How to Plan for Success -- lessons from the military
Part 1 : The principles
In the army, one of my jobs was Senior Scout Observer. The main focus of this role is land navigation. A team of scouts gets dropped into the wilderness at night, many miles away from their target, and I had to lead them to a suitable hide site overlooking an objective, and get there before first light.
It's not as simple as blazing a straight line from A to B. There is the enemy to consider. This complicates things. Needless to say, there is a lot to consider. An overwhelming amount. Beside the sheer amount of information to process, there is pressure: If you make the wrong decisions, you and your friends may get killed.
But there is a job to do and not much time to get ready, so forget all of that -- you've got get down to fucking business.
So, do you just wing it, and hope for the best? No, that is not how you manage risk. That is not the way to success. You plan for success by collecting as much hard data as you can, identify every possible risk that you can, and mitigate those risk as much as possible by making multi-tiered plans and rehearsing actions for failures and contingencies.
Ok, blah, blah, blah. That's like, mindless corporate mumbo jumbo. What does it really mean? Let's take it one step at a time. We don't want to miss any important detail and get our buddies killed, do we?
First, we have to know where we are going. Some spot of dirt in the middle of nowhere in a foreign place in the pitch black of a moonless night. That may be a little problematic to find. Could easily go past it. Walking a long distance at night, there are so many tiny errors that could be made, any one of them could get you off course. And every little mistake adds time -- time that you have to stop, figure out where the hell you are, figure out how to get back on course, and time to walk your ass back on course -- and you don't have time to be fucking around like that. You've got to plan to avoid that sort of thing.
The plan, then. My method was a little different than a lot of my peers. But it was better, because I never got lost. Missions went smoothly. And when chaos struck I was able to adapt on the fly. The difference between the way I did things and the way my peers did things was not a matter of intelligence or talent or anything like that, only a difference of effort and humility.
Even when you are planning something as serious as a high-risk military operation, your emotions fuck with you. Your emotions will always fuck with you. You have to plan around them. If you are tired, you will take the easier paths. This is what happens. People grab their GPS, plot the coordinates, do the minimum checklist like "identify backstops," "identify casualty evacuation points," and so on, and then they say to themselves, "alright, I did my part. I've got this."
That is the mistake right there. "I've got this." Let me tell you, the moment you allow that poisonous thought to take root in your brain you're done. You don't got this. Nobody has got this, okay? Your mantra must be, "I'm a stupid fucking worm and I don't understand anything."
Go ahead and say that. "I'm a stupid fucking worm -- an ignorant, dumb, worthless motherfucker and the grand total of my understanding is diddly fucking squat." Really internalize these words. How does it make you feel?
It makes you feel like doing some fucking work, right? Like, maybe you should double check the things you've already double checked? Maybe you should go over the contingency plans again, double check the data they are based upon? Maybe instead of having the route's coordinates in the GPS, you store it in your brain, and on paper, and you run it over and over until you can practically envision the entire movement like a movie in your mind? Maybe instead of just relying on yourself, you go around to anybody whose not busy and make them memorize key pieces of information so if your brain fails and your GPS fails and you lose your paper, you can say, "hey bill, whats the azimuth for leg three?" What's the pace count?"
There is a set time in which you've got to begin your mission, and you know you'll need a certain amount of time to rest beforehand, but up until the very last second you are covering all the details and rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing. You wipe out everything you ever thought and fill your brain to max capacity with the details of this mission.
Ok, so you identified your goal, you identified ways to know when you've gone too far and you've practically google earthed the terrain from insertion to extraction and everywhere in between in your mind. So if something goes down, and all of a sudden you have to haul ass for 2 kilometers in some random direction, you'll be able to figure out where you are quickly, even in the midst of chaos, because you aren't dependent on any single system like a GPS. You have a pool of data to draw from. Well, you made the best plan you could in the time you had. You've gone over it all many times. You can run it all through your mind crystal clear. Ready or not, now you have to execute.
You've heard it a thousand times because it's true: Regardless of how well you planned, there is always something you missed. All plans go to shit. Usually it's something stupid. You tend to focus on the big things, like the enemy, or keeping track of distance traveled in pitch black of night and hilly terrain, or what to do if somebody steps on a mine. But you didn't think about your squad leader stopping you every ten minutes, GPS in hand, telling you, "you're off-course, Cut right five degrees." The guy telling you are off course is your senior. He's been around longer than you. Here he is second guessing you. The enemy ambushing you? You got four rehearsed ways to deal with that. Lost your pace count? You got ways to figure out where you are. But the second guessing.... this is the tough shit to deal with, because it erodes the plan. It erodes your confidence in the plan. And if the plan is gone, you are just an idiot lost in the woods.
What do you do?
