How long do your 3D projects take to complete?

MagicMeister · Aug 13 2025

Just a general question for the community. If you could, please describe what kind of 3D art you make while answering. I'll give an example from my own process:

so far, I think I spend anywhere from 150-200 hours on making a single real time game character. That includes the high poly sculpt, the retopo, UV unwrap, texturing, posing (sometimes rigging) and rendering.

I'm asking not only out of curiosity, but also because I want to get faster. I would wager that there are artists out there that can produce the same quality or (hopefully) much better quality than I do in half the time.

poopipe · Aug 13 2025

ive been working on a robot for 18 years now ..

more seriously - pre-substance painter our outsource partners would produce a set of modular assets (average 10-12 pieces) mapped, textured and lodded (5-7 handmade lods) in 20 days with feedback.
This was first-party AAA content for ps4

speed comes from making good decisions quickly - that comes from experience. concentrate on being good for now - you'll only get faster

Lt_Commander · Aug 14 2025

It depends on the goals. If the main purpose is to learn and improve with the end product being a portfolio piece, time isn't the real constraint - it can take months or years to finish a project because part of it was to learn sculpting or grooming, or other core skills that themselves are adventures in their own right.

If you want to focus on speed, have a set idea that you know you can execute on, retread only skills you're comfortable with, and hit go. Start with a very solid concept, record hours on the clock, and find areas to improve. That said, it's relatively low utility as a standalone exercise because that's something you can get paid for in the form of contract work. Like poopipe said, if you're not good enough to do that yet, just focus on building skills first.

sacboi · Aug 14 2025

For instance hard surface automotive content e.g. Gran Turismo PS3, their vehicles we're generally 500k tri count so fairly comparable to budgets nowadays mitigating potential efficiency bottlenecks excluding evolving tech, remains fundamentally unchanged i.e. well thought out topology, uv's, LODS...etc

As already shared proficiency comes with experience - I'd recommend following that advice albeit start small then gradually build complexity.

MagicMeister · Aug 16 2025

poopipe said:

speed comes from making good decisions quickly - that comes from experience. concentrate on being good for now - you'll only get faster

That's what I've started to pick up on. When I first really got into 3D and making ambitious projects, I felt like the time that it took was just "baked" into the project itself. i.e. you want to make a real-time character? well then it takes xyz amount of hours no matter what. Now I've realized that you could make a finished character blazing fast if you know exactly what you're doing, know exactly when to do which part of the process, and don't make any mistakes while you execute on your vision / design.

One of the biggest timesinks I have at the moment is having to continuously go back to the high poly during texturing to remake pieces that just aren't working or where the high poly normals were distorted from forgetting to auto-mask my backfaces. I've been particularly stuck on faces, which I often have to remake 2-3 times before I'm even remotely satisfied with them.

iam717 · Aug 17 2025

1 - 6 months, sometimes more if i am like, .. "well i do not know this thing right now" & either have to figure it out myself or use someone else's solution for it, which i usually do not do.

A calculated time-frame I've never really done, i heard about all them timers but how 100% accurate are they really and you have to remember to click this button here or that there, and people walk away from the P.C. to do other things most times and then time is added when you aren't doing anything and have to remember to pause the timer.

Edit: calculated a hourly time-frame based on 8 hour work week for 6 days each "week", 480-520 hours, for me to do stuff & its usually more relaxed now a days cause of becoming more "aged".

3 months usually, this is low to mid quality works, i usually want to make it the best i can so 4-6 is the real time frame for me. I also haven't looked into being "faster", it takes as long as it takes.. taboo but eh being realistic. I make most things from 0 and forget or hardly use basemeshes so that could help especially if they are already loaded on the pc i am using to do any projects, so that time frame will become much less then. (i do 0% as i do not want to forget how to do it later on.)

All this while remaining ignited/passionate to complete the task, while irl sticks its nose into the progress of the projects.

btw your artstation link doesn't work, idk if its by design after their situation.

Fixing it for you for others curious:

https://www.artstation.com/dylan_swint

Sempoo · Aug 17 2025

I have noticed that 3d takes a lot of time. For example, at the start of my 3d journey, I modeled Daewoo Tico in 100 hours:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/0ngAey

My other works on Artstation also indicate work time, so that one can compare.

How long do your 3D projects take to complete?

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