Finding talent within rendering

Students aren’t allowed to freelance?

Talvis posted a reference image above and if that is what he needs, then it is no problem getting this from a legally freelancing student.
Of course, he needs to find someone who can provide the service with the skills required and of course on a consistent basis, according to the contract.
As far as I understand, Travis needs a certain number of rendering done in a certain style. Sounds like a pretty simple project to me.
Why not then seek out the cheapest way to get the results he needs?

If we are talking about complex art direction, animation work and the like, that’s a different story…

I would have to disagree with this one. The budget and needs should fit the resource, i.e. I could do the renderings and provide the items you mentioned but I would be charging $150 per hour (perhaps overkill - - same as my professional job, if all i need is sketches done then im not going to a design firm that charges $150 and paying them high dollars when i can give the work to a student if i have access to them. I of course would talk with the professor and ask which student is reliable and make sure my project schedule would accommodate their availability. I have done this in the past and was extremely happy with the level of work and professionalism the student provided.

Chevis, you are a design professional that is willing to put in the time to guide the student. It really depends on who the client is. When I was leading the in house design team at Sound United I had two approaches. If the project was big enough and required a sustained resource, I would just hire someone in house. If the project was either a gap in available resources or a gap in skill sets but only a temporary thing, I would hire the best design firm possible, and they were charging a lot more than $150hr. More like $300-$400. And for that price what i was getting was full project management, and a guarantee that I could push them as hard as I needed.

I went out of house for renders a lot as well. I used xyz mainly: http://www.xyzgraphics.com Expect to pay $10k-$20k for a suite of excellent renderings that are super high res, use all of the right materials, and can work for print or web.

You always pay for quality. The question is do you want to pay for it once on the front end, or pay for it twice on the back end?

Those are great - and in terms of level of quality you can really tell where time went in. That work probably involved modeling in things like draft/part lines, weathering on the details, stitching etc. Those are things that often a complete remodel of the 3D usually in a traditional animation package, custom shaders to match the leather grain, etc.

Without the OP’s types of products hard to say who’s right or wrong. More importantly, if a $20k render will actually sell more product. I would argue @ 20K you might be better off building appearance models and paying a professional photographer depending on the type of product.

True, I typically recommend both. Depending on the complexity of the model, a good photo ready model from E-Proto or Image in Taiwan is going to cost $8k-$15k. Then hire a great photographer, at least $5k maybe $10k depending on the level of the photographer and the scenes you want shot, and you might be right back to $20k… but you get the model to show retailers and have at trade shows. That is why typically I recommend both. Yes it is $30k - $40k, but it is all part of doing business if you want to run with the big dogs. I can tell you based on experience that the budgets at the big valley and Asian tech companies are 10x that for one video shoot.

If it’s a simple product then like bepster mentioned, find a freelancer/student/professional whose style you like; maybe they already show a product very similar to yours on their portfolio so the job should be fairly straightforward.
However, it all depends on the types of shots you want, materials, environments and quality of the 3D model. I love it when people say, you just hit the render button and i’s done. Nobody talks about the hours/days cleaning up the 3D models, setting up the scenes, tweaking the materials, lighting, cameras, etc.
Cost will probably be all over the place depending on what you need and who you contact.

The problem with student freelancing is the software. If the student invests multiple thousands of dollars in commercially licensed software then no problem – more power to them. But if the student is 1/6 my hourly rate because they have nothing invested and no overhead then I have a problem and so should every professional designer who has purchased all the software, invested in the equipment to run it and the time to master it – all that is required to produce that beautiful rendering. Bepster, I’m sure that when you do independent work, outside of your employer, you use your own licensed software, your own equipment in your own space and you charge an appropriate rate. If a company that is in business to sell a product needs outside professional services they need to hire a professional. The alternative is for the business to HIRE a student as an intern and purchase the software, equipment and provide the space needed to produce that beautiful rendering – oh, wait, that costs more than hiring a professional.

It’s easy to throw around money if it’s not yours and that’s the path of least resistance. I’ve worked at smaller corporate gigs, medium sized brands, and start-up brands (working on launching my own right now), and can for sure say that there is more than one way to achieve a similar result.

I have no issues with hiring students. I have no issue with hiring professionals. I do think you get what you pay for. You need to clearly weigh your needs, your ability to manage/frame the project, your timelines, and the cost/benefit of the objectives. Some projects may be done at 1/4 the cost and good enough to not make a difference, others might be under a time pressure so you have no margin of error to experiment or try out a new resource.

…spending money because other people are spending money isn’t always the best answer nor does it always get you the best results though, in my experience. If you want to run with the big dogs you can’t beat them by trying to outspend them…

R

All good points Richard. We won multiple design awards over the years using touched up pre-production parts (send them out for painting and texturing and cleanup usually only costs a couple hundred bucks) and photography that usually only ran between $1500-5k for a 1-2 day shoot (depending on locations, models, etc, but stuff on white with a good lighting setup was never too prohibitive.)

