Rough ETAs for work?

thegreyman1

Just curious guys but I've always wanted to know how long it takes other people to do their work. I'm interested specifically in professionals, working in a studio, under average contemporary deadlines. And of course, try to be honest and realistic. This is just out of curiosity as I said.

Lets say a character to this standard:



Or a weapon to this standard:



Start to finish of course. Lets just say your team leader handed you a brief wanting these items, how long would you expect him/her to have put down for due delivery.

Cheers! Can't wait to find out.

LMP

It really depends on the project and the assets, and the current stage of the project. On one project for low poly environment building assets, I could generally do a first pass model and a texture within about half a week, or 2 assets per week. But, this was pretty early on in the project.

When I was a lighting artist for a project... towards the end of production... I would generally polish setup and fix lighting bugs for 2.5 to 3 days at the start of the week, and then prep scenes and render the 70+ lightmaps over the next 1, 1.5 to 2 days... trying to get all the maps rendered and committed by 12pm, so we could build the weekly build and send it to QA. I've had to submit renders to the farm until 11pm before, and then only manage to commit the lightmaps 10 minutes before the build.

Edit: Also, generally, work tends to expand to fill the time I have.

slosh

This is a hard questions to answer. Different studios have different pipelines and tools. For example, are you doing the character from complete scratch? are you using marvelous designer? head scans? All of these weigh in heavily and can drastically affect timeframes. I just finished up a human male character that I got 10 weeks to work on but it only took about 8. I did the base nude, then did a full base outfit, and a hairstyle and all from scratch. I did it to as realistic as I could but did not photo source, no marvelous, no scans. It probably could have been done faster but I since I was afforded the time, I noodled a bit at times. I am assuming most studios work at a much faster pace for realistic characters.

thegreyman1

Thanks guys.

LMP, I'm not really talking about low poly or first pass or environmental, I have little experience in that stuff. but its interesting and good to know Plus I'm sure others will find it handy to know

And thanks Slosh, very interesting.

Ok to clarify, I know its hard to answer, everyone always says it depends on such and such. So lets just say, both are from scratch. The character is from concepts, the gun from whatever refs you find but its a real-world gun. No marvelous designer, no substance, no scans. Ok, maybe substance painter if you want but declare it at the outset! zBrush sculpt to low poly to texture for the character, to a spec and close quality to the alien isolation character above. High poly in your modelling program to low poly to texture for the gun.

Don't worry too much about the details like what if I have to retopologise or the lead artist wants changes, just pretend everything goes swimmingly

Rough estimates are appreciated as its all very helpful

Joopson

For the gun, I'd say around two work weeks. I'd lean towards 2 1/2 weeks, because it's always better, at a studio, to name a further away deadline, and turn in work on time or before, than to name an earlier deadline, and be late for it (even if it's still earlier than the 2 1/2 weeks). A lot of it is about being dependable, reliable and trustworthy. And keeping or beating a slightly longer deadline is better than aiming for crazy short amounts of time to impress, and then failing.

Kevin Albers

Maybe 30 days for the character. Maybe 15 days for the weapon. If either is a very important hero asset (i.e. the main player character), maybe double that number.

thegreyman1

Yeah I'm talking about "hero" assets here. As I said, to the quality of the assets above and they're pretty top notch. Thats hardly a 3rd person weapon....

So, Kevin, you're talking 60 days for a main character and 30 days for a main character 1st person weapon?

AlecMoody

30 days on a weapon is really excessive to me. Unless your lead is changing the concept art as you go, 10 production days tops.

radiancef0rge

AlecMoody wrote: »

30 days on a weapon is really excessive to me. Unless your lead is changing the concept art as you go, 10 production days tops.

This has been my experience 7-10 for a weapon of that "scale"
Probably 10-15 days for the character. Including crit and adjustments.

almighty_gir

radiancef0rge wrote: »

This has been my experience 7-10 for a weapon of that "scale"
Probably 10-15 days for the character. Including crit and adjustments.

you'd need the concept to be absolutely set in stone with zero chance of revisions to hit that kind of deadline on a character though. you'd also need some kind of technical documentation from the animation/rigging guys so that you can nail the lowpoly first time too.