Hey guys and welcome to this video! We're going to talk a little bit about
the Lean Production process, start getting you thinking about your work flow! Right,
Mikey!? Yes! Now, I've struggled with the concepts of Lean Production, because
that's not generally how we're taught to do things. We do
everything, almost, in our lives in batches, and when you switch over to Lean
Production it actually makes things a lot easier, but it takes a while to get your
head around and Ben's going to explain that a bit more in detail now. Yeah! So what's
lean about? Really it's about three things. Lean is about delivering value
to the customer, i.e. something that the customer will pay for, the
end customer. So say you are making bowling pins and a bowling ball, in this case,
and you're handing it over to a game developer,
eventually there's going to be a game made, and somebody on the app store is going to be flicking through and deciding
whether they're going to buy that game. And if what you're about to do isn't going to add to that end
experience, it's not value. So that's what value is, it's about delivering something
you'll pay for. Yep! And in this case, that's exactly how we're making
the course. We output something to you guys as quickly as possible, and then let you guys give
us the feedback, as quickly as possible. And you want to employ that, basically,
in your modeling, so you want to make sure you get to the end result as quickly as possible. Find
all the problems you're going to have and then jump back again and reiterate and make
them better. It's all about a feedback cycle, making sure that you get that feedback
quickly and improve your model or improve the course or whatever
you're working on, as quickly as possible. Yeah, so feedback is key.
Mikey says deliver the end result. Now we need to be careful about that, let's deliver a first version of the
end result. Yes! That's the whole point here! And like sometimes, maybe,
when an images loads on the web and it's just really fuzzy and then it gets sharper and sharper.
That's kind of like Lean, because it's giving you an impression of the entire thing. Very
early on you can go, am I or am I not interested in waiting for the rest of this image?
And that's a bit like your bowling pins or your bowling ball. What you want to do is mock something super
simple up, get it through to your game developer, for example, and then, get their feedback.
They might go, oh well the pins have got too many polygons for my colliders ore the ball doesn't look right
or the axis is wrong or the handedness is wrong or something. So get a really
basic version and then keep iterating. So in this video we want to help you to understand
that Lean is not about Pre-Production, Production, and Post Production.
We want you to imagine that you're creating these bowling assets,
these assets for a bowling game, computer game. Yep! We
want to help you understand how many iterations you need to do. Yes that's very important, because it's very
easy to keep going and keep going and keep going and searching for that
100% perfect and that is an unobtainable goal. What we really want is
that 80/20 rule! You've probably heard of that, we want to get to that core 20%
that is going to produce 80% of our outcome. Absolutely! So this
production method is a way of discovering. Your first base is to discover
20% of the work that you need to do, just 20% of all the work you could do,
that's going to deliver 80% of the value. That might well be that you're a perfectionist and the
80%'s not good enough and that's fine, but then, we'll work out what the 30% is that gives you
95% of the value and so on. Diminishing returns
can rear their ugly head very quickly, whenever you're doing anything like 3D.
So in the slides for the course, we've given you a little bit of information
here. Let's just define Lean again, this is just a summary of Wikipedia. It says that it eliminates
waste created through overburden or an uneven production process.
So let's talk about that for a second. It's all about not wasting your time
or not wasting any input, before
you get stuff to the customer. So I've already produced some bowling pins and a
bowling ball for Ben and his Unity course that he's working on, and
the first thing I did was I went away and produced a wonderful, great big
high definition, bowling pin and we soon found we were
running into problems. Now, I spend a lot of time getting that, in my mind,
bowling pin perfect for Ben, but, in fact, it wasn't perfect for Ben, because I didn't
understand the constraints he was under with, what he was doing. So then, we
very quickly went into a series of rapid iterations to get to
exactly what Ben wanted, and that was important because, otherwise, it's
wasting my time generating all that stuff that's of no value to Ben
and then ultimately you guys, if you're taking the course.
