Architect of His Own Destiny

I feel both proud – and at the same time humble – to be asked by Caligari to tell you about what I have achieved with the help of trueSpace – and years of hard work. From my home office I have billed my clients of a total of more than $130,000 (US dollars) from January through September this year (2004). As I said to the editor of this Newsletter - “I must be doing something right!”

Around 40 I lost everything; my job, my home and my car. But most important I did not lose my self, my family, my close friends or my dreams. Close to 50 I decided to go for 3D visualization, and Target Presentation Ltd – a one-man company - was born. I didn’t know much about 3D at that time, but I was willing to learn and to study.

I set the pace: I decided to learn at least one new thing every day about 3D, and I decided to spend at least one hour on the subject every day, no matter what. That added up to many hours, and many days and many years!

The first few years I worked almost exclusively on 3D visualisation within R&D in the oil and gas industry. But that market is not easily accessible, it is a very closed environment, and I was looking for a market that could utilize the power of 3D visualization on a more regular basis.

Then one day I showed a 3D-artwork that I had made of a house and garden to the marketing director of a real estate business. He was quiet for 3 minutes, and than he said; “This is very interesting. We can use this.” In many ways, that was the beginning of my business as it is today.
 

That is very important when dealing with clients (or your wife for that matter). My best advice is that you find out what they need, and then show them something that they need, and if you got it right and they do need it, then they will buy it.

I have made a lot of samples, and my clients buy a lot of them!

I also discovered one thing; “What is more important for success in 3D for the real estate business market - making out-of this-world-brilliant-3D-artwork, or making 3D artwork that works and that help your clients sell their projects?”

It is obvious. I don’t spend time tweaking the radiosity or the image based lightning or 100 transparent layers texturing. First of all I don’t have time to do that, and my clients are not going to pay for that time - but perhaps more importantly, they really don't care that much about such technical details!

Don’t talk “3D” or “properties” to your clients - they are not 3D artists or animators, they are real estate salesmen (or whatever it is that your clients are). So instead tell them and show them the advantages of using 3D in their sales and marketing as a tool to reach their own goals.
 

What do my clients say?
 

“Our challenge is to visualise housing projects somehow photographic, so that the market and the customers are able to “see” the project before it is even physically built.… We have a turnover of 1.000 planned private estates this year and we have used Target Presentation Ltd for 3D visualizations on a substantial part of these…. Our collaboration with Arne Jacobsen has during the last three years evolved extremely positively”
 

Per Arne Bakken, marketing director of Nordbohus says ”Nordbohus, one of Norway’s largest residential (home) suppliers, chose Arne Jacobsen as the illustrator for our "Nordbohus-catalogue 2004/05". For years we have used watercolour-painting techniques, but we do now choose more and more "computerized" illustrations.  This brings our houses closer to reality, and at the same time it gives us great flexibility in creating the “picture” we want. Of special interest to us, is also the fact that Arne continues to work on our own created 3D models. This gives us a seamless production line”

You can see the varied workflow I have here, which can be different for each client some of my clients create the 3D-models themselves, and then I import them into trueSpace (as 3DS) and I continue to work on it making a scene, texturing, trees, set lights and so on. I also extensively use other 3D artists to do modelling for me.

What is good enough?

I learned from working with one of the largest companies in Norway that there are three quality levels: one is “not good enough”, the other one is “too good”, and the one they are going for is “good enough”. The 25% that is “not good enough” nobody wants. The last 25% of quality assurance - of “too good” - cost normally too much to be taken into consideration. You may choose differently, but the in between 50% that is good enough is the one that I go for – and my clients are willing to pay for.

How much should a 3D-visualization cost?

The cost of an artwork is not that important to a client - it is what the artwork gives in return to the clients that is the bottom line. It is the same with hardware and software – it’s not what it costs, it’s what it gives you in return. If the making of textures, trees, people, cars etc makes you very happy, go a head and do it. But if you really only need to use this in your scenes – buy them. At least that is the way to go if you are planning to make a good business out of your artwork!

My last PC cost about $10,000 (US dollars). When it comes to production, it is worth its weight in gold. It renders so fast! Recently I bought a lot of RPC content (and Composer) that is a wonderful concept - currently I use Archvision Composer or Photoshop to integrate that content, and an RPC plugin for trueSpace is high on my wish list!

To summarize my advice - focus on your business’ core activity, which should be helping your clients to reach their goals. Anything else is a diversion from what you should be doing.

My background:

• 5 years education in arts and crafts (after ergular schooling)
• Many years as a guitarist (studio musician, on the road, on stage, TV and radio, guitar teacher – you name it!)
• Many years running a music store with my dear wife
• First computer graphics for business (TV) I did on Amiga in 1987

• Started full time in 3D around 8-9 years ago on trueSpace2

My Hardware

• P4-2,5GHZ/1024 RAM/Nvidia 128MB
• P4-HT-3GHZ/1024 RAM/Radeon 256MB
• Dual Xeon 3GHZ/4GB RAM/Wildcat VP990 512MB
• All three are XP
• Gigabit network and wireless Internet/Laptop
• HP CP 1700 A3 photo printer

My software:

• My number one software is trueSpace. I actually bought LightWave, but I did not like it that much, so I more or less gave it away to get some favour in return. (Right Bjørn ;o)
• Deep Exploration, SketchUp, Photoshop 8, CAD-converters and many others.