Working Efficiently and Fast

This post is about working effectively and therefore quickly either together with people or by implementing a simple but tedious way.

What is efficiency?

When I think of efficiency, for me it means solving and rounding up all the tasks that I have for that day. So if I am not working efficiently I am actually dragging myself. Being efficient is mostly related to experience or the help you can get from experienced people, for example you had a problem that you need to solve, either you are going to spend time on it to make that thing work or ask someone who had that issue before and knows the solution. This kind of efficiency improves with time and devotion in my opinion. The second type is more on the technical side of things, you guessed it right, its the power of the hardware that you use. So if the computer is fast than you will work fast and efficient or not? Keep reading if you are interested.

Part 1 — Experience and Environment

As I mentioned above the first part is related to your practices. It is about how many good quality tutorials you watch and the invaluable R&D that you do. No matter how much you work or even if you work in the best VFX studio you need to do R&D when you get home/have the time. That is what will make you efficient because you are going to be fixing problems when doing research. If you are like me and most of your time is not in an office with other artists like you; then you need to get into the community by following other artists on social media, entering and participating in the forums, talking to senior people, going to events getting ideas etc. This was an important short coming I had for a long time. These things will give you the speed and effectiveness I am talking about. In addition when the environment around you is helpful, friendly and experienced, you will get the answers and solutions to your needs faster. Also you can observe how other people had a problem and fixed it. Just like having an instructor struggle with a problem and watching him/her fix that issue in a tutorial will make you get rid of that problem easier in the future or better not even encounter it. Unfortunately, at the places and in teams that I worked together, there wasn’t many helpful FX Artists that I hoped to find.

However, in one of the small studios in Turkey, there was a guy that was a talented compositor, we had such a synergy with him that the amount of job we did together was maybe more than what 4–5 people did summed. And the way we did was to plan our shots ahead. Talked about how he wanted the renders from me (lights separated, smoke a different layer, shadows not included, gamma value etc.) so that he can comp better and faster. And how much of the things should I do in 3d or which layers were needed to be rendered first for him to check if the compositing works. These might sound simple and totally straightforward, but often you might not be in an environment with synergy and that is mostly because of the lead or supervisor, basically the leader, which is another topic.

Part 2 — Technical Side

The technical side of things are more important for freelancers or stock sellers like me, but still valuable for everyone if you ask me. The way to get efficient this way is to work on a slow/old computer. Yes, this might sound weird because that will surely slow you down and that is why I called it tedious in the beginning. (This is more doable if you are learning stuff and are a junior or do not have time constraints) While I was learning, I didn’t go and buy a super powerful workstation that did all my FX simulations in an instant. I had my laptop which was fairly old that I still continued using not because I couldn’t afford a new PC but because I wasn’t sure if I can turn this new profession of mine into a business after leaving the bank (I used to work at a bank as a Forex dealer, check my first blog post, I wrote about that there). This by itself and without me knowing helped me a great deal. Because I always had to find clever ways to make things faster, free up RAM, decrease render times etc. And I have seen so few tutorials or people that show/talk about these things. Again this sounds like common sense but that actually is not the case, you might be surprised how much time you can save by doing these.

To give examples; assume that you are making a destruction simulation of an apartment that have thousands of pieces and you know that your PC is not going to be able to handle it all, the solution might be to separate light pieces, like low weight furniture or glass pieces and simulate them after simulating the more visible and heavy/main parts of the building. So you just make the light pieces collide with the heavier parts which won’t make a big impact at the end because if you did the whole simulation together with light and heavy pieces the result would be very close, the reason being a piece of glass surely wouldn’t push a concrete piece a lot.

Another example would be about using proxy geometries where most renderers these days have available. That saves a lot of render time and RAM. Imagine making a forest with hundreds of high polygon trees, why not make the ones at the back proxy trees that are more friendly to your hardware. Also if possible, in some cases choosing a renderer that utilizes GPU while you are working on something else that works on CPU is a plus which again saves you time and doesn’t bind you to waiting for the render to finish.

One last example is for an explosion, if the back of the explosion won’t be visible just cut your volume box at the back and do not let it get bigger and bigger. Or if the smoke leaves the camera view do not let is simulate outside the camera view.

I worked like this for a long time and when I got my first job at a studio the computers were much faster than my home computer. However, since my laptop gave me the habit of working efficiently I continued to do these tricks that I got used to which makes everything even faster. You might think that this is redundant and you have the power to render/simulate a lot or you have the time to wait. Think of it this way, instead of waiting or doing something else while the PC is busy why not use efficiency, finish your work faster and rest or get to another task. There is also the possibility that there might be an error in the simulation and you might have to get back and fix issues and resimulate. So it is two simulation times you have to endure, better be efficient and clip those times down if you ask me.