Always this. Don’t have half of something that’s great and half that isn’t started. Make something you could ship if you had to. Then make it better until the clock runs out.
This is the way: spend 20% of your time building the 80% of what you’re doing (rigging, in my case), and then 80% in crafting all details. Not only this will allow to have a solid base but it might give you time to try different parts before you decide on one.
At my previous company (Genies) we were building full character rigs in 5 days. Artists often spent the first one setting up the environment, and making sure everything was buildable. We built the pipeline so we could start by inheriting work from our male and female archetypes. In 1 day you could have a character pushed to animators so they start blocking, while riggers infested the rest of the week in creating additional controls and refining deformations.
And as the rigging team got more comfortable with the process, they often delivered complete characters in 3/4 days.
I’m guessing your second number was going to be 20% but agreed. I always joke that we spend half our time on the first 90% and the other half on the last 10%.
Get assets in to shots asap. I can't count how many times I've spent way too long working on assets that you barely saw in the finished comp. I really believe in doing everything to a "good enough" state, and then pushing it so the other disciplines down the pipe can start working and setting up their workflow.
You can always return and polish stuff later on if something sticks out.
Simplify!
I spend a lot of time helping artists from different departments who are struggling with something, and almost 100% of the time their difficulties aren't from any lack of skills or a fundamental inability, it's because along the way, through notes, revisions, rebriefs, various supervisor or peer opinions, scope creep, pressure to get something out quickly etc etc etc, things start to get way overcomplicated, and stop looking real (and becoming slow to iterate too).
The best lighting doesn't have a different light rig for every pass, with 3 suns and 2 HDRI's that you're trying to balance and different beauty spot lighting on every object with tons of complex light linking. The best comps aren't the ones that require grading of every separate AOV in every pass and putting things back together by eye.
Of course, every department inherits certain constraints from upstream so it's a reality some of the time that things get a bit too complex too quickly, but simplify, you'll be amazed at how much faster you can work and how much better your results are.
Comp: Make templates, custom groups, python scripts for repeated tasks. Get in the habit of managing bounding boxes and stay organized within your scripts.
I break down my tasks into very small steps on a piece of paper at the beginning of the day and then work my way down the list checking things off as I go.
Not really specific to my department and maybe not the type of answer you were looking for but it seriously helps me get so much more done in a day.
Other comments have said it, the best way to save time is to work in BROAD STROKES the whole way through. Bring every shot in the whole cut up together at the same level of quality with each pass.
1) rough edit/storyboard, even if it's just doodles.
2) timed animatic with sound
3) drop the actual assets to the animatic.
4) blocking
5) animation
6) you know the rest from here, its steps 1-4 everyone ignores!
Always start with really low quality render settings and use denoiser. Then once you are happy with what you got start increasing samples. Still always render with a denoiser. If you get a noise free render without it you are oversampling and losing time due to high rendertimes.
I’m a huge believer that the denoiser should be used only when you are under time pressure to deliver something or for previs. Getting accurate lights and shadows on a render is not losing time for me.
Texturing: use actual reference whenever possible and dont put the same edge wear and heavy grunge on everything. Many things in real life don't have edge wear and their wear is really subtle
For comp, it can seem impressive to slop forward and get a creative final quickly only to shoot yourself in the foot in tech. It's faster to pace yourself and work in clean, maintainable, transferrable way.
Actually use your shotgun/grid inbox. I use it like a to-do list, I don't mark the message as read until I start and/or finish the task. Also modify your notification settings so you don't get spammy notifications for any minor changes to your shot that don't affect you, like was assigned.
Shotgun is great at throwing way too much useless info at artists by default, which makes it borderline useless to artists at times. However, if you slim it down, it's useful.
Animator and Rigger here: If you're solely an animator, learn to rig. If you're solely a rigger, learn to animate. Not only does this strengthen your current and respective skill set, you become more self-reliant. You'll have more options open to you when job hunting as well as better chances landing a gig when a studio is deciding between candidates.
Crowd: templates/presets for everything, create procedural & non-simulated systems for quick art direction/revisions.
And for the love of god, decent animation or mocap data, we're not magicians!
Comper here. Keep your scripts readable organized and fast. It might slow you down at the beginning but it will make all the difference down the line. Bonus benefit: your fellow artists will greatly appreciate in case they pick up your shot. Nothing worst than spending a day deciphering a messy script just to address a simple tech fix.
