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Frosty
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>>Another classic would be "It doesn't look right, you have done it wrong" >>which roughly translates as "Whoa, our design looks crap now that we see >>it in 3D for the first time"

 

That's soooooooooooooo true my friend. I did a bunch of homes for a client this spring. The homes looked awful. They gave the base models of the homes, with no upgrades. Bland and boring. After presenting them to them, they went through 5 sets of render revisions to beautify the homes. I smiled the whole time because I had explained up front that:

 

"changes will be billed hourly"

 

And I had their signature to honor the agreement. And they did.

 

Chris Johnson

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I smiled the whole time because I had explained up front that:

 

"changes will be billed hourly"

 

And I had their signature to honor the agreement. And they did.

 

Just goes to show that in reality the client "budget" is usually a load of crap and is almost always MUCH bigger than they say.

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After sending a draft render of a building with just a solid background colour AND stating 'this is just a draft', the reply was 'Mmmm...can we have some clouds' !

If I had a penny for everytime that has happened to me I would have been able to retire already! Maybe the next time we get prelimiary concept drawings from the architect we should ask if we can get the manufacturing schematics for the door handles that will be used on the office doors. LOL.

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Did a job recently for a nearby city which has a high percentage of ethnic monorities. So I thought I would do the right thing by reflecting this in my image.

 

I got pulled up on this because apperently I put too many in and would be seen as 'positive discrimination'. I was then told it's a 25 / 75% split.

 

I had to count every figure in my image to make sure it was right !

 

'PC' gone mad!

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This is one of the most interesting threads I have ever read... so entertaining! One of my clients:

"Just reproduce this photo by rendering."

 

He just wants to make the design in the magazine as if his own design and present to his client. I have stopped working for that guy anyway.

Have you ever worked with a client (e.g. a developer) who wants you to make up something (e.g. double the size of a swimming pool as shown in the plan) just to increase the marketing value of what they are going to sell?

 

I am getting lost...

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I had lots of freeky clients but I allways remember one. He asked me to make him photomontage for jumbo poster, 12 by 8 feet.

I sad, no problem but you have to send me photograph so I can make it, becouse that was a job overseas.

He send me photos in resolution 640x480 with poor Jpg quality settings and when I explained him that its useless, he told me to think of something becouse I usually solved all problems we had in past working together.

 

I made him photomontage using that photo. He was happy with it except photograph was litle blurry. I told him that it looks artistic and he agreed with me. He was happy and I am happy, happy happy happy.

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For this past weekend I got slammed by a very late info situation. It came after more than a month on the project, working of backgrounds waiting for an approved subject design. The deadline was late Monday and I started getting docs on Friday, and late Saturday and even Sunday and Monday. None of them agreed with the rest, of course, making them a slow-go at best.

 

So I gave my client a 'consultant comment' to remember:

 

"You have now set the record for the most work handed me with the shortest time, in over twenty years of rendering".

 

I emailed in the two renderings last night at 3AM, done but not to the level that they should have been. I had hit 'render' at 2:30! (Lightscape, plus my one-button NPR treatment can do that).

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Ernest, good job man.

 

I am right in the middle of that right now too. I was sitting around most of last week twiddling my thumbs, waiting for more info. on 2 big-time interiors I had to do.

 

Then I get a call from the client on thursday asking if I would have any trouble having the renderings done by saturday.... By 9 o'clock that night, she sent me most of the design 'sketches', lighting, & materials, but not all of them. There was no way I could have done them by saturday! So, at that point, the deadline was undetermined. I worked all weekend on it and yesterday about 5:00 I got a call again....'hey tim, just checking to see if you will have the renderings done for fed-ex tomorrow.' At this point, I STILL don't have everything I need from her, so I get those sent over finally around 7 or 8. Then another call around 9...'oh, and can you make 3 sets on 13x19 paper?'....Sure no problem!

 

I stayed up until about 3:30 last night when I hit the render button. Although that was only the calc. pass and I still needed to re-size to do the final render. Unfortunately I overslept till about 8 this morning so I lost a few precious hours of rendering time. The 1st one is still rendering, so I'm going to have to cut some corners with the second if I want to get it done in time.

 

Its SO frustrating because this could have been such a great project for me, but I'm not really satisfied with how these are turning out.

 

But it didn't really help that these are my first interiors in about a year, and I've only done a couple before that. So its party my fault for not having enough experience under my belt. I just needed more time!!

 

I'm just glad my wife is patient with me when I sleep in my office.

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TWIN BROTHER? That's amazing! great story.

 

 

One of the most aggravating one I have had happen a few times was:

 

 

he “That is not the same color as the swatch I gave you”

 

me - “The color is outside and has exterior lighting on it”.

