Terragen project job to offer

[schreibix]

Hi there,

first let me introduce myself, as i just registered for this forum: my name is Marc Bischoff, i am located in southern germany and i own a business giving advice to novelists who aspire to publish their works as ebooks on Amazon and other platforms.

Currently one of my clients is planning to start a series of fantasy novels in fall 2013 and this guy wants a 3d landscape animation of the world where the stories of about 14-16 upcoming novels will happen.

There is a comprehensive description of the world / planet, which is a world made up pretty much of rocks and stone, with just one deep canyon running through the entire world. there is no weather, no clouds, just the desert like landscape, the canyon, a small kind of medieval city and some caves that hold water.

We are looking for a birdseye animation, kind of a flight over this world, hopefully looking down on the city and the canyon, about 2-3 mins length. Part of the animation will also be used for a booktrailer. The animation will be made available on the authors website and also via youtube. Is anyone in this forum interested and capable to do this work? There IS a budget, although limited.

Thanks
Marc

[Tangled-Universe]

Hi Marc,

Every once in a while somebody drops in here with a job offer, description and with this exact same finishing line "there is no money though"

2-3 minutes of quality animation = 2880-4320 frames @ 720p.
To render this on a farm, the only option, this probably will cost you >1000 euros anyway.
Then there's the compensation for the artist's work which is along the same line of 1000 euro's, as this would easily take a week or even two.

I think I've even been extremely positive, perhaps even unrealistic, with these ballpoints.

As usual I'm very interested, but I'd first like to know how realistic this is and what your budget is.

Kind regards,
Martin

[schreibix]

Hi Martin

the budget is around 1000 Euros, maybe 1200. I dont know if there are options to still realize it, maybe cutting down on quality or length, but there is not much room for negotiation budgetwise.

Marc

[Dune]

I don't think that would be enough, if I may chime in. I wouldn't do it for that kind of budget anyway. Even putting together a medieval city is quite a job, and copyright/publication fee isn't even mentioned. Unless there's a hobbyist around who has spare time ánd TG knowledge.

[Tangled-Universe]

Hi Marc,

Thanks for the extra info.

With a budget like this it's going to be very hard to get this done!
As I said rendering alone will eat up your entire budget under normal conditions.

An option is to find someone who renders it for free:
http://garagefarm.net/free_rendering.htm
Here you can have work rendered for free on some conditions.
Since this project is meant for fantasy novels I take it that it won't pass for being an educational project, so it's likely these guys won't render it for free for you, but you'll never know and can always try!

Another option is to find someone who does the work for free so you can spend all on rendering, but then I'm not your guy

Though there's of course a chance someone's willing to do this purely for fun and exercise, but that would also mean that you probably can't impose deadlines and demand a lot of taylored work.
This can affect quality of the work and is a reason why some ask money for their work, because they take it serious.

Of the 2 options I described I'd investigate on the cheap rendering one as having machines sweat for free is better than having people sweat for free
That garagefarm is cheap anyway.

Other renderfarms: PixelPlow and Ranch Computing Farm.

Before you can make a good estimate you'll need to spend some of your budget on scene development.
Someone needs to make your canyon and tell you that it renders at 2 frames/hour in 1280x720 resolution (fast!).
If you need higher resolution then rendering takes (a lot) longer. Lower res is faster of course.
From that scene you can estimate/calculate the time for rendering the total animation which you can then use to estimate/calculate the costs to have it rendered on the farm.

So I'd like to suggest to give it some thought and get back with some more details on output and references here to see what we all can mean for you.

Martin

[Tangled-Universe]

I don't think that would be enough, if I may chime in. I wouldn't do it for that kind of budget anyway. Even putting together a medieval city is quite a job, and copyright/publication fee isn't even mentioned. Unless there's a hobbyist around who has spare time ánd TG knowledge.

I agree. I have spare time and the necessary knowledge, but given the size of the project and my hourly rate I'm not sure if it's economical to me.
It would mean that all the budget needs to be allocated to the content creator and that it will never be rendered out, as I explained above.

I only charge an hourly rate for my work and don't charge a copyright/publication fee (we should discuss that some time maybe Ulco).

[Dune]

Well, I have my own illustration business, which provides my only income. In that field of work it is common that users pay publication fees, depending on use. Plus the hours worked on something or an agreed sum. I guess if you have some other source of income, and do this stuff in free time, it's different.

[Oshyan]

While I'm slightly more optimistic on render times (having done a lot of animation in Terragen, and much work on optimization), unfortunately I agree that the majority of your budget is going to be taken up by rendering at this point. A quick calculation for a 2 minute animation at 720p yielded about 1100 Euros on the Ranch Computing farm (this is assuming 1hr/frame, which is a fairly safe estimate for a well optimized scene in my experience, it could be less but I would not bet on it).

Now there may be people willing to take the project on for work experience, portfolio material, etc. But as Martin points out, then you lose the ability to expect hard deadlines, etc. If you're ok with that kind of compromise and the likelihood that someone doing it for the experience will of course have less experience than a professional, then I think there's some potential here, if you can connect with the right artist. Hopefully someone with interest will see this, the chance to have someone else pay for your render time on a ~2 minute animation alone ought to be enticing to someone.

- Oshyan

[schreibix]

Thanks for all your responses. Would it make the project more realistic if we cut the target time down to 1 minute? Is there anything else that we can do to cut costs? As i said, this is not a Hollywood standard movie, it is a goodie for an e-book project and i think we could live with some quality compromises.

[Oshyan]

Cutting to 1 minute would (in a rough approximation) half the rendering time (I had assumed 2 minutes of animation in my previous estimate) and therefore the cost, so it certainly makes a big difference.

- Oshyan