I can tell you two outcomes. In this first example, I gave in to the second guessing. Not wanting to go against my superior, and not having enough confidence in my own plan, I let them take over, but in trying to manage their corrections and keep track of my own data and deal with the social aspects all at the same time, it was a disaster. It just didn't work. And who do you think had to take the fall? Of course afterwards I bitched about it with my buddies. "This motherfucker's the one who fucked shit up. Not me!"
So what? Does that matter? We need success, not excuses and regrets.
The next time this happened, it was very uncomfortable and took some courage, but essentially I told my superior to not fuck with me, trust me, and let me do my fucking job. This wasn't about two alpha male ego's butting heads -- I felt it was essential to achieving mission success that I be left alone to do my work without second guessing. I put in the work during the planning phase, I had the relevant data permanently scarred on my brain... a GPS is not smarter than I am.
So, this time, without giving in to a second-guesser leering over my shoulder, I executed my plan, and perfectly. And I did this many times, sometimes despite contact with the enemy and complete chaos thrown into the mix. When you can safely predict what a person is going to do, trust develops. Pretty soon, people knew that if there was a mission with a tough infiltration or lots of pressure for things to go smoothly, I was the go to guy.
Part 2 : Application of the principles
Alright. Whoop-dee-doo. Somebodies tooting their own horn. What is the take away? Let's see how we can apply these same principles that lead to success in high-risk military operations to make a plan so that we can get a job as an artist:
First we have to know where we are going. We need to get a job as an artist. That's the goal. But where is the goal? How will we know when we are there?
Easy. People who have jobs as artist are sharing their current, best work all the time on artstation. So we find people who have the jobs we want, and we know that we have to be as good as them or better.
So we know what the goal looks like. We have a handful of artist whose work we are studying. Note : we are studying their work. Not their person. We don't give a shit how many years they have been working, or what advantages they may have had. We are on a mission, right? Don't let your emotions fuck with you. That petty emotional shit of comparing yourself against other people is a waste of time. It won't move you forward. We care about achieving mission success. Nothing else matters.
So, step one. We identified the objective. Now, step two: How do we get there?
What we have to do is figure out where we are. Point A. A lot of people, when they are lost and trying to figure out where they are at, give in to emotions. They are full of fear, but want to be full of hope. So as soon as they get what seems like an answer, they run with it. And then they get into much worse situations. We need to get serious about this. Do it right the first time. So no wishy-washy emotional bullshit, like "Ohhhh, it's gonna take me yeeeeeeaaaars to get there." "There is sooooo much I don't know." "I'm such a noob."
That shit is useless. We can admire our hero artist without idolizing them. We must believe that we can match them or even do better than them, without diminishing them or aggrandizing ourselves. How do we keep such a level head? We collect data. In land navigation, you need to have three known points to accurately figure out where you are at. In digital art, our known points are technical knowledge and the foundations of art. So we have to find those landmarks, understand what they look like, and then we'll have enough data to figure out where the hell we are. Only then can we make a plan to get to the objective.
So, the data. Where do we find it? It's all right there in the art.
Say that again. It's all right there in the art.
You study the work of your hero artist. You have to reverse engineer it. You put it side by side with your own art. What are the differences? You'll spot some obvious stuff. "Okay, so clearly they have more nuanced lighting, which leads to a sense of authenticity while my work is kind of drab and plasticy." How to fix that? You search. Google is your workhorse. Maybe typing in "how to improve lighting in unreal engine" returns a bunch of technical stuff that is mostly over your head. What are you going to do now? Sit there and click buttons in the game engine, hoping some understanding will magically pop into your head? Well, that is one approach, but it will take a long time. You have better options nowadays. You can go forwards faster by taking a step backwards. If the technical information about lighting in unreal is over your head, you've got to first get familiar with the basics of unreal. So you spend a few weeks doing every 101 tutorial you can find. You assume ignorance -- remember, you are a worthless fucking idiot -- so that you'll be humble enough to patiently work through everything, now matter how basic, and you'll be paying very close attention, rather than feeling bored and saying, "oh come on, I don't need all this. I got this!"
With humility, you read the fucking manual. You post detailed questions on forums and reference the answers you get back to the documentation. You do the fucking work not until you are tired and want to quit, but you do it until you are ready for the next step. You are both the ox and the driver. Whatever it takes to keep moving forward, do it. If you need a carrot, eat a carrot. If you need to crack a whip, crack the whip.
You may not know when you are ready to go to the next step. Don't let your emotions fuck with you here. Test. Testing is a way to collect data. It doesn't matter if we feel ready, or if we feel bored or tired or whatever. We need data. What you do is return to those original technical tutorials that stumped you, and see how it goes now. Maybe you can mostly understand what is being talked about, and if not you can find the answers quick enough anyway. Now you are good. You took a step back, but it was necessary to find a better path forward.
