Old projects cannibalised by mutants

Do not delete it!!! In my experience whilst learning 3D animation you start off with all these great ideas and go off to start making you masterpiece :)... then a few hours later you realise you're not at the current level to finish it  off and it gets covered by new more interesting projects and sooner or later it finds a cold dark corner on you're hard drive. Well the best thing to do is keep some of them as later on you may decide to re-open that story or something similar. For example: once upon a time I decided to make a street, and with visions of pavements, shop windows and blue clear sky's... then 6 hours later I was stuck (sad face), I had some building in place, a few detailed props but... not a clue how to use the UV texture editor or shader's and like "Raiders of the lost ark" it was stored away to be looked at by top men.

All hope seemed lost for the neglected street scene with its simple UV's and un-clean topology. However when I started my individual project I thought to myself, wouldn't it be good to have some sort of street scene to start off with, something that wouldn't take too long to make (as its not a main part of the story). Then suddenly that old neglected scene file was lifted from the depth of removable HDD hell, given hope and injected with the power of Maya 2001 from Maya 6. Then with a few minor improvements I was able to cannibalise this old withered husk of a street scene and strategically save 2 hours :)

This may seem pointless as 2 hours isn't that significant when spending months on a project however recycling several props and keeping a small library of primitive objects can end up saving you a ton of precious time on tight deadline projects. This might seem like cheating and avoiding learning new things but after you've made 5 different ears there's not much you will learn from making a 6th. Keeping a primitive ear you can easily incorporate into you're next new character and modify will give you more time to spend elsewhere making something new or better.

So next time you make something that doesn't work out, think how it can be used in other projects, and when making several characters, instead of making 6 head from scratch, make 1 low-res simple head and re-use it for other characters and projects.