Firm Profile: Archiform 3D — Challenging China with Integral Design

It has been an absolute pleasure to have been introduced by Maxon to the work of  Steve Bell and his colleagues at Archiform 3D. We knew of course right away that Steve was a CINEMA 4D expert user–because Maxon was excited to tell us about his work–but what we didn’t anticipate fully was how interesting the Archiform 3D story really was.

Steve is not just one of the “grandfathers” of architectural visualization, he’s a leader of a global consulting practice and a model for how inspiring young 3D professionals might want to shape their career. I say this not just because Steve has been very successful, or because he has a global client roster that includes the likes of Porsche, CBS Sports, HGTV, Four Seasons and more, but because of the way he has adapted himself, his views, his practice and his methods over the years in response to global business change.

A consummate artist who loves the detail and tech behind the craft, Steve prefers to keep his business intimate and small, working alongside the talented Bianca Miller, and a small globally dispersed set of ArchiCAD and CINEMA 4D experts. He explains in the interview how Archiform 3D delivers its value to its global clients and how it relates to the work being done inexpensively in China.

From his nascent beginnings with an Atari computer to his 40 plus machine Xserve-controlled private render farm, from life down under to commuting to the Miami office in his yacht, Steve shares his views on how he works, what his clients value, and what he thinks about his favorite technology. He even shares his perspective on Apple’s newest Mac Pro and he doesn’t mince words.

Background and Beginnings

AFR (Anthony Frausto-Robledo) :  Can you tell me a little bit about your background in this industry, how did you get started in this field?

SB (Steve Bell) : Well…that’s going back a long time. I’m kind of one of the grandfathers of the industry now. I was very happily designing buildings and houses for a very long time in Australia and was one of the very first to make the break to CAD. And back in those days the choices were quite limited. Mac hadn’t really set in, PC wasn’t entrenched like it eventually became. The first thing I got was an Atari machine and our earliest CAD solution was DynaCAD.

It was limited in what it could do, so we started writing our own programs that would take 2D data and convert it to 3D data and come up with nice perspectives because everything was orthographic at the time. So we ended up doing really well because nobody else had this capability. And then, one day, ArchiCAD came to my attention.

AF: And what impact did that have on you?

SB: Well…it could not only do true 3D it had a beautiful interface–I mean there was absolutely nothing like it at the time. And we could also use our programming experience to customize it. And we did.

AF: So I take it the Atari experienced ended quickly. 

SB: Yes. We were running on Apple Mac with ArchiCAD and then we adopted Artlantis. We were doing very well doing renderings with that for awhile and then we ended up pushing up against the boundaries of that. So we looked at CINEMA 4D. And the Macs kept evolving as well–and business went crazy because we could create and develop incredibly quickly in ArchiCAD and then render and animate with CIMEMA 4D like nobody else.

AFR: So after you went on your own how many years were you doing both the architectural design practice and the 3D professional business?

SB: I was probably doing both for just a few years. We started using CAD and 3D about 25 years ago. And from there it just grew and went to the US, Europe and the Middle East. And then two things happened. The global market crash and China…everybody with their expectations of the two hundred dollar rendering.

next page: Competing with China – How To Do It Right

Competing with China – How To Do It Right

AFR: Ah, I sense a nerve there about China…

SB: Of course nobody on this side of the world can compete with China. So we came back towards architecture, design and getting deeply involved within the projects again. Now people are coming to us where they don’t have the architect yet, they haven’t hired their design professionals, they kinda have no idea or are looking for ideas…and I’ll take it and I’ll start running with it.

AFR: So did you just say people are coming to you prior to the architect being onboard?

SB: Yes, certain clients of ours come prior to that and they need something done that they can take to the financier to get projects moving. There is often a phase where the project is too undeveloped to make a commitment to an architect and our clients just need quick ideas thrown together, brought to life and assessed. Then they will go to an architect after the investors have come onboard or they know what direction they want to head in.

AFR: Hmm…that’s an interesting discovery. 

