Are we in danger of everything having the gi look?

[heni30]

Hi,

 

Do y'all think individual uniqueness is getting lost in gi rendering. Before the computer

renderings looked very different depending on style, experience, and medium of the renderer. Now, you see newbies posting "This is my first render guys" and it doesn't look that different from what seasoned renderers are doing. And it all looks the same and has the same feel. Of course there is the 10% who take it a step further and make it their own but for the most part everything is looking the same, especially to the untrained

(client) eye. It's almost like good enough is good enough. Like true type fonts compared

to professional type setting, or mp3s compare to cd quality. It's kinda scary to think that

architectural illustration, as it used to be, is being taken over by this cold, automated process.

 

What do you think?

[alias_marks]

the yankees always win cause the other team can't take their eyes of the damn pin stripes.. Find your pin stripes in the field of arch viz that's different than what everyone else is doing... and you'll keep everyone looking at your work..

 

At least that's my recent outlook..

 

...maybe cause I just watched catch me if you can

[anejo]

the yankees always win cause the other team can't take their eyes of the damn pin stripes..

 

...is that why the yankees always win? anyway...

 

I don’t think individual uniqueness is getting lost. Unfortunately, or at least in my case, to many projects want that same look that you're probably referring to. However, that hideous look does sells.

I sure most artist do add a bit of their own creativity and/or imagination to each render, but to keep the integrity of the overall project in line with what the client wants, there’s a fine balancing act.

Edited August 9, 2010 by anejo

[Justin Hunt]

There was a time recently where every image looked the same, things are changing now and its becoming even more important to stand out with your own style as competition gets even more fierce than ever before.

 

Photorealism is being taken to the next level and photostylisation is emerging.

 

jhv

[Ernest Burden III]

The Yankees [usually] win because that's what Yankees do. It's a mindset.

 

I will repeat this until everybody gets it:

You make your money in Photoshop.

[heni30]

Hi Ernest,

 

Could you please elaborate on your Photoshop comment? It's the middle tier client I'm worried about. Their architect's Vray in-house guy was killing renderers and then along comes SketchUp. Ouch! I'm seeing a lot of construction site renderings done in

plain SU.

[Ernest Burden III]

Out-of-the-box anything gets tired after a while. First it was generic CG, then the vRay look, now cute SketchUp, next... well, I don't know what's next. But everyone wants their work to stand out, and running with the herd is a bad way to get there. Make your work visually unique and you will survive. Add good service and you will do even better.

 

If there is nothing unique about your work you are a commodity. The place you make your work your own is probably Photoshop. That's where you go from being a software user to an Illustrator.

[leoA4D]

First it was generic CG, then the vRay look, now cute SketchUp, next... well, I don't know what's next.

 

FotoSketcher, of course.

 

 

 

 

 

(Kidding. Seriously!)

 

Leonard

[padre.ayuso]

My take is that the seasoned guys have more opportunity to take it a step further. The guys who are doing their "first render" and it looks the same as everyone elses is learning from every one else. However, those who are seasoned and have been around for a while, also know more basics and should know their products better than the newy and should be able to provide a better product than the newy. My thought on it. I'm every day improving myself and see others do them same around me.

[Justin Hunt]

Taking it further, even us "seasoned" guys are always learning, we look back at the stuff we did in the past and cringe saying, "I sent that out?". Experimenting and playing often leads to the next best thing.

 

jhv

[carlotristan3d]

Hi Ernest,

 

Could you please elaborate on your Photoshop comment? It's the middle tier client I'm worried about. Their architect's Vray in-house guy was killing renderers and then along comes SketchUp. Ouch! I'm seeing a lot of construction site renderings done in

plain SU.

Couldn't agree more. Architects are using less and less external renderers because they can do it themselves with SU. Think about this, while everybody is lamenting that outsourcing to China, India is harming the industry, It's actually the ease of SU that is taking jobs out of Viz studios.

[heni30]

I know. I was doing renderings for an a designer who had a client who did airport wine shops. Every proposal required a rendering and it was a national market so I was very comfortable doing at least 5 or 6 renderings a year for them especially since they all used the same design elements. Then I hadn't heard from them in quite a while so I went to the company's website and there were 2 brand new proposals done in SketchUP in-house.

 

It's hard to see your bottom line affected that way. And no matter how fantastic my renderings were, it didn't matter; they were going to go the most cost-effective route. "Good enough" was good enough when there was an 80% savings involved.

[Justin Hunt]

As an in-house guy there are times where I wish we had sent a job to a studio, especially when it comes to marketing animation work.

 

Now before I go any further, the 3D team here is fantastic and very talented. We are more than capable to do the work, we can and sometimes do rival studios.

