darchvis

 

3dlivestudio

 

archimotion

 

arcrenderings

 

bartproject

 

dbox

 

drawingstudio

 

icube3d

 

methanoia

 

projects3d

 

red vertex

 

squint/opera

 

tangram3ds

 

transparenthouse

 

uoku

 

vuejardin

[Frosty]

i'd add

 

http://www.hayesdavidson.com

 

Hey Matt isn't it bad karma to pimp yourself

[STRAT]

nah. every hole's a goal and all that eh?

[mattclinch]

Hey Matt isn't it bad karma to pimp yourself

 

lol. not there anymore, so technically its not pimping

[ronll]

No doubt some beautiful work listed here. But again it reminds me of how much I hate FLASHy web sites. I know, to each his/her own.

[brianzajac]

No doubt some beautiful work listed here. But again it reminds me of how much I hate FLASHy web sites. I know, to each his/her own.

 

Keep the FLASHy web sites coming. More search engine traffic for the HTML-based sites like us out there.

[ronll]

Keep the FLASHy web sites coming. More search engine traffic for the HTML-based sites like us out there.

 

Are you saying that search engines find non-Flash sites easier? (Just asking, I don't know.)

[TheAllusionisst]

Keep the FLASHy web sites coming. More search engine traffic for the HTML-based sites like us out there.

 

SHEEEEESHHHHH! Brian, let the competition shoot themselves in the foot.

[TheAllusionisst]

Don't think I knew about MIR (so many out there, a guy can forget a few), but I have to say they impressed me as they have a good "vRayish" style to their work that has a touch of signature style to it. Of course the other studios listed are great, I just like to see studios that have a pretty cohesive style to their work and not just photorealistic.Thanks for sharing that link.

 

I was told they use LightWave so I guess I have to re-evaluate what I think the soft Vray style is, because apparently I can't really pick it out form a line up!

[kippu]

i dont think the guys with the flashy website really need search engine driven traffic

[Koper]

Are you saying that search engines find non-Flash sites easier? (Just asking, I don't know.)

 

oh yes

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Flash is one of the most poorly used pieces of internet technology. Not only do search engines have trouble with the sites, they are often very difficult from a user standpoint to find what you need, and get the information you want.

[BVI]

That can be said of most HTML websites.

 

Most search engines (lets face it, Bing and Google are the only ones that count) can crawl through flash files and index them. You can also place text in a hidden div etc - there are lots of tricks.

[Nils Norgren]

As one of the studios on the first list, with a flash website, I would like to just say that there are many philosophies, motivations and expectations to one's website. I understand that flash sites can be difficult to use, and the internet may treat them differently.

 

It is my understanding that there are ways to improve a site's footprint with search engines (there is always paying for add words with Google). We employ strategies such as deep linking (among others). Our average monthly visits are around 4k and with 31.25 page views per visit our average length of visit is 12 min and 55 second. 69% of our traffic is new viewers.

 

We use Google analytics to check our traffic and look for spikes during marketing campaigns.

 

I am glad to be in such company as the list provided by Strat. I don't think that many of the firms mentioned expect much business from random internet searches. We have a process for qualifying clients and tracking hit rate, our quality clients usually come through more traditional means, marketing campaigns, direct sales inquiry, word of mouth or competitive analysis (by our clients). Our site is more of an online brochure for potential clients to look at our portfolio (often with someone directing them to particular content). Catering to everyone on the web dilutes things and therefore may not be as effective with the potential clients in my opinion.

 

my 2¢

 

-Nils

[TheAllusionisst]

It sounds like Neoscape has researched and tracked very well there site traffic and their average length of visit is phenomenal, speaks volumes for the quality of work. It would be interesting to get similar stats on other "Big Name" studios. If you visit their site and watch the URLs, they have unique URLs for the different pages, a lot of flash sites don't and I think that is a major weakness.

 

I have spent years trying to get my sites to rank high on search engineswith the exception of paying for advertising. I have followed standard SEO recommendations as best I could with CMS (content management systems) sites and have paid for evaluations that included key words, meta tags.........

 

That stuff really didn't make much difference so I have adopted trial and error methodology with more success. Our studio site has right at 25% of Nils and average visits are more like 2 minutes, we are not a big name studio, so what I say is my opinion and not coming from an industry expert. In addition I have the luxury of linking the studio from my main sites, I have to think that is of some benefit. I am hoping that if we share what we know with each other we might be able to work our way up the ranks with the knowledge we gain.

 

Flash sites are typically slow to load not only at initial start up but at intermediate page changes, content changes....... They do not have to be, but a lot are because they weren't optimized. Visitors can't typically "Deep Link" or even link to pages on a Flash or Ajax site, so you can't send a link to a particular page if you find something interesting you want to pass on. Imagaes can't be copied unless you get a flash content downloader or the old screen capture, so if you wanted to send someone an image from a flash site, typically you are out of luck. Vendors releasing products send me links to their sites asking me to put up news and it is very annoying to go through the process of grabbing images or marketing text content if their site is flash, so vendors remember to send the content in the email to people if you want them to use your content.....