Maybe that was like full month of research and now you know a little bit more about the technicalities of lighting in unreal. So you return to your work, implement your new knowledge, but when you compare your new stuff to your hero's artwork.... well, it still isn't there. You get sad. You get down. How will you ever get there? A fucking month you spent learning shit, and for what?
Take a break, get back at it tomorrow. Don't let your emotions fuck with you.
With a more level head, you compare again. What is different about the lighting? Hard to place it. You really can't say. There's just... something. Maybe the smart thing to do is gather some other peoples opinions? You go to a friendly place like polycount or some facebook group and you post of your work and ask, "what could be improved about the lighting?"
Maybe you don't get a response. Maybe you get differing opinions. Maybe you get some solid answers with actionable advice. Even if you do, you still have to implement it. And when you go to implement the advice to got, you find it really challenging. You kind of understand, but not really. So what will you do now? Keep asking question after question? No.... people don't have time to walk you through step by step. And even if they did, that would take forever.
So, now what? "I got good advice, but I'm too dumb to implement it."
Ignorance is the problem. Where is the ignorance? You don't even know. That's kind of how ignorance works. So what to do? It's like when you lose your wallet. Go all the way back to the beginning. So you go back to the basics. Find everything ever written about the art of lighting and read it. Practice it. If you can't find advice in your medium of 3d, go to 2d. Go to traditional art. Go to film. The blue whale is the largest creature on earth, yet it eats some of the smallest creatures. It opens it's massive mouth, and just every fucking thing flows right in. This is what you got to do .Find all the information that you can and eat every bit of it.
Maybe this takes you three months. Three fucking months you are doing nothing but learning everything there is to learn about lighting. Then you go back to your project and you implement your new knowledge into it. Then, you compare.
Now the lighting is looking pretty decent. It's not quite there, but you can identify what is lacking. It's something you'll need to research but at least you know what it is. You feel pretty good. You aren't there, but there is visible progress. You figure with a couple more practice runs, you'll work out the kinks and get the lighting where it needs to be.
But, oh shit.
The modeling kind of sucks. You didn't realize it at first because everything sucked, but now that the lighting is halfway decent, the shitty modeling is really evident. You look at your heroes works. It's perfectly natural -- crisp where it should be, soft where it should be -- just perfect. Your's is chunky and wombly. Looks like a trained chimp made it.
You were high about the lighting improvements, now you are down twice as far as you realize all those months of effort amounted to only a single step forward in a very long journey. Now you are really down. You wonder about quitting.
No, no, no. You can't quit now, you tell yourself. You suck it up, and just as you did for the lighting, you do so for the modeling. Five months of work this time, and then your modeling is pretty decent. You compare. Now, the modeling is legit, the lighting ain't bad, but.... oh god. Oh god why? How did you miss it. The materials. The texturing is like a two year old with crossed eyes got ahold of crayons, ate them, and barfed it all over a canvas. You didn't realize how bad it all was until you had improved the rest of the scene.
Now you are truly down. "When will this fucking journey end? When can I just get a fucking job?"
Maybe you are just being too hard on yourself? You send out your portfolio. Silence.
Now you're going to quit. It's fucking pointless. You sleep for five days.
Your emotions are fucking with you. You realize this. But what can you do differently? There is only one way to learn, and you've been doing it. You do the practice and learn by the slow process of accretion. It's what you've been doing all along. It's what everybody tells you to do. So you keep on for a while longer. You are pretty tough, so you keep up the practice for a full year. But, you don't really get anywhere. You aren't sure where you are anymore. And more and more you feel like you just can't keep it up like this anymore. The end is so far away, you've been going in circles.... you'll never get there... you are lost in the woods.
What has happened is that you let the second guesser take over. The second guesser is your emotions. They have their use, but when it comes to getting from point A to the objective, they can't be in charge. They don't have the data. They didn't make the plan. It's not their responsibility.
Okay, so to hell with the second guessing. Time to get back on course. First thing is to figure out where you are. You must always know where you are. So you go back to your heroes artwork and compare it against your own. By now you aren't a complete beginner. You've made quite a bit of lousy art and you've learned a lot of lessons the hard way. You've developed a bit of an artistic intuition in addition to technical knowledge. This time you can make a more comprehensive plan. You identify every quality that the hero's artwork has but yours doesn't. Some of it involves technical knowledge you don't yet have, some of it involves just getting a better sense for shit like color or shape language. Some of it you can't quite place but you know where to look to figure it out. You've been around in art communities long enough that you've heard about some things that you don't think are necessarily pertinent but, knowing your own ignorance, you decide to get familiar with that stuff as well -- the answers might be in there.
You write it out. Organized by which things depend on others and by how much time you think it will take to learn. Your best, conservative estimate.
So you've got a real plan. You've had your trial by fire. Now you have the confidence to understand why sticking with your plan will give the best chance for success, and why second guessing is only going to make things worse. You'll have hiccups. You'll get lost here and there. But you've got your landmarks so you can figure out where you are quickly -- before Sergeant Second Guesser can open his mouth.
