Development time

[Jon Berntsen]

During a week, how many hours are you laying off to develop your libraries, skills and searching new inspiration?

 

And how many percentages of your daily worktime are you required to bill out/work on commissioned projects?

[Scott Schroeder]

During a week, how many hours are you laying off to develop your libraries, skills and searching new inspiration?

Unfortunately this usually gets rolled into a project's budget, which shouldn't happen but it more often than not does. Or if it does happen outside of a project it will happen during downtime between projects. Which, lately, hasn't been happening very often in my experience. It's usually finish one project and off to another one that is already on fire.

 

And how many percentages of your daily worktime are you required to bill out/work on commissioned projects?

Typically for your average CG artist it is around 100%. If you are senior level, you may have some off project time for project management or what not, but you are still usually working directly on a billable project. Most places don't like to see general office hours billed.

[Chris MacDonald]

During a week, how many hours are you laying off to develop your libraries, skills and searching new inspiration?

 

It is entirely dependant on workload. I've had weeks before where I've not looked at a single design website, or touched a library model because I've been absolutely flat out. Then other times I've had the polar opposite where I'm scratching around for work, browsing design websites for hours and modelling just about anything that comes into my head... even running cloth/solid body simulations just "because it looks cool".

 

I genuinely believe that taking time out to look for new designs/inspiration/tutorials/skills is paramount though; I wouldn't be where I am without having taken a genuine interest in it.

 

And how many percentages of your daily worktime are you required to bill out/work on commissioned projects?

 

It depends what I put on my timesheet, I am often caught between a rock and a hard place with it too. If I put a lot of hours down to a job, that job may lose money because we're working for a flat fee rather than hourly... But if I put it all down to office admin, the powers that be want to know why I'm not working on a job.

 

I am sure that working in an architectural practice my situation is quite different to that of actual visualisation studios.

[artmaknev]

Most of the development I've done was in the middle of the deadline trying to solve a specific problem, searching for specific script or plugin to solve something and then watching quick tutorial trying to understand how it works. I never really find motivation to turn on my computer after the project is finished, need to go outside sometimes!

 

But I always wanted to allocate at least 2 hours per week for self-development, learning new software/scripts/plugins, working on personal project or studying new techniques, but its really hard to find that motivation after work...