A Well-Handled Project
What does it mean to do project management?
Working in 3D can be complicated, especially if you’re jumping between animating, editing, storyboarding, compositing, doing audio and whatever else. If you don’t have a plan for how to tackle these parts and if you just slap everything in a folder on your desktop you can very easily get overwhelmed. Proper project management is about avoiding that, and knowing how you’ll get from point A to B.
It’s also about efficiency. Would you rather take 6 months on a project or just a few weeks? Your workflow becomes like a checklist; an order of operations that helps you build out your project efficiently, and with minimal backtracking.
Pilots use checklists everyday to ensure their plane is safe for takeoff, and that list is the same, every single time. It makes sure that nothing is missed, and the process gets faster every iteration. Luckily lives aren’t at stake in 3D, but we can still use that methodology to assist us.
On this page we go over a suggested order of operations and some tips on how to stay organized. Working in 3D is an art. What you decide to do, what you WANT to do, is art. But there’s a science to being able to make the art without getting tangled in the metaphorical wires.
File Management
The first thing you need to figure out is where things are going to go. Decide where you are placing your project file, your audio cues, and where your renders are going to be placed.
Camera & Framing
Plan out how you are going to frame your characters. Figure out timings, placements, etc.
Animation
Animate your characters! You can start with keyframes and then do in-betweens, or whatever you feel comfortable with.
Lighting
Lighting makes up maybe 80% of how much you like the final product. Important to have a “main light” and keep it consistent unless you’re going for something more stylistic.
Rendering
Rendering is your computer taking ALL the data that you can in the shot, and putting it together frame by frame to give you what you want. This is highly customizable to what you are wanting from the next step.
Compositing
The “post-processing” this can be as deep or as non-existant as you wish. It can definitely help with giving you that “artistic touch” to your projects!