 

What I and many architects, developers and clients experience when visiting a flash site is exasperation, they are busy and they do not want to wait 2 minutes for a site to load and then find a site where the designer was to focussed on applying cool flashy affects and not on intuitive navigation, I have watched time and again these people closing the page when it became apparent the site was too slow or non-intuitive. Flash can be efficient and very effective and when done well it really looks like you are a successful and professional business.

 

Old School for the little guys:

On my sites, what has seemed to work best are a few different things, the first item isn't necessarily right for a studio, but I see more and more people doing it, "Free Content", take MrMaterials, it jumped up to 30,000 registered users in a few months and is still growing, a bad month is 4 million hits. So perhaps adding some tutorials or content to your site in a non cheesy fashion may lead to some visitors.

 

That leeds to the real traffic builder and that is links from other sites, the more popular the site the more clout Google gives it. Free content gets listed at other sites and you have inbound links. Tutorials are good, but it seems more and more content harvesting sites are out there that take your content and publish it and some don't even link or give credit to the originating site, real poor ettiquette in my opinion.

 

It is said that getting your site listed in DMOZ the open directory project is one of the best ways to get good search results, I have tried to get 3DA listed for ten years without success with them, MrM has been accepted and listed, nothing else of mine seems to have been, the project is a real joke in my opinion, so I wouldn't stress out if you can't seem to get in, but by all means make the effort.

 

Content is obvious but I thought I better mention it, that the content and aesthetics for your site need to be good or the visitors will probably close the tab immediately. But to get them there you need them to find you, so Google search results are important. Here is the sticky wicket IMHO, it is said that Googles search algorithyms are getting so good that SEO (search engine optimization) is becoming less and less crucial, so my past experience may become outdated quick. Search words! The search words you probably want most "Architectural Rendering" is probably going to be the hardest to get at the top of the list since everyone and their weekend rendering brother in-law are after it. So on top of that you need some things that you specialize in that someone might type in in a search that would separate you from the pack. So focus on words or terms that someone might actually type in during a search.

 

Where the important words are in your site. Things like that awesome logo you have in your top left corner, make sure the image tag has your main search word, phrase, etc. in the code and put a service description at the top of your page so that when the search engine bots come searching, some of the first things it finds are linking you to the audience you are after, same goes for meta tags and descriptions. Each page should have a different title and meta tags for example.

 

Site description and keywords. I had heard that if you have one too long and too many search words that Google penalized you, I thought that it might be false as plenty of sites have 200 keywords, and so I crammed those baby's full. It seemed that after I shortended things and made things more reasonable that I started getting better results. Main thing it seems is that they are specific to your content and the key phrasing you want search results for.

 

With all my efforts and hours spent I only get regularly something like page 5 or 6 for "architectural rendering" and page 3 for "architectural visualization" and there are pages full of sites that have less content and less traffic that rank higher than mine in Google, so either they are paying for Google ads or know some great tricks that I would love to know (actually a lot of them have a large amount of incoming links) AND BY THE WAY MOST OF THEM ARE FLASH!

 

What do I know? I watch and hear frustration about Flash sites from end users, but it appears that when done right they excel and they do look really cool! My conjecture is that a lot of people are using "canned" flash site templates that are bloated and are using them on cheap shared hosting that has limited bandwidth and thus come across and frustratingly slow. I wouldn't be afraid to use flash if you or your designer know what you are doing, just avoid the pitfalls of bloated, slow and confusing interface. Study sites that are successfully using it, I haven't because I do everything myself and do not know Flash, perhaps I have been shooting myself in the foot all these years?

 

Does a site even matter? We get around 50% of our new clients from the site and the rest from reference basically. That 50% kept the business alive last year, so even though it is a lot of work, business isn't booming right now and things are tough, a website came in real handy for us this last year.

 

A tool for studying the competition and seeing why they are more successful:

 

http://www.alexa.com/

Edited February 5, 2010 by Russell L. Thomas

[ronll]

Likewise I don't depend on my website traffic to generate business anymore than I would expect to get projects from my listing in the yellow pages. My site is an online portfolio that I can point people to if needed. My problem with Flash, as others have pointed out, is that it makes navigation of a site slow and difficult. I usually find myself not only running out of patience but also losing respect for the owners as they seem to be saying, "Look at me, I'm the cutest and cleverest page on the block." On top of that, Flash sites don't show up on my iPhone, which I'm finding that I use more and more to browse the web. And Apple has indicated that they are in no hurry to add Flash to either the iPhone or the iPad.

 

My 2 cents, YMMV, and all that.