Pricing an animation?
 

How do you/businesses etc go about pricing animations? I have been approached to do a 2 minute presentation animation, which is currently taking 10 minutes to render each frame at 24fps. Anyu ideas/suggestions/pricing guides would be a great help thanks.

you really should set the price before you start.

When I worked on projects before I start my full time job I would ask what the project is and try and estimate how long it would take.

Then I would work out how much I think I`m are worth a day (I have been between between £10 - £55 a day). Then balance it to the company. A small firm may not have the budget for something thats going to take months to finish, while larger company's do.

but if I was working on a model I would just set a price for that model.

It depends on the project as well. Animations can take a lot of your time so what ever you think your spare is worth. But be sure that they know why these things take time as most people think animation is easy.

Do you have to build, texture and rig everything ??
Are these people mates of yours ??

I made a interactive cd rom (with some 3d animation in it), once for the vodka bar chain "Revolution" down in Swansea. As I worked there and the manager was a close friend I said I would do it of £75 and £100 bar tab. The project took over 4 months to finish and in the end worked out that I was on just over a £1 a day. For the 56 second animation it was taking 1.3 hours a frame to render.( it was a ice caven with lots of reflexions in it

Yeah, I understand there are so many artifacts to consider, we are an engineering firm creating 3d as built models in our own package which can be exported to other formats, in this case blender as we have no licence for Maya. We tend to only do animations (well they are camera paths walkthroughs and simulations really) if we have a spare bit of time and usually supply them to potential clients to show our capabilities on a free DVD. So we have no ground level ideas on pricing this. Setting up the animation took around 2 weeks and 10 minutes per frame at 2 minutes is 20 straight days rendering I believe. Tend to charge around £1200 a day for modelling and analysis, thinking 50k may be a good starting price. Can't find anywhere that provides standard rates to go from though at the minute.

I dont really think that you would find an actual price on a site as each job's different so theres probably not a standard rate to go by.

I think Jay posted a price some time ago, not entirely sure if its his price per hour or an average in his experiance.

One thing Ive thiught is rendering, if your a company grab a few old PC's and make up a render farm this then would stop your workstations being used up rendering (dont knowe if thats what your doing) you then could cost rendering as power consumption, equipment wear and tare, etc etc and then cost it based on that, might make it more competative.

I think a small render farm would make its money back in no time, see if you can get a few old Pc from a college or uni, should be dead cheap to get up and going and save your workstations for working on.

(that is of course if youve not got a render farm!!)

P.S Any chance you could chuck some work my way since were in the same area!! J/K!

LOL, yeah I will be rendering across several spare machines we have here in the office so thats no problem, ( client accepted the price so its a green light :) ) As for the work, this is a one off, I produce as built 3D models/structures to an extremely accurate degree for designers/ engineers to use for future modifications, and sometimes produce rendered movie walk arounds to show the work we do. Hopefully sometime soon I can gain full time employment in the CG field rather than just in my spare time!