Question of Time

StrykeDeltoro

Hi all,
I own a small miniatures company, with 9 miniatures released to date, and have decided to learn Zbrush for the purposes of sculpting the miniatures myself. I made this decision as hiring a digital sculptor is easily 50% of the cost of each new mini, which, combined with a concept artist comes in at about 80% cost of each product.

My question is; how long will it take to become proficient with zbrush for the purposes of making miniatures? 
So sculpting in a t-pose and then posing, cutting, adding keys for assembly. I am scratching out a living as is, which is fine and expected, but that does mean I have a lot free time to work on this.

I am going to be doing this no matter how long it takes, and I expect it to be difficult and frustrating to start but that's learning. 

If you have any suggestions for a beginner i'd love to hear them.

Thanks.

Taylor Brown

That's kind of like asking "how long is a piece of string?". The answer is arbitrary and has a thousand variables.

If you want to create aesthetically and technically appealing art, expect months of consistent and intentional quality training, full time, at an absolute minimum.

Do you really want to learn a whole new and very time consuming skill just to maybe save yourself some cash or is there an actual desire to learn the craft? 

Brian "Panda" Choi

Artists should and do get paid as much as they do because the speed and quality at which they can produce the work can only be done when you have years of training to back it up.

PixelMasher

I would be looking to scale and just make that 20% of a bigger pie rather than trying to spend a bunch of time and money trying to get 80% of a cupcake. IE, hire way more artists if you are profitable and increase output/product lines.  I would much rather have 20% of a 1-2m/yr revenue business than 80% of a 100k/yr solo operation.