I don’t dislike Architecture and 3D I dislike the BS you have to put up with from clients for what you get paid. I work from 6:00 AM til 9:00 PM most days, and don’t make much these days. I also left a big corporate firm to freelance, another mistake for me personally. Some people do quite well on their own, I was better off at a large company.
I don’t know what to tell you, for everyone it’s different as to what makes them happy.
That’s fine, just interested to get some background info to your earlier post… it is pretty amazing what people think of what we do, one guy in my firm refers to it as pressing the ‘render button’ in order to produce a visualisation, that was until he did a little 3D and was out of his seat every couple of minutes with a question!
Yeah, I know! I get clients all the time that want a full animation for nothing! You can’t explain it to them either because they get lost soon as you say something like “I have to uv map everything and lightmap it too.”
If you don’t like arch-viz or computer science (to a certain extent) you’re not going to be happy in this field. It’s a lot of work. I guess I’ve found something I truly enjoy since I’ve been learning this stuff for about 2 years now. I’m putting around 5 hours a day, everyday, on 3d stuff and I’m not even payed for it… yet! Thankfully my other ‘‘job’’ gives me more free time than I know what to do with it!
You have to expand your services to include animation, motion graphics, modeling, graphic design, etc. To get anywhere you have to have the abilities as a visual effects artist capable of working in the Game, Movie, or Architectural industries. Limiting services to Architectural is very narrow - Architects pay nothing 3D services because their fees are so limited.
The money is going to be in Advertising and Marketing - go to developers and people who need help with product marketing.
The only hope of staying with the ArchViz industry is if Oculus VR takes-off. Then there will be the need for people good in UE.
I agree that the money is in advertising and marketing but you can focus on architecture nonetheless. I understand architects alone may not have the budget for rendering but their clients might have it tho! The final buyer of the design will probably at some point request a visualisation of the project. They’ll ask the architect/designer to contract a 3d rendering studio if the architect can’t/don’t have the time to do it in-house. I guess that’s how it works. Architects also need high-end rendering sometimes to have a chance at winning competitions. Of course these contracts must be hard to get. It’s not for the 250 000$ bungalow tho.
I agree with you that it may be important to have knowledge outside of 3ds max and architecture. Doing a movie without being able to add some motion graphic is not so good.
I’d say, aim for architects, industrial designers, interior designers, property developpers and you should be able to find clients. The real clients asking for viz isn’t the professionals, it’s you and I buying houses, condos, expensive luxury appartement, etc. If there’s a demande for that, we are in business. What do you think?
I was fed up of reading pages you wrote of terrible advice, misinformed, inaccurate and extremely biased due to a subjective terrible experience in the field and lack of passion.
I registered here only to counterbalance the tremendous amount of negativity and delusion you were sharing.
You can’t really “burst anyone’s bubble” since you’re incapsulated in your limited and suffocating one!
You criticise others in being delusional but you’re living in a completely unreal and hallucinated dark fantasy world.
I’m a professional character artist and my wife is a designer and 3d visualizer by trade.
She has a fantastic career (which she loves) at one of the top studios in London where they hire dozens of artists everyday.
We lived throughout Europe and the visualizer careers is becoming one of the more sought after and a fantastic entry point to art direction or other creative outputs.
3D changed our lives and it’s true you should have probably never entered into it because you lack the soul of an artist.
You sir are doing something which is really not helpful at all: you never found out how to make it work and you’re now sharing your lack of motivation and strategy.
Ask yourself why you’re doing this and let this forum be populated by passion, energy and sacrifice.
Bye
OP asked if it’s worth it to go the freelancer route**, not work for a company. Doing everything as a lone wolf is much more difficult than when you can specialize like you and your wife! Would you be able to make a living out of freelancing as a character artist? I’m not so sure.**
So… is it “Worth it”? 4 years later - what did you decide?