Hi folks

Please check out my medical animations on the following link:
http://comart-one.com/3d_medical_animation/comart-one_medical.html
In order to keep the file sizes small on the web all three play at twice their actual speed.

While I would definately welcome comments on them I have a few specific questions on the Total Hip Replacement Surgery, which is my latest attempt. First let me give you some background information. My experience in Max has mainly been for design visualization of products and packaging. I have recently entered into the Medical Animation domain. The animation has been done almost single handedly - I did have a little help from two other people who are novices. Except for the body taken from Poser, eveything else, including the instruments, are modelled and textured. All clinical insight was provided by the client. This was my first attempt at rigging, skinning and animating a character. The rigging and skinning had to be done so that the body, muscles and bones move together.

Questions:
1. The animation is 5 minutes long. It took five months to do this animation from start to finish. Is this timing ok - one minute takes one to three persons one month to do this type of animation? Or did I take too long?

2. The animation was stipulated originally for three minutes. However, it was finally 5 minutes long. Obviously I got paid only for 3 minutes. After studying all the clinical information provided by the client, I wrote out a storyline for the animation, but had no idea how to work out the timing in advance. Could I get a little advise on this - how does one estimate the length of the storyline more accurately?

3. I charged GBP 2000 per minute of the animation - ie total GBP 6000 for three minutes. Is this price OK, or am I giving it too cheap?

Thanks in advance
Rasheed

Wow, really nice animation...i really liked them, they contain a lot of details if you are demonstrating it to a group of doctors.

PS: I really don’t wish to have such injuries and have the doctors to do in me such operations :S

Application: 3Ds Max 2010
GPU: ATI 3850x2
RAM: 4GB
OS: Windows Vista 32-bit
DX: 10
My website: http://mohdsportfolio.weebly.com/

Thanks for your appreciative comments RedCobra. Would like advise with respect to the questions I have posed, though. Please 3D community, do give me your valuable comments in regards to these questions.

Thanks in advance.
Rasheed

I currently work for a medical animation company in sydney using xsi. I would say that the hip video is well done, explains it well. I would take a guess that for one person to do that animation would take about 2 mths max, even less if you already had the objects in stock. But to model whats in the animation, texture, animate and render then i would say 2 mths max. Experiance is the key, 5mths for your first go is fine but i would be happy with the 3 mths pay you got.
As far as planning and quoting the time a job will take, that all comes with experiance, next hip video you have to make will take you less time and you will be able to quote better for it.

Make sure you keep all the models textures etc you use and create a libary of them for latter use.
Have a look around the net for medical animations and have a go at reproducing them yourself, even to the point of planning and doing a fake quote for a fake client, then at the end of the project you can see how accurate you were, and also have some more stuff for your libary and demo reel.

I also think you could work on your look a bit, but all in all well done and keep posting any more that you do.