In the postmortem of Blood Frontier, a table of 3d art workload was presented:
6: Good Assets Take Time.
When I started doing modeling and animation, I jumped straight into doing characters, weapons, and scenery models. This was such a huge mistake that I can not even start to tell you how much time it wasted. The player characters and weapons were redone FROM SCRATCH several times, and yet another redo was on the way when the project finally died.
So for every aspiring artist out there, here is the breakdown on project times per asset *IF* you are familiar with the process used and you are already pretty competent at doing these things. This also assumes that they can be dropped right into the engine with no extra work. such as defining a configuration file or a text file for it.
GUI or menu graphics 4 - 8 hours
One level texture 1 - 2 hours
One scenery object 4 - 8 hours
One detailed object(animated or seen up close, like a gun) 8 - 12 hours
One good room in a map 2 - 4 hours
Modeling and painting a character 30 - 50 hours
Rigging a character 4 - 8 hours
Animating a character, per short animation 1 - 2 hours
Note that these times are for detailed, professional looking assets, and that the times will vary depending on your competence, experience, what assets you already have at your disposal and the complexity of the assets themselves. If you spend less time and just crank something out to fill immediate needs and wants, you'll pay for it when you have to redo it later.
http://web.archive.org/web/201107190132 ... ntier.com/
What is your experience with this? Do you have any examples of work, that you remember exactly how long it took to make? Do you think the numbers listed above apply to your work flow as well?