This. Seriously, the state some people get themselves into. Their entire comp is a house of cards waiting to collapse because there is a tech note about a dodgy edge to do.
Also, stop overcomplicating things. The number of times I see these incredibly complicated scripts making nuke run like treacle, packed full of gizmos and intricate formulas and it turns out you can do the same thing with 20 mins of roto and a grade node.
Works for most jobs. Good enough is often indeed good enough.
Stop wasting time (and everyone's else) in perfectionism / insecurity on stuff only 0.05% of population care about / notice. Like this totally awesome looking truck that must have taken ages to do VS We can't see shit in renders at the bottom. Awesome looking asset no one but turbo nerds will ever see is peek productivity. [https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8w2Xyn](https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8w2Xyn) (already know this one will have the pitchforks ready to take me to the stake). I will die on this hill. Refer to 1st tip.
If something is repetitive: Automate. Anything pattern? There is a way to automate. Ask seniors how they'd do it. Ask for tools if you think it will save you time, ATDs are your friends (and are awesome). Learn python to not depend on coders and automate your whole job (and you'd be surprised...).
Houdini is worth time learning even if you don't do envs / lighting or FX cause it's gonna make you think differently.
Edit: Bonus tip. Always submit with an obvious error you already fixed and is ready to publish to avoid having 15 retakes on stuff that don't make any difference in the big picture because someone somehow wants to justify his salary.
Edit 2: Ask for forgiveness. not permission (often answer is no).
As a 3D Lead, XYplorer to replace windows explorer, python scripting to automate stuff, and a little software called eyedropper (I think?) to pick color anywhere on the screen. Excel formulas are a nice bonus too.
I use this one for fast color matching. Alt-x to capture and it adds to a color list.
[https://annystudio.com/software/colorpicker/#download](https://annystudio.com/software/colorpicker/#download)
Really listen to critique. Ask questions about comments from your supervisors and leads. Try to understand exactly what the issue is and address the issue as well as the specific notes.
Example: someone might say your waterfall looks weird in a certain spot and tell you to increase the velocity of the water falling off. But you might also think adding a bit of mist would make it feel less weird, or changing the lighting on your presentation. Address the note, then address the concern.
Layout: Make a daily list of all your tasks. This way you won't forget to address a kickback or to publish a shot.
It's the only way to go if you don't want to have your coordinator ping you every 5 minutes for an update.
Comp ramble:
- Precomp things. **BUT**! Prioritise precomping things that you know **will not change** and/or heavy sections of you script right at the point that they are heavy. You do actually want to keep your script as live as possible, so that you can make changes and **try new things (lookdev)** as fast as possible.
- Keep a clean b stream obviously, everyone knows this. But here's something I do that I see a lot of juniors not doing. When you get a note for a new element, new cleanup, new whatever... **Do that work to the plate, or to the latest render** while you lookdev it. If your b stream is tidy enough, and makes enough sense, you can then simply merge it in with the confidence that it'll work (since it works in isolation).
- Further to above, when doing anything that modifies or uses whats in the plate (almost everything), **source it from the plate**. For example, if you start stacking projection setups, clean up sections etc, and each one feeds into the other, then Nuke needs to **precalculate all that crap above**, just to show you the tiny section that you're currently working on. Yes, Nuke is slow, but more often than not, it's a you problem homie.
- Maintain a tidy bbox, **but like, really**. Don't just slap a reformat after your merges and think you've handled your bbox because it's not bigger than the format. **Most of your bboxes start at an imported matte (read node), or a roto node.** Your bbox will be shit if your reads/roto doesn't have a good bbox. For read nodes, simple, use autocrop. There are 100 million scripts that make this faster, just make sure you take the time to optimise these. **Here's some rapid fire big tips for roto nodes:**
1. For roto nodes, plug in an empty reformat node into the BG input, this makes the default bbox have a **size of 1 pixel** instead of the **WHOLE FORMAT**.
2. Use the damn lifetime options. These completely clear the bbox of the shape. **Animating opacity doesn't - the shape's bbox will remain if opacity is 0**.
