Presenting Animations to Clients?

[mbr]

I was curious how others presented animations to their clients as things progressed. Any tips on how to avoid problems?

 

My approach has been to:

1. show stills of the rooms (for interiors - I have an image posted in the WIP section) for approval of colors and lighting

2. draw the camera paths across the floor plan to show what will be viewed

3. send a low res (with Smooth and Highlights - in Max) animation

4. render every 50th frame or so to show random renderings

 

Thanks.

[nisus]

no one?

[jucaro]

what we do here is present our clients with a traditional storyboard panels with descriptions of key frames rendered either manualy, or with shots of initial renders. But quick manual renderings more often suffice.

 

After the client gives the GO signal to make the animation, thats the time we render the full frames. Then, depending on the client, we give the finished product in either interactive DVD or VCD or as per client instruction. But we push the DVD option nowadays.

 

Basicaly thats it.

 

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

so far we have...

 

scripted the animation using floor plans, paths drawn on the floor plans, and a written description that gives a rough idea of movement and length of each segment. we provide this at the same time as the proposal for service.

 

then we set up a series of meetings...

 

the first to review modeling, lighting, and texturing.

 

the second to review the cont'd progress of modeling, lighting, and rendering, as well as incorporate any changes made from the first meeting. during this time we also try to have a preliminary animation path set, flat shaded. to give a better idea of the movement, speed and length.

 

the third meeting we review the animation path, and make sure everything looks the way we want. get the go ahead to proceed. any changes after this point, even if included in the original proposal, will be billed as additional services.

 

deliver final animation.

 

we clearly outline what the final deliverable format will be in the proposal. whether it will be raw frames, compressed, what resolution, ect...

 

we have only done this a few times, so we are still refining the process. we typically bill by the complexity, and size of the space

[mbr]

Thanks.

 

I did discuss specifically what the animations would entail, but I've also remained somewhat flexible (in my sleeping schedule, too .

 

There will be 3 interior animations that basically cover each room of these condos, all to be incorporated in an interactive Flash presentation at the end (this will all be uploaded to the web and all be in Flash - no quicktimes). The length of the animations will be kept as short as possible to keep the file sizes as low as possible. The final version will be 320x240 and one smaller (I've yet to test the sizes to see how tiny it has to go for 56k modems).

 

So far the difficulties have been around the material selections and furnishings, but things are still moving along.

 

I'll try to post some images once the materials have been finalized (and I can work on the lighting).