How to Empower an In-House CGI Team

Some furniture manufacturers choose to outsource 3D visualization, while others employ in-house CGI teams. The latter often consider an outsourcing 3D rendering service provider as nothing more than direct competition. But it couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, remote CGI studios are trustworthy allies to in-house specialists.

For instance, you might need more experts and more resources for your projects. Sure, you can hire 3D artists full-time, but they’ll have nothing to do in-between the tasks. Outsourcing providers, on the other hand, are available to you exactly when you need them. At any moment, you can have a whole team, or even several teams of 3D artists working on the 3D visualization of your next furniture collection.

Here’s another example — a design change happens just days before the catalog needs to be ready. In this case, you can call upon an army of seasoned professionals and get drop-dead gorgeous results right on time. Moreover, you can be sure that everyone will love how smoothly you run things. The designers, the marketing director, and your in-house team members who got a good night’s sleep and had a productive, stress-free day as a result — all of them will appreciate your decision to delegate some of the workloads to the pros.

Just think about it. A professional outsourcing provider of 3D rendering service develops and perfects its business processes over the years of working with countless designers and manufacturers. Furthermore, a studio like that invests in top-tier human and technical resources, which an in-house CGI team cannot afford in most cases. But partnering up with a remote provider, they can fully enjoy those benefits.

So, how exactly does an outsourcing 3D rendering company empower in-house 3D artists? Let’s see what you get by working with one!

#1. Get the Renders Ready Ultra-Fast with a Render Farm

A render farm is a cluster of interconnected computers that all work together simultaneously to complete a task, namely — the rendering of CG images. Compared to a single machine, a render farm is a lot more powerful. That means you can get high-quality 3D renders much faster.

Naturally, buying and maintaining all the equipment for a render farm is a costly endeavor. And if you don’t need it on a daily basis, there’s no point investing in it. Instead, when you need a batch of top-notch CG images ASAP, you can always rely on an outsourcing 3D rendering service provider.

#2. Save on Pro-Grade Software for Product 3D Rendering

For an in-house CGI department, buying professional programs and plug-ins for 3D rendering can be quite expensive. And, most likely, not all of those will be used every single day. An outsourcing 3D visualization service provider, on the other hand, uses pro-grade software all the time. Plus, it has all the scripts that are necessary for the optimization of work in such programs. The latter includes Autodesk 3ds Max, Corona Renderer, Lumion, Substance Painter, Marvelous Designer, ZBrush, Solidworks, Blender, AutoCAD, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop.

So, when you delegate your tasks to an outsourcing provider of 3D rendering service, just specify the software you want them to use if you need the result in a certain format.

#3. Reduce Spendings on Recruiting and Onboarding CG Artists

The process of recruiting and onboarding highly skilled 3D visualization specialists is tedious and expensive. Moreover, it’s completely unnecessary! Because you can always contact an outsourcing 3D rendering service provider and get a full team of professionals at your disposal, including project and client managers, a team lead, and an art director.

Remote 3D rendering companies have lots of experts in various areas of CG, like 3D modeling, visualization, animation, and motion design. Moreover, those specialists are already used to working together, so their workflow is ultra-efficient. So why bother spending time and money on recruiting and onboarding so many 3D artists? You can just reach out to a trusted team of professionals at any moment and get amazing CG visuals.

Meanwhile, your in-house CGI department can focus on compiling project briefs, giving notes, and accepting results. On top of that, the budget you saved on recruiting extra employees can now be used to step up your marketing game. For instance, you can invest more in advertising, 3D assets, testing new promo channels, improving the skills of your existing employees, etc.

#4. Organize Communication with an Online Platform

Now, you might be wondering if working with an outsourcing 3D rendering service provider will be compatible with your workflow organization. And we’re here to tell you that it definitely will. In fact, such practice will only improve the way you manage your projects and store your files.

The thing is, an outsourcing CGI studio specializes in remote work. That means they have their brief templates and perfectly running processes ready to tackle any assignment. Moreover, they have a CRM, or customer relationship management system. It’s an online platform that allows having all the project data organized and always at hand.

Now, how does it work in practice? At CGIFurniture, we have developed our own custom platform called CGI CRM. There, you have all of your project information, including the scope of work and attached files, such as technical drawings, references, CAD models, and intermediate results. At any moment, you can go to your project tab on the online platform and see all the information related to a particular assignment. Also, you get your own client card that has all of your standard requirements, as well as unlimited cloud storage for your files.

Examine case-studies of CGI projects to see real examples of using 3D technology for marketing purposes.

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All of your communication with the 3D rendering team also happens within CGI CRM. You can write and receive messages, leave notes, and, of course, receive the final results there. This way, it’s absolutely impossible to forget or lose things. And finally, you can make payments and track your payment history directly on the platform.

Better yet — we can API-integrate our CGI CRM into your own CRM system. As a result, your employees won’t have to duplicate the entire correspondence and adjust to a new interface. And all the functions will remain intact. We can even add your personal library of 3D assets we create for you to your website.

