Styx-Art

This could sound like an old man trying to teach you a lesson but it is not.

First of all: I am not old :P and second of all: Many people would tell you the same things: preparing your project before it actually starts is essential, the bigger the project, the longer it will need to be prepared.

One of my friend told me not a long time ago about the 80/20 - 20/80 law which means: that a project is 80% about preparing it and the last 20% are for production. Within those last 20%, 20% are for real production and the remaining 80% used to fix bugs and refine the project.

I will only talk about the first 80% (which is already something) using a simple example that we have all already experienced:

We all started using our 3D software, creating polygons there and there and after a while, we might have been happy with what we have done. We added textures and lighting but then? what is next? we just lost inspiration and dumped the project somewhere to start a new one and so on.

This is not the best way to do it. Had we taken some time before doing just something like a sketch of what we wanted to do, it could have been used as a guideline easy to follow throughout the rest of the project. The project being huge, there is no secret: writting a scenario, a script, drawing a story-board , designs for characters, sets and props allow us to know at any given time where we are and what we need to do. We can detail the guideline and a well-built one will for example prevent us from having to restart something as we did not anticipate the fact that it would not work the way we are doing it but it is already too complex to be easily changed. This makes you save time which is an important constraint in most of the projects.

Of course, what I am writting here is not the ultimate thing to do in order to achieve all your projects but it helps to be organised.

Hopefully you will think about it next time you start a project and hope it will help.

I will try writting more of this kind of "tutorials". And if you have any comment, I will gladly read them if you send me an email using the contact page.