I second your suggestion … and third … and fourth.

To reduce delivery time, doing only the absolute minimum amount of work required in 3d and getting to a compositor as quickly as possible can save a significant amount of time, specially in the client change rounds.

Once the animation is locked, rendering individual passes for material channels, depth maps, object buffers, and each light, can offer a significant amount of flexibility.

You can, for example, darken one building, change its color, or re-render only a few “layers” like the debris in the foreground. Motion channels and depth maps also help you blur individual layers and add depth of field in compositing, which saves significant rendering time.

This increases project setup time, but decreases overall project and rendering time, specially for the change rounds.

When you’re working with clients, the change rounds can often last longer than the original time required for animation. So setting up project set up from the get-go for flexibility like this can be advantageous.

Cinema 4D is strong in the area, with a built in multichannel renderer that can be opened up as a multi layered AE or Motion project. If blender can do the same, I’d love to see a tutorial on that.

Best,

F

One way is to take the task list and estimate time for each one, and your level of certainty (as a percentage) in the estimate. If the certainty is too low, say below 65%, then break that task down into smaller parts and estimate for each. That way you can find where your uncertainty is.

-Mitch

Next most important thing is to break down your project into manageable milestones and actions to reach those. The actions should completable in one workday at best. This allows you to see problems with the deadline a lot in advance and figure out what to do with your client.

Then, use a timetracker to check how much time you actually used. After the project is finished, you have to go over that data again to figure out, where and why your estimate was totally off and how to prevent that in the future. While this task is always annoying, especially when a project went wrong and all you want to do is file it in the archive, you won’t learn anything if you don’t do that step.

Last tip (especially true for artistic work as your field of expertise and perfectionists, which I am, too): use the approach of having milestones, that reflect the state of work from rough to detail. This leaves you with a very good basis in the early stages, does give your clients plenty of time to address issues and communicate changes, and restrains the perfectionist in you to the end of the whole project, where you might have or not have time to give him credit.
This approach does work very well for my students, too. When they miscalculated a project and only finished 1/4th of it to the deadline, the mark will be really bad. But if they used the above approach and only made it to the first milestone, that means they already have something on the whole project and not only on 1/4th. It may not be perfect, but they still made it and thus will get a much better mark.