Character Creation Timeframes?

PolyMonstar

This question has been sort of grinding my brain for a wile, but, as various artists of varying specialties in character design and creation, how long is it usually expected in your individual environments for a character to be made, be it Photo Realistic*, Highly Detailed but stylized, cartoony, low poly-mid-high etc.

I figure in a lot of cases it fits into that project triangle, good-fast-cheep -> pick any two; but without a general knowledge of industry time frames, its hard to estimate the range between fast, and cheap, with good quality in mind.

I have to fess up, this is some information gathering to compare with how I am doing in my own environment as a non-trained character modeler doing photo realistic characters and I could swear I had seen some vague information on it before, but apparently I'm google-tarded at the moment and can't do the simple phrase to find such information. But, for people who have had lots of constant experience in character creation, I thought there would be some people here with some knowledge to share on the vague approximation of time it takes for this kind of thing.

ZacD

hi man, well for all the ennemies/guard we took 3 weeks from start to finish to make them all together, the textures are shared between each others. basically i worked on the cloth&leather parts and my pal Laurent Sauvage worked on the metal parts , we were working in the same time on all the elements and eventually comp it all together in a few texture maps. That's the only characters we've done like this, because we had to deliver the whole gang in a short time. usually one model is done entirely by one artist.

Not me, but I remember seeing that on zbrushcentral.

Rick Stirling

It also depends on the length of the project, the number of assets to be built, the importance of the asset and the size of the team.

haikai

I think a good rate for medium res models is about 10 days, and I think that's probably common on games with a lot of assets. I thought I remembered hearing that the AC models took about that long too.

Higher res models seen in single player games I believe can take anywhere from 10-30 days. Depends on how much the details need to hold up close, iterations involved, etc.

For lower res, last gen stuff you might get anywhere from 1-10 days. I remember on Guild Wars 1 we had about 4 days.

It's something that might be good to know, but I wouldn't obsess over it too much. Until you actually start to do it on the job it might be difficult to reach a good rate. As long as you can reach the quality, the speed will come eventually (hopefully).

PolyMonstar

ZacD - Ah yeah, the assassins creed posts from ZbrushCentral, now I remember. There was one about some heads as well, I think they said it took about 8 hours working in sort of sequence with 2-3 artists to turn each one out. Thanks for the refresher on that!

Rick Stirling - Oh deffinately, yeah, I'd expect the needs to change based on complexity of course. Personally I work in a non-standard environment, with no senior art lead or an existing pipeline or good education in character creation, so its a "by the seat of my pants" kind of situation.

haikai - Those are some interesting numbers, I just wish I knew how to convey that to others who don't really understand art as a whole, let alone character creation. The concepts of needing an understanding of a wide variety of things like anatomy from skeletal to muscular, and even sub dermal, lighting, physics, cloth dynamics, etc, just to make something look even 'OK' close up.

Of course, even with all that, there's that point where you have to say "I've done enough" right?