Even a Brick...

[Hiraghm]

Finally finished my latest project. Took about 4 days total, but most of that was rendering the huge bitmaps. I probably spent 10-12 hours in Lightwave and another 8 or 9 in Aura, plus about 30 hours rendering time.

[Hiraghm]

My family have been masons (the trade, not the club) for 5 generations. My late father knew just about all of the contractors and masonry suppliers in town. He was especially liked by the people at Trinity Brick Company.

About 3 years ago, I went into their offices with him, and about everyone there greeted him enthusiastically by name, and one secretary gave him a big hug. About 6 months later he died of colon cancer. I remembered, and have ever since wanted to show my appreciation for their affection...

Some years before this, a movie came out called, "Indecent Proposal", in which Woody Harrelson portrayed an architect who lost his wife to Robert Redford, and began teaching an architecture class. While the movie stank, that scene stuck with me ever since; because he gave a slide show, and told his students the quote by Louis Kahn, "Even a brick wants to be something." He held up a brick, and showed slides of great buildings, and repeated it in different ways... "Even a common, ordinary brick wants to be something... to be something more than it is... it aspires.." and so on.

Well, you can put the two together. I remembered the quote, and one of the first projects I put on my whiteboard to someday do, was to make a poster of a brick aspiring to be a skyscraper.

Tomorrow I'll present the poster to the head salesman at Trinity, with my appreciation.

[legomanww]

That's great that you're doing that. It'll be nice as a poster. Good Job.

[drclare]

Yeah, that looks great. Nice design work. And it will looks great really big!

[Hiraghm]

Thanks legomanww and drclare, for the nice comments!

The 8 or 9 hours in aura were because I did about 20 versions of the final composited image, trying to get that look, and aura kept hitting out of memory errors (with 1.5 gig of ram, I wasn't amused.) So I had to find creative ways to keep the high resolution while compositing the two images (building and brick) and then adding the atmospheric effect.

I learned a lot about LW and Aura, so it was time well spent.

Lessee.. if this were a for-pay job...

25 rendering hours @ 25/hr = $625
18 editing hours @ 100/hr = $1,800
Total = $2425.

Which is a completely unreasonable price for that.
Even at 25/hr for editing, it comes to $1025. Still too much.

Even if I grant the editing hours for free, the rendering time can't be improved, much. Say I can cut the rendering time down to 20 hours (by tweaking volumetrics, etc), and the price per hour to $10 for rendering... that's $200. Now we're in the realm of reasonable. Then say I just charge for the LW time, and stay at $10/hr... that brings the total to $320, or about what such a painting might fetch.

Is my logic screwed up here? Did I take too long to create the image? Or is my estimation of "reasonable" pricing wrong? Or would I lose my hat if this had been a paying job?

[Zarathustra]

I'm REALLY confused by your times and what's going on.
What's the final size of the poster?
Volumetrics?
Why compositing in Aura instead of Photoshop?
What exactly do you mean by "editing time"?
25 hours?

Rendering:
Radiosity? That'll drive it up, though it doesn't look like you did that (hard to tell on small image). Could try Overcaster.
Did you have the windows REALLY reflect? I'd just map an image on for a still.
Volumetrics?

Photoshop:
You could cheat DOF with a directional blur on a feathered selection or the blur tool.
Whatever cloud volumetrics would be better painted in Photoshop (even cloning from a cloud photo).
The transition to marry the 2 images I would think would be a painting matter.

Pricing:
Generally, any time to model, texture, light and animate is one fee.
Rendering I split into on and off hour rate.
Editing? VIDEO editing might claim $100+, but what you're doing would fall into a design fee.
There SHOULD be a fee for conceptualizing, but then again there should be universal health care, right?

Bottomline, you ALWAYS eat most of the time. That's the nature of the beast because you want everything to be the best it can. Best advise is to quickly add up how much time it would take you, do the math and then take a knife to the total - how much you cut off is up to you.
I worked 6 weeks straight on a dvd. Do you think I recouped EVERY hour? No. I knew I'd be busy for 6 weeks and I'd have portfolio material so out came the BIG knife.

The other reason you use the knife is because clients are stupid and may not be able to tell the difference between gold and s h i t. So, you spin them gold for a modest to decent price so you get the job and hope that if they ever try anyone else (because they're cheaper) that they'll realize your work was way better. Of course some clients care more about the difference in price then between gold and s h i t. Not much you can do about that.

So how much is it going to cost you to have this poster printed? Sometimes you can go to a smaller shop with a brochure from Kinko's and see if they'll beat their price. Those guys hate Kinko's.

[Hiraghm]

In the orignal rendering of the building, I used volumetric fog, which slowed things way down, and wasn't really necessary. Yeah, I used a reflection map for the windows. I guess for the look I was going for I could have used image maps. No radiosity.
The building took about 24 hours, the brick was under an hour.

Final size ended up being an 8 x 10. I wanted to do an 8" x 10" print to see how it would look before doing a 3' x 5', and after all the time and difficulties I decided that 8 x 10 would have to do.

The DoF and painting matte I did in Aura. Why Aura? I have Aura and I don't have PS. And I like using Aura.

By editing I meant modelling, texturing, basically everything I did in LW other than rendering.

Actually, I printed the darn test render out on an old Canon 4304 printer; I found some photopaper in my paper drawer that I didn't know I had, so for giggles I used that (actually I figured it'd give me a better idea of how the final print would turn out). Turned out so nice, I decided I didn't need Kinkos. Put it in a frame I already had, and basically got off for the price of my time.
They seemed to really like it when I took it in to them, too.

Thanks for the hard questions and comments, Zar. A little embarassing, but I can't change whatever I do wrong without knowing I'm doing / not-doing it. What you said about eating the time is good to hear, because that's what I figured I would have had to do, had it been for pay.

[lone]

while 2425.00 certainly sounds high, i'd say that 320.00 definitely sounds way, way low. 4 days is almost a week - 320.00 for a weeks work (before taxes) = kibbles and bits for dinner.

nice work - cool idea.