How long does it take to make professional 3D models?

How long does it take to make professional 3D models?

Postby qubodup » 02 Jan 2013, 00:00

How long does it take to make 3D art?

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?
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Re: How long does it take to make professional 3D models?

Postby Julius » 02 Jan 2013, 06:51

Hmm hard to tell, as I never sat down to make anything from start to finish in one go, or clocked the time of individual sessions.

Overall I would intuitively say those figures are about correct, if not even somewhat underestimated and not taking the conceptualizing/planning part into account (which probably is one of the reasons why he mentions so many re-dos).

Of course it really depends on the target quality level also... this seems to be for a somewhat modern 3D FPS, with not too detailed characters. Lower resolution texture and no normal-maps etc. would obviously be a bit quicker... making a unit for a RTS is obviously not quite as time consuming as for an FPS.

Oh and regarding the animations, 1-2h per animation with a character usually having at least 20 or so, e.g. about 30h for that also.

Creative reuse of assets is really the way to go for small team projects, as the art workload is otherwise really not doable unless you have a full time, paid team of artists. Animations should always use a common rig and be shared between characters, characters should always be based on a common base mesh, levels should reuse as much common props as possible (relatively easy with vegetation or wall details for example), and if you can find high quality freely licensed assets, use them instead of reinventing the wheel!
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Re: How long does it take to make professional 3D models?

Postby alexander » 02 Jan 2013, 14:59

it sounds largely reasonable. I am not an artist, but I have dabbled with Blender and I know people who have dabbled quite a bit more, from being a Game Engineering major. the thing about 3D-modelling is just like the thing about programming: design ahead, design ahead, design ahead (one project that comes to mind has taken around four years now, and the programming bit has been done for two. they have two programmers and *six* artists! ... that frequently change their mind). couple this with reuse, reuse, reuse (if you are good at this, you can make everything look unique in a lot smaller amount of time) and you will be efficient. provided of course that you have experience, experience, experience... and that comes with work, work, work. ;-)
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Re: How long does it take to make professional 3D models?

Postby hc » 02 Jan 2013, 19:38

Just my cents on the keywords replaceholders, redo and effort:

If you put real effort into it then try to make it last - ie: If you paint a texture or image then use insane resolution not just state of the art - it may become obsolete - keep image source, ie. layered high-res versions and just merge-scale-down for delivery.
I think (maybe a decade ago) I've wasted my time on pixelated images. But that holds still true: At one point you plan to use resolution x and some time later.

On the other hand I would argue against "just crank something out to fill immediate needs and wants" is a waste of time - that is if you don't put a lot of effort into a replaceholder. Replaceholders are IMHO most valueable to open source games. IMHO successful games started (and maybe iterated) through replaceholders to get the game done. Flashy tech demos don't get far...(Disclaimer: I consider LinWarrior more a simulator than a game tech-demo ;)

Anyway, I think redo-ing and iterating can't be eliminated (and shouldn't be for open source).

Effortless replaceholder = good
Effortful replaceholder = bad

+1 for Julius about creative reuse of assets.

Back to the topic: I would need more time anyway - not beeing a professional artist. But I think that the total cost could be higher, say for textures based on photographies if you need to *find* and take pictures first - on the other hand it can be combined with taking a hike, a holiday trip or a visit to the zoo.

Generally for estimating it is helpful to split the task down until you can estimate the sub-tasks.
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Re: How long does it take to make professional 3D models?

Postby cdxbow » 16 Jan 2013, 08:01

Walter, our original artist quoted 40 hours work for 2 models, but delivered only one in over 40 hours, much of this was my fault because I stuffed him around, so 30-50 hours probably is a realistic estimate for a player model. Depends a lot on if you already have already have a paper design, a working skeleton to reuse or if you are modding a pre-existing model. For small indie developers Julius nailed it here.
Julius {l Wrote}: Creative reuse of assets is really the way to go for small team projects, as the art workload is otherwise really not doable unless you have a full time, paid team of artists. Animations should always use a common rig and be shared between characters, characters should always be based on a common base mesh, levels should reuse as much common props as possible (relatively easy with vegetation or wall details for example), and if you can find high quality freely licensed assets, use them instead of reinventing the wheel!

4 - 8 hours for rigging a character seems a long time. I wonder what happened to the autorig button? I have to produce another mek for mekArcade over the next month, I will try to keep track of the time spent on the various steps.
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Re: How long does it take to make professional 3D models?

Postby qubodup » 16 Jan 2013, 16:45

cdxbow {l Wrote}: 4 - 8 hours for rigging a character seems a long time. I wonder what happened to the autorig button? I have to produce another mek for mekArcade over the next month, I will try to keep track of the time spent on the various steps.

+10 Karma achievement if you record a video too! ;)
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Re: How long does it take to make professional 3D models?

Postby cdxbow » 17 Jan 2013, 00:24

It would just be rigging up a mesh to one of our skeletons, probably the human walker. Usually a couple of hours.
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Re: How long does it take to make professional 3D models?

Postby Olinelooo » 25 Apr 2016, 08:06

but delivered only one in over 40 hours, much of this was my fault because I stuffed him around, so 30-50 hours probably is a realistic estimate for a player model. Depends a lot on if you already have already have a paper design,????
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