Hi guys, I’m here in Barcelona, today we will be doing a studio tour of an architectural
visualization studio called Play-Time. Big thanks to Autodesk for sponsoring
this video. Without them, it won’t be possible for us to visit Play-Time and
show you guys the arch-viz studio from the inside. We can learn so much from these
talks and actually experience the atmosphere, working style, and culture of the studio.
And this is definitely not the same as just online talking through the camera! With
that being said, let’s start our visit. PLAY-TIME GROUP is formed by a couple of friends. Play Time group is divided into two
businesses: Play Time and Bside. At the moment, the whole structure is
made up of a team of 19 3D artists and 4 partners. Most members of the two teams
are architects, many are self-taught in the field of visualization and others have been
trained through specific courses in arch-viz. In Play-Time, we are more focused on
architectural competitions and big projects, and public projects. And in Bside Visuals,
we mainly do projects for real estate and interior designers. We are more focused
on details and this kind of stuff. Ok, so can you tell us a little
bit about how you started? Yes, as you know we are, Aleix and me, architects
and we knew each other when we shared our co-working offices as
architects. And it was around 2008 when the crisis started, we lost all our
projects, and then we started to do the images. And it was a good point for that because most
of the offices, here in Barcelona, lost a lot of projects and they started to do competitions, and
somebody had to do the images. And at that time, we also did competitions, and Aleix and I were the
ones who mainly did the images. So we just put the website with the images that we did for ourselves
and that was the start of all of this. Yeah… I’m sure you are curious about what
software they use in the office. All the software we use is
quite standard in our industry, we mainly work with 3ds max. And
we use corona as our render engine. Like most artists, they chose Corona at the time
when lightmix was not available in V-Ray yet. What about the plugins? As plugins for 3ds Max, we highly
recommend the puzzle manager and of course, Forest Pack and RailClone
are really a must for us. We also use Connecter to manage our library, it works really well if you
are capable of being organized. Anyway, nowadays most software can achieve really
good results and the differences among arch-viz companies do not rely on that, they rely on the
people behind it. When you are starting you are always trying to know what software your idols use
but then you realize that that is not the point. One of the common questions we get on
the channel is about PC configuration, so can you tell us about yours? Most of them are workstations with people
working with them and some are just for use of render farm, or secondary things
like managing licenses and render queue. Do you use any other hardware
like tablets for instance? Yes, we use tablets for post-production
work but not many of us. Some people in the office still prefer
to use the mouse. And the tablets we have are also of different kinds, some
are the ones that are also a monitor at the same time and others not. It
is up to the one who is using it. Apart from that, all computers
have a couple of 24-inch monitors. There is even a guy here who uses a
kind of 3d mouse that allows you to move in the viewport in a different
way but is just a bit special case. From the business side, the PlayTime
group has a very horizontal structure, there are partners and 3d artists without
any middle points, no project leaders, etc. What is really interesting about their approach
is that instead of growing Play Time company, they decided to create another
one linearly called Bside. They all work together in one office, but each
person is assigned to a specific brand. You may wonder why that is. They really
emphasize human relationships and the feeling of being part of something together.
They found out that to achieve this the limit of people for them is 12 artists, otherwise they
lose control. The group is just too big for them. So instead of hiring people for PlayTime,
they made one of the workers the partner of another company. It was like replicating the
model in parallel rather than just growing. I like the idea of a friendly
atmosphere in the office so I talked with Josep a bit more about their approach. Can you tell us a bit about the work culture here? Of course, so we always thought about our
well-being at work because we spend a lot of hours together. So the most important thing
is everyday life, that's why when we incorporate a new member into the team the first thing we look
for is a personal feeling and a positive attitude. We have never looked for individual stars but
for people who are eager to learn and in turn We all love what we do but at the same
time, we all need to have a personal life. I’ve seen on Instagram that you
organize some trips from the office, can you tell us a bit more about it? Yes, of course. I will mean let’s not fool
ourselves, the day-to-day work in the office is very demanding, but we try to have fun and
it’s always easier spending time as friends. We try to do a minimum of two outdoor activities
together every year to make interpersonal relationships grow. We go out for a weekend
in the mountains or skiing, go to the beach... One of the indicators that show that the team
is working is that outside of work many team members meet to do other leisure activities
together. And for this reason, I think it is important that the working day does not exceed
8 hours and that work is never done on weekends. It really sounds and looks like a great
place to work. Talking about work, let’s chat a bit more about it. Can you show us some interesting
projects you worked on? The perfect example for me is one of the latest
projects we did for Tengbom. It was a residential project in Stockholm and the interesting thing
about this project is that the facade was green. So we decided to make an image finding a sky
that was the exact opposite of the color of the project, a purple sky, not very
client friendly but in this case, we pitched the image with the name “brave
pink” and we explained the client the idea, and to our surprise, he actually
agreed to make this mood. Another example would be one of the first projects
