Cv19

[Tommy L]

Hi,

I don't hang out here as much as I used to. I logged in expecting to see a lot of chatter about the current events.

Anyone have any studio insights? We've vacated the office and everyone's taken their workstations home. Took 3 days to figure out the logistics! We have always been a company that works entirely in the studio. Im not a fan of people taking their work home, I like the work/life separation.

Whats everyone else doing?

Seeing any drop-off in demand?

Speculations and doom for the future not really my question here, more the today-and-next-week experience....

Tom.

[Scott Schroeder]

So far, our workload has remained the same. I suspect that will change if construction sites are the next thing to get shut down, but I haven't heard of any just yet. It seems that any project that has a deadline in the next 30 days is at risk for delays or push back. A project that is 3-6 months out, that is still going full speed ahead.

 

Firm wide we are all working from home, but we've had a mobile culture for a while. It wasn't too much extra work to get people to work from home as we all have laptops. As to be expected with everyone working remotely, there were some small bumps along the way to get licenses and connectivity back to the main offices. For the rendering teams, asset transfer has probably been the bigger issue as we're trying to avoid unnecessary internet/intranet congestion when at all possible.

 

The uncertainty of this whole situation is probably worse than the virus itself for most people. At least with 2008, you knew what you had to do. With a natural disaster, you know you can start to rebuild once it is over. There is a recovery timeline. With this, the timeline is either in 21 days or ???

[John Dollus]

No drop off in demand but projects being pushed back by 3-5 days or so while others make accommodations. I'm an introverted gypsy so kinda fine on my end. I just opened up my home to a couple coworkers since I have a much better fiber pipe here and we have a sorta co-working space setup. For Max, we have checked out licenses so it doesn't have to pull from the office server.

[Francisco Penaloza]

My situation is similar to Scott's, hour company its been moving to 'flex workstation' for a while, now we are about 90% workforce working from home. Now we also do site visits and partnering with construction projects so those are the complex one to figure out for Architectural companies.

 

 

 

 

Our projects have long time frames that helps substantially, but we are all aware that budgets are behind demised or stopped in several cities now so we need to wait and see how that will affect future projects.

Personally I am working from Home, we did HDD backups of our server and share a copy to each one of our team to access our assets mostly.

Software licensing that is sort of a issue, we VPN to get some licenses, Other software have a cloud system that really help in this situation, I guess after this most companies will adopt this system.

 

 

Now what is concerning to me is for Architecture things will change for sure, design can be done in many ways, but clients meetings, presentation, competitions construction, it is very face to face situation, I don't know how that will evolve with this 'new reality'

some companies are talking about two weeks of isolation others a couple of month, personally I don't see any solutions until a year or more, when they finally get a vaccine so we can deal better with this virus.

[Jeff Mottle]

This feels like eons ago but here is last week's news: http://www.cgarchitect.com/2020/03/covid-19-and-the-arch-viz-industry-march-16-2020-upate I'll be pushnig out another update this weekend.

[Justin Hunt]

Sadly the turmoil hit the company I was working for, a large multi-national architectural firm, really hard. Within a few hours many projects got put on hold indefiniterly.

 

I got retrenched on Friday after 15 years at the company.

 

This is going to hurt, but I am not going to let it get me down. I have already started the search for new oportunities, dusting off my portfolio and re-invigorating my freelancing.

 

Good luck to everyoe out there , keep safe and healthy

[Tommy L]

Sadly the turmoil hit the company I was working for, a large multi-national architectural firm, really hard. Within a few hours many projects got put on hold indefiniterly.

 

I got retrenched on Friday after 15 years at the company.

 

This is going to hurt, but I am not going to let it get me down. I have already started the search for new oportunities, dusting off my portfolio and re-invigorating my freelancing.

 

Good luck to everyoe out there , keep safe and healthy

 

Thats dreadful Justin, best of luck finding your feet and finding work.

[Chris MacDonald]

I've had/am just getting over CV19 (though unconfirmed, as the UK isn't testing anything but the most severe cases) and it's pretty damn miserable, and I had it mild compared to most!

 

I've seen our workload in the short term increase a little, but long term it's looking quite uncertain. I'm part of an architectural practice and we've already seen a couple of very large projects go on hold until things calm down a little.

 

How are you guys in America coping with/finding Trumps way of dealing with this?

[Scott Schroeder]

How are you guys in America coping with/finding Trumps way of dealing with this?

 

Glad to hear you are recovering! Our testing is woefully inadequate here in the US as well.

 

Here in the state of Michigan, event though there is a stay at home order for the entire state, they have classified all of the liquor and marijuana stores as essential businesses. So we have that going for us.

 

For me, I am avoiding the news as much as possible and not watching the Current Occupant of the White House's daily press talks as they are filled with so much misinformation it is sickening. Some areas in the US are not even broadcasting them because they are nothing but lies. Thankfully we have fairly decent state and local leadership here in Michigan, so that is what most states are doing. They are leading from the state and local level while the Federal level just does nothing.