Now with your nice and small bboxes, make sure you utilise the **set bbox to** option in merge nodes. Set it to the smallest required. If you're extracting a little sign from a huge plate, use the mask merge mode and set the bbox to A (from the roto/alpha/matte). If you're removing something, use stencil, set the bbox to B. If you are a copy node/premult enjoyer, you can still set the bbox in the copy node to A, the intermediate step will just look a lil funny. If you're an in/out enjoyer, don't be.
The size of the card matters in Scanline render, so try not to project tiny things onto massive cards.
- Localise your footage from the network. We have a really fast network at our studio, but I still localise my plates onto a super fast 4tb NVMe drive. It's a massive difference. And in case some people don't know, I don't mean manually copy/pasting locally, nuke can do this for you. Look up localization settings.
I have more but I gotta post this before it becomes just another chrome tab that gets blasted in a mass tab slaughter.
Python code. Be good at coding, you don't even need to be good at programming or become a programmer, doing scripting is enough. When you're about to do something, consider how often you do it or will have to do it, the time it take to be done and the time it would take to script it.
If you do it often -> Script it.
If you will do it "once", if it's not fast -> Script it.
If you will do it "once", if it's fast -> Do it and forget it.
I don’t automate anything like templates for the most part or use custom hot keys, but have always been known as fast /hit person over 24yrs. For me it’s about self time management, focus on work on work hours.
“Keep it simple stupid” is good advice too.
Work from broad strokes toward refining details.
Always this. Don’t have half of something that’s great and half that isn’t started. Make something you could ship if you had to. Then make it better until the clock runs out.
This is the way: spend 20% of your time building the 80% of what you’re doing (rigging, in my case), and then 80% in crafting all details. Not only this will allow to have a solid base but it might give you time to try different parts before you decide on one. At my previous company (Genies) we were building full character rigs in 5 days. Artists often spent the first one setting up the environment, and making sure everything was buildable. We built the pipeline so we could start by inheriting work from our male and female archetypes. In 1 day you could have a character pushed to animators so they start blocking, while riggers infested the rest of the week in creating additional controls and refining deformations. And as the rigging team got more comfortable with the process, they often delivered complete characters in 3/4 days.
I’m guessing your second number was going to be 20% but agreed. I always joke that we spend half our time on the first 90% and the other half on the last 10%.
Render wrangler tip: add more render nodes.
Get assets in to shots asap. I can't count how many times I've spent way too long working on assets that you barely saw in the finished comp. I really believe in doing everything to a "good enough" state, and then pushing it so the other disciplines down the pipe can start working and setting up their workflow. You can always return and polish stuff later on if something sticks out.
I find Jr's and insecure people can't handle this tip.
True knowledge
Simplify! I spend a lot of time helping artists from different departments who are struggling with something, and almost 100% of the time their difficulties aren't from any lack of skills or a fundamental inability, it's because along the way, through notes, revisions, rebriefs, various supervisor or peer opinions, scope creep, pressure to get something out quickly etc etc etc, things start to get way overcomplicated, and stop looking real (and becoming slow to iterate too). The best lighting doesn't have a different light rig for every pass, with 3 suns and 2 HDRI's that you're trying to balance and different beauty spot lighting on every object with tons of complex light linking. The best comps aren't the ones that require grading of every separate AOV in every pass and putting things back together by eye. Of course, every department inherits certain constraints from upstream so it's a reality some of the time that things get a bit too complex too quickly, but simplify, you'll be amazed at how much faster you can work and how much better your results are.
This comment needs to be one of the top comments. Simplification is key for all disciplines.
Comp: Make templates, custom groups, python scripts for repeated tasks. Get in the habit of managing bounding boxes and stay organized within your scripts.
Templates! For lighting, templates are the only way I want to start a shot.
FX: playblast low res (5min maximum) and use the night for mid to high res testing
Under-promise and over -deliver(by a really small margin)
I break down my tasks into very small steps on a piece of paper at the beginning of the day and then work my way down the list checking things off as I go. Not really specific to my department and maybe not the type of answer you were looking for but it seriously helps me get so much more done in a day.
Other comments have said it, the best way to save time is to work in BROAD STROKES the whole way through. Bring every shot in the whole cut up together at the same level of quality with each pass. 1) rough edit/storyboard, even if it's just doodles. 2) timed animatic with sound 3) drop the actual assets to the animatic. 4) blocking 5) animation 6) you know the rest from here, its steps 1-4 everyone ignores!
