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How do you get to become the best visualization studio in the world? We can´t tell for sure, because we´re not there yet, but we want to share our approach with you as a possible guide.
Visualization Art is a vast field of various professions poured into this one person that is called CG-Artist. You need to know about architecture, construction, programming, interior design, and not to forget all the business that comes with it when you work as freelance or you want to start a studio on your own. Almost 2 Years ago, Renato and I started DARQVIZ with few experience and nothing in our hands. Combining Renatos architectural background with my sense for business our Studio already showed a comprehensive skillset, but we still faced a bunch of difficulties and uncertainty that we understood as challenges rather then dead ends. After our process of figuring out most of the issues a CG-Artist has to overcome, we want to share with you 5 of our most valuable understandings that made us survive the tough kick-off.
LEARN FROM THE BEST OUT THERE
ONLINE PLATFORMS MAKE YOUR LIFE EASIER
DON´T REINVENT THE WHEEL
BE BOLD AND PATIENT
TAKE YOUR CLIENTS INTO YOUR FAMILY
LEARN FROM THE BEST OUT THERE
We live in a globalized and digitized world, where everybody on this planet is just a few clicks away. Education is accessible easily from anywhere in the world, as long as you got a proper internet connection and know where to find it in the data floods. Some decades back in time it was impossible to connect with your idol, they where just out of reach. Luckily nowadays most famous people share their lives on Instagram and even build communication channels towards their communities. One of our Role-models is Ander Alencar, a Brazilian CG-Rockstar, that counts over 180k Instagram followers although never misses to answer a private message. When we found out that he was about to drop an online course on how he works, we immediately signed up and what we could take out of it completely blew us away and leveled up our work a straight 300%. Our hint for you as an artist to increase your image quality, seek out to learn from the best, it´s not as impossible as you think! Most of the experts in a field are very likely to share their knowledge and skills. Down below you we leave you the 2 courses we took that massively increased our skills on CG-Artistry:
https://anderalencar.com.br/esp/ (only for spanish speakers)
ONLINE PLATFORMS MAKE YOUR LIFE EASIER
You could model every piece of furniture, compile every texture and render every image on your own, but why should you? So much work is already done by others, there are platforms that give you access to a insane variety of models, textures, tools and other crazy stuff. Use the technology ingredients out there, and create your own recipe to serve a delicious visualization better and faster. Most of our models we source from 3dsky, make sure to go for the PRO ones! If you need any possible vegetation that grows out there in the wild, search for it on Maxtree, they literally planted a digital jungle on the platform. Almost every texture we use, we get it from textures.com. We sometime even get in touch with product designers and furniture companies to get specific pieces of craft directly from them. There are many many possibilities out there to source your raw material to build high quality CGI go and use them! Another important buzzword to mention is renderfarming. Often when you start with such computationally powerful software your computer might be to weak, but that´s problem you can just send your image to a renderfarm and they´ll do the job for little money. Still for us this is a very powerful way of getting through capacity shortages, and we´re happy to count on our close friends of RebusFarm.
DON`T REINVENT THE WHEEL
A blank page is often hard to fill. We know that and although creating fresh inspiring images without copying someone else is what we aim for, you´ll always have to find inspiration somewhere. If you can come up with a great interior design by walking through the forest,
that´s totally fine, but that´s mostly not the case nor do we have the time to take a walk every hour. Why not inspire our work in the work of other architects, designers and artists. The internet is full of creativity! Our design process starts with gathering a moodboard of designs or even one specific design that meets the requirements of our project. We choose from over a billion designs out in the world the one that fits our needs and then we can use that as a guidance to develop our image. Behance is a great platform to find those projects I´m talking about. We don´t have to come up with everything, we just have to combine wisely.
BE BOLD AND PATIENT
It takes guts to start your own business and take the risks that come with it. In the beginning there just your vision, and you have got a lot of work ahead to get to the end of the tunnel. But just always know that it´s worth the effort, although you feel small in that insanely big business world, you´re already a part of it and will grow into it bit by bit. Success does not come over night. As we started DARQVIZ we did not want to hear that and began this journey way to positive and unrealistic, but reality quickly catches up. Although the path to success is harder then expected, this naive optimism helps us get through the tough times and serves as a source of energy we can drink from all the way. Complementary to that Boldness that keeps you going, you need a lot of patience. Maybe you do extremely good renders and you know it, but it takes sometime until others realize, appreciate and finally seek you out as well. Give the world this bit of time to get ready for you, meanwhile you can make yourself ready for them. Although it feels like eternity, the moment will come. Be bold and patient.
TAKE YOUR CLIENTS INTO YOUR FAMILY
There is this German saying: The customer is king. We don´t really see it that way. We rather want our customer to form part of our family, of what we´re building with DARQVIZ. The word "customer" sounds like an unknown person buying our work in a shop, and "king" seems so obsequious. We want to build family like relationships where both parties can place their trust in each other. The vision is to co-author the stories we write and not provide just a service. Honesty and respect is our top priority when communicating with our partners. We even integrated agile workflows where all project parties can collaborate together online throughout the whole design process. It´s not just about creating CGI for a project, it´s about becoming familiar while doing so.