 

The President of the United States used to be a position that stood for something, it is crazy how that has fallen in the last 3 years.

[Devin Johnston]

Let's not turn this into a political bashing thread.

[John Dollus]

.

 

How are you guys in America coping with/finding Trumps way of dealing with this?

 

The cities are pretty much are on their own around here. Each governing county has different guidelines/proclamations so it's a bit confusing. Some have restaurants open and others have everything closed up except for life-sustaining businesses with a mix of in-between all within only a few kilometers of each other.

As a staunch introvert, I pretty much self-quarantine all the time so it hasn't impacted me much at all except I save a lot of time and fuel now that I don't have to go into the office to do what I could do from my living room anyway. Makes me wonder if this will stop the 'open office' style of design? desks have been getting smaller and smaller with people crammed closer and closer for years now.

[Lewis Garrison]

Me and my team started working from home last week. We've always remoted in to our computers at work in the past, but it was always just to do small quick stuff over the weekend or at night. Nothing to this level where we're doing everything remote. Our work load hasn't slowed down so it's a bit stressful getting used to the workflow of things. We each have powerful computers at home but our servers are in the studio so we have to remote in. I was trying to avoid copying the entire server and distributing it to the team however it might come down to that. We're still hitting our deadlines thankfully but it can be quite frustrating at times not being together in the office. Stay healthy out there everyone!

[Tommy L]

Me and my team started working from home last week. We've always remoted in to our computers at work in the past, but it was always just to do small quick stuff over the weekend or at night. Nothing to this level where we're doing everything remote. Our work load hasn't slowed down so it's a bit stressful getting used to the workflow of things. We each have powerful computers at home but our servers are in the studio so we have to remote in. I was trying to avoid copying the entire server and distributing it to the team however it might come down to that. We're still hitting our deadlines thankfully but it can be quite frustrating at times not being together in the office. Stay healthy out there everyone!

 

Lewis! Hows are you old pal?

this touches on something Ive been wondering....

A lot of peoples version of 'working from home' is to screencast their workstation (LogMeIn, Teamviewer and such). Our situation demanded more. We were about to move to a new studio. So I figured we needed to de-centralize completely. I put extra drive in all workstations, installed Dropbox, let the job files sync to the workstations. Our asset library is huge, so Ive taken that home. Staff are all on fast enough machines to render locally.

So Im manager/artist/librarian. The guys are all carrying on as normal. Its pretty seamless.

So what are people doing? Logging in remotely or working locally at home?

[Lewis Garrison]

Ay Tom! We're doing a mix of both. We use VPN and Splash top to log into our machines at work. Each of us has 2 machines in the studio. But we do as much from our home machines as possible transferring files through Dropbox.

 

I doubt the open office design will go away anytime soon. But I do think the "hoteling" concept will become more popular. It's where you aren't assigned to a desk and are free to take your laptop to any work station or couch or bar stool etc. for the day. Cramming in desks will become less popular and we'll see offices with varieties of open space with phone rooms and huddle rooms for private work situations. I'm already seeing it in the forward thinking office spaces me and my team render.

[Scott Schroeder]

I really hope the concept of hoteling in an office doesn't take hold. One of our studios tried it and pretty much the entire studio hates the concept. Anyone who visits that studio, hates the concept. I had to work there for a few days and I didn't like it either. People are trying to camp at their spaces so they have at least a small sense of ownership in the office. No one has the ability to put pictures of family, dogs, etc on their desks because the desk isn't theirs on a daily basis. Even something as simple as finding a pen is a giant pain in the ass as again, you have no sense of space. You need to be a pack mule every morning as you unpack your stuff. The hoteling concept tried in that studio went over so badly, that firm wide no one else has adopted it. Maybe for an office outside of our practice it may work better. But with prints, material samples, mark-ups, etc. That needs to be packed and unpacked each night and morning as you move desks every day.

 

It'll be interesting to see if there is a shift in office design after this is all over. I know we are actively looking at it as all of our studios are open floor plans. All of the research in the past has pointed to the open office plan for being great for collaboration but poor for productivity. The older cubicle style plan is poor for collaboration but better for productivity. The fact that in the open office floor plan viruses can rip through faster than in the older cubicle style may shift things to a hybrid of the two layouts.

[Larissa Holderness]

Scott - My previous employer does this. Everyone has a locker, and at the end of the day you put your plastic ikea box of items (pencils, your mouse, whatever) into it. The next day, you sit somewhere completely different. Luckily, I had a PC and not a laptop so, I couldn't do this.

[Scott Dombrowski]

I'm at an A/E firm where a majority of our work is city/state/federal government work. I don't have visibility to all of the projects the company has going on, but none of the projects I'm involved with have slowed down (yet).

 

My team took their computers home and we're working remotely. Others in the firm are using remote desktop to work from home. My team tried that, but we were not able to get Sketchup or Enscape to work over a remote connection without jumping through a lot of hoops. The downside to working remotely is that we're having some bandwidth issues with the VPN. We've synced our 3D project files to our local computers and back everything up to the network at night, but getting updated Revit files and CADD files from the architects and engineers during the day can be slow. Other than that, it's been seamless.