SB: I develop many of the initial ideas and when the architect comes onboard I will send my ideas to the architect and the architect will keep developing it and we continue to work in tandem like that. In today’s real estate development market that is normal. You do what the market demands and adapt to it.

AFR: Can you talk more about the impact of the financial crash in this latest economic cycle and how it affected the world of 3D for you?

SB: Sure. Well, as I said earlier people started coming to me for 3D, and I was met with great success for years. Then the market started changing worldwide–in two very big ways. Number one: pre-sales. The world of financing changed of course with the global recession and when that happened that made the demand for 3D within pre-sales go through the roof.

AF: Can you explain ‘pre-sales’ because I want to make sure readers, and myself, understand what you refer to? 

SB: People sell a building before they even commence building it now.

Back in the old days financing was different, money was more easily attainable for doing a complete development. The developer was doing much more guess work back then with product, but the market was also more forgiving…nowadays pre-sales and constant product development is where it is at. And it is going to stay that way for a long time.

So when property development people saw 3D–especially high quality 3D–they were all over it like a rash.  My real niche is animations, because most people just offer renderings. And I do the whole building, not just two faces of it. And the landscaping is all 3D–not 2D image props of plants and trees. And I have the big render farm. So if they want another minute or two of footage, they don’t have to wait a couple more days, they can have it quite easily within a few hours.

But you and I both know that the developer doesn’t just need a quick rendering. They need more services than that. If it is one of those types of cheap developers or builders, they can go find those types of services in China. It will come back screwed up a few times but in the end he has got his rendering for a few hundred bucks. And he thinks he’s happy.

AF: So how has Archiform 3D adapted to that given your background in architecture and Bianca’s interior design expertise?

SB: It’s simple, we offer complete solutions. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have plans. It doesn’t matter if you are half way done…or you don’t have the colors or the furniture picked out yet. And that instantly gets their attention. And that is something that the Chinese just can’t do.

People come to us and ask, “how much per second?” And I say, “I don’t know.” And they ask, “well what do I get?” And I say, “you get exactly what you need–and more. If you need 20 renderings, you’ve got 20 renderings. If you learn you need five minutes of footage, then you get five minutes. You are paying us to do a complete job. You are paying us to get it right. It’s a fixed fee. That’s it!”

And the more I got into that the more the big clients started to come in. If you look at our website it isn’t about 3D renderings, how fast we can do them or any monthly special–its about solutions. That’s how we differentiate from what you get in China. We use our backgrounds in architecture and interiors to solve problems that are relevant to today’s global development market–not just do renderings.

Living in the Bahamas

AFR:  So you started in Australia and gained an international clientele during the golden years of market expansion but along the way you ended up in the Bahamas. How did that come about and why?

SB: Well, I got a job working for CBS for a certain famous golf tournament that I’m not allowed to mention by name.

AFR: Okay, so I saw the animations with the golf balls and the dynamics involved…quite cool. I take it you didn’t do the terrain of the course though.

SB: No we did! Absolutely. We did the whole thing. We actually did that in ArchiCAD believe it or not. And then we put that into CINEMA 4D. I flew over the course in the helicopter and did my own ground textures. They got me this wonderful fire-fighting helicopter that could just freeze in the sky. We chose this time where they cleared out all the golf members for maintenance and then we gathered the pictures we needed.

AFR: I take it you used the motion dynamics features in CINEMA 4D to make the animations with the golf balls landing on the green work?

SB: Yes, exactly.

AFR: That was quite a unique project for you…

SB: Yes, that was a bit different. It was around that time that I decided to get out of Australia. I decided that I just liked the way Americans do business and wanted to be closer to the United States. It’s very backward in Australia on the business side of things when you compare to the ease of doing business in the USA.

AFR: So tell me about being in the Bahamas. What’s your setup like?

SB: I have shared office space in Miami for meetings and I reside here in the Bahamas. These days I kick between the two depending on who needs to meet. Bianca, who often travels with me, is a USA-based interior designer–so between the architecture and the interior design backgrounds we can pretty much turn any wild idea into a presentation quickly.

