Thanks & updates
Added 2018-05-20 14:07:50 +0000 UTCI see Daisy has attracted some new patrons in the past few days. If you're one of them, welcome! And to everyone in general, I want to say thank you. You're all bringing me closer to my being able to make a living doing something that actually makes me happy, which really I don't think I can ever thank you all enough for. I can try, though, so again, thank you!
This may be a long post, because I have a few things to talk about. Good news & not so good, basically. First and foremost, I've made some decent progress on Daisy's rig over the past few days! Her brows are rigged, and also weighted about as well as I'm probably going to get them. Her breasts are also finally attached, and weighting is in progress and going surprisingly well.
The flipside to the progress on Daisy, is that she will not be ready to animate by tomorrow. My anxiety over the rigging & weighting slowed me down too much. It's amazing how easy it is to sit back and do nothing, when you're convinced that something you've been planning for a long time might fall apart once you actually try it. And maybe Monday was an unrealistic goal.
One reason I wanted to have Daisy ready by tomorrow, was so I could animate her while I'm waiting for this contract to resume. Another contract has come along, though, so I may be spending the next two weeks doing clean-up work. I've also received my paycheck for the first phase of the first contract, which... makes me not want to think about animation for a while.
When something is as stressful as that job was at the start, you want to be able to look at your paycheck and think that all of the pain and frustration was worth it. Not even close, this time. My work took almost twice as much time as what was originally estimated, and the texture guys put in even more; but all of us are paid based on the original estimate, rather than the hours we put in. It's a punch to the gut that makes me not want to continue that job, unless the time estimates & pay rates are adjusted.
Comments
It does suck 😑 And I feel for you. Having your process down only to have the clients ineptitude make YOU look like you're fumbling. I'd be pretty upset too. Best I can say is use this experience for tools to combat future process issues like this. Have a game plan when you have a client that's iffy on the tools they're using. I'd also use the lack bonus of pay as an IOU with your boss. You did good for the team.
2018-05-20 15:34:16 +0000 UTCThe frustrating thing is, my team has experience to spare, but a number of things made this job different. My boss had estimated the animation time based on the work we've done so far, which is typically a mix of soldier animations and cleanup, usually made with 3DSMax's Biped rig. For this job, the characters are non-human and require a lot more personality. Plus they're animated in Maya, which requires more hands-on care. The texture guys especially got screwed, because it was estimated that each texture set would only take two days - about a week, total - but instead all of them combined took over a month. This was because the color values kept getting screwed up, due to a convoluted process that the client neglected to inform them about. Another bit of client neglect - they were supposed to provide the tools I'd use to rig the characters, but did not. Their parent company's legal department would need to approve that first, and they are SLLOOOOOWWWW... We originally thought we'd be starting this job in January, but legal's slowness pushed the start date back to April. If we waited on them to approve the tools, it might've delayed us another month. So I wrote some new tools of my own, greatly streamlining some of my existing scripts to make them much easier to use. At the start, my boss said I'd be paid extra for any R&D, but in the end the money just wasn't there, after all the extra time everyone had put in.
Jared Lindquist
2018-05-20 15:13:15 +0000 UTC
