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Stijn Stragier
Architect and Managing Director, Polygon 3D
Polygon is a Belgium-based 3D visualisation company aimed at architects and designers.
We make visuals, stills, animation, and 360° visuals for building projects, working with other architects as well as companies or city authorities.
Our team visualises architecture as well as urban planning projects, and sometimes infrastructure and interiors.
Stijn Stragier, Polygon 3D's Managing Director, tells us more
"Our clients are mostly developers. We have rather typical architecture in Belgium, where a lot of developers can buy land, build, and then sell it to customers. There's a lot of building activity in Belgium compared to other countries. It means there's always a need to make good commercial websites, drawings, and visualisations; so that is the majority of our clients. We also work directly for other architects, enter competitions, and sometimes we work with companies that wish to expand their company and need visualisations of how the building is going to look. "
When we do a project, there's always lots of people involved.
There's the client; which is, most of the time, a developer or an architect, when it's a competition we work with two or three design offices, maybe an interior designer, sometimes landscape architects. Basically, there's two, three, four, five different parties involved.
Within a project, we'd be sending emails to each other and it would get very complicated. It's easy to forget to copy all the right people in; communication wasn't that easy.
Often, our emails would have large files attached because we always send a lot of visual information - it's tricky.
It's hard to communicate about images when you're not next to each other.
What our clients would do is print the image, make remarks all over them, then most of the time, we can't read them! Next, they scan it and send it back.
This gets very difficult - we'd get tons of emails with the scanned images with the text and pick-ups.
We had been using email and WeTransfer for everything after stopping using Basecamp for file sharing and client communication.
Recently, we had some new clients asking us, "is there a revision system that you guys use?" This was a catalyst; we decided that there must be a better way to communicate about graphics so we started to search for a revision software, and we found Oroson.
Oroson is very visual - it allows clients to make annotations on the images and the graphical layouts. All our designers use Oroson to communicate with clients now, and it's our goal to get all of the clients using it, too.
All comments from the clients are in one place so it's possible to just go to the projects on Oroson to see a collection of everything that's been said or drawn on top of the images.
We've replaced WeTransfer with sending a link to Oroson. Our file sizes are large and sometimes content is too big and too difficult for our clients to download.
Also, 90% of our work is images, sometimes we share animations and having it all in one place is awesome.
Our clients go wild with using the annotations!
I was immediately drawn to Oroson because of the option to make annotations on images.
On the boards, we get to see a collection of feedback including what's been drawn on top of the images. On video, you can just press pause and start commenting, too.
It's a more professional way of communicating and gathering feedback from our clients.
When we started using Oroson, I made a template and we used the same one for each client. We're always working in the same way.
It helps with version control. We keep it very strict with the clients; when we have the same clients and different 3D artists working with them, they see their items appear in the same way each time.
It keeps the process very structured.
Oroson is future proof because of the ease of use. Some of the main benefits we've found when using it are:
We use Oroson for organisation and presenting to the client with a very visual overview. The features that we use during that are:
I'd suggest that you make it very visual. We're used to typing everything out, but with Oroson, the overview is very visual, so take advantage of that and use images!
“I'd recommend Oroson to very creative teams. It's perfect for a team that can use it internally as well as to communicate with clients. For creative teams, you can use it for whatever you think of; use the grids to make a mood board, place reference images, add some texts, and showcase posts. You can browse through those images, it's very list base - text base. We're using Oroson with our clients and our goal is to get all of them on to it.”