 So hello everybody, my name is Martin. I hope you can hear me, but yeah, it seems well If you're like me, you probably tried starting a lot of personal projects and never finished them and Yeah, you start all excited and full of energy but that gradually wears off and Suddenly you realize that you cannot reach the finish line it happened to me many times over and Curious thing actually happened on this latest personal project of mine It's called heroes of bronze and there the excitement never wore off And I was able to get back to it every day doing piece by piece until finally I reached the final stages and Throughout the years that I worked on it I actually learned quite a few valuable lessons I think and I distilled those into 10 tips that might actually help you start and finish your own projects But before I do that Let me actually allow me to play a few of the best shots from the project I think that I created over the four years and Kept me quite busy in the past four years But before I get to the tips, let me actually talk a little bit about myself Originally, I'm a 3D artist filmmaker and currently a cinematic director. I'm based in Prague and one of the biggest Professional projects of my career was Kingdom come deliverance and RPG game from Czech Republic And there with a team of several talented people. We worked on cinematics I also if you couldn't tell I work for CG boost where we with fellow artists We share our workflows there, so yeah, that's it about me, but let's actually get to the tips Because this brings me to the first one in 2018 I finished working on Kingdom come I left the company and I really knew that I want to create a short film something that would be mine And I could have it like check. Yeah, I finished a short film I had lots of ideas back then you can see some of them here I started doing storyboards for various fantasy projects I also had some unfinished Star Wars fun film business and yeah, I never never got back to it So I was considering that as well but gradually I realized that I want to work more on historical projects and I've done my fair share of medieval topic But right around the time of 2018. I discovered this amazing book series about ancient Greece and it's also when I first started working with blender testing various scenes and You can see Sorry, you can see that actually This first scene that I created in blender. It was back in the time of 2.79 And I think there the UI finally started working for me Also, I needed some free alternative for Maya back then so this is my first test that I did back then in blender And immediately I was hooked I knew that I want to make my short my future short film in blender and Yeah, I just wanted to learn all the possibilities of the software. I Started working on more assets. I started creating Various concepts some of them you can see here and gradually I realized I don't really want to do any any Fantasy stuff or any science fiction I keep I kept coming back to this ancient Greece topic and that's actually the first and I think most valuable Tip that I'd like to share and that's really pick something not because you think it will be popular or because it will bring you likes But something that you cannot put down that you like burn with passion for such a project and for me It was this ancient Greek topic Second tip is not this much fun, but I think as valuable as the first one and that's really once you're settled with your topic Create a schedule for yourself because we all think that we will be able to work on our projects in spare time But there's never enough spare time and gradually you let the project slide and then you never finish it So right at the beginning I created a little schedule for myself. I knew that few days in the week I will be able to work on it and Then I even increased it so that every day I did at least a little bit a little model little texture polished and animation And that that ultimately throughout several years helped me to finish such a large project So that's tip number two and tip number three at the beginning of your projects You should definitely discover new tools look around see what's new in the world of 3d graphics for me It was Blender back then so I was learning a lot of that But by learning Blender I discovered lots of workflows where I wasn't really good at I knew that I cannot create character meshes at least not very fast and not very nice and I also didn't know anything about rigging or animation and Also, yes creating clothing or sculpting that wasn't for me And I knew that I will have to use some specialized tools for that I made a little research and discovered tools by Reallusion They have this amazing combo character creator and I clone and there I could create my base meshes for all the characters of years of bronze I then send them to I clone where it was automatically rigged and even though I still know nothing about animation I was able to employ another amazing tool and that's Rococo suit So I invested in that and in combination with I clone It gave me the possibility to record hundreds of animations that I ultimately used on the project So so yeah all the characters moving even women in the short film. It's me That was fun And yeah, as I mentioned, I also used Marvel's designer I knew that I'm very bad at creating clothing and this tool helped me a lot Be that as it may Really at the beginning it's best to look for your flaws look for the weaknesses of your workflow Discover tools that will help you with that and then then put them into a pipeline Discover new tools up until a point because once you have your pipeline ready and here you can see see how my pipeline went Once you have this sort of workflow ready and you're fairly confident that you can do with it everything you need for your project Then stick to it and don't go into new tools every day Don't learn new stuff new tutorials because it will just slow you down So at some point I really recommend that you lock your pipeline Don't learn new stuff for example in my case It was geometry notes and I never learned that because I knew I have to finish my short film And if I started working with geometry notes, I would be changing