I have tested for you: the lockdown.
I decided to take
advantage of the decrease of activity caused by the lockdown to tidy
up my assets, train myself and rethink part of my workflow. It’s
also important to think about how we are going to work “afterwards”,
as part of clients will keep on working from home for a period of
time.
Training
Our job changes fast
and training is a key to success. I usually train when a question
rises during the preparation phase of a project or when I see awesome
images created by colleagues and wonder how they were made. During
the lockdown, several platforms offered free courses. Software
publishers also seized this opportunity to broadcast more webinars.
Just out of curiosity, for pleasure or to refresh my knowledge, I
watched over 50 hours of training. The ones I found most interesting
were provided by Guerilla Renderer and Johannes Lindqvist.
Johannes Lindqvist
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvQZI8x6BiGomx5XvclA9aA
Johannes Lindqvist
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/vizguru
Guerilla Render Youtube
Tutorials
Spring cleaning
Hard drives are like
garages: you pile up things, you store stuff that might be of help
someday… and you end up with not clearly or even unidentified
objects, a large majority of which will never be used. Great textures
and 3D models are available for a few years. There is no more need to
keep old 512 pixel textures and cars from last century: all this goes
to trash! I freed up gigas of space and I have a much better
visibility of my files.
Among survivors:
https://www.friendlyshade.com/
https://www.arroway-textures.ch/
https://www.viz-people.com/
https://www.designconnected.com/fr/
https://maxtree.org/
https://humanalloy.com/
New software
I needed a software
to help me create my reference boards. I was a bit old school and
used the good old “copy and paste in Photoshop” technique. And
then I remembered PureRef which enables to create and set up a board
of images just by dragging and dropping them. How come I did not use
it earlier? No idea… You have to get used to the keyboard shortcuts
but I couldn’t do without it now.
I
also found a few discounts during the lockdown. I seized this
opportunity to buy Affinity Photo. I would like to test it for
post-production on 32 bits files to see its added-value compared with
Photoshop.
I also cleaned up my workflow in 3ds max. I
already used Substance painter / designer in my set and I added
Quixel. The connection plugin works fine and their library brings
materials, maps and 3D models that are complementary to the ones I
have in Substance Source.
Here’s
a quick tutorial to connect Quixel to 3dsmax 2021 >
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz-TzWYK-gE&feature=emb_logo
I took the
opportunity of the clean up to install Design Connected to manage my
assets library. It’s when I watched the video by Johannes Lindqvist
that I realized that I really missed a tool that could boost my
productivity. I had already tested it but I thought I had to have a
ready-to-use library of assets and not a big empty box.
Files exchange
I have had my
routine for a few years regarding files exchange. I use a cloud
service (in my case it’s Google One – 100 Go / 1.99 euros per
month) with a shared file for each project. There
are other providers like DropBox or Microsoft OneDrive. I
also use other services like wetransfer.com or fromsmash.com
occasionally.
I admit I am quite tempted by an alternative
solution: using my NAS. I have a Synology NAS and there is a
dedicated suite for exchange and collaboration. I face a crucial
question that a lot of companies have raised during the lockdown:
security. To what extent opening the access to your NAS –with a
very common and famous system like Synology- represents an
unnecessary risk exposure?
Customer care
The lockdown did not
really make any difference in my relations with my clients. It’s
usually based on a phone call and a screen share. I could imagine new
online solutions for my regular and geek clients, like wipster,
filestage or frame.io that enable to add a comment directly on an
image or a video.
I also use an
activity tracker to quantify my working time. But mine only detects
the use of a software, not the name of the files.
Working with
other free-lancers on mutual projects
The lockdown did not
really affect my way of working in this area either. It is a
full-functioning method: I share files on Google Drive, open a Slack
or Discord channel, regular meet-up on Skype or any videoconference
tool. I would say that the main issue is to agree, from the start, on
a nomenclature for the names and the tree of the files or it’s a
mess pretty quickly. It’s the very first document we create and
keep it at the root of our project’s file. Sometimes I make a
mistake when I render a sequence of images. In that case I use Bulk
Rename Utility to rename several files at once.
https://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/
I had the
opportunity to work on pretty big projects and if you are stringent,
it’s pretty smooth providing you have an Internet connection good
enough to share files quickly.
I know there are a
few full-web platforms to create a virtual studio composed by several
remote graphic designers but so far, I don’t have the impression
this concept has been adopted by a large majority of free-lancers.
