Tips for going faster...
polycounter lvl 13
So, I think I just lost out on a job because I'm not fast enough. Fair enough, as I certainly think it's a weakness of mine. So, while I'm in the process of being unemployed, I'm going to work on getting faster, and was looking for any tips or advice on that front other than "practice".
I will say that I tend to get bogged down in the technical junk. Retopology is the devil. But I could certainly be a faster sculptor in Zbrush as well.
So, any tips from you pros out there?
Chris
I will say that I tend to get bogged down in the technical junk. Retopology is the devil. But I could certainly be a faster sculptor in Zbrush as well.
So, any tips from you pros out there?
Chris
Replies
Seriously unless there is a bottle neck in software, only practice to speed you up.
Hotkeys are a standard too, customise your UI to whatever your doing ect.
I do agree with Lazerus that practice speeds you up. Sometimes doing the same prop several times allows you to do things faster and you learn a little more on how you should optimize your workflow.
That and become omniscient, ideally if there were 2 omnisciences you should be both, Indeed.
People do a lot of stuff that slows them down for no other reason than it's the way they're comfortable working... Myself included.
Practice is obviously going to do you a ton of good, any time you can nail down something in the first try is going to be great. But you also need to anticipate problems and think ahead about whether or not what you're doing is going to be wasted or difficult to change later in the event that you mess it up or your art director tells you that you need to do it differently. And be aware of what stage you are in your workflow and get as much feedback as you can while everything is at the easiest point to change it.
Sorry this post is kind of unorganized but the point is there's ALWAYS something you could be doing more efficiently. Every time you run into something tedious or find yourself undoing/redoing work, think about how you could have avoided it or made it less time consuming to deal with.
Hitting the right form at the beginning without getting caught in local details is super important for efficiency and the overall feel/impact. As for what slows me down, I tend to get caught up working away on something without it really changing too significantly for the better (like when you look at the before and after and aren't sure exactly which one is better). So advice there, the leeway in plausible anatomy/design makes it so that there isn't really one 'right' look, and it can make it so that you end up spending a ton of time without really progressing the piece. So simple advice would be to learn to catch yourself when you notice these ruts and take a step back to make sure you are either correcting errors in the credibility of the design or changing the design with a specific intent (and not just blindly iterating although that certainly has a time and place).
(The fzd school youtube vids are actually great for this general topic, although they deal with 2d, many of the principles are the same.)
Topology can be super quick depending on how you do it; you can even incorporate geometry you've already made and just snap/shrinkwrap it to your mesh. I used to use 3d-coat for my retopos, but I enjoy using blender now for pretty much everything other than sculpting (honestly sticking to one app can help a lot with efficiency; it will speed you up by not only cutting down on steps in the pipeline but by also keeping you building comfort and experience in one 'place of zen').
As far as suggestions that I'm not completely at liberty to recommend (ie I'm not doing these things as part of an industry workflow), I love using Sculptris to selectively decimate meshes using the reduce brush; so for organic meshes I've been fiddling with just decimating static organic high-polys a ton and saving the meshes as my low-polys for baking and use. There are also tons of other decimation techniques and options in other programs, but I like the control of a reduce 'brush' for the decimation workflow. I also enjoy starting sculpts in Sculptris since it's clutter free, feels good imo, has a nice interface with little to worry about, and I can just GoZ to Zbrush and dynamesh when I'm ready.
More practice. By doing you will see where you can save time and also get away with spending little time on one part of the model and become faster.
I found that you really need to identify where you can reuse parts that have already been unwrapped but also think about where that might happen further down the line. The hardest thing I find to speed up on is working on old models done by other artists who didn't have the time to polish an asset. Every artist is different and then you have to work out where the other artist was going with things.
So say you were given an asset with a bad mesh and an unwrap that has been overlapped into heap, you need to consider whether it would be faster to fix whats there already or use step build to create a good mesh with a clean slate UV layout.
Its important to know if you're quicker at modelling or unwrapping, set your workflow to which ever is quicker for you. I also cannot agree enough with everyone who says practice and remember that in this line of work you don't need to be at a computer to do that. As long as you have sight you can observe almost anything and think about how you would model that and do it efficiently.
I have a sixth sense thanks to my boss and its called wire-frame vision :poly136:
Am I just being crazy or is that a Ziltoid the Omniscient reference? :P