Timely Constructive Feedback

When you're working from home, only your friends and family can critique your work, and they might go as far as telling you that it looks cool or something is off. While you might think that is a useful thing to hear, they're not going to be able to tell you why it's wrong or what you could do to make your work better.

The other major issue is they cannot help you out technically, especially when you do anything procedural or even if you are dealing with animation.

They can look at an animation and say that the character is not animated correctly or it just looks very silly or it's not funny or the timing is off. But they're not going to be able to tell you why your timing is off, what you need to be looking at in order to make your timing better.

Or in terms of compositing, when they look at your work and they say that doesn't look real enough. It's these kinds of answers that will leave you scratching your head. You know, that's a very broad answer to a question.

What you want is someone to tell you, look, there is no chromatic aberration in this shot or the edges of your key on frame 37 to frame 55 are pretty bad or in the key that you have for your hair is kind of buzzing and this is what you need to do to fix it.

These are the kinds of feedback that you actually need to hear, and you also need to hear the solutions to your problems. Now you could say I'm going to go on forums and rely on the kindness of strangers.

Half the time when you go on a forum as a new user and you do not know something, you ask a question and the first thing some people tell you is to go and read the manual. The problem is you have already read the manual but you do not even know what the manual is trying to explain. Remember not all manuals are written equally. Some manuals are very much on the techie side.

When you think about software, software are mostly designed by engineers. They're not artists. They're not the end users. They're creating a tool that does a specific function and they document its function in the manual.

They're not necessarily going to tell you how to use that particular tool in a production setting. Often time engineers are surprised how an artist ends up using their tools!

Another thing about forums is when the workload at the studio increases, artists will spend less time on the forums.

Think about it, if you work for 10 to 12 hours a day, you're not going to come home and then try to answer questions from some random noob user.