Long hours, hard focus on asset creation, closing a client, and painterly love!
This week had work for a high paying client close, enough to be put on "retainer", or just a contract with no more work that's on pause. It had a lot of issues with rendering and organization. I think as teams grow, having a strong central file structure and a core for project management is integral and super important, even if documented and trained with everyone the better. The more complex the project, the more room there is for failure. It was incredible to see how days can burn just trying to organize and consolidate data - and remote work with local storage and limited cloud storage also become a bottleneck that needs to be contented with. Freefilesync is kinda like my hero here. This week also had a lot of love in my creative field put in, the painterly project. It has become a beast of it's own and I am super happy to work on that project.
But I can't help by feel the end of year pressure. There is work that needs to be finished, others put on hold (though I had to push out a chunk of translation work) and then.. I can breath with the singular project next year after the new years. I have put on my mind to finish these before the year is ended, but it's now already December, which is like a half month when it comes to holidays and socialities, even my up and booked holidays eats into it! I haven't had a 7-10 day holiday in two years! But I can't wait.
Also, if you haven't noticed, this week there has been a salaries data from game roles coming out in twitter, which shows that salaries, for me.. could be really high if I get my leg into that world overseas... anything from over there can go a long way here. A salary there could feed a team of 3 or 4 artists here quite easily. I will be updating my portfolio January for sure.
Let's take a look at my performance this week. I worked hard, really hard. I managed to get in a total logged 65 hours of work, but at the same time this didn't pan out with full productivity. Many of the tasks took a lot longer than expected, either and probably due to poor planning and splitting up the large tasks into smaller easier tasks. When I don't split things up, I usually get more distracted with more grueling tasks - so best to eat an elephant by many bites.
Also, though I closed a client, I am still 3 times over capacity, meaning I need to cut back on 2 of the now three active clients. Individual clients could be the way forward, time to work on the socials and actual passive income, and also work by not letting clients down by pushing delivery time, also full creative focus for higher quality. My only fear is.. if I have only one, would I get bored and be more distracted? or is there a fine balance? I think multi-tasking on my own projects and one individual client at a time might be most optimal at the end of the day, but old habits die hard.
In the gallery you can see some of the captures from this week. As you can see it was all about modeling for the painterly project. In discord you can see the open project. I also had a look at raycast scattering. You can see I also worked on layout and lighting, doing tests for the short music loops. I didn't finish animation, but layout yet. Enough to get general animation started. I tried to work some city generation tool Thursday, but will require a lot more focus. I did have fun making and kitbashing a ship design though, and prepping city assets, working a system to try make it work.
There is a gallery here! This weeks screen captures.