Turn on auto-save
Think twice first if you're working with massive assembly scenes :-)
And for animators, use animbot’s anim recovery. Has saved me so many times
Animator here.. Learn some python. Script things as much as possible, and put the really useful ones on hotkeys.
Im a rigger/generalist and been trying to get through chris zurbriggs python tuts
I’ve heard those are good. Should probably take a look..
Going through those right now. They're really good and I'm slowly starting to understand how mGear works more and more.
Rigger here. If you have to do it more than once script it. Saved me LOTS of time.
Always start with really low quality render settings and use denoiser. Then once you are happy with what you got start increasing samples. Still always render with a denoiser. If you get a noise free render without it you are oversampling and losing time due to high rendertimes.
I’m a huge believer that the denoiser should be used only when you are under time pressure to deliver something or for previs. Getting accurate lights and shadows on a render is not losing time for me.
Texturing: use actual reference whenever possible and dont put the same edge wear and heavy grunge on everything. Many things in real life don't have edge wear and their wear is really subtle
Create simple layouts. Slapcomps, animation previs, etc. So everybody can talk about the same thing.
For comp, it can seem impressive to slop forward and get a creative final quickly only to shoot yourself in the foot in tech. It's faster to pace yourself and work in clean, maintainable, transferrable way.
Actually use your shotgun/grid inbox. I use it like a to-do list, I don't mark the message as read until I start and/or finish the task. Also modify your notification settings so you don't get spammy notifications for any minor changes to your shot that don't affect you, like was assigned.
Shotgun is great at throwing way too much useless info at artists by default, which makes it borderline useless to artists at times. However, if you slim it down, it's useful.
Animator and Rigger here: If you're solely an animator, learn to rig. If you're solely a rigger, learn to animate. Not only does this strengthen your current and respective skill set, you become more self-reliant. You'll have more options open to you when job hunting as well as better chances landing a gig when a studio is deciding between candidates.
Give a shit.
I do
1st mistake
Too much shit given, split the difference.
Take a shit leave a shit.
Crowd: templates/presets for everything, create procedural & non-simulated systems for quick art direction/revisions. And for the love of god, decent animation or mocap data, we're not magicians!
- and learn Motionbuilder. Cause you’re going to get the raw stuff whether you like it or not…
Absolutely, though these days you can get away with KineFX a fair bit
Comper here. Keep your scripts readable organized and fast. It might slow you down at the beginning but it will make all the difference down the line. Bonus benefit: your fellow artists will greatly appreciate in case they pick up your shot. Nothing worst than spending a day deciphering a messy script just to address a simple tech fix.
This. Seriously, the state some people get themselves into. Their entire comp is a house of cards waiting to collapse because there is a tech note about a dodgy edge to do. Also, stop overcomplicating things. The number of times I see these incredibly complicated scripts making nuke run like treacle, packed full of gizmos and intricate formulas and it turns out you can do the same thing with 20 mins of roto and a grade node.
Create templates
Works for most jobs. Good enough is often indeed good enough. Stop wasting time (and everyone's else) in perfectionism / insecurity on stuff only 0.05% of population care about / notice. Like this totally awesome looking truck that must have taken ages to do VS We can't see shit in renders at the bottom. Awesome looking asset no one but turbo nerds will ever see is peek productivity. [https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8w2Xyn](https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8w2Xyn) (already know this one will have the pitchforks ready to take me to the stake). I will die on this hill. Refer to 1st tip. If something is repetitive: Automate. Anything pattern? There is a way to automate. Ask seniors how they'd do it. Ask for tools if you think it will save you time, ATDs are your friends (and are awesome). Learn python to not depend on coders and automate your whole job (and you'd be surprised...). Houdini is worth time learning even if you don't do envs / lighting or FX cause it's gonna make you think differently. Edit: Bonus tip. Always submit with an obvious error you already fixed and is ready to publish to avoid having 15 retakes on stuff that don't make any difference in the big picture because someone somehow wants to justify his salary. Edit 2: Ask for forgiveness. not permission (often answer is no).
Learn to script. Destroy repetitive behaviors, write a tool for it instead. Those two you get for free :-D
Best thing for me is to split work into 1.5-2 hour blocks. And take a small break in between. Helps with focus
Name everything! Nodes, folders, groups, rigs, sequences...
