What are you working on now?

Hmmm... Currently....

• Misty Creek - Hotel and day spa in the Mountains (Architectural project)
• Eastwoods - Pub and Grill interiors (Interior decoration project)
• Mount Lyric – Multi-housing scheme (Developer project)
• Morning Mist - Speculation house for sale (Developer project)
• Ellerines - Air conditioning installation (Informational)
• Øistensgate – Multi-storey complex (Estate agent rentals)
• Floorplans - Ongoing 3D floorplans for Norwegian company
  

Why use LightWave for all these projects?

I feel the company has a competitive advantage due to imagery that is more rich and realistic. In this market a visual breach between built and yet-to-be-built products (concept or tangible) determines the sale. LightWave allows us to generate these images through its superior rendering quality.

What's the average turnaround time for a flat?

Exteriors? Around 10 hours from concept to deliver (if all specs are received on time)
Interiors? Typical interior setting incorporating Kitchen, Dining & Living setting.... Around two full production days (including rendering time)

Who are your main clients? Is it architects, estate agents or someone else?

Regular clients: Architects
Lucrative clients: Property developers

Tell me the process of "virtualscaping" a property?

• Inception: Formal meeting with client to find out requirements.
• Proposal: Based on budget and target audience we present the most logical project based outcome for the client.
• Organizational: All head animators in each department (Modelling/Texture Lighting/Post production/Customer Liaison) sit down and discuss the process and what is required of each department and when the outcome is needed.
• Modelling: After the base model is built, we send out what we've branded as "greys". These are untextured models that supply the client with a template to indicate texturing and other specifications. Also a good time for them to make design changes. After this has been signed off we reach a design "freeze".
  

• Texturing: All texturing to be done according to specifications.
  Placement of the unit on the specified site and implementation of all secondary attributes (according to client specification).
• Preliminary phase: This phase might take up to two rounds depending on the client specifications. We go back and forth between the client and tweak the
  outcome to satisfy the client's requirements.
• Post production: All images or sequences to be rendered for the post production department. They do all the relevant applications and design for whatever the marketing campaign requires.
  

Are the properties only in SA?

No, we've done work in Bazaruto, UK, US, and our biggest off-shore client is a company in Norway.

Did you do a traditional arch viz for the Norwegians?

It's more of a booking system for the vacant apartments. It incorporated visualizations and the "blueprints" product.

People can go to the website, have a look at the apartment and book it from there?

Yep, considering the weather conditions in Norway, displaying a show house in the property market is not always feasible. Hence this result was generated more out of a need than a want.

Is there anywhere we can see a virtual tour?

We have done virtual tours in the past, however we feel they become fairly tedious and there are better and more cost-effective ways of communicating the interior of a property. If a client requires something like that we would rather move towards an "advertisement" type clip (round 30-45 sec) to illustrate the "benefits" of this project or development. We've had quite a lot of success with these.

Some of the work we've actually stitched cube faces together using Panoweaver, and then displayed on the site, but mostly it's just stills presentations and in some cases we make PDF downloadable documents for the buyers to download

Here's an example of a site we've made. This was a development with 36 units that they wanted to sell off plan. There you can see a combination of the Visualizations, and the Blueprints.