Still, it’s a bit of a different pipeline than working on one or a couple of interiors. When it comes to handling a lot of images, a system is very important. I’ll try to talk about it with a recent big project for Egger in mind.
The first and obviously most important thing after studying the brief is to develop a system for numbering and tracking jobs. I use Excel spreadsheets for this. For the Egger flooring catalog, I made a total of over 250 images, of which about 50 were unique interiors, then the same interiors but with other flooring products, as well as closeups. We divided the work into 5 phases. Since we needed different types of interiors, the name of the room (bedroom, children’s room, etc.) was at the beginning of the title, followed by the room number, the article number of the decor, the width of the board (large or classic), the presence or absence of chamfer. And before starting work on each stage, I painstakingly filled in the table with names.
Then, I cut the textures of materials for the whole stage into strips.
And only after that I started working on the scenes. In each scene I immediately paid attention to optimization to reduce render time, didn’t use heavy models, made sure there were clean paths to textures, turned off shadows at curtains and did other things that allowed me to render pretty fast. I can write up my scene optimization checklist if you’d like. As I completed tasks, I marked the file name boxes with different colors on a “preview-approved-final-paid” system. This allowed me to never once get confused by such a huge number of files.
I also made heavy use of the Batch Render and Scene States tools (with the Layer Properties setting) in this work to reduce the number of files and run the rendering of multiple images overnight.
What else did I do to speed up the work? I tried to do all color correction at once in the render window and at the material level in Material Editor to avoid rendering masks and post-processing in Photoshop.
Of course, such a large amount of work is not without problems: sometimes the coatings got mixed up, Scene States settings were off, and other things that we visualizers deal with every day.
The main message I want to convey in this article is that you just need to work on optimizing and systematizing all processes, from numbering and accounting to scene quality. Both before starting work and in the process.