 

But, when it comes to animations most in-house people just dont have the right structure to make a decent profit. In a studio there is often a team of people to work on one project. In-house its usually just one person. Far too much work for a single person to handle. Throw on top of that, meddling architects who decide that this is the perfect oportunity to refine the design. Before you can blink the marketing animation turns into a design develpment exercise, BANG goes the budget. With animation not being a primary source of income for architectural firms, there is little to no knowlage of the process from the people liasing with the clients. As such unrealistic expectations are imposed and agreed to.

 

An other reality for in-house is often there isn't time or budget to take images further than "good enough". Most if not all the time is taken up in design develpment. That is where our value lies for the firm. The fact that the images are usable and often thrown in for free is why more and more is being done in-house. Its got very little to do with Sketch-up or Vray for that matter.

 

jhv

[heni30]

The reason I mention Vray is because with a medium amount of time and effort it's possible to create images with a breathtaking degree of realism; something that used to take a pro years of practice and experience to do well. The value of that expertise is rapidly diminishing in the realm of "good enough" (medium tier clients).

[Ernest Burden III]

The most 'seasoned' of us put our knowledge into the last 3DAT 3D Max book. Buy it, read it, learn it. My chapter in particular, of course--I dropped 30 years of experience onto those pages. Composition and storytelling are two areas where you can raise your work above 'good enough'.

 

I'm doing a small project for an architect who had done SketchUp images in-house, but now needs better art. In their images they use the standard SU people, including the guy walking the dog (away from you) in the foreground. So the first thing we see in their rendering is a dog butt--complete with a nice anal dot. Really? Who walks a dog at a college, anyway?

[hockley91]

They actually talked about this topic at Siggraph. It was a course called "Stylized Rendering". It was more about gaming, but the issue of style is pretty important to separate you from everybody else.

 

One thing that was mentioned was just because you can create photorealism doesn't mean you have to. They gave some examples of how photorealism has been present in painting for many centuries, but just because one could do that didn't mean that you had to. Picasso was an example and they gave many many more examples. One of the photorealistic painters they mentioned was "Ralph Goings" and "Murakami" for the stylized look.

 

I always wanted that "photorealistic" look, and I think in some circumstances that can be warranted depending on what type of rendering you are trying to do. Compositing a shot with an existing image I think should be photo real. But, if you're selling something for marketing, perhaps we should investigate more and invest some time in creating a style instead of the same old same old.

 

I'm certainly going to look into that.

 

I would say that Ernest Burden has stuck to his guns and definitely has "style"!

[M V]

I'm doing a small project for an architect who had done SketchUp images in-house, but now needs better art. In their images they use the standard SU people, including the guy walking the dog (away from you) in the foreground. So the first thing we see in their rendering is a dog butt--complete with a nice anal dot. Really? Who walks a dog at a college, anyway?

 

Seriously LOL Ernest!

 

As software gets easier to use and hardware opens opportunities for things like multilight and RT viewports, the newbies are going to be able to learn in 2 weeks what took us 5+ years to learn. I remember I would setup a light and then click render and wait 15 min for the thing to render just to realize I had to change the falloff - rerender - oops change it again. Now you can see the thing live on screen in a RT viewport. The newbies dont have to deal with that. This doesnt mean that we are losing the game here. We have to be above the technical and bring artistry to rendering. I have see crappy SU renders on marketing brouchures, construction site boards, and even HGTV! If I can provide high quality renderings for the same price as the crappy ones because of my style and experience, then it's a no brainer for a client to hire me, right?

[Brodie Geers]

I seem to be hearing a lot of people here complaining about technology advancements which have made 3d more accessible to more people. Is that really the position you want to be in? Luddites longing for the good ol' days when everything was harder and took longer. This sort of neo-luddism is a fallacy. It's based on the idea that the amount of work out there is constant and so the more people who get involved, the less work there will be and so the 'old-guard' begins to look harshly at those entering the field. It's simply not the case.

 

Things like faster computers, ubiquitous internet connections, faster rendering, increased memory, etc. are making our work better and more fun and versatile. Meanwhile the addition of Sketchup with its intuitive interface and the fact that we're being inundated more and more by the wonders of 3D means that the overall workload is increasing. For example, a city in California (and probably many others) now requires a rendering for all new commercial structures as well as a full 3d exterior model which is used by their urban planners (they have the whole city blocked out in Sketchup). As our progress developed with the project in this city they eventually wanted to see a rendering from each entrance into the parking lot which meant 5 more renderings. Then the hospital commissioned a separate rendering from an outside source as well as a physical model.

