Pipeline: How much is too much?

blenderphunk

After 23 years doing CG, I took an extended break in 2012. Some of this was due to various life related reasons. Some of it was due to waning passion. Now, just over 8 years later, that passion seems to have been rekindled and I'm looking to get back into the game.

Here's my dilemma, if that's what you can call it:

In that 8 year break, despite only doing the occasional 3D doodle, I still kept my various licenses and subscriptions updated. I also added a few along the way in an attempt to keep my skills current even if I wasn't consistently putting them to good use. Consequently, I've got a lot of (legit) apps in my toolbox.

So, for me, it's not a matter of focusing on mastery. It's a matter of practicality.

I've always been a proponent of using the right tool for the job. However, doing so seems to lengthen an already long pipeline. How many apps is too many?

A core set of apps for me would include:

Blender
Maya 2021
ZBrush
Marvelous Designer
World Creator 2
Substance Painter 2021
Substance Designer
Marmoset Toolbag 4
Affinity Photo v1.90 (Love Photoshop, but Adobe... not so much.)

Part of me feels like this is the saturation point, but another part of me feels as if maybe I could add more or take away some in order to streamline/improve my process.

Yes. I know. "Focus on the art instead." I used to tell newbies that all of time. That said, I'm just curious what YOUR toolboxes look like and what you'd add/remove in order to best put your skills to use.

Eric Chadwick

Those all look like good choices in a pipeline, though they depend on the types of work you need to do. I guess you're a generalist? Marvelous and World Machine tend to cater to very different types of assets.

You might be able to ditch Affinity since you have Designer and Painter.

I personally don't work in games anymore, but in a firm doing visualizations primarily, and we're able to segment into specialist roles. So, a few use Marvelous, a few others use Designer, and so on.

thomasp

In my experience there's always a need for a image editing program that has a decent brush feel for actual painting. Affinity is the closest Photoshop replacement in that regard, better in some regards. IMO that should be the last program to drop.

I don't see why Maya and Blender both make the list though. Two full 3d toolboxes seem like a lot to handle especially for somebody who's trying to 'focus on the art'. Both feature an integrated sculpting toolset so losing ZBrush might be feasible - depending on what you actually use that for.

Painter and Designer seem like another big time sink in the workflow. Either you work more on the hands-on texturing side or prefer the material-setup side of things. Yes you can do both but with all the other listed stuff thrown in... realistically?

almighty_gir

Blender and Maya? Pick one.

Substance Painter and Toolbag 4? Pick one.

Neox

to be honest, we can not ditch maya as much as we wanted to. all our clients work with maya, at least in the character department all assets have to be delivered in the respective maya version. and yeah that means we pay for maya licenses just to be able to import and save data \o/

the thing that is most realistic for us to ditch in favor of blender is 3dsmax. that we didnt do that yet is more out of comfort than anything else. but this is the one software we would not need at all.

All the others in your list are pretty much needed in our pipeline, dependent per project of course. stylized stuff doesnt usually need marvelous or worldmachine.

Leinad

Agree with everything that has been said. Definitely consider minimizing software overlap.

I use Maya (currently) over other 3D-Modeling alternatives mainly due to software lock-in. 

Internal tool development in Maya generally creates lock-in for the full life-cycle of post-production/launch due to stability concerns.

Here are the software I use, keep in mind I am more a tech artists (majority of my time is spent in Unity):

Core software (used weekly):

Unity

Maya

Zbrush

Photoshop

Substance painter

Other software (used in the last year):

Unreal Engine

World Machine/GAEA (terrain generator)

Blender

Substance designer

goekbenjamin

almighty_gir said:

Blender and Maya? Pick one.

Substance Painter and Toolbag 4? Pick one.

Choose between Painter and Marmoset, can you elaborate why? Or did i get it wrong? Painter= baking and texturing
marmoset= baking and rendering

Alemja

goekbenjamin said:

Choose between Painter and Marmoset, can you elaborate why? Or did i get it wrong? Painter= baking and texturing
marmoset= baking and rendering

Substance Painter has a renderer built in that some people use, and Marmoset Toolbag 4 has some basic texturing capabilities. However the standard pipeline is to use Marmoset for Baking/Rendering and Substance for Texturing. If you're going to use those 2 programs that is what I would use them for.

rollin

Neox said:

to be honest, we can not ditch maya as much as we wanted to. all our clients work with maya, at least in the character department all assets have to be delivered in the respective maya version. and yeah that means we pay for maya licenses just to be able to import and save data \o/

the thing that is most realistic for us to ditch in favor of blender is 3dsmax. that we didnt do that yet is more out of comfort than anything else. but this is the one software we would not need at all.

All the others in your list are pretty much needed in our pipeline, dependent per project of course. stylized stuff doesnt usually need marvelous or worldmachine.

Big companies are slow..
We setup our new pipeline on blender and forward this "requirement" to our outsources as well. 
So lets see how it looks like in a few years

Neox

rollin said:

Neox said:

to be honest, we can not ditch maya as much as we wanted to. all our clients work with maya, at least in the character department all assets have to be delivered in the respective maya version. and yeah that means we pay for maya licenses just to be able to import and save data \o/

the thing that is most realistic for us to ditch in favor of blender is 3dsmax. that we didnt do that yet is more out of comfort than anything else. but this is the one software we would not need at all.

All the others in your list are pretty much needed in our pipeline, dependent per project of course. stylized stuff doesnt usually need marvelous or worldmachine.

Big companies are slow..
We setup our new pipeline on blender and forward this "requirement" to our outsources as well. 
So lets see how it looks like in a few years

good for you, i personally dont care who uses what tool. but we will start to invest into a blender based pipeline as well. fingers crossed we can get rid of max and maya in the long run.

Brandon.LaFrance

A bit of a tangent, perhaps, but I was hoping some of you guys could expand on baking in Substance Painter vs Marmoset Toolbag. I've used both, but still tend to prefer baking in Painter, simply because it makes managing feedback and re-bakes so much easier. As long as I set up everything correctly, any change requests that need to update the sculpt can be re-baked in just a few clicks. Export updated high from zbrush, pop into Painter and click bake. If the changes are significant enough to require updates to the game-res, the just re-export that, too before re-baking. Strokes are preserved, no fussing with importing super dense meshes into Toolbag, and then re-importing however many base maps or masks you're baking out. For me, this has made my workflow much more non-linear, and makes responding to inevitable requests for changes much more streamlined.

And for renders, I find I tend to leverage Blender's EEVEE for the things I used to use Toolbag for. Textures straight out of Painter, reloaded in Blender, and I can evaluate what changes I might need to make in a mesh, and can do them right there in real time. Can even throw on a quick rig and pose right there.

Don't get me wrong, I love Toolbag, and certainly its baker has some amazing features that blow the pants off of Painter's. And for sure, Toolbag's renderer far exceeds the capabilities of EEVEE, but I haven't found that those trade offs have been worth the added friction in my pipeline. Maybe I'm missing something, because a lot of my colleagues do prefer to use it. But they are using Maya, which might negate some of the value I have found in using Blender.