If you’ve got an ultra high end brand image to maintain - I can certainly justify the dude who probably spent a week modeling those stitches, hand tweaking UV maps and getting just the right level of “puff” out of a foam earpiece.

But since we have no idea if the OP is making spinner toys or Bugatti’s hard to gauge the appropriate level of entry. But usually hiring a freelancer means you’re towards the low end since you don’t want a full agency cost overhead.

Again, you are an experienced design professional managing the process. You can project manage less experienced resources. What I gathered from the OP is that they are less than experienced in this area since they didn’t know where to even begin looking for rendering talent, so an experienced professional or agency is likely the way to go… from the little info provided.

I wound’t disagree. Someone not knowing what they are doing managing someone else who doesn’t know what they are doing is not a good recipe for success :slight_smile:

R

LOL, definitely not the winning formula :slight_smile:

When I was in house, I tried to do as much as possible in-house, preferring to hire in resources, even if I had to start them as an intern, knowing we could invest in the software. Sometimes an ask was too big, the timing too tight, or it was just a one off that I couldn’t justify in-sourcing for. In those cases I went outside and the ask was typically north of $50k… depending on what it was. If that happened more than once, it became an easy ask to in-source it.

Being a consultancy we do a lot of visualization work for our clients, specially for the aircraft industry. There is no cost efficient way to make prototypes at this scale so we rely heavily on renderings. Sending parts of the job out would be missed revenue and would slow us down quite a bit. Our clients often request renderings during the bidding process which I’m sure sets them apart and helps paint a better picture of their proposal. The key is always model quality, data management, lighting and material accuracy…it’s hard lighting the inside of a tube.

Would never argue with the cost of professionals for work like this (especially since planes are much closer in requirements to arch-viz then product rendering). But you missed the FBI agent’s dragging the passengers off the plane for that last 5% of realism. :laughing:

Based on OP’s post of “Lifestyle technology products” and renderings of a tablet I was imagining more of the need for simple, hard products on solid color type work.

Wow, definitely. This is impressive work and requires a special skillset as well as equipment.
I was also under the impression the OP has much simpler needs.
But without more info, who is to say?

Just as a reference where some recent grads and students are today, I bookmarked Dustin Lee.

I have never met or know Dustin and don’t know if he does freelance but in terms of output, it’s pretty close to the extent what can be done with keyshot/PS, I’d say.
After this, I’d also recommend a specialist with special software or agency.

We are using XYZ as well, along some other but are also building our in house capabilities.
Doing stuff inhouse has so many advantages. Especially when it comes to convey the feel, brand values and intent of the product.
Here at Logitech, the Industrial designers do the vis and render-work for pretty much all internal comms, then the render experts take over for consumer facing work, using the ID renders as starting points.

That is how I transitioned it as well. Once I was spending a regular large amount with XYZ over a period of years, I was able to use that to get a budget for remote render towers and more equipment and we moved it in house.

Now that I’m back on the consulting side full time I know my engagements take 3 shapes 1) building up design enough for a company to in house it 2) extending an in house team’s resources or 3) my favorite, tacking an difficult advance project an in house team doesn’t have time for… a rendering house operates in kind of the same way.

Yeah, I went on a tangent based on the other comments.

Mike. Funny you mention the FBI incident. The video shows an older seat and the famous armest security guards couldn’t lift. Over they years we were tasked with retrofitting this seat and eventually redesigning it. Funny how all I could see what the armrest.

Yes. The OP mentioned simpler, stand alone projects. Simple to render. The hard part will be finding the right person with the right style (art direction) to do it right and consistently over time…someone like Bepster showed.

These were done using Bunkspeed now Solidworks Visualize Professional. The only reason why we didn’t stick with Keyshot back in the day was lighting capabilities.

I love Keyshot for the quick stuff, but for really punchy stuff V Ray just seems to really nail it.

You think that because most people use canned keyshot shaders and settings which inevitably leads to the typical keyshot look. If you would set up your shaders and your lighting from scratch and with knowledge about rendering like you have to do it in Vray you would probably get very similar results to Vray. That pros use Vray is usually not because keyshot is lacking rendering capabilities, is is mostly due to other reasons (workflow, features, etc.).
It is like saying KIA engineers are not as talented and hard working as Porsche engineers because their cars don’t drive as fast.

Besides, what sets an okay render apart from a really great render is usually not a rendering software but good old Photoshop :wink:

This is true, too. I have to stress this to students when their renders come out a bit dull and flat and ask why it’s not like examples they see online.