 

As things develop more and more clients will want not just 2d images but we'll likely be providing 3d models more and more (something no one seemed to run into 5+ years ago but now is cropping up more and more). It's not unlike how architects used to provide a bunch of 2d drawings to clients but now are often being required to provide a full BIM model which can be adapted over time as the building changes.

 

-Brodie

[Gary Ledgerwood]

I am still laughing at "anal dot" after reading all the way down to here. Hahaha! )

[Joel Gray]

Taking it further, even us "seasoned" guys are always learning, we look back at the stuff we did in the past and cringe saying, "I sent that out?". Experimenting and playing often leads to the next best thing.

 

Boy, ain't that the truth. I often look back at the old stuff just to remind myself that I'm much better as an artist, but I must have been a better business man back then because I can't imagine getting paid for some of the stuff I churned out!

 

Joel

[Scott Schroeder]

I seem to be hearing a lot of people here complaining about technology advancements which have made 3d more accessible to more people. Is that really the position you want to be in? Luddites longing for the good ol' days when everything was harder and took longer. This sort of neo-luddism is a fallacy. It's based on the idea that the amount of work out there is constant and so the more people who get involved, the less work there will be and so the 'old-guard' begins to look harshly at those entering the field. It's simply not the case.

 

Things like faster computers, ubiquitous internet connections, faster rendering, increased memory, etc. are making our work better and more fun and versatile. Meanwhile the addition of Sketchup with its intuitive interface and the fact that we're being inundated more and more by the wonders of 3D means that the overall workload is increasing. For example, a city in California (and probably many others) now requires a rendering for all new commercial structures as well as a full 3d exterior model which is used by their urban planners (they have the whole city blocked out in Sketchup). As our progress developed with the project in this city they eventually wanted to see a rendering from each entrance into the parking lot which meant 5 more renderings. Then the hospital commissioned a separate rendering from an outside source as well as a physical model.

 

As things develop more and more clients will want not just 2d images but we'll likely be providing 3d models more and more (something no one seemed to run into 5+ years ago but now is cropping up more and more). It's not unlike how architects used to provide a bunch of 2d drawings to clients but now are often being required to provide a full BIM model which can be adapted over time as the building changes.

 

-Brodie

 

SketchUp was the worst thing to happen to the arch viz industry since the lens flare, chromatic aberration, and the concrete panel house in the woods at sunset combined. Now, there are a bunch of clients saying, "But I already have the model. Just make me an amazing image." Yeah, sure they have the model. It was done in SketchUp free by their 12 year old nephew and it's a massive pile of turd. Even if you dress it up really nice, it's still a turd. They don't understand that having 14 faces all co-planer causes problems. Or the scale is completely off and nothing is modeled correctly. Can you tell that I hate SketchUp? Maybe unfairly so, but oh how I loathe that program.

 

Every studio I've ever worked at had adopted a practice to never accept client provided models for anything other than use in pre-viz. You spend more time trying to fix a crappy model than if you'd just build it yourself from scratch.

 

It's like Pro Tools in music. Now, everyone with a Mac thinks that they are the next big thing and flooded the market with really awful home produced music. Sure, there are really good Pro Tools users, as well as SketchUp, but that's the upper 1%.

 

As arch viz expands and more areas are requiring visualizations of the building before hand, you'll start to see a shift away from the crap renders. But crap renders have always been a sore spot in this industry because while the render may be awful, you can still see what the building is going to look like. So why pay for expensive software and employees, when you can just get SketchUp free? The big thing that the true visualizers have over the crap is putting emotion and feel back into the render. It's not just a lifeless building anymore, it becomes a piece of art. And that piece of art will always excite people over the crap image, and excitement is what really sells a product.

Edited August 24, 2011 by VelvetElvis

[Brodie Geers]

SketchUp was the worst thing to happen to the arch viz industry since the lens flare, chromatic aberration, and the concrete panel house in the woods at sunset combined. Now, there are a bunch of clients saying, "But I already have the model. Just make me an amazing image." Yeah, sure they have the model. It was done in SketchUp free by their 12 year old nephew and it's a massive pile of turd. Even if you dress it up really nice, it's still a turd. They don't understand that having 14 faces all co-planer causes problems. Or the scale is completely off and nothing is modeled correctly. Can you tell that I hate SketchUp? Maybe unfairly so, but oh how I loathe that program.

 

Every studio I've ever worked at had adopted a practice to never accept client provided models for anything other than use in pre-viz. You spend more time trying to fix a crappy model than if you'd just build it yourself from scratch.

 

It's like Pro Tools in music. Now, everyone with a Mac thinks that they are the next big thing and flooded the market with really awful home produced music. Sure, there are really good Pro Tools users, as well as SketchUp, but that's the upper 1%.

