About efficiency #1

One trait that distinguishes a great specialist from a good one is the ability to optimize their workflows. It's not enough to create beautiful work. You need to make it beautiful while being as efficient as possible. As a supervisor, when choosing between two candidates who deliver visually identical results, I’ll pick the one who completes the task faster and more technically proficiently.

Once again, this might sound obvious, but you wouldn’t believe how few specialists with impressive portfolios actually pay attention to any kind of optimization:

• Rendering glass? I'll just crank up the samples to 100500 and let it calculate each frame for an hour and a half.
• Creating a layout for a background location? Sure, I’ll throw in a couple of dozen stock assets with 8K textures that no one will ever notice, completely maxing out the video memory.
• Need to do a rotoscope? Great — I’ll export the masks as an uncompressed TIFF sequence along with RGB channels, taking up half the disk space.

I could go on with this list for quite a while. If you want a less abstract example, here’s a recent real-life case. One of the artists was preparing an animation scene for rendering on a farm and sent in a test. He showed an image and reported that rendering one 4K frame took 4.5 minutes on an RTX 4080.

Numbers like that trigger me immediately. There’s no way this image should take 4.5 minutes to render. There’s just nothing to calculate here. I asked the artist for the scene in Alembic format, did some research, and two hours later, I presented my version. Same 4K resolution, RTX 3080, render time per frame — 6 seconds!

Yes, there is a visual difference — a different engine, lighting built from scratch, different compositing. But is the visual difference critical for the task? No. Is the difference in render time critical? Absolutely! When it comes to rendering the entire animation in 3.5 minutes instead of 2.5 hours, that’s a big deal.

You don’t need to be a genius to grasp the underlying arithmetic: the faster you deliver the same result, the more valuable you are as a specialist.

So here’s my advice: whenever you tackle any task, always ask yourself, “Is there a way to do this faster, simpler, or more technically efficient?” The answer to that question will almost always be “Yes,” simply because progress never stands still.

Do in an hour what others take a day to do. Efficiency is one of your greatest competitive advantages.