Maxwell Render | Official public forum

I dont want to ask the old hourly rate question as it tends to scare people so I'll put it this way.. if you were given a model of a mobile phone how much would you charge to set up textures/lighting etc and render? If thats too personal could you give me a fair rate as I'm new to rendering and trying to figure out if I'm being ripped off or asking too much.

Please PM me if necessary.

Thank you.

I wish I could tell you...


I'm doing my first paying rendering and I offer the client an ultra sweet deal... He though it was going to be wayyy less $. Bottom line I end up selling myself like a dirty hoe for 1/2 of the going rate here in Miami

Leonardo wrote:I wish I could tell you...


I'm doing my first paying rendering and I offer the client an ultra sweet deal... He though it was going to be wayyy less $. Bottom line I end up selling myself like a dirty hoe for 1/2 of the going rate here in Miami

I've done that, each time the client will come back and try and get things done for a little bit less and less and so on, don't fall for that, make clear that your rates are the industry standard and don't whore yourself (too much, I can see how it might be necessary sometimes to get some startup contacts).

Leonardo wrote:I wish I could tell you...


I'm doing my first paying rendering and I offer the client an ultra sweet deal... He though it was going to be wayyy less $. Bottom line I end up selling myself like a dirty hoe for 1/2 of the going rate here in Miami

I think that the rendering setup cost for architecture is probably a lot more than for a single product, so your prices might seem more costly than for a product designer.

By the way thanks for all the PM's... I will post the data of all of your rates here soon

Yeah... I'm letting them know that was the introductory rate. They are not getting any more freebies from me

Leonardo wrote:Yeah... I'm letting them know that was the introductory rate. They are not getting any more freebies from me

Think of it this way. You want a new macpro, costs 3000$. You look around, and find a vendor who says ok, I'll sell it to you for 1000$. So you buy it. After a month, you need another macpro for work, so you go to the same vendor, expecting him to offer the second one for 1000$, but instead he says this time it costs 3000$. Wtf?!? That's what you risk doing. But its still pretty common to lower prices on jobs until you get a solid client base, ...

Totally agree aitraaz. ......I'm sure we've all done it at some point, but it won't do you any favours!
Establish an hourly rate, then make sure that the next '50 dollar job' looks like $50 worth...........after all, people who pay peanuts should get monkeys.

glebe digital wrote:after all, people who pay peanuts should get monkeys.

terrific

This is a hard question that I've yet to find a good answer for, I have my day job and then on occasion I do side work for people. I typically will look at the project and see what is involved and then just come up with a number I feel comfortable doing the job for. Keep in mind that I don't have any over head so all the money I make is pure profit. Generally speaking I'll do 1 rendering for $1000 - $1500 it will be more if there is a lot of modeling involved or if the project is extremely large. I find this number gives me adequate compensation for the time I spend away from my family, whether this is a competitive number I can't say but if it takes me 40 hours of work to complete it them I'm getting about $37/hour. I have done jobs before that I've charged $137/per hour but in these cases it's because the time line is extremely short and I have to really put in a lot of work.

Also what's the standard if I need to send out an image for them to preview before doing the final render? Do you just send it at 72dpi or watermark it?

If they want to see it before hand and a screen resolution shot won't work for them then I'll provide a half resolution images that is watermarked. Actually this is now becoming more common because of the wide difference from one screen to the next. On my screen I might see a bluish green but on the customers screen he might see green only, or my screen may display a very bright image while his shows a darker one. This all has to do with how your screen is calibrated and unfortunately there isn't anything you can do about it. Obviously this can cause all kinds of problems because you are both looking at two different images of the same things and making color changes is almost imposable.

Sorry what do you mean by this... actually print the image half res and watermarked and show it to them?

For preview images you should decide on a standard *small* size (eg. 1024 x 768), put your digital signature on it, and probably also add a visible watermark (eg. logo etc), then send it digital format.

Not quite sure if Maxer's suggesting sending a printed copy ( ), but at least from my end monitor calibration and print calibration is the clients problem...

Uh... digital signature. I've had a look on Google: looks pretty complicated and I've read book on all the coding/public key/private key stuff which gets quite in dept. What's a simple way of doing this?

I've thought of two ways out of the watermark thing:

1- Just blend your logo into the image in a way that the product is clean but the customer would have to cut half of it to get rid of the thing, like cover the corner of the image and mess the shadows and studio setup.

2- Add your logo to the product in a subtle but widespread manner - it's sneaky, but IF the guy is to use the image he will mess it up. Replace a number with it, write your web site on the screen, where ever you want.

Ricardo