AFR: So where is everyone based?

SB: Today I am quite accustomed to living out of a suitcase. I could be in the Bahamas, United States, Middle East and Europe all within a month and entirely at the whim of my clients. The Miami office is mostly my render farm and that shared office. I have an ArchiCAD contractor to help with overload and she is in Serbia. And I have a similar person for CINEMA 4D who is in Macedonia. We are spread out all over the place but these days it absolutely doesn’t matter.

AFR: So how do you all work?

SB: Bianca helps me with design. She’s beautiful, talented and accomplished and we work well together. You can see her working with me on the HGTV episode in our portfolio. For the remote team, once I have my ideas down I can send them what I need and I can get my ArchiCAD model back in a few days and I can continue the work. I can just jump in and make my changes.

AF: So tell me about your clients..where are they? What percentage of your work in Florida in particular?

SB: I would say only about 2 percent of my work is in Florida. The big reason I have the space in Miami is not because of clients there but because I have the render farm, which I built myself. I have a yacht that I take over and I’m there in the office in about 4 hours or so. I can’t do that with New York. I love the Bahamas, have a great lifestyle here but I’m also close to Miami which gives me access to civilization!

AFR: That’s a nice way to get to work!

SB: Those are the days when it’s fun to be me.

next page: The Porsche Tower Project

The Porsche Tower Project

AFR: So you said only a small percent of your work is in the Miami area but one project, the Porsche Tower project is definitely there and definitely quite interesting. Can we talk about that a bit?

SB: Sure. That project is really quite special and I’m grateful to have been a part of it. The Porsche Tower in Miami is a luxury high-rise residential tower with integrated personal car lifts (elevators) that take your car directly to your own garage next to your unit in the tower. It’s extraordinary. We did it fully in ArchiCAD. It changed more than five times, but that’s the beauty of ArchiCAD is we are able to execute quickly and adapt to change with a program like that.

The most important thing we helped solve was to present the sophisticated car elevator issues. And we did the entire project within weeks from the ArchiCAD work to the CINEMA 4D work. And I mean weeks, including design interpretations, redesign–as Sieger Suarez of Porsche threw ideas around–renders, animations and glitches worked out.

AFR: That sounds intense. 

SB: We were sending draft versions of the animation nearly daily to the client with their engineers able to easily see where all the headaches were going to be. The animations became invaluable to the design and development process. Porsche would fly in from Germany, the client was in Miami, I would take the boat over and we would get around the table and solve these problems. That’s something that a Chinese high-volume, low-cost render shop can’t do.

It’s a very powerful thing to be able to convey an occupant driving their car into a glass elevator and staying inside the car while the elevator takes them to their personal garage at their apartment up in the sky…I mean, just to explain that on paper to the building authorities would have been nuts! But if you show it in 3D it all makes sense.

Shop Talk: The Archiform 3D Pipeline

AFR: Our readers love seeing the work others do but one thing they always want to focus on is the tools used to get the job done. Can you tell me a bit about your unique pipeline and workflow tools?

SB: It started with ArchiCAD. We have been on it since version 3 or something. Way back…

I started dabbling with CINEMA 4D in the early 90’s. In fact, you had mentioned education at one point, back then there was no Internet. No public forums or anything like that. And it wasn’t until after a year after that the Post Forum website went up. We were just a bunch of guys with this new technology–we were pioneers–and we would share what we were doing and help each other out. Training CDs, training websites–these things didn’t exist back then.

AF: So that is the core of your workflow? But I know you do camera tracking so can you talk a little bit about that? 

SB:  Sure, I use SynthEyes for that because it runs on both Mac and Windows. I have this policy now where I will not use any software that is not on both Mac and Windows.

AF: Please explain.