we did for BIG, the train station in Vasteras. A really cool part about this project
is that they wanted to showcase the train station at different times of the
year and in different moods so we really got to play around with the
storytelling part of images. So a different kind of project we worked
on was making some images for a non-profit organization that was supposed to
collect funds to fight against covid. We made a series of images depicting the van
surrounded by natural environments. And we had total freedom to decide what moods
to have and what landscapes to portray. We were even allowed to decide the colors of
the van and to do that we made an internal competition to decide on the colors and
design of the van that it will have. Every member of the team proposed their favorite color
scheme and they had about to decide the winner. It was really cool to see
that they painted the real van with the design and the colors that we picked. What, in your opinion, is the
key to a successful project? Well, the best work comes out when the
relationship with the client finds a good way. I mean, when the clients trust you and
understand that the image is a focal point of the work, and forgets about their fears,
and some restrictions, about the competition, or anything like that. That’s, I think,
the way that our work works better. Yes, that makes perfect sense. This way working
together becomes way easier and more beneficial. I saw that you have been
working for some famous brands, how to cooperate with big international clients? Well, the truth is that there are not many
differences with big clients. Probably it will need more people involved
because it will probably be a big project but apart from that
the process is mostly the same. In fact, sometimes it is easier as they use to work with external rendering companies
so they know very well what they need. Sometimes cultural differences are noticeable
in little details (for example, I don’t know, Scandinavian companies pay more attention
to the storytelling part of the image, and Swiss companies prefer checking there are
no dark areas around and prefer softer images). How the workflow of creating
images typically look like? Well, I mean, our workflow depends on the
client and the project we are working on. But mainly we do competitions so we live in the
timeframe of 2 weeks which is not a lot of work. So basically, this means that we have to be very efficient with the time that we have
and, yeah, not make any big mistakes! So our ideal scenario is that we focus
the first week on doing sketches, and trying to find the best way
to portray a project. And then, we spend the second-week refining things and
focusing on the feedback from the client. And can you show us an example? Yes, of course! This is our RAW render where everything starts.
We then work on the surrounding buildings to try to have a narrower composition of volumes. This
was done not just with a photo but with multiple pieces of photos because we didn’t have the right
one following this point of view. After that, we tried to find a good sky that fits
the mood. And then, we composed the rest, mainly the trees, that bring the focus to the
building. The next step was focusing on the foreground which we tried to work with the
fragments of cold photographs. And finally, we incorporated the people
trying to explain the story. Do you have some tips for 3d artists? Maybe let’s
start with people who just started the journey. Yes, of course! Practice, practice, and more
practice! It’s very easy at the beginning to get very obsessed with technical settings and
specifications. But the most important thing when you start is to really try and
see as many references as possible and enrich your visual library and have
a lot of visual tools that you can use. Yeah, this is what I always say on my
YouTube channel. Practice and don’t think about technical specifications. Ok,
so maybe something for intermediate artists? Yeah, try to find some process that helps
you get faster and your speed. But also, try to step out of your comfort zone and
not rely always on, like, the same image, try new things so you don’t get stuck in a certain
style or certain ways that you always be doing. Ok, so now, finally, what
tips for advanced 3d artists? I would say the most important thing is to find
things outside of your job that motivate you and complement your work because it’s easy to get
burned out after years of working on the same thing. So I would say that and try to always have
something that you are proud of from the project, that you can get out of each project, even though
it is like a simple project that you worked on many, many times, always find some ways of
doing things in new ways and explore that. Yeap, definitely! These are the tips that 3d artists
should take to their hearts! Now, you mentioned that you have a
little gift for our viewers, it is a PSD file for testing the images. I’ll
put the link to this file in the corner and in the description below the video. Anyway,
Joseph can you explain to us how to use this? Here is a PSD file with some layers we use
to check three important aspects of an image: value, saturation, and color. It
is a really useful tool not only for checking that everything in
the image is well integrated. For example that the hue and
saturation of the vegetation is right. Also, you see and control where you want certain
things to stand out in the image, for example, you might have something more saturated that stands
out but not if it’s in a place where it distracts you from the main focus. With these layers we
can check where we are guiding the user’s eye. Can you tell us how many
images per year do you guys do? Yeap, in Play-Time, we are now doing
around 1000 images per year, and in Bside, not so much but almost there, I
mean, about 900 maybe. And, well, that’s a number we’re trying to reduce
a bit year by year, just to improve the quality and the time dedicated to all the
images to make it the best possible. Yeah. Awesome, thank you for this meeting. It
was a pleasure to meet you guys and talk about your way of approaching arch-viz. Thank you! Thank you! Good bye! Thanks for coming to our office. Thank you! Now, let us know in the comments how you like this studio tour and if you want to
see more videos like this one. Bye, bye! We have a deadline tommorow. It wasn’t supposed to be tomorrow. They change it like… we lost a day.
