Thank You!
As for this garden house manufacturer, their revenue is in tens of millions, so I guess they have some of it go to marketing :). It was definitely a profitable project. Although I have to say, budget and therefore timescale weren't great, and it was clear from the beginning that I can´t model a lot of detailed stuff or spend much time on every small detail, I really had to find ways to streamline the process. Moodboards with a basic composition for every image was a huge time-saver. It made it a very fast process in max to make a landscape and to put key objects in place. Houses were provided for us and my colleague used a script to detach every plank, give it it´s own box mapping and attach everything back together, so I could easily use corona multimap. It was fast, but maybe even not needed. Most of the objects were bought and converted to corona material. I then tweaked a lot of the materials, but nothing fancy. Grass and trees are mostly from different premade packs (VizPark, Maxtrees). I modified the materials again. When I got it good enough, it was just a matter of telling ForestPack, where I want stuff to grow and it takes literally just minutes to get to a pretty good result. Then, of course, it´s easy to lose yourself tweaking it for hours:) and it´s fun, but I managed to not do it too much..
I have growfx and making a tree or even just tweaking vizpark models takes just forever. It took me two days to make fir trees and I´m very skeptical if they are any better than whatever I already have in the library...so it was actually kind of a waste of time and I knew it and I did it anyway.
It took a few days per image on average. Fastest were Gardening and Fences, I did both together in one long day (about 16h minus eating, surfing the web or whatever other distractions I had). Rendered it in a rebusfarm and the client was happy with these and I didn´t have to change a thing on them. This doesn´t happen a lot for me, so it was great:)
I wish the deadline was twice as long and budget twice as big, but it was fun project anyway:)