 

Beyond those bandwidth issues, working from home has been pretty great. I keep in touch with coworkers via Skype and text, and it's nice to see more of my family even if I'm tucked away in the home office most of the day. At least now they know that the rare occasions I'm working late on a project, I really am working late on a project and not gallivanting around town. I think they had doubts before.

[Tommy L]

I'm at an A/E firm where a majority of our work is city/state/federal government work. I don't have visibility to all of the projects the company has going on, but none of the projects I'm involved with have slowed down (yet).

 

My team took their computers home and we're working remotely. Others in the firm are using remote desktop to work from home. My team tried that, but we were not able to get Sketchup or Enscape to work over a remote connection without jumping through a lot of hoops. The downside to working remotely is that we're having some bandwidth issues with the VPN. We've synced our 3D project files to our local computers and back everything up to the network at night, but getting updated Revit files and CADD files from the architects and engineers during the day can be slow. Other than that, it's been seamless.

 

Beyond those bandwidth issues, working from home has been pretty great. I keep in touch with coworkers via Skype and text, and it's nice to see more of my family even if I'm tucked away in the home office most of the day. At least now they know that the rare occasions I'm working late on a project, I really am working late on a project and not gallivanting around town. I think they had doubts before.

 

With the next federal stimulus focusing on infrastructure, you may find you're even busier tham before Covid19

[Valtiel]

Hey folks. I haven't been around in ages (I ended up doing a degree in urban planning instead of jumping into archviz). My employment's been compromised, to put it simply. I found my way back here with all the extra indoor-time I have and planning my exit strategy once Autodesk denies me an activation on my old Max license. For now, I've got my machine crunching away on Folding @ Home COVID-19 therapy simulations.

 

Good to see the forums alive and everyone doing fairly well and mostly employed.

[blogcaodep]

we all try to get through this time

[Chris MacDonald]

Just a small update on my situation.

My team (except me, being the manager of the team) has been furloughed, so I'm now handling all 3D work. Due to the almost instantaneous (and personally, I think shortsighted) decision by many developers to put their projects on hold our workload has dropped off significantly enough to warrant putting large parts of the practice on furlough. Aside from concerns about the future of the economy/my job, I've been enjoying working from home...

Around 9 months ago I switched to a laptop workstation, which instantly highlighted the fact that for me to work from home I needed to sync our 3D models/texture assets from our server instead of trying to pull tens of gigabytes over my crappy internet connection. I've used Windows Sync Centre to achieve this and aside from one random hiccup where a lot of tiles were duplicated, it's been working fine for months. That said; it is only me using it and I can imagine if a whole team were, it'd be a bit of a nightmare.

I've been enjoying my more creative freedom when working on images! I hadn't realised just how often people come to my desk and look at a half finished image (which then scares them) and begin making changes. I've been sending images out with much more interesting lighting, shading, post production, etc than I normally would and people are loving it!

My home setup has always been quite a robust one; because I produce music in my spare time - so I've got a full office setup ready to go, whereas many of my colleagues are struggling to work from their kitchen tables.

I've done more DIY and gardening than ever before, I'm not getting stuck in rush hour traffic every day, I'm working hours that suit me, I'm spending LOADS more time with my wife and dog. Aside from missing socialising with my family and friends, and going to pubs... I am actually really enjoying everything. Once normality is restored I may ask my employer if I can work a day or two a week from home as it's been so successful.

[heni30]

Being in an airport store development niche forever, things have come to a screeching halt as is to be expected.  Luckily main client has decided to go ahead with up one last multi rendering project so thankfully we are pretty busy for the moment.  I've always worked from my home studio. I've enjoyed the intermittent periods that I have worked on site just to get out and have some different stimulation.  Having a balance would be ideal.

 

[Scott Schroeder]

We're in the same boat as everyone. It feels like we are busier than ever, but our overall revenue is way down.I suspect that if things don't improve we could see a bottom out of incoming work by the end of May when this current phase finally ends.

It's funny that quality renderings are now more important than ever, but they are the first line items to get cut. Even though on an average project the renderings are less than 1% of the overall building cost.

The one downside is that when my 3 year old was coloring next to me on a conference call, I snuck out a silent but deadly fart. And of course, as soon as my mic was unmuted she says loudly, "You farted! It's so stinky!"

[Karl Larsen]

16 hours ago, VelvetElvis said:

It's funny that quality renderings are now more important than ever, but they are the first line items to get cut. Even though on an average project the renderings are less than 1% of the overall building cost.

I've been in my business (construction document production) for 35-years and here is what I have learned: It's a Walmart world, to my utter a complete horror.

[Marco Manunta]

On 4/28/2020 at 12:06 AM, VelvetElvis said:

The one downside is that when my 3 year old was coloring next to me on a conference call, I snuck out a silent but deadly fart. And of course, as soon as my mic was unmuted she says loudly, "You farted! It's so stinky!"

oh my god you killed me!!! lol !!! :D :D