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Concept to 3D Art for the Game Designer Tutorials
Organization / Project Management
Subtitles of the Movie (Concept to 3D Art for the Game Designer / Organization / Project Management)
Project Management is something that you as an independent designer or Concept Artist or freelancer should have in your workflow somehow. Now this is coming from me, a person who is both organized and oblivious to time itself. That's the creative side of me I guess and also because I'm a Gemini. So half of me is logical and the other half, really just doesn't care as long as it's sunny and then it's nighttime, I know when to go bed. So I want to show you an application that I use to help stay organized and I'll just give you a quick overview on how I use it. Now keep in mind that many of these Project Management Applications are similar in some fashions. So this one is called OmniFocus. I also have another one I used to use called Things, literally the word Things. But as I said before, there are many, so just do a search for Project Management software and experiment and hopefully you'll be able to find a demo. And if I'm not mistaken there is a demo of OmniFocus available to you. So what is Project Management exactly? Well, simply put, it's when you want to be able to keep track of the tasks and the goals that you have in your life. From short term goals, like go out tomorrow and buy some pet food and some kitten litter, to long term goals. For example, write a novel one day. See the difference is, with Project Management, you want to at least get the project rolling. I've met so many people who have this one day thing in their mind and one day, well, it's today. Every day is that one day, so you should start to do something to head towards your goal as soon as possible. So let's go ahead and I'm going to show you how to create a project and in this instance, let's say we're hired to do a Golem 3D model. Alright. So I'm going to go ahead and just type Golem model. So this is my New Project as you could see here. So this is my project list and what I could do with this new project that I have, I can go ahead and create tasks. So the first thing we know that we have to do when we create a model for someone, is we should do some exploring or experimentation. So we can just say, you know, look for reference. So I don't like to just use the word reference because it doesn't mean anything. So I try to use sentences, look for reference. Now that we've found reference, what do we do? Well let's start thumbnailing. So start thumbnailing then head to sketches. So as you could see, you just want to get everything out of your head. It's called doing a brain dump. Oftentimes we have a lot of stuff in our head and by the time we get back home or you go to work or whatever, you've forgotten half of what you were trying to achieve. So with OmniFocus, which is also available for the iPad, iPhone and other devices, you want to get these ideas out of your head so you can worry about organizing them and putting dates and due dates also later. Step one, get it out of your head. So hit the sketches and then we can say that, you know, do a value study, then a color study. You just want to drop it down, doesn't really matter if it's in order or not. You know, so that's the whole idea. So we could say, do base mesh or create base mesh, let me go back and just put a create, just for example. Alright, so we have create base mesh and I just move it out of the way here, so let me go back to where I was. But you get the idea, so we have in our workflow, all the things that we need to do. From there, you can go ahead and do stuff like add a due date or a start date. You can also put a completion date, so when you're done with something, you can go ahead and check it off. For example, boom, just like that. Look for a reference is gone. So I, that means I accomplished this task. Now if we want to look up here, we can go to the View Menu and you can look at all the columns available to you. So you have a start date, due date, an estimate, context, all kinds of stuff here. Now OmniFocus is pretty complicated so I'm not going to really have time to talk about what a context is but just briefly, it's simply where or what do you need to accomplish that task. For example, when I look for reference, where am I looking for this reference? So the context would be, online or on my Mac or on the Internet. Start thumbnailing. Well I use a, a Wacom, so I could say on my Mac or I could say on SketchBook or sketches. So a context is something that you group together so that if you have more than one context in different projects, you can go to a Context View and see all the similar contexts. So you know that, okay, today on my Mac, I have to do this for this project, this for this project and this for this project, all online. So they could all be lined up and make your life a lot easier. So I'm hopeful that I didn't hurt a lot of your heads out there. Project Management took me a long time to get into but I've been pretty good getting myself used to using it and it's the first thing I check every single morning. And I've gotten a lot better at it. So check it out, OmniFocus has a demo, check out Things and just do a search for Project Management software and just explore.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Concept to 3D Art for the Game Designer |
| Author: | Dwayne Ferguson |
| SKU: | 34310 |
| ISBN: | 978-1-61866-036-7 |
| Release Date: | 2012-03-10 |
| Duration: | 8 hrs / 88 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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