What does a 3D character designer do in a single workday?
polycounter lvl 4
I mean, you enter your office at whatever hour and what, practially speaking, happens until you leave? How much work do you do? What can be accomplished during a single day? I watched this today and it was very informational 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjUPYB8x-Cc, but I couldn't find anything similar regarding character artist's job. In interviews people use very vague language, like "well, it's different every day", which - while surely true - gives me zero useful information. Something like: "for example I sculpted a face today" or "I made a set of 5 pants with textures" would be much better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjUPYB8x-Cc, but I couldn't find anything similar regarding character artist's job. In interviews people use very vague language, like "well, it's different every day", which - while surely true - gives me zero useful information. Something like: "for example I sculpted a face today" or "I made a set of 5 pants with textures" would be much better.
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What can be accomlished within a day is completely depending on so many factors - can you texture 5 sets of pants per day? Yeah, probably within 1h if they are using the same bakes and are just some minor color/dirt variations. If I have to sculpt them, make them fit in a modular system it won't doable. Depending on pipeline and how the project is organized you might have a lot of things ready at hand to re-use (from prop kits to materials when texturing) or it might make simple things more complicated to fit the projects needs. Depending on the importance of the asset you might have a day to sculpt the face or more than a week...
Also the sheer difference in what you have to do at each step of the character pipeline makes it vary. Not to mention how much a concept influences the amount of complexity and time that goes into something. It's completely pointless to talk about 'how much a character artist accomplishes within a work day'.
but seriously...
that's not really how production works, it's an iterative process and you should expect to redo everything you touch a number of times over the course of a project.
What you can turn out in a day is largely irrelevant - obviously it doesn't hurt to be fast but if it's at the expense of quality and good working practice it can be utterly disastrous.
What is it really like? When I chat with potential new hires, there's often quite a bit if stress about all the unknowns.
We have quite a few articles and threads about this, see the sticky for links.
Of course, a hobbyist doing all this on their own isn't going to be the same as a studio that has done the process many times successfully, but you'll still have a much better idea about how games are made than if you only work on portfolio things.
Even the average day at the office comes down to 'it depends'. What stage of a project are we talking about? The beginning of a new part of the project? In that case the meetings increase and working on assets is less of a factor. Once the scope and workflow are established it comes down to more convential working on assets. The biggest difference between working on your portfolio and working in production is probably the big picture that leads to things being standardized to fit the pipeline. You want to have a common file structure, you want to have some reference example for props, characters, scenes as guidelines for other artists, things being as modular as possible to make it both more consistent throught the project, easier to combine and thus faster to create...
On a personal level my days always start with me checking emails to get up-to-date, see if there are any appointments, followed by team standup meetings to get everybody up to speed and then it is working on assets. Depending how team / project is structed you will get peer feedback while working or at least once you complete a step (for example block out, high poly then low poly, uvs, textures,...) - again depends on who is on your team and how reviews are organized. Typically an asset will undergo several reviews from different people for different reasons, mainly attempting to get issues sorted out as earily as possible, before its called done - and even then you might have to go back and change things later on. So non-distructive workflows become even more important than when working by yourself.
I personally like to know what the scope of a milestone for my team is so I can adjust my time per asset to make sure I can get my stuff finished in time + buffer. So I keep my eye on the teams progression to be sure we don't miss something and we can help each other out due to random events (changes of plans, sickness,...) and I keep that in mind when while working on assets to know how much time I will have to polish and prioritize accordingly. That's another reason why its hard to say 'I get this much done' within a day. Sometimes it is polishing and it takes as much time as there is and sometimes it just needs to get finished before a deadline and it has to be good enough.
So it all depends...
Emails, Slack, meetings, 1-on-1s, etc. all take up time. Some of which is valuable and good. But a lot of it gets in the way of the actual hands-on work.
So that's probably the toughest part for new hires. Learning how to organize your time effectively, excuse yourself from unnecessary meetings, how to avoid some of the random chatter, how to protect your "flow" time so you can get things done.
Besides that its the little things that come up with working on a big project and having more than a single task assigned to you over months. Sometimes its also about decisions only being made over time. For example last time I've got a character assigned plus his props. Since the character was the priority I've only got the detailed brief for him, not the props. Some resources came later in, some optimization details weren't clarified at the beginning. So once you start the next task you'll be asking around for someone who might know something or checking with project manager if something has been decided. And since you are not the only one who might have a question poping up, someone else might come to you. Sometimes its adjusting to things that weren't thought of, sometimes people just missed some info or just want to check what the status is.
I still spend most days working for several hours without interruptions. On some though you can't get through an hour without some interaction being necessary.
No, he's not kidding. It's not to say that the character to be rigged and animated takes that long, it's that finalizing the character will take that long sometimes. All the bug fixing, all the slight adjustments. It ain't done till it's out the door in reality.
This is the hero character. Think of God of War when the camera barely leaves Kratos. That character better be bloody perfect, with no clipping with ANYTHING he happens to wear, with no visual bugs, with the textures lookinng good at ALL close ups and ALL deformation possibilities.
Its standard to work 4 years on such chars. Multiple versions, tech changes.