Well, as I spent this evening making my decision, I may as well say what the work is that I have now decided NOT to take on. Without naming names of course.

The project was to produce some 'artist impression' style visuals for a big circus production. Great work on the face of it, a lot of creative freedom, and a change from the norm. I was on the understanding that this was for a "Cirque du Soleil" style circus - ie. a big theatrical event with high production values.

5 minutes on google revealed that this non-US/ non-European circus company, in addition to it's human performers makes extensive use of animals, including bears and great-apes, in some frankly appallingly demeaning ways. Ways that I'm pretty sure would be illegal here in the UK.

Nope, sorry. Not something I'm going to be complicit in. Decision made, off to bed to sleep well. Tomorrow I'll find a better client!

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Probably shouldn't have admitted it

It's a tricky subject isn't it. In the past I've adopted Solo's attitude to the problem, but I guess we all have lines we won't cross, and I may have found my line with this latest client.

Solo, as a fellow left-leaning aetheist, I had to smile at you having become the go-to-guy for churches. In the past I've been asked to remove women from visuals for engineering projects because the (male) client thought that women had no place in the engineering world. I "accidentally" forgot to respond to that email...

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If only

Yep, that makes a lot of sense. In my case it's a potential client with a large number of on-going small projects. Each project by itself isn't worth a great deal to me, but the combined value across the months and years is pretty high. The obvious downside is that if I did decide to 'take the money', I'd have to deal with this client, and hence live with my decision for the long term. Which isn't so great.

On balance, I'm pretty sure I'm gonna turn this down and just work harder to find client's I can deal with more comfortably... tricky one though.

A question to all the hard-working freelance designers/architects/visualisers out there.

Ever had an ethical dilema about accepting a contract? For example working for a client whose business you found morally questionable - I'm not talking about anything illegal, but just certain industries you feel ethically uncomfortable about.

If so, what did you do? Take the money and run, or take the moral high-ground? I know the "correct" answer is to only do work you feel is right.... ...but in the real world with bills to pay.....?

And yes, I am currently wrestling with this one myself......

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Beautiful. The evening version of London is especially great. Perfectly understated.

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Another one from the same project. SU was used to model the fore-ground armour (roughly!) axes, and a few other bits and pieces. The rest was Photoshop and ArtRage.

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Yeah, to be honest the SketchUp time was probably only about an hour or two, So less than 10% of the total time I spent on this. As such, not really a proper SketchUp project at all, but I thought you guys here might appreciate it anyway

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Thanks Jeff. The landscape is comprised of around 30 photographs, with a lot of hand-painting in photoshop to fill in the gaps. I'd say about 70% / 30% photos/painting. I used a rough version of this as background in SU to arrange the house and ship models, then exported jpegs from this, and did a lot of the final texturing of them in Photoshop.Then lots more detail painting, colour-corrections etc.

This was to have been used as a large-format print, so was produced at hi-res, around 8000px wide. So the details were a lot more visible than I'm used to

cheers,

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I thought they looked like hair-clips.... but didn't want to say in case they turned out to be some specialist fitting and I looked like an idiot Yep, that joint is a very neat solution. And I love the idea of slotting windows into the flutes. I occassionally need to make quick mock-ups not dissimilar to this. I'll definitely be trying your method next time. Thanks for sharing.

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Been a while, so here's something new(ish) from me.

The buildings and ship are SU, the rest is Photoshop. The two foreground figures were provided by another artist and comp'd in by me. This piece isn;t 100% finished, but the project it was done for has hit the rocks, so I'm leaving it as it stands

Thanks for looking!

Cheers,

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Richard: that is a fantastic approach, and one that I may have to borrow! Those sketchy wraps really work well too. One question: what are those clips you are using for the corner- joints?

Brilliant work

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I've had exactly this issue, CNC-ing formers for panels for exhibition stands.
As these are formers, and not seen, I've found that upping the number of segments-per-curve to around 120 gives a close enough approximation to a true curve for my purposes.

Plus in the exhibiton sector, we don't tend to work to particularly precise tolerances, so can get away with this. And I keep reminding myself that this lack of perfection is compensated for by the time savings versus having a carpenter scribe out large radii by hand, with all the tolerance issues that involves!

On the rare occasions when I've had to CNC very large curves which will be seen, I've had to redraw the arcs in CAD, same as you. Frustrating not to be able to do this within SU

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Hey,

I also use SU primarily for exhibition design work, so hope this may be useful.

For rendering I use Thea, which I've found offers the best balance between quality and speed in a deadline-driven environment.

As for drafting, it really depends on the level you need. For knocking out some quickly dimensioned elevations, Layout does the job, but for drafting from-scratch, I found it way too laborious (I do accept this may be my shortcoming, not SketchUp's).

For 2D drafting, I've moved over to NanoCad, which has a VERY Autocad-like interface, and more importantly is FREE, for the basic version which does everything I need. Between SU, Thea and NanoCad, I think I've got it covered

cheers,

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Majid - the portrait is lovely work. Only tip I'd suggest is to add some jitter to your brush settings in PS. This just breaks up the edges of the brush strokes slightly, and give a more natural painterly feel.Regardless, this is beautiful work and I can't wait to see more

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A quick presentation board for an unusual project, visualising a piece of polar research equipment... SU & Thea (the aircraft is a photo)

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Hi,

Long-time,no-post.

Some quick renders from a recent project for a touring, modular and re-useable exhibition space. SU & Thea....

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Lovin' your work Ken

Especially the giant, sculptural machines a few posts above.

Some of your more orgainc stuff reminds me of Sparth's paintings - http://sparth.tumblr.com/

Was wondering if he was an influence Either way, awesome work - I always check out your threads first when I visit this site.

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It certainly seems like a must-have

I had a quick play with Kerkythea several years ago, but didn't really have enough time to look into it properly, and clearly the software has moved on a long way since.

Thanks again guys - I think you have solved my problem for me

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