A Rough Word on Schedule and Pipelining

One key aspect involved in this project is to work together as a production team. However, this brings up a pipelining issue that "Industry Exercises 3" addresses, that is not necessarily directly connected to CG.

In this field, it is common for practitioners to go one and be free-lance practitioners. People in this category and eventually everyone, should be able to know what their time is worth in terms of price.

In class, we were given a very interesting thought that I had overlooked. We were posed the question by our tutor (Jared Taylor) "How much our last project would cost a client?" The question was a very simple one, yet not one that I had ever considered. We then collectively started ourselves how long the project took us to do, the average hourly pay we would like, whether it was a sustainable income and whether the finished product was worth that much- i.e. would a client pay that much for it.

Conversely we had to start thinking that if a client did approach us and ask "How much would a project cost and can it be done by such time", how would we quantify our time and the variables we would need to take into account.

This brings up an important issue on scheduling. The only way in which we can value a project is  to understand how many man hours it takes to create the end product. then one can calculate the raw hours that it takes to fund the project. However we then must take into account that not everyone can go away, do their parts and then we all bring back our finished products for a final assembly. Some (actually most) jobs are dependent on other jobs finishing. i.e Rigging is usually dependent on the model being finished, as is texturing and UVing.  Then we can answer the next part of the question, which is how long it will take for us to do the project.

Taking these into account requires us to have a plan the lists all of the jobs that need to be done, in what order and by what person, given the constraints of the group and also include time that may be resulted in unforeseen delays. A good director and scheduler would want all people to be working at the same time. Anyone who is unoccupied is wasted time which is equal to wasted money- and budget is the underlying constraint of all.

To carry out the otherwise laborious task of organising work, we will be using a software that is highly regarded in animation companies globally- Shotgun. This software should be regarded as a professional tool to help us organize our workflow and serve as the backbone of who should be doing what at any given time.