Thats what I’ve wondered for awhile now, those of you who have produced some very very good images, I have always wondered how much time out of your day does it take to produce those?
I don’t think that I create “very very good images” as such, but nonetheless, I usually spend about 6 or 7 hours directly in Blender, but most of the time I’m doing other stuff at the same time, switching screens and multitasking.
On the days I don’t work my ‘real’ job, I can spend from 1 hour to 12 or more in a day. Average is maybe 4 or 5 for the days I’m off work.
But see, there’s a difference there. I don’t produce images, I produce models and work on animation. The images you’re talking about are planned, and the people working on them work on them for days or weeks. Making an awesome 3D image - or any kind of art - is just a matter of knowing what you need to do and then doing that. Planning is the key to making a good image. Eventually you have to stop. With 3D you need a goal, or it’s hard to know where exactly to stop.
The fact that some of them can crank out images quickly (Robert T. springs to mind) is less about how fast they work and more about how efficient they are with their time.
Example: http://andreewallin.deviantart.com/art/Alley-401-112434388 (click it to see the large version). He painted that in about two hours in one sitting. The reason he can do that isn’t because he’s painting it really really fast… in fact I bet he makes more slow, deliberate strokes than quick sketchy ones. The reason he can paint something like that in a couple free hours is because he knows how to cheat the details by selling the main structure. You start with the most important stuff and work your way down to the little details.
A lot of people starting out try to spend all their time rendering a drawing, or worrying about getting every hair on a model’s head, or trying to get all the pores to look good. They’ll focus on stuff like that, but then put all that crazy detailed work onto a head that doesn’t sell the face or shapes properly. It ends up looking like the typical “not experienced enough” sort of image. In reality, if the head shape had been good, then the hair or pores or whatever could be just faked or done very simply, and the good head shapes would have sold them.
Granted, some of the 3D stuff out there is extremely detailed, but I bet if you zoomed in closer on a lot of them you’d see that they’re made up of just a lot of simple shapes or a lot of repeated geometry, and that the same sort of ideas apply. Look at Pixar. There are shots in the beginning of Wall-E that have huge towers made up of little blocks of trash. I’ll bet they modeled maybe a dozen of them and just copied them all over the place, but the overall structure of the trash towers and how huge they were was the real focus of those shots. I’ll bet if you looked you’d probably find all kinds of shots that had repeated blocks of trash lying around.
Anyway, that’s my $20.02.
i work 8. I work with other people’s images, as I am not an independent producer.
I use to spend alot of time in blender, then i took a whole year off from it… now im finding it hard to spend maybe an hour or two using blender a day, i havent created a decent image in nearly 2 years now.
Anyway i agree about the planning, if you know what your going for then it becomes alot easier than just jumping in, perhaps spending 4 hours on detailing body armour to find out that the proportions arent correct etc. It’s really all about planning and time management. Something i need to work on before i start producing images and animations again.
:no:Never enough!:no:Never enough!
I spend a few hours on it on the days I have the time to use it. I mostly lack the planning skills.
I stuff about with blender on weekdays for about 3 hours, and on weekends, about 6 hours.
Right now I’m spending about 4 hours a day on Blender. I’m going to use Blender to create an animatic for a short film project.
Terry
5 minutes a day on average, even though blender stays running for hours. (I get distracted a lot) So far I’ve modeled,um, a bookshelf and a crappy toy shark. In TWO GODBEAVER-CONSTRUCTIONED years!
I need to uninstall flash.
Hard to say…
One thing you can be sure of though, is that I open up Blender EVERY day of my life
as long as I’m near a computer, just to see where the development are heading, and
try out every single new thing that they throw in.
I sometimes also use it for checking upon my older characters, to spiff them up
a bit, see if something new and more practical can be done to /with them.
Example…
…Joshua from the developers team - just recently committed an real-time
animation (motion capture if you like) feature that made it possible to just
animate “on-the-fly”. That was pretty awesome, and I could in seconds make
my Characters Dance synchronized to music!
Kind of like grown-ups playing with barbie dolls…or monsters 
Not enough, used to be on it 4 hours-ish a day…now about 1.
usually 0-30 minutes daily unless i’m working on a project, then i might spend 4-8hrs+ per day