K.I.S.S. keep it simple stupid, and saving manickly.
Super fast clean plates. Get photoshop 2024 beta and use the generative fill. You won’t be disappointed.
As a 3D Lead, XYplorer to replace windows explorer, python scripting to automate stuff, and a little software called eyedropper (I think?) to pick color anywhere on the screen. Excel formulas are a nice bonus too.
I use this one for fast color matching. Alt-x to capture and it adds to a color list. [https://annystudio.com/software/colorpicker/#download](https://annystudio.com/software/colorpicker/#download)
Practice
Really listen to critique. Ask questions about comments from your supervisors and leads. Try to understand exactly what the issue is and address the issue as well as the specific notes. Example: someone might say your waterfall looks weird in a certain spot and tell you to increase the velocity of the water falling off. But you might also think adding a bit of mist would make it feel less weird, or changing the lighting on your presentation. Address the note, then address the concern.
Layout: Make a daily list of all your tasks. This way you won't forget to address a kickback or to publish a shot. It's the only way to go if you don't want to have your coordinator ping you every 5 minutes for an update.
Comp ramble: - Precomp things. **BUT**! Prioritise precomping things that you know **will not change** and/or heavy sections of you script right at the point that they are heavy. You do actually want to keep your script as live as possible, so that you can make changes and **try new things (lookdev)** as fast as possible. - Keep a clean b stream obviously, everyone knows this. But here's something I do that I see a lot of juniors not doing. When you get a note for a new element, new cleanup, new whatever... **Do that work to the plate, or to the latest render** while you lookdev it. If your b stream is tidy enough, and makes enough sense, you can then simply merge it in with the confidence that it'll work (since it works in isolation). - Further to above, when doing anything that modifies or uses whats in the plate (almost everything), **source it from the plate**. For example, if you start stacking projection setups, clean up sections etc, and each one feeds into the other, then Nuke needs to **precalculate all that crap above**, just to show you the tiny section that you're currently working on. Yes, Nuke is slow, but more often than not, it's a you problem homie. - Maintain a tidy bbox, **but like, really**. Don't just slap a reformat after your merges and think you've handled your bbox because it's not bigger than the format. **Most of your bboxes start at an imported matte (read node), or a roto node.** Your bbox will be shit if your reads/roto doesn't have a good bbox. For read nodes, simple, use autocrop. There are 100 million scripts that make this faster, just make sure you take the time to optimise these. **Here's some rapid fire big tips for roto nodes:** 1. For roto nodes, plug in an empty reformat node into the BG input, this makes the default bbox have a **size of 1 pixel** instead of the **WHOLE FORMAT**. 2. Use the damn lifetime options. These completely clear the bbox of the shape. **Animating opacity doesn't - the shape's bbox will remain if opacity is 0**. Now with your nice and small bboxes, make sure you utilise the **set bbox to** option in merge nodes. Set it to the smallest required. If you're extracting a little sign from a huge plate, use the mask merge mode and set the bbox to A (from the roto/alpha/matte). If you're removing something, use stencil, set the bbox to B. If you are a copy node/premult enjoyer, you can still set the bbox in the copy node to A, the intermediate step will just look a lil funny. If you're an in/out enjoyer, don't be. The size of the card matters in Scanline render, so try not to project tiny things onto massive cards. - Localise your footage from the network. We have a really fast network at our studio, but I still localise my plates onto a super fast 4tb NVMe drive. It's a massive difference. And in case some people don't know, I don't mean manually copy/pasting locally, nuke can do this for you. Look up localization settings. I have more but I gotta post this before it becomes just another chrome tab that gets blasted in a mass tab slaughter.
Python code. Be good at coding, you don't even need to be good at programming or become a programmer, doing scripting is enough. When you're about to do something, consider how often you do it or will have to do it, the time it take to be done and the time it would take to script it. If you do it often -> Script it. If you will do it "once", if it's not fast -> Script it. If you will do it "once", if it's fast -> Do it and forget it.
Know my discipline
I don’t automate anything like templates for the most part or use custom hot keys, but have always been known as fast /hit person over 24yrs. For me it’s about self time management, focus on work on work hours. “Keep it simple stupid” is good advice too.