It Takes Longer


So the game I've been working on since last September-ish, almost a year. (took time off for Skyrim and Mass Effect) The programmer, Andrew, had been working on the game for 3 (4 now) years. His A.I. and other aspects of the programming were very developed and advanced by comparison to the art which looked like placeholders at best. I said well I can make spaceships easy enough. I imagined it'd take about 3 months. Model, texture... how hard is that? Well there are like 20 ships, at the time a lot of my methods were still old school by comparison to how things are done now. So every time I did a new ship or new texture I learned something I figured out or tried to find a better way to do it, resulting in a better workflow and product. However, doing that made me go back over and over and over all the ships for consistency. Its hard to manage all the notes and things I want to do along with things that need to be done.
Right now I model hard surfaces in Maya, Auto-UV in 3DCoat, fix UV's in Maya, bake lighting in VRay, paint Textures in 3DCoat, touch everything up in Photoshop. Seems easy, but doesn't everything in CG seem easy until you do it? hah. All that and I'm not even doing Normal Maps! I would/will when there are fewer objects/ships or more artists.