stuff And it would just slow me down and I would never finish it again. So I refuse to learn it I still don't know it. But yeah, well, I'll get to that surely So but also you can see my pipeline here. So I started with some pre-production In Photoshop and some writing then went into blender for asset creation One thing I didn't mention is substance painter. I used that a lot for for texturing in combination with blender. I Used at the end of the pipeline after everything was assembled in blender and rendered out from cycles I used after effects to composite stuff together Fifth point I'm a fan of planning It doesn't have to be anything too difficult but I like to create storyboards for my short films or whatever I'm working on and I also like to create these sheets that you can see here I basically put their thumbnails of all the shots that I plan to do and I dice it up into several rows of information and Those then I fill with colors. It starts with red for not worked on and you go through orange to yellow like almost finished Up you and then you reach green at the end and it's amazing because it's beautiful to see it fill with green You can see there's still some yellow. Those are the shots that I still hate There's I will get back to it. But basically you will you're never finished with your project plan but Not excessively always leave some room for experimentation for example this shot I was messing around with mega scans just throwing stuff into blender scene And then I like put water in there and look kind of nice So I figured I have some boats I can put it in there as well and then I finish up the lighting and what started as an experimentation for one afternoon is One of the favorite shots of the short film for me And that really helped me push new fresh energy into the project And I cannot recommend this enough try to at least like every now and then try to do something that you did not Accept I expect that you would do and it will help you in the project ultimately and then go back to the plan So yeah, and if you have big projects that you're working on on your own It also has this hidden adventure this hidden plus that you can jump from task to task and always keep it fresh So that's also something that can help if you're fed up with one thing jump to another and then return to that previous thing Optimize yeah, I learned it the hard way Basically when I started rendering my shots, I realized I cannot render my shots because I was using 8k resolutions for textures and Yeah, so I learned that I have to optimize a lot and I recommend that you learn it beforehand not not at the end of the project Blender is fortunately very good with polycount so that wasn't much of an issue but Optimizing your texture resolutions is is a crucial point and when it comes to optimization It's also good to use asset libraries or anything that you can buy on the internet That will speed up your workflow for me. It was of course mega scans I knew I will have a lot of natural assets there So I I used mega scans a lot I used some stuff from kid bash that the Roman Empire pack and I just edited it so it looks like Greek stuff Blender is Blender is of course Famous for its add-ons, so I use them a lot I cannot recommend these three enough because they helped me fill my scenes with lots of vegetation So geo scatter botanic and vegetation. They saved me months of time. I think Don't forget to invest in render farm because rendering is very very long process often Unless you're working in with Evie and that everything is amazing you with Evie because it renders very fast But in cycles it can actually be a major cause of you never finishing the project In my case, I didn't really invest in render farm But I was able to string two computers together You can see my workstation here and while I was working on one computer I was sending the data to another one and there it was rendering I think if I didn't do that, I would still be rendering some of the shots. So yeah again It saved me months of time Ninth point is something more about motivation This point helped me a lot Because if you're working alone on a project, it can get quite lonely and then yeah You find yourself crying in the corner alone Nobody to help me and then when you start talking about it with your friends or you start Sharing your experience and results on social media There may come a magical point where people start actually asking when is it gonna be ready and when do post next image or stuff like that really helps you in your efforts and It brought some fresh energy that I needed at certain points of the project Also, what was amazing was that suddenly I started working on tutorials Connected to the heroes of bronze project. So even before I was finished with the short film I was able to teach some people my workflows and they were able to use it on their projects so that's that's always nice to hear and 10th point is knowing when to stop because I'm one of those people who could work on the project forever I'd be the first one to admit that there's lots of flaws I hate some of the shots for their animation close-up facial animations Also, the dynamics is something I have to improve a lot in future But at some point I realized that done is better than perfect and I had to stop I set myself a deadline and I stacked to it even though you could see in the in the axle sheet that there's still some shots that I yellow so done is better than perfect and Really force yourself to finish your project to a certain date And that's it. That's the 10 most important things that I think helped me in major way on this project And because of it, I was able to finish it. Thank you for being able to present it to you Thank you. I should I should I guess I should change the logo Twitter at this point But yeah, so here you can see the social media links if you want to follow the future of this project because I plan to continue it and If you want to learn my workflows, there's a lot of it on CG boost I have my courses there and on my YouTube that you can see in the middle There's lots of breakdown so more technical stuff is on my YouTube But thank you again and enjoy the rest of the conference