Illustrator : John MacDonald

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Jeff_Mottle_3 - Australian Association of Architectural Illustrators (AAAI)




Jeff Mottle Interview


The man behind the screen…



What are your future plans, vision for CGarchitect?



Now that I am working on CGarchitect full time and not working for anyone else right now, there are a lot of things in the works. The one thing that is really missing in our industry is a legitimate training program for architectural visualization artists. My goal over the next several years is going to be to create a full fledged school, both online and hopefully at some point a physical presence, where just like going to school for architecture, there would be something for people who want to specialize in architectural visualization and marketing. They will be able to go through this program and really hone their skills. There are a number of other projects I am working on as well, but nothing I can comment on publically at this point.

And will we see any changes on the site itself?



In the third and final part of this interview, Jeff looks at the future of the industry, predictions for software, new international competitors for work, how to survive in a tough economy, and reveals plans for CGarchitect that will shape the future of the visualization industry…

THE FUTURE (the profession, technology, CGarchitect)

What do you think will be the most significant change to the profession in the next ten years?



I think economy wise we can equate what is happening right now within the architecture market with what happened in the dotcoms. I think this a leveling process. There was a huge boom that happened over the last five or six years that has come to an end. The companies that diversified and who understood business rather than just being artists are the ones who are going to survive. I think in that respect, the industry is also going to be reshaped. The strong will survive – survival of the fittest.

In terms of technology, the mood is towards trying to simplify the rendering processes and work flows to democratize that whole rendering and design process. Autodesk is working on a lot of new technologies now where the whole goal is to make it as push/click/render as they can. To make it as easy as possible to just drag and drop materials, and let people focus more on design than the actual technical rendering aspect.

I hear a lot that people saying that the whole industry is going to go away Certainly there are a lot of people in the industry who will be affected, but I think that there will always be a need for all levels of architectural visualization, whether that is the high-end marketing or really low end lighting studies and design stuff. For the immediate future we’ll see a lot of work being done in house at architectural firms as the software becomes easier and there isn’t a demand to outsource every single visualization that happens for an architectural project.

Architecture firms will still outsource the work for really high-end competitions or work that they just don’t have the time or desire to create internally. During the design process, I expect a lot of that work to stay in house. Applications like Revit using MentalRay are part of this transition. The quality and workflow is not phenomenal at this point but that is going to improve. That will have an impact on the profession in terms of how much and the volume of work that used to be outsourced to dedicated firms or freelancers. There will be a demand for visualization though - it has been around for the last 1,000 years and it will be here for the next 1,000 years!

Jeff, Julia, and son Kael in Banff 2009

It is interesting to see how the work has always fluctuated in and out of architectural offices depending on the skill sets and economic conditions?



I think you start to see a fluctuation even in to which country this work is going to. A lot of people comment on how China is offering such cheap labor. Interestingly, if you look at the question in this year’s survey where I ask how much people charge on average for a still image, and for an average animation/film you see that China is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to price and definitely quality, but eastern Europe and South America are equally prone to take that work as well. Their pricing is very much in line with China and the quality in many cases is the same. That will have an effect on our industry as well.

The website has definitely grown tired –its been a constant source of frustration for me being a one man show and not being able to execute on everything I want to do, but now I have more a little more time to do that. One of the things I am working on actively is a complete front end and back end overhaul of the website. That is going to facilitate a lot of the other programs and projects I want to bring on board and also freshen the website.

A relaunch of CGarchitect?



Yes, it will allow me to launch content more quickly and easily and to cover a lot more areas.

When I first launched I had the two competitions. I had the architectural visualization competition (AVC) and I had the 3D awards. The AVC was quite intensive - I ran it for 3 years and in the first year we had well over $100,000 in prizes and it was very successful. But, I thought, if I am going to hold a competition I don’t want it to be something that someone can finish in a week-end. I don’t think that can really showcase what someone’s true capabilities are. There were some fairly complex challenges that lasted between two, three and five months, depending on the year. As a result of that complexity, we found a lot of people dropping out of the competitions early because their paying work had to come first.

There were actually quite a number of companies that would sponsor an employee internally and they would actually assign all their internal workload to the other staff members and their fulltime job would be to compete in that competition. There was one guy I remember, that spent over 400 hours working on his competition piece - he ended up winning it that year.

I decided to stop the AVC this year. In all of the competitions I personally thought that the people that won, deserved to win, but I didn’t want the competition to end on a sour note and have one year where somebody won by default because the contenders dropped out because they had other work they had to do. I decided to increase the number of categories for the 3D Awards competition which doesn’t have any specific challenges, but opens the door for people to submit whatever work they have been doing in the past year.

Jeff and Julia helicopter tour in the Canadian Rockies about 30 min from their house.

And what about your future? CGarchitect must take up a huge chunk of your life. Do you have other passions?



My passions tend to change over time, but photography has been an avid hobby of mine for years. I wish I had more time for it, but I always try to book a at least a day on my business trips to spend wandering around new places to take photos. You can see some of my photos online here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jmottle/

I don't know if I can call it a passion just yet, but aviation is also something I've loved for a long time. Probably longer than I've wanted to be involved in architecture. I WILL get my pilots license in the next few years if all works as planned.

A sample of Jeff's photographic work, "Mundos Digitales 2008"



This is the final part of an interview recorded with Jeff Mottle and posted September 2009. Many thanks to Jeff for the time and effort spent on this interview. I would also like to thank AAAI Co-Editor Nigel Gough for his valuable assistance and advice.
Jane Grealy

Jane Grealy has worked in the architectural illustration industry for over 30 years, has been President of both the American Society of Architectural Illustrators (ASAI) and the Australian Association of Architectural Illustrators, and is currently Website Editor for both those associations.


To read Part 1, "Chasing a Challenge" click here

To read Part 2, "Name of the Game" click here