 

he - “I want it to look like my swatch”

 

me- “You want the color to look like it does inside under fluorescent lights not how it would look in the sun”

 

he- “Correct”

 

Proof that saturation of colors can change with viewers intelligence.

 

 

Another one that I had and this was really weird. The client at first wanted a complete house, then they thought it might be too much so I suggested close up views on defining features of the house, entry way, special details, pond, stuff like that.

The rep said, “why would I pay you to do that when we could just go out and take a picture of someone’s pond?”

 

Interesting point :()

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The ‘time-equals-money’ maxim causes friction...He asked how long the images would take to produce and I said ‘well, about 6 days’. His immediate reaction: ‘Can you do it in three?!’

 

If you could, it would take six days worth of your time and a lot of coffee (which reminds me, I must go make some). Being honest, one should bill for the rush. Time IS money. The question is whose time, whose money?

 

In my final telephone conversation with him (obviously sick of me calling) he actually pretended to be his twin brother!!

 

On one of my earliest jobs I had a similar experience--calling, calling for months for my pay, finally on a call his secretary answered, she asked who was calling, I actually heard the guy in the background say 'tell him I'm not here'.

 

That guy is now a 'big and famous' architect. Jerk. Later my evil stepmother went to work for him as a receptionist. I'm sure she had no trouble putting off starving artists to whom Mr. 'isometric house' owed money. Jerk.

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...we got to the subject of costs and I told him what my day-rate was.

 

My question is, why not hourly?

 

Why does it have to be done by a day rate, if I work 4 hours a day or 14, I want to get paid hourly. I guess you could only work the four, but then you would not get the job done. As EBIII said, time is money. Sorry, off topic. Chasing rabbits again.

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My latest "client comment" dealt with an animation path that I've been working on for a few days. I've sent him several preview animations showing the exact path with the clear understanding that once he is satisfied with the preview I would go ahead and render. After much debate we finally settled on a path and I rendered the animation which took several nights. Hoping to impress the client I had his animation ready several days before his big meeting and I decided to show it to him. Next Monday is the deadline and now I'm going to have to re-render the entire thing because he didn't like the path that only a few days before he had approved. I don't understand these people, how they were able to get to such important positions when they can't make up their minds to save their lives. It doesn’t' help that my bosses have become "yes men" and will basically do anything the client wants no matter how much overtime is involved. Just once I would like a client to actually listen to what I say, without trying to backtrack on a wrong decision they have made, or add twice the amount of work to a project and still expect to pay the same fee. Speaking of fee, for those of you who work in large or mid sized offices, do you find that your superiors undersell your services to clients just to get jobs?

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My latest "client comment" dealt with an animation path that I've been working on for a few days. I've sent him several preview animations showing the exact path with the clear understanding that once he is satisfied with the preview I would go ahead and render. After much debate we finally settled on a path and I rendered the animation which took several nights. Hoping to impress the client I had his animation ready several days before his big meeting and I decided to show it to him. Next Monday is the deadline and now I'm going to have to re-render the entire thing because he didn't like the path that only a few days before he had approved. I don't understand these people, how they were able to get to such important positions when they can't make up their minds to save their lives. It doesn’t' help that my bosses have become "yes men" and will basically do anything the client wants no matter how much overtime is involved. Just once I would like a client to actually listen to what I say, without trying to backtrack on a wrong decision they have made, or add twice the amount of work to a project and still expect to pay the same fee. Speaking of fee, for those of you who work in large or mid sized offices, do you find that your superiors undersell your services to clients just to get jobs?

it sounds like you work for a firm, so you are in a tight spot when it comes to playing by your rules. the only advice i offer is to not work extra hours to meet the deadline. even if it means not making that deadline by a day or two. by not meeting the deadline, you run the risk of looking bad, but you also enforce the point that if things change at the last minute, the time line will need to be extended. i run into the problem all the time where things are changing up until it gets sent out the door.

 

if you work on your own, it is important to have your contract set up so that when the client agrees on a path, it is then understood that you are moving ontot he next stage of the project, and that if you are required to go back to the previous stage, it will require additional hours that will be billed hourly. it is probably best to get the client to sign off on a stage when it is complete.

 

anyway, i don't mean to threadjack.

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Your right I do work for a firm, one that I thought understood the value of 3d but the more work I do, the more I believe they take it for granted. Don't get me wrong I love my job and I wouldn’t want to do anything else, but what makes me mad the most is when they impose these 2 or 3 day deadlines on me and I'm not able to do the quality of work that I know I can do. It's been going on so long that now if I get to work on a job longer than a few days I think I'm doing something wrong.

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