Neoscape on the state of the Archviz Industry
How did the company grow through the years, what were the key factors in stimulating this continued growth?
Sales volume was a key to growing the business. In the beginning, our growth was about adding more 3D artists, animators and account execs. Eventually, we expanded our service offerings to include interactive, design and branding, which required artists with new and varied skill sets.At its largest, how many people big is the production studio? How many projects are handled at the same time on average?
At its largest, the studio was about 60 people. We are now 55 people split between two offices – 40+ in Boston and 10 in NYC. The number of projects is variable and ranges anywhere from 20 to 30 of varying sizes and durations.You founded Neoscape in 1995, and prior to that had been working on CG visualization for a number of years. How has the architectural visualization industry changed through these years? How has the profession of CG artists in Archviz evolved?
We’ve seen a large number of changes in the industry over the years: Photoreal Vs Art, GI, unbiased rendering, render engine battles, etc. The evolution of the profession has expressed itself in many ways: technically, artistically, and in industry maturity. Technically, the hardware has evolved in every way. The computing power available now greatly outstrips anything available when we started in 1995, an expected and predictable growth. The software and techniques also have evolved—often in more unexpected ways. The ability for massive scenes, (almost) unlimited polygons, global illumination, distributed rendering, 3d capabilities in compositing applications…the list goes on and on. Artistically, the profession has evolved as well, taking its cues from more established media such as traditional architectural illustration, architectural photography, filmmaking, fashion, product rendering, etc. This evolution is evident in high levels of work. Photo-real is only the starting point of a good rendering—artistic considerations like composition, subject matter, perspective, visual balance, contrast, color, and coincident line consideration (among others) all make a successful rendering. The most interesting evolution is the way in which the entire industry has matured. The profession has gone from rare, specialized, and esoteric to mainstream. Only in the last few years are there education paths for students to enter into the profession. It is now customary and expected that some sort of CG is created for large developments, for everything from conceptual design through to marketing materials. The profession is respected, and the artists are seen as much more than “button pushers.” Just like a great camera can’t make a great photographer, good software and computers can’t make a great CG artist. Artistic talent, eye, experience and thirst for excellence generally trump technical knowledge—all of which are necessary to get ahead in the industry today.Neoscape has added green screen filming capabilities to the studio, due to its frequent need to incorporate live characters into visualization projects
How has the production process at Neoscape changed through the years?
In a nutshell: deadlines are shorter, and clients are less and less easily impressed. As a result, we have now come full circle to give new value to the product: artistry. Marketing value as such is no longer about a rendering looking like something or looking real. Architectural rendering before CG was pure art, then it became gimmicky, and now it’s time we make it art again.What is the largest project Neoscape has done to date?
We’ve completed many large-scale projects both in scope and size, but the one that came as a surprise for all of us at the time was a huge project for Callison in the Middle East, “Marsa Al Seef.” Like many of the projects being built in that area, the existing site was ocean, and developers were going to pump sand to make land for it. Marsa Al Seef was made up of more than 100 buildings, each about 40 to 50 stories high, plus two iconic towers and villas. This was a city from scratch. At the time, we weren’t sure how we were going to render all of these buildings—we didn’t know if the render farm could handle it, or how the process of building the whole city would work since there was very little design for the buildings. We created mostly everything from sketches we received from the architect. Back then, we didn’t have a plug-in to manage high-density landscaping or big volumes of polygons. We simply had to come up with some creative ways of putting this city together with some fake GI and a lot of faith that it would render. We ended up producing a 5-minute animation and 10 renderings. It was a huge learning experience for all of us. Large projects don’t seem nearly as daunting after Marsa Al Seef.