SB: Well yeah, because I own about 40 Windows machines but I use a Mac on my desk. My entire render farm is just about all Windows boxes with the main master machine being an Apple Xserve, which sadly is going to have be switched out soon as there is no new follow-through product from Apple to move to.

AF: So what is running on the Xserve versus the 40 PCs?

SB: The Xserve is running CINEMA 4D Server. But keep in mind that we now have Team Render, which I have switched to. So it is running the master version of CINEMA 4D. All the PCs are render slaves and are stripped down boxes. And this is because you can’t buy a stripped down Mac that is just about the horsepower.

I greatly prefer the Mac OS X environment–which is why I personally work on it–but my business is about speed, client schedules, and dollars and fortunately for us, CINEMA 4D’s excellent cross-platform abilities and network rendering technology enables me to optimize the scenario that is right for me and my business. Because of the render farm and because I built inexpensive render slave boxes, I have incredible fire power behind my CINEMA 4D pipeline.

AF: So how do you reach your Xserve and render farm from your home in the Bahamas? How do you tap that power if you are holed up in a design review meeting in London with your clients? Are you able to tap the power of your Render Farm from there?

SB:  Absolutely. I usually have a fully loaded MacBook Pro and can do a lot with that with clients but it has limitations. If I need a lot of power, am away from my workstation, and have reasonable Internet speeds I can use Logmein to reach the Xserve and CINEMA 4D on that with the power of the render farm behind it.

So using Logmein I can go in run the process I need and just collect the results and do what I need to with that. Sometimes I have great Internet and I’m just fine.

Favorite Features in CINEMA 4D

AF: So what are  some things that you like about CINEMA 4D beyond what you have mentioned before? Can you talk a bit about the features that stand out to you, the user interface, etc?

SB: The main reason why I got into CINEMA 4D is because there weren’t too many options back then. So there are historical reasons, I admit that. But the more I got into it the more I realized that it is damn good software. I always keep my eyes open for new stuff but Maxon does an amazing job of staying ahead of the curve. It’s also rock solid, fast, has great network rendering, runs cross platform and has a great user interface. Just when I think I’m maybe getting envious of another platform and consider straying they always hook me again–like with the new Team Render. It’s fantastic!

AFR: What kinds of other things have caught your eye?

SB: I keep up up with new technology as best I can and always see what the newcomers at universities are up to. I have recently trialed the GPU-based iray system and am always reassessing Vray. CINEMA 4D has an option for Vray as well, so whenever I begin to get a little bit of 3D envy I take a deeper look.

AF: So what do you think about Vray?

SB: It is a very good rendering engine, no doubt. But it comes at a price of longer render times. So I tend to stick to the rendering engine in CINEMA 4D and that’s because my clients can’t wait that long. We work very quickly and as I said earlier the way we work we are more than just providers of renders and animations. It’s the whole process and how we take care of our clients’ every need giving them exactly what they need in the end.

AF: There are different rendering options in C4D, are you using the physical rendering option or the standard options?

SB: I tend to use the standard GI renderer rather than the physical renderer. The reason being that the physical renderer tends to chew up too much memory for me for my work. I need render instances and the memory input on those was slowing my work down with the physical renderer. Those are incredibly important for my work.

next page: The New Mac Pro: The Good, the Bad, and the Not So Ugly

The New Mac Pro: The Good, the Bad, and the Not So Ugly

AF: I want to insert something here since we are talking about performance and speed. So you must be aware of the new Mac Pro. So what do you think about that…being a Mac oriented 3D pro?

SB: I have always had enormous faith in Apple, especially when Steve Jobs was there. They would come out with stuff that at first didn’t make sense but it eventually did and won over the industry–just like when they threw away serial ports and moved to USB.

Now I love the design of the new Mac Pro, I like the look of it–it’s beautiful. I love the processor…but us 3D guys need power–lots of it! And the new Mac Pro only has one CPU socket and 3D is very CPU intensive.

AF: Right but the new Mac Pro does have a 12 core option. But you can only get one of those, no 24 core machines yet!

