Arch Viz in Bulk

[jessestormer]

Hello,

 

I have a client who is seeking to have a significant Arch Viz project completed: Digital walkthroughs for hundreds of homes. This will involve beginning with a basic 3D CAD drawing, texturing, populating with furniture, lighting, and rendering. We aren't concerned about rendering because we have a farm, but what does concern us is how to turn around hundreds of home CAD drawings with all of these steps in any sort of logical time period?

 

Does anyone have any idea of some kind of batch processes can help through the workflow for project like this? Is there some sort of automation tool that can help us to make leaps and bounds of progress without 100% manual labor?

 

By my estimates, if they need 400 homes - with a team of 5, and each person completes a home every two days... it could easily take a team of five people: six months. That's IF they can knock out one every two days.

 

Any help is appreciated!

[Zdravko Barisic]

1. Do you work both exterior/interior, or only interior shots?

2. What kind of architecture are the houses? Could you post anything? That would maybe help for finding the solution a lot.

Hm....thinking still...

[aristocratic3d]

Outsource part of the project! I have a team of four member here.

[Justin Hunt]

Are all 400 houses unique? 2 days per house is generous you probably could do each in a day once you work out an acceptable level of detail. I bought you will need a very high level of detail for everything.

[John Dollus]

There are companies that specialize in this for good reason. It takes an efficient pipeline and significant resources to pull this off. I am sure the client also has a design center and will want some variation among the homes as well. Some with Kitchen A, some with finish package D etc.

It's also likely they will want different furniture in the homes as well so altering those will take some time to fit the various spaces.

[jessestormer]

Thanks for all the response,

 

Yes, all of the houses would be unique. There will be no exterior (so far... I hope), only interior.

Here are some early renders of what we are trying to accomplish:

 

As you can see, our big time suck is going to be the steps between .dwg format, texturing, and populating with furniture. Lighting and anything seen out of the windows will be default and the same on all houses.

 

Thanks for the input, I was dreaming that maybe there's some sort of magical 'auto furniture popular', I should know better.

[Nicolai Bongard]

This might be obvious but: The architects probably have some idea of how many different kitchens and bedrooms and whatnot there are in the project. Then you should make seperate max files with kitchen a, b and c, etc and perhaps some variations of those (different colors, clutter etc if required), and save them with names that makes sense for you. You should organize a document with what type of kitchen, bedroom, bathroom etc each house has, for easy reference. That way, when you have created one of the houses and textured it, it should just be a matter of merging the files of the furniture and place them, as they allready have textures. You could also make seperate files for common items such as doors (open and closed), and windows. Also, for your convenience, you could make a maxstart file with camera and render setup and whatever lights/hdri`s you need, so that every time you start a new file to create one of your houses, you allready have that set up. If you are making animation you just need to edit some splines probably to fit the path you wish to take through the different houses. Also make a material file with the general textures for the houses (flooring, wall finishes etc) so that you have easy access to it across all houses, and it will save some time in setting them up every time, and make sure that the look is consistent. Also, for your materials you should make them real world sized, so that you (most of the time) can get away with applying the texture to an object and add an UWVmap modifier with box mapping and real world size. This might all be pretty obvious, but it is stuff worth remembering as it should speed up your workflow, at least a bit.

[aristocratic3d]

I would definitely prepare some modular system. so that I can use after some easy modification.

[aristocratic3d]

I would request client to give all the plans together if possible. I would separate models based upon similarity and there are some other technique that one develops from his experience and those can be unique.