Neoscape on the state of the Archviz Industry
Mar 29, 2012 by CGP Staff
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Neoscape’s main focus has been architectural visualization, but you’re now also producing other type of work. Please tell us more about this.
We focus primarily on architectural visualization, but we do take work outside of our traditional strengths when opportunity arises. We have corporate clients that have become some of our biggest clients, but for the most part what we create for them is very similar to the work for our traditional clients. We have also expanded the range of services that we offer to our core clients. Clients that may have in the past only thought of us for architectural visualization, now ask us to create and develop multifaceted marketing assets that include photography, branding and design, as well as interactive presentations, mobile apps, and web design. We have been getting much more involved in iOS development, which we target towards our core audience, although there is no reason that what we create couldn’t be used outside our normal circles. We tend to follow the philosophy of “new services to old clients and old services to new clients.”What are your thoughts on the amount of work being outsourced to large studios in other countries? Has this negatively affected the industry?
As the architectural visualization industry developed over the years, we started to see more and more people creating digital visualizations. The software got better—faster and easier to use—prompting the emergence of many more studios capable of producing “renderings”. This evolution applied as well to many architectural firms who began to rely on their own artists for 3D viz. This shift definitely made a dent in the industry and, as expected, competition grew and prices shifted. Outsourcing became just one more part of that process. Now we find that more and more clients who tried outsourcing are coming back to us not only because of the lower quality of work, but also because of the “brain damage” from working with these facilities. So, has it affected the industry negatively? Perhaps at some level. But even though the shift was inevitable, clients noticed the big difference in service and quality of work—both of which they grew to miss, prompting a return to smaller agencies. Now, a lot of these outsource studios are taking on work that doesn’t require the level of detail or the investment to create what is needed for a particular delivery.Has Neoscape taken on any real-time rendering technology?
No, we have been asked by some of our clients to use this technology to advertise their products, but that has been the only instance (aside from Unreal Engine way back when) where we have actually used a real-time unbiased render engine for production of still imagery. The technology has a lot of potential but is not there yet –at least not for the way we do things right now. We think once GPUs become cheaper and faster this could be something used every day to preview, manipulate light and materials with real-time feedback, and even create interactive applications where you can move things around and design.What is Neoscape’s go to software combination?
3ds Max, Photoshop, After Effects, and Final Cut are our work horses, but there are many other programs we use for particular tasks: PFTrack, RealFlow, Mocha, Adobe Creative Suite, etc.Does Neoscape rely on any key plugins or scripts on a daily basis?
Plug-ins are something of a double-edged sword. We are very careful when and how we use them. Plug-ins need to pass a series of tests amongst production and our Technical Director before we use them. Basically, we’ll use a plug-in if we think it will consistently save time and money. To give you an example, one plug-in we just got recently (and that we use a lot) is “Forest Pack”. Of course, the great help it provides doesn’t come without its pains. We’ve found along the way that not only are there kinks, but there are quite simply limitations to its use. We also write our own “plug-in” scripts to tackle otherwise boring and repetitive tasks.How much time do you dedicate to the different parts of the CG process in a given project?
Modeling, texturing, and lighting go hand-in-hand, so I would give them on average the same amount of time. As for compositing, we end up giving our film team very little time to put things together (sometimes just a day or two). Ideally, we’d like to give them more time, but in the process of accommodating our clients’ last-minute requirements and short deadlines, we end up having to eat into our own schedule. And, as always happens, the guys at the end of the process are the ones that suffer. In an ideal scenario, we would devote a reasonable and equal amount of time to all tasks in this order: modeling, lights and materials, compositing/editing, and color correction.