It's a ton of work, constantly moving forward, managing a lot of information, and maintaining awareness so that you don't get lost. What happens is you'll get lost in the hard work you're doing. You'll lose track of time. You just become the work, and petty shit like your emotions and aches and pains in your body dimly exist in the distance. Eventually you'll notice people looking up to you. All of a sudden, you are the fucking dude. You'll get your job, you'll get the respect you deserve, but you won't even care about that shit. You spend so much time hyper focused in the work, you just keep doing it because you love doing it. It just becomes who you are.
Replies
Admittedly, I didn't get more than a couple of paragraphs into Part 2 before giving up, and I suspect that the majority of people who come into this thread will see an enormous wall of text and move along.
I kind of see the points that you're trying to make but all of it is lost in a long, rambling story that not many people will be able to relate to.
I think if you do some editing this can provide a useful perspective for people trying to break into the industry. As it currently stands, it takes too long to get to the point, and is far too long in general.
I think a video would be best with actual on screen examples, but I'll need a lot more time to get something like that made.
Thanks for the advice.
Yeah, probably a tad TL;DR and via a perspective not many would relate to, although I'd got there in the end. As an example in engaging the reader, Tim Simpson's authoring style I think is reflected in his industry write-ups. Apart from being extremely informative, they also have a certain 'rhythm' that makes digesting the scope of the subject at one sitting in my opinion an appreciative experience for the reader.
EDIT:
Dig the military vibe though, did something similar myself back in the day worked as armoured recon.
I'm a big fan of Tim's articles of course and recommend them all the time to people. One thing I think missing from most all the advice you can find online though is methods for self-teaching. There is plenty of how to make art, how to work in 3d, and what you need to have to get a job, but the big part in the middle -- the actual doing -- seems like a lot of people are just winging it. And that's just taking unnecessary risk. So I think if I can relate my experience in a more digestible manner, it's going to help some people.
I guess Im just pointing this out for any polycounters reading your thread thinking that your plan just isnt for them. This may make them feel that they are not suited to the industry. At the end of the day you do this because you enjoy it. Pushing yourself too hard can ruin that enjoyment.
Truncate it down, Alex. You have wisdom you want to share, jsut you gotta get to the point faster and more succinctly. it's just better writing given the format here.
If you want, Artstation has a blog section for things like this. Or you could start a Medium account.
Ah yes I can see what you meant now. Yes a condensed version would be great. I like the message of working smart and having a clear plan.
As for getting things done. I remember an animator called monty Oum (RIP). He worked hard on his animations and was really good at what he did but he always mentioned he didn't focus too much on perfecting every movement he animated or tried polishing it. He always looked at the big picture and learned how to be very fast in getting animations out. That got him into the games and later animation industry
Today, he is the creator of a very popular anime-ish series called RWBY. He unfortunately passed during the production of the 3rd season but he lives on and continues to inspire a lot of young animators.
He used to say:
''The goal isn't to live on forever; it's to make something that does.” and ''Keep moving forward''
He used to talk about how some ppl would waste time polishing every single thing, making sure everything is perfect and this takes time and if he did that, he wouldn't be where he is now. Speed and efficiency is important. Knowing what to focus on to get a good enough result is important. He became popular because of how entertaining his animations were and he managed his resources and most of his early work he did alone.
Of course, when starting out, patience should be exercised and practice should not be rushed. But also, everyone is different. What might work for one person, might not work for another. Understanding this is also important. If u watch a tutorial and u find the workflow not suitable, look for another one u are more comfortable with. Everything does not have to be done the same way. It's the same reason, we all have different taste when it comes to softwares we use :- )
Most importantly, repeated unrelenting practice is key.
Same thing with the animator I mentioned, he probably practiced till he had a good idea of what quality animation was, before gauging what he could bypass and focus more on for the end result to still look good. Since his passing, I am yet to find an animation that has the rhythmic fight choreography his animation had. He was also a dancer so he understood body movements and how to make cool poses in his fight scenes.
I agree, the only way u can figure out these things is by practice. It's also important to understand how to be flexible with workflows as well especially if u intend to work in a team. I personally don't mind adopting workflows different from mine. But this I feel shouldn't be the concern of a beginner, all that will sort itself out once u can produce high quality work.
The way you used your military experience as reference was awesome......i'm kind of in the similar spot right now( just started 3d) trying to get my mind in the right place, you made me realize i was giving excuses to myself and dwelling on past too much......
"i have 5 years to get good at 3d character art, there is plenty of time" this was one of the excuse i used to not go all out up until now....although there are so many things to i need learn in order to get competent enough like language, social skills, observational skills etc, I had somehow managed to ignore all of these.
Need to get rid of this comfort zone somehow.