SB: But the frequency on the 12 core is just 2.4 GHz. And that’s a problem in editing functions. When you want to move 3D geometry around or move a group of objects it’s just using one core (single-threaded).

AFR: So are you saying that for the bulk of 3D work that doesn’t involve the rendering function stuff, like creating and editing, those functions are highly single core frequency oriented, rather than multi-threaded and multi-core oriented? So higher frequencies are preferable?

SB: I’m saying you want both. I prefer two 8-core CPUs at 3.4 GHz, which gives more cores and more responsiveness.

For editing and little tasks single core performance is key. When you start doing heavy calculations you will max out every single core of the system. Now I mentioned earlier that I have two systems at my desk for work. A Mac and a PC. I prefer the Mac because OS X is superior to Windows on just about every level. It’s a UNIX system with an amazing user interface and it’s far easier to manage and use. So with CINEMA 4D and Team Render I can arrange a setup where I use a PC as my “after burner” machine but do all my work on my Mac.

So I’m probably going to build a new machine using 16-core Opteron processors, and a quad socket motherboard so I have a 64-core monster. That will be the fastest, “gruntiest” afterburner render machine that money can build. But it will be slow for editing, because those cores only run at 2.4 GHz.

AF: That sounds quite amazing.

SB: Well, your ultimate system has lots of cores but all the cores are running fast. There is no point in having lots of cores if they are only running at about half the speed. So, I guess on one level I’m disappointed in the new Mac Pro. It’s only one socket. Don’t get me wrong–it’s a really good socket, it’s a great CPU. But it only has one. If the new Mac Pro had two sockets I would gladly pay for it.

The second thing that really worries me is the spagetti. You are going to have so many wires coming out of the back side of this beautiful machine that aesthetically wants to live on its own. You want to see it as this beautiful object but you can’t with tons of wires and boxes behind it.

And I also need to have a lot of hard drives and in the new Mac Pro you are limited on the storage side as well. You can’t load four hard drives into it like the old Mac Pro. Now, if I didn’t need so much data, and my workstation here has about 9 terabytes of data, than the storage issue wouldn’t be such a big thing. Or if I still had a studio of 20 people and we were all on a gigabit network working off a fast server, than maybe it wouldn’t be such a big deal. But that is not the case for me. Now I would love for Apple to once again prove me wrong but we will have to wait and see.

True 3D Trees and 64-bit

AF: I understand all your trees and entourage are true 3D. Can you explain?

SB: In a nutshell all our plants and trees are full 3D models, not imagery. Everything we do has zero touch-ups. I hate adding fake things in the final images, especially with the way my clients change things all the time. Anyway, I need to take you back to the beginning. When we were all in the 32-bit days nearly all of my peers were having trouble doing the true 3D nature work that I was doing. But they were all on Windows. But I was on the Mac. So remember the 32-bit days and the 4 GB limit? Well, the difference was that for Apple it was 4 GB per application, but on Windows it was 4 GB overall. So I had Macs with excess of 4 GB and I would assign a full 4 GB to the entire CINEMA 4D application and it gave me this wonderful advantage. I got really good at modeling very efficient but very realistic 3D trees and plants as well.

AF: Going back that far you must have an amazing parts library, right?

SB: It’s monstrous. And it’s true I have an amazing library now. And then Apple came out with OS X, which in my opinion–under the hood–is leaps and bounds ahead of anything on Windows. And I’m saying that as someone who uses both, as I’ve mentioned before, every day. OS X actually gave me real true 64-bit performance and smoothness which translated into me being able to do bigger and bigger stuff. And I do some very big 3D models. I mean monstrous.

So what I do really taxes my machines the results are worth it and my clients really appreciate the difference.

AFR: Thanks for talking to Architosh about your work. This has been a really interesting discussion and I am sure readers will appreciate the spartan nature of your approach. Best of luck with your future endeavors. 

SB: Thank you. It’s been my pleasure.

Closing Notes

To learn more about Steve Bell and Archiform 3D visit their website here.