#5. Save Time and Money on Modeling the Props

A large outsourcing 3D rendering service provider works on hundreds of projects per year. That allows the studio to accumulate whole libraries of high-quality 3D assets over time. And you, as a client, can have free access to them. So, there’s no need for you to spend hours browsing stocks to find, for instance, a perfect set of home decor 3D models. And, of course, no need to spend extra money on either buying ready 3D assets or ordering custom 3D modeling.

We at CGIFurniture have a library with 56 444 CG models as of today. And we’re constantly adding new ones and updating the old ones. Using our library, you can quickly and easily find all kinds of CG items for lifestyle images. For instance, there are 3D models of furniture, fixtures, decor pieces, textiles, plants, etc. You can just select the ones you like. And then you add them to your SOW — it only takes a second.

To make it more convenient to find the right models, we have filters with numerous categories. Using those, you can look for specific brands, types of objects, styles, materials, colors, and so on. Plus, we can always take an existing 3D model and customize it for you e.g. change material or color. It’s much faster and less expensive than custom 3D modeling from scratch!

#6. Cut Project Costs Using a Variety of Ready 3D Scenes

Another empowering thing that comes with teaming up with an outsourcing 3D rendering service provider is having access to a library of ready-to-use 3D scenes. Working alone, an in-house CGI team has only two options. They can either create new scenes from scratch, which takes ages, or use the ones from previous projects. And neither of those options is very efficient.

On the other hand, our library at CGIFurniture has over 4000 virtual scenes we’ve created over the years. And all of our clients can use those absolutely for free for their own lifestyle product images. Moreover, we’re always ready to customize the scenes at their request. For instance, we can change the color of the wallpaper and the material of the floor. Even with such small changes, the room will look completely different.

Our library has 3D scenes of all kinds of interiors and some exteriors too. Overall, there are 12 styles you can choose from. You can also filter the library entries by type of room, style, color palette, tone, and material.

#7. Have Your 3D Assets Stored, Managed, and Updated for You

CG specialists often struggle with storing their 3D assets. The files weigh a ton, there’s a lot of them, and their number is constantly growing. To create and maintain a structured archive, one needs to pay a small fortune for a cloud storage service. Plus, someone has to curate the catalog, check that all the file names are correct, etc. Basically, you need a full-time employee just for that.

But for an outsourcing 3D rendering service provider, storing 3D assets in an organized way is no problem at all. For instance, we at CGIFurniture have designed built-in cloud storage for our CGI CRM. With this feature, our clients can store all their files in impeccable order.

Our customers can have all their files stored on our platform indefinitely and there’s no storage space limit. They can easily access their models, scenes, textures, etc at any time and reuse them in new projects. It only takes a couple of clicks to find necessary assets and forward them to the 3D rendering team.

#8. Tap Into Skills and Artistic Expertise of Seasoned 3D Artists

It’s true that in-house 3D artists know well the specifics of the product and all the promo visuals that have been created for it before. Furthermore, they are aware of what kinds of imagery their competitors are doing. And, of course, they know what the overall advertising trends are in their market niche.

However, a fresh pair of eyes and a different kind of artistic experience can be just as valuable as the in-house product marketing expertise. When 3D artists of an outsourcing 3D rendering service provider start working on a new project, they can suggest some improvements, share their own creative vision, and give advice on general workflow optimization. For instance, if you come in with an urgent task, we’ll suggest cutting the number of custom 3D models of props. Instead, we’ll offer you to choose similar items and scenes from our library. Also, we can suggest texture baking instead of super-detailed modeling, which also reduces the scope of work.

Besides, an outsourcing provider of 3D rendering service places the vast artistic expertise of its specialists at your disposal. For example, our studio has developed a visual style guide for lifestyle 3D renders. It’s a collection of 35 CG images, each in a different style. You can browse through them to find inspiration and get fresh ideas for your lifestyles. Then, you can add the pictures you like to your brief as references. So, there’s no need to create a Pinterest board and spend a week searching through thousands of images. Therefore, if your own designers ever run out of ideas because of the stress of a looming deadline — no problem! We’ll help with that in no time.

Download CGIFURNITURE price guide and learn the costs of top-tier 3D visualization projects of different scales!

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Now you know 8 rock-solid benefits of partnering up with an outsourcing 3D rendering service provider even when you have an in-house CGI department of your own. As you can see, there can be situations where you might need access to a larger number of 3D artists, expert project management, pro-grade software and hardware. So, you can truly benefit a lot from empowering your in-house specialists with the help of outsourcing professionals from time to time. Or all the time — we’re always ready to work on even the most challenging tasks.

Looking for top-notch 3D rendering services to make your products shine in promo campaigns? Contact us at CGIFurniture and get unbelievably photorealistic visuals faster than you can imagine!

Ana Wayne

Content Writer, Copywriter

Ana loves writing about CGI technology in product and interior design. She swears by mid-century furniture style, soul music, sci-fi movies, and loves tasting delicious street food when traveling abroad.