Week 6: Captain Hindsight Part II

It’s that time of the project for a drawn out post on the should's and could's of the project, the if’s and but’s, it’s another hindsight post. This project was a bit strange in that I had no intention of doing it originally and no real expectation allowing me to forget about the end result and work more into my process. I usually get really attached to my work which has a habit of misguiding my decision making or overly complicating it. Although I strongly believe it’s important to take pride in your work I also think sometimes you need to do something that you wouldn’t usually so as to give yourself a different perspective on the way you work regardless of the outcome. It’s a balance between what you know and what you don’t that creates successful and Meaningful progress.

So a quick rundown of this project and all its up’s and downs. I spent the first day on an environment project as I thought it was a good exercise and a bit different to my usual antics. However this proved futile as I realised I am not really an environment artist and my frustrations were turning into a fruitless first day of grinding agony. I decided at this point 1 day in I would cut my loss’s so as not to end up wasting a week burning out and potentially having a mediocre environment. The next day I decided to just do the stylised brief despite a lot of contemplation this seemed like the best idea as I was comfortable with character art, I had a workflow which worked but required refining and a concept provided giving me a jump start.

The bonus was that if I could finish this project reasonable quickly it would allow me to take a bit of break between the projects so that I could collect my thoughts and prep for my next project.

Week one went through the same process as usual, create a high poly using a combination of max and zbrush, during this time I went through several design decisions including adjustments to the anatomy and feel of the character while still trying to retain key elements. I also used this time to define a type of style, by Friday it was in a state I could be happy with. Like always there was areas I want to tweak and iterate on but after the last project I realised I have to become more decisive and look at things based on the bigger picture, for better or for worse.

In the previous project I spent much of my time sitting on the fence making minor adjustments and wasting time, mostly because I was attached to what I was making and really didn’t want to do make mistakes. This in itself was a mistake as it caused me to be inefficient. It also really knocked my confidence in my ability leading to unpleasant mood swings about what I was producing, which doesn’t help anyone.

By second week I was onto re-topology and unwrapping and all the boring conundrums that come with it. How do I use all this topology effectively? Will this bake out well with less geometry? Etc… This period of a project is the only part where I can watch an entire series of the wire in two days while working with little consequence. Never the less I got it all done in my delegated two and a bit days. Partly to give myself more time to texture and partly to relieve pressure on my time management so I could go on sports socials. I have found this kind work hard, play hard attitude to my week really satisfying. Crunch during the week, go sport climbing and relax on the weekends. It’s a nice balance, Something I hope to achieve by FMP so I don’t break down due to overworking or fall behind.

The second half of the week I spent my time baking and learning substance, a program I absolutely adore. It makes texturing better in pretty much every way. Which is great as I suck at texturing and massively aim to improve in it. It also makes texturing really enjoyable something which has greatly affected me in my projects, usually it results in sloppy PSD’s and poor material definition. But now it makes me look forward to that area of the project. Not going to talk too much about substance as I will save that for a later blog post entirely.

After spending that weekend fumbling around with substance I came back on Monday with a mostly textured character, this gave me a nice amount of time to create a small base to pose the character on. Much like the previous week I spent the first half of the week powering through all the boring stuff, in this case rigging. Followed up by the really fun bit, posing and rendering.

So to conclude on the ups and downs of the last three weeks, managed to skim time of all areas of production, Next time I think I am going to spend a bit more time on some areas, but still keep it less than the first project. My decisiveness and confidence to just take a direction has improved considerable since last time something I hope to constantly improve. Finally on the more technically side I have found substance painter to be an effective and rewarding addition to my pipeline and as a result I will have added that to my default work flow. Overall a successful project.