xeon

Well… I think before we go round and round adding things after I supply a solution we should define all the requirements.

Is this latest twist the only addition or are there others after this that need to be considered?

I am sure there is but you could just create some Collections in Blender and store your instances in those collections and then just reference the collection by puzzle or code.

There are a few approaches but this one is one of the most straight forward methods:

Wow…congratulations.

If you have never done a Verge3D or AR application I would strongly suggest finding someone with a lot of experience to help you out for pricing, project planning and just avoiding the major pitfalls if not helping you out. I am sure there are many users on this forum that would be able to offer such help.

Pricing is a tricky thing. It requires knowledge of the customer. If your customer is small business that makes only $100,000K a year their budget is going to much different from a company that as revenues of $1,000,000,000. If you don’t have someone experienced on your team that does pricing, you are going to have to decided what are you wanting to make for the time and effort you are going to put in. You can start this by stating an amount of money you would want to make per year if you did this project for an entire year.
Lets say that amount is $120,000 (i choose this number for math simplicity). So this means one month of your time is $10,000. You then determine how long it will take you to complete your project (this is the base production time). Lets say it takes 6 weeks. So thats $15,000. And if you are familiar with doing these sort of things there will be numerous rounds of changes that you will have to account for…so lets say you offer 4 rounds of changes at 1 week each, so that adds $10,000 more. Then you have to account for your margin of error…(10 week project – 25% error). 2.5 week additional so additional $7500. This is the base. You then need to consider what are your expenses for the project, software, hardware, vendors, plugins, licensing fees, health care, rent, legal fees etc. You add all that up and then agencies will add 5% to 50% margin on those items. You then you go back to your base amount and decide what margin you want. Agencies will charge anywhere from 5% to 50%.

Then add these up and you have a price.

Again this is very loose and only a general concept of typical pricing thoughts.

Knowing your customer is key.

Your next issue is getting the STL files into something that is low poly. In my experience I almost alway only use the STL as a reference model and rebuild the models to keep the poly counts low. If these objects will never have moving parts…then you can use more automated poly reduction like decimate. Your texture/shader/material needs will have a large impact on the approach you take. You will need an experienced low poly modeler to take a look at those and give you an estimated period of time to convert them. You also need to compare the time it will take to do the conversion to the overall project length as you may have to use an automated approach to meet your project timeline.

Depending on where you are located modeling can be farmed out pretty inexpensively but this will be heavily dependent on your region and whether your client will allow you to outsource. What ever you do do not assume you can outsource, especially with larger companies…its usually not allowed.

Now…you have AR and depending on your clients device and OS needs this could become two builds or if you are lucky its just one. If your client requires iOS and are picky about colors, lighting and textures and you need more interactivity than QuickLook provides you are going to be building a native app for iOS. So make sure you have all the business requirements for iOS if needed. FYI…textures for iOS may need to be recolorized depending on the materials you use. In my experience with my clients I have yet to have a V3D model export to USDZ using the same textures for android and iOS and the client be happy with the difference in colors but your client may be different.

So with all this said….no way to really help you with pricing. Its an artform in itself but more importantly…you need to be sure you capture all the requirements and needs so you can create a great SOW and then through the creation of that process you should be able to figure out your price.

Good luck.

The webp file I created was very rough. Meaning I did quickly masked out the white and did not take any time creating a clean mask. Which is why I used Alpha Blend. Using Alpha Hashed can cause the original color (in this case white) to appear in some spots. But for the most part it should look good.

JPG Hair cards are not going to work well so you will want to separate them into an alpha based image format. There is nothing wrong with using Alpha Blend to get the effect you want…its probably the most simple solution for you as you can just separate the white hairs in the image using tools similar to tonal range selection.

If you have a technical reason for using Alpha Hashed and you do find colorization you don’t want…you will find that if you colorize your files from black and white to black and the color of the hair you want..then alpha hash will work without creating the white but it still should be on a separate alpha layer. The white areas are the blending areas between the color edge and the mask that are not able to be clipped by alpha hash.

Attached is the webp….i didn’t pack it in the blend file.

• This reply was modified 2 months, 3 weeks ago by xeon.
• This reply was modified 2 months, 3 weeks ago by xeon.

I looked at your blend file and made a modification to your haircard_clipmap.JPG

Just as a general its best to use an file format with an alpha channel (.PNG, .WEBP). You will get predictable results.

I took your file….separated the white out and created a new .WEBP and applied it to your model.

As you can see EEVEE, EEVEE render and V3D look very close.

Project/Blendfile here: https://v3d.net/t91

• This reply was modified 2 months, 3 weeks ago by xeon.
• This reply was modified 2 months, 3 weeks ago by xeon.

Can you post the image file you are using or a sample of it?