– Who is the company founder? What was your motivation when you/they decided to start the company?
The company was founded by us: Max Lykasov and Slava Oganesyan. We realized we make an outstanding product which can be sold on a global level. Besides we wanted to give young CG artists in our country an opportunity to show their worth as we saw a lot of potential in them. As experience has shown, we made the right decision.
– What difficulties did you face in the early years of the company? What about today?
The major challenge we faced at the first stage of communication with clients was the level of trust of Western companies to companies from Eastern Europe. Fortunately, this problem is solved after the first project is completed. Most companies become our loyal customers once they received our work.
– How was it to get clients back in the early days, and how is it now? What do you do to get clients? Some interesting marketing tricks?
We have a well-established sales system that has proven to be highly effective. For obvious reasons, we can not share more information about it.
– What is the best client like?
It is not easy to define the best client, but as practice shows, large architectural studios are easier to work with as they have better tuned work processes.
– What do you think about clients requesting unreasonable deadlines?
In our opinion, there is no such thing as unreasonable deadline. It is more about some clients getting into nonstandard situations whom we always help to find a way out.
We would never work again with the clients who do not appreciate our efforts.
For now we haven’t had a situation in which we would have had to deliberately refuse a project.
– How much time do you usually spend working on a project?
It depends on a certain project. Some occupy 2-3 days, others take up to a month or longer.
– How do you calculate/estimate the project price? What amount/rate does your price range start from?
Our company estimates the cost based on the time required for project completion. It is difficult to assign a lower bound of the project price, but so far we haven’t done a project which would cost less than 500$.
Certainly we work according to our client’s requirement specification, at the same time we possess our own style that is visible in all the works. For us the larger the project is the more interesting it is for us.
– If you have your own unique and recognizable visual style, how would you describe it?
It is quite hard to describe our visual style. We try our best to produce high-quality photo realistic images.
There is an example of a real requirement specification on our website according to which we ask our clients to provide us with project information. Yet naturally each customer is unique and we can change the approach to gathering information to fit a certain project.
– They say we learn from losses more than from victories. Can you share some “failure stories”?
There was a situation when, due to heavy workload, we didn’t pay enough attention to our major loyal customer and nearly lost him. We drew a good lesson from it.
– What country do your major clients come from?
Most our clients are located in the USA, but the largest one comes from Canada.
– How do you divide the work load among the team? Does one artist take a project end-to-end, or do you spilt according to specialization, e.g., modeling, post-production, etc.
We assign one artist for each project. In case it’s a challenging project the assigned artist has a team to help him.
– If you are looking for an artists to join your studio, what qualities and knowledge are you looking for the most?
We aim at hiring high-level professionals or people that show a lot of potential for professional growth.
Our company performs the major part of work in 3D then we apply post-work, which occupies less of our time.
– How would you rate your studio’s 3D expertise on a 0 to 10 scale? What areas would you like to have more knowledge about?
We would rate our expertise in static 3D visualization and virtual reality 9, in animation and animated virtual reality 7. but we are actively developing our skills in this direction.
– Do you take part in non-commercial projects and, if yes, what is your motivation in doing so?
Once we produced a visualization of a sports complex for a newly established hockey club in Georgia because we wanted to contribute to its prompt development.
– Do you attend 3D visualization conferences?
No, basically we learn new tendencies from various web-resources and on our own.
– Do you have any other company activities with teammates besides work?
Our team is young and active with the average age of 25 years old. To keep up the team spirit we practice various sports activities.
– What is your greatest work? What was the most challenging project you have worked on?
It’s rather difficult to select just one greatest work, but we would give prominence to our project STALINKA. As a rule and unfortunately the most complex and interesting projects fall under NDA, so we can not disclose them.
– What can you tell us about your techniques in developing a visualization? Do you provide any training for newcomers?
Our main technique is to render an object as close as possible to reality. One of our key objectives – a continuous development of our team of artists.
– Do you want to expand, becoming a larger studio with more and more artists? Or would you prefer to “stay small”?
Our studio has an intention to expand by attracting high-level professionals.
Our country has a large number of high-level professionals, but our goal is to make it more recognizable on the market of 3D visualization.
– What can you tell about your competitors? Do you have any in your country/worldwide?
Unfortunately, in our country there is no direct competition in the sphere of 3D visualization. As to the whole world, we are constantly following a number of companies whose success truly brings us delight and inspires us to go further.
– Are you affected by the market overwhelmed with low quality/price offers and a lot of software existing that allows one to create simple 3D renders without any knowledge? Do you think such a job as a 3D artist will still be needed in future?
The product we offer is of high quality that non-professionals are unable to replicate, so we are confident that our work will always be of steady demand.
– What are your long-term goals?
For the coming year we are planning to expand our company up to 50 employees.