Staging a Project
Target audience expectation: 3D novice/moderate
A topic that I’ve been asked and likely others have as well most often is ‘how do you make things?’ It’s a very broad question and one from curiosity, Some people want the technical answer while others want a more philosophical one. As I think about this question and others like it, of how or why to make anything at all, philosophical answers and even more questions arise, to address some of those; Sometimes it just because an idea strikes, or because I’m requested to do so. Inspiration, a challenge, spite. Whatever is enough of a motivator to start.
This isn’t a fully technical write up but if that is desired, bug me about it and I’ll write up a follow up page regarding more specifics.
Here’s a general overview of staging a project
Starting
It tends to follow the same pipeline of how to go about creating.
Idea → Gathering Reference → Planning → Block out → Revisions → Optimization → Final
I find that each process has their own sort of subprocess within it. And there are lots of things that facilitate how well one is done over the other all of these are up to the person(s) experiences and knowledge points that sum up a project. While it is good to know a little it isn’t required to know all while making a project. From my personal experiences having the goal of wanting to make something is what inspired the curiosity and interest to learn which is what greatly helps bring the project into being. The only wrong is to not do anything at all.
IDEAS
What makes up your wants? This is your spark but not your fuel for your project and getting it going. Ideas can be anything and everything as long as you have a goal in mind. Because this is the spark and not the entirety of the flame, the things that come next are the questions you must begin to ask; the who, what, where, why questions are great to contribute to how the project should look the things you’ll need and going through getting a list of requirements.
Gathering Ref
Gathering of references and establishing what is and isn’t what you’re looking for in your project is that list of requirements, meaning that it can be as detailed or not as you deem fit. Establishing some notes and going and revising the scope of your project will help you get close to your intended goals. Establishing the theme and settings will provide the details of which to consider in later stages of the project. Something to consider additionally when gathering your references is, if you don’t know something doing a bit of research is the prime source of fueling your ideas. In many cases this can lead to very pleasant new ideas and even more refined reference! Feel free to look into how things work and operate. You don’t have to go overly far but a quick dip into subjects can give you some more insight on some design decisions.
While you won’t have everything planned out at this point the more you do with defining what you want to do helps contribute to your next stage.
Planning
Planning is by far the most important step when you go into a project, knowing what you wish to make, how you want to go about making it, the investment into the project are key decision making factors that you’ll be using to determine the scope and what you will and won’t be doing. If you have the required skills will also contribute to how you go about problem solving the requests. Are you making everything? Do you need to purchase asset packs? How much and what of compatibility. All things that should be thought about and planned for.
I’ll be continuing on with the assumption that this stage is completed to the best of ability and don’t worry if you might have missed something we’re all human after all and doing our best here is more then good enough.
Block out
The block out stage is entirely of primitives and minimal details on the work. The goals of this block out is to establish scale. And this is scale in terms of true genuine scaling measurements (how tall, how wide, ect), as well as just how much is able to fit within the project. (how many). It is good at this point to establish some importance tiers. This is where you would take your planned wants and start assembling where and what connects to each other and what holds most importance. Outside skills like design, art direction curation, contribute a lot here . The block out is intended to show you the problems and needing to solve them through iteration, this is the time to be doing so, there is no need to rush your foundation making, play test, test lighting, test navigation and make notes of the things you tend to run into. If possible get others to assist in this process to help point out tension points and if the desired effect is happening. Once you feel this phase has made it to it’s settled state is where you can begin your detailing.
When detailing the reference planning begins it’s usefulness. All the details and learned from researched details should now fall into place where your planning was done. In your project you are now setting the stage, either with your assets, or your own creations.
Optimizations
Optimizations is a tricky balance game. Has by far a multitude of techniques and decision making that come with asterisks for each situation as to why and for specific reasonings for their implementation. It is a balance game as you will need to make decisions such as, lets hypothesize that an effect that you desire is suspected of causing a performance impact yet is highly desirable. Optimization of the effect could be the likely first step, in the event of dimensioning returns, alterative optimizations would need to be considered to work with the effect instead, thus a balance game. Here is where knowledge in problem solving is sought after. There are multitude of techniques and how people have solved various other problems to accommodate the desired results. Which if learned at this point will cause some rework to find what best achieves the desired result both performance and visual directive. Through trial and error, learned knowledge, and/or guided teaching, preemptive optimization planning would have occurred and would have been considered when detailing the revised settled block out phase. There is no one situation fit all solution to problem solving. There are popularized methods and encouraged practices that have results you can determine for yourself if they fit your needs.
Personal preferred methods I recommend learning are: Trimsheets, UV Packing, Texture Channel Packing, High to Low bakes, Atlasing. To name a few, as well seeking out research within the field of what others are doing.
Final In your Final submission you should be doing a check over your scene. Taking the time to appreciate your hard work and to share with others your creation.
Wrapping up
While this isn’t the most in depth guide or the most technical I hope that it has helped lift the curtain on a process that I consider when approaching a project.
I intend to have this website to similar to a garden and really enjoyed the sentiment of Maggie Appleton and her segment
… Gardening is a practice that treats a personal website as a constantly evolving landscape where you develop your ideas in public.
Gardens are…
a) Explorable, rather than structured as a strictly linear steam of posts. This is usually achieved through deeply interlinking notes where readers can navigate freely through the content.
b) Slowly grown over time, rather than creating “finished” work that you never touch again. You revise, update, and change your ideas as they develop, and ideally find a way to indicate the “done-ness” state to your reader …
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