 

As arch viz expands and more areas are requiring visualizations of the building before hand, you'll start to see a shift away from the crap renders. But crap renders have always been a sore spot in this industry because while the render may be awful, you can still see what the building is going to look like. So why pay for expensive software and employees, when you can just get SketchUp free? The big thing that the true visualizers have over the crap is putting emotion and feel back into the render. It's not just a lifeless building anymore, it becomes a piece of art. And that piece of art will always excite people over the crap image, and excitement is what really sells a product.

 

I'm not sure I understand your support for the assertion that "SketchUp was the worst thing to happen to the arch viz industry since the lens flare...". You seem to be saying that because people are creating their own models it's hurting the industry? The people you seem to be referring to aren't using those sketchup models as a replacement for archviz work (or else they wouldn't be coming to you with their model). Instead they seem to be creating a sort of sketch model for understanding proportions and such and then assume that you can use that model as a basis of your work.

 

They may overestimate what their model can do or be used for, but I don't see how those models are hurting the archviz industry any more than it hurts the industry for those companies to have an intern build a physical study model which serves the same purpose and is of approximately the same quality. If I were a professional physical model builder I wouldn't tell clients they can't send me study models nor would I claim that study models are ruining the physical model building industry. Rather, I'd use the study model to give myself, at a cursory glance, what the final building form will look like, which might help me plan my building process. Similarly, these sketchup models could be used the same way. If a client asked me to turn their study model into a presentation model it would be a simple matter to explain to them that, while their model is helpful, it will be more efficient to build the final presentation model from scratch.

 

-Brodie

[Fran]

With the advancement of render engines, I spend more time improving my modeling and material creation skills.

[BVI]

The value of experience can never be taken for granted when it comes to 3D. These same new guys may be able to peddle away for 2 weeks on an image, but experience allows us to produce the same result in a day, while juggeling 10 other projects and an animation.

I read a Neoscape interview where they said they are now using Zbrush for pillow and fabric detailing and so forth to make images even more realistic, so with the advancement of technology I hope we can further achieve even more stunning imagery.

[CJI]

I'm not sure I understand your support for the assertion that "SketchUp was the worst thing to happen to the arch viz industry since the lens flare...". You seem to be saying that because people are creating their own models it's hurting the industry? The people you seem to be referring to aren't using those sketchup models as a replacement for archviz work (or else they wouldn't be coming to you with their model). Instead they seem to be creating a sort of sketch model for understanding proportions and such and then assume that you can use that model as a basis of your work.

 

They may overestimate what their model can do or be used for, but I don't see how those models are hurting the archviz industry any more than it hurts the industry for those companies to have an intern build a physical study model which serves the same purpose and is of approximately the same quality. If I were a professional physical model builder I wouldn't tell clients they can't send me study models nor would I claim that study models are ruining the physical model building industry. Rather, I'd use the study model to give myself, at a cursory glance, what the final building form will look like, which might help me plan my building process. Similarly, these sketchup models could be used the same way. If a client asked me to turn their study model into a presentation model it would be a simple matter to explain to them that, while their model is helpful, it will be more efficient to build the final presentation model from scratch.

 

-Brodie

 

This happened to me just the other day actually, a client asked if providing the model would help. The person modelling in sketch-up is an architect and actually a friend of mine. I have seen his sketch-up models and have even helped in the past by showing him how to model more cleanly and efficiently so his models can be exported without to many problems.

 

Despite the fact i think he is a competent modeller i still politely replied that it would still be easier, more efficient, and less time consuming for me to model the building myself. That a supplied model is often very useful for understanding the project and would be invaluable as reference. I have often found that simple short cuts done by someone in sketch up adds painstaking correction time on my end. Likely down to the fact that its not deemed important enough to worry about. But we all know how these kind of things can turn out in renderings where the detail is everything.

 

I am not a fan of sketch-up either but not for any reason other than the fact i prefer the advanced tools that working with high end programs like Max, Maya and C4D provides. This is more down to the way i learned my skills. I think the reason why so many of us dislike sketch-up is more down to its ease for anyone to pick up but lack of knowledge of a large portion of its user base on the principals of 3d modelling and rendering (Tris, Quads, Surface Normals, Co-planar faces etc). Add to the fact that we are often expected to work miracles with these nightmare models for less money and be happy about it too. A model is a model is the general conception of the uneducated in these matters.

 

Thats not to say there are not exceptionally good sketch-up modellers. I sadly am not one of them. The interface is too simple, there isn't 20 ways to do the same thing....its not natural!

 

I agree that its the extra style/art we put in to programs like photoshop and zbrush that stand you apart and make your work truly shine.