But ultimately I'm also wasting Ben's time, since he sat there waiting for an asset.
So it goes both ways, about eliminating both sides of the waste.
So the whole point is to really plan your work, right, so we want to eliminate waste.
We want to maximize the flow or value, i.e. something that the customer will pay for,
and ultimately it's about gaining the highest possible quality, it's about finding a way
of making that thing that is at the highest possible quality.
Now, I must stress at this point, it is a learning journey to get
to a Lean production, and you are going to find that it's difficult,
from time to time, to adjust to that, because you'll want to achieve the best results
you possibly can. However, we urge you to iterate as many
possible times that you can. In fact, there's a good fable about this, and Ben
tells it incredibly well! Well I'll summarize it here but there's a fable that
may be an approcraphle story, but the idea is that a teacher of a pottery class says guys, I'm going to
divide the class in two this term. One half of you are going to be rewarded with a prize at the end
of the term, for those who have made the most, the person who has made the
most pottery, we're just going to put it on a scale and see who's made the most. On the other side of the class,
we are going to reward the person who makes the best piece of pottery, and guess what,
at the end of the term it was both the person that made the most pottery that also made the single
best piece of pottery, which is kind of against what you'd think. You'd have thought that the person who
labors over one supposed masterpiece would produce the best thing, but actually, the process of
iterating and just doing more stuff, throwing more at the wall,
and maybe more sticks. So that's the concept here, it's get
busy, get active, and get the entire pipeline done.
We're going to be showing you that the bowling pin that you create, for example,
in a game engine needs a very different type of mesh
for collision detection, and that mesh has some constraints on it. It must be convex
and it must have 255 or less polygons,
and that is very very different to the visual mesh that you're going to create.
And in future sections we'll also be talking about things like normal maps
or bump maps and how this ties into the process. So please get it through the whole pipeline! You know
we showed you about handedness... Yep! ...and about left and right-handed coordinate
systems and also about what's up. Yep! Yep!
Y or Z, all of that you want and scales, that's the other thing. Get all that
out early or the game guy may go, the scale is all wrong and it's pointing in the wrong direction!
Obviously with a bowling pin that's not going to be an arduous task to rotate it, but if you
just produced 1,000 assets for something and they're all the wrong way up, that's going to
annoy, well it's going to annoy everybody in the production process. However, if you're
running a Lean production, the first asset they receive, they could have given you that feedback
and no more problem further on. So in your mind remember the progressive
JPEG! You get to that website, you get a fuzzy image, and then, it gets sharper and sharper
and sharper. Even Netflix does that when you watch it, and the thing is, you can make a decision
about the complete product and say, yes I do or I don't want it in that form. You can
change the film, before you have to wait for that high def stream to buffer;
you can change the image, before you wait for the full thing to download. The same thing, get your models
to the end user as quickly as possible, and then, improve and improve and improve.
And that's where the box modeling, we've already covered, comes in, that's literally your
placeholder asset, that you would move about to see whether it fits in your scene,
to see whether it's the right size, scale, upright, and everything else. So
that's why that's core to getting that simple model out there, straight away. And also,
all the unexpected things won't catch you out either! There can be a million things you can imagine
maybe going wrong, to do with lighting or reflections or scale or rotation,
it goes on and on and on. And by progressively building up the entire
pipeline and not just working on your model in isolation, but delivering it out, delivering it out,
rendering it, post processing, the whole lot, then you're going to avoid
those mistakes. Another brief example we gave, when chatting about it early, was maybe you've been
asked to just do a close in realistic thing of somebody's face.
And maybe you missed the part of the brief that they're going to crop everything but their eyes and you spent three days
modeling an ear and it's not going to appear as part of the scene. Or maybe something that's reflecting in the
eyes is very important, that you've included in your scene, so it matches some real footage.
It goes on! The point is, iterate like they do in the films and you'll be
golden! Excellent! Well let's get on with some modeling! Let's do it!