I want to see that mentality in everything. It is soooo impressive what a bunch of fans can do!
I must see this! Show us, show us, show us!
Hey thanks but Iāll have to clear it.
Right now it is not online. It is being held back for live public screening events. It was really intended to be seen projected large as well and to evoke an immersive feeling.
I am not sure when or if it will be online but hope we can apply to show and screen our recent work and in progress projects if there is another Blender London live event or something simillar. But I do also hope to soon be able to post more about all this work on here soon. So much to talk about. The work I have posted here in the past is such a tiny part of what I have been working on in Blender.
Blender is the core app and pipeline in everything we do with this sort of work. For 3D animation compositing and editing too. None of it would really have been possible without Blender and itās amazing integrated and light and nimble wholistic workflow.
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Hahaha, donāt worry too much !
Because we live in the matrix you can keep aside 2022 technology and enjoy futureās real time render engine technology called reality !
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Being drawn to people with the same interest seems natural to me. Would really like to mingle with Blender people.
I recall back in the 90ās, living in Toronto, there was quarterly Apple get togethers, usually in a college auditorium (anywhere from 50 to 200 people). Having something in common, and seeing the same people, took away any isolation. It made it very easy to talk to other people. Surprised thereās nothing like that for Blender, other than in the Netherlands.
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three thoughts
1 - I really like working in isolation sometimes. I like painting with analog media, I like building stuff in 3d, like 2d/3d animation, sound creation, telling stories, exploring math and procedural stuff. So I love blender for letting me isolate because of its all-in-one scope. Itās the pressure cooker, where I can combine it all. And it makes me so happy.
2 - on the other hand there is nothing greater than finding someone who has a whole different approach to it all or has talent in a field where I struggle and then we try to fuse everyones strengths together. Bringing to life the paintings of a comuterphobe analog artist, having a soundtrack from a person who actually knows what they are doing. Having a gifted storytellerā¦ Magic.
3 - āblender artistsā That is a pretty heterogenous term for me. A forum like this has definitely a certain bias for a lot of reasons. What does it even mean? I met blender users in the most unusual places, was even able to convert or persuade some poor souls to use it for their own good. Most of those wouldnāt bother posting here, or elsewhere.
just my 3 random thoughts, I hope they fit into the discussion 
Not sure where I am even going with this. Maybe we should just all work on thought 3.b - tell people, that installing and learning blender is simply a no brainer, so in the future the original question would make as much sense as āare artists isolationist?ā (answer: some)
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Iām a bit bewildered:
Q: Are Blender artists too isolated / isolationist?
Then follows a disscusion on Blender Artists (hint 
) with the idea to make a chat for artistsā¦ ?
ā Who else will know this?
I mean there are dozens of other forums for artist and more chat like entities (discourse discord for exampleā¦ which seems to be started for every artist who wantās to be serious ā¦ ??)
As @ogonek said: Blender Artistsā¦ (hint again) ā¦we even have the Traditional category or Off-Topic-Chatā¦
Or you go and count your polygons, make your art deviant or also maybe a station of artā¦ (triple hint with reversed naming ā¦ is there an emoji with the other eye closing this getās exhausting 
) or even just read it (okay this is getting tiresome).
Of course i could get it all wrong, sorry, didnāt want to be destructive here.
(Or maybe just share some other community URLs ??)
EDIT: i meant discord not discourseā¦ i always mix them upā¦ silly me.
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I think a big part of the resulting isolation is coming from specialization.
We communicate a lot because we need to solve problems. The situation demands that we speak with people who know the subject.
While we can solve a problem that is of an aesthetically nature with the help of any visual artist probably, the knowledge of an musician or stage actor is of no help at all in this situation.
The tech side of it creates a lot of communication because it is a dense field of specialised knowledge and it breeds clustering.
But even within the community do you find this clustering into specialized topics/fields.
A rigger probably talks to more animators than texture and VFX artists.
People who sculpt/paint/animate characters stick to their in-group - etc.
It happens out of necessity, therefore its natural.
The trick is to net let that box you in.
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Another problem (in general) which may lead to isolation may be if someone doesnāt want to ask too specific in the first place for something to achieve (not mentioning a special tool) often people answer something like:
- just use this (or that) tool
- buy this brand
- use that template (or addon)
- nobody needs that
- use this special feature of that professional tool (which may the asker doesnāt even know of)
which mostly doesnāt help and not something like:
- actually this was solved by people living 200 years ago and you just have toā¦
- this needs some practice and knowledge because their isnāt a general solution
- this is called X in some tools or Y in some others, nevertheless itās just a simpleā¦
- this can be done in several ways depending on your needs in this or that wayā¦ see alsoā¦
- if you watch how the real thing is made you can get some tips to make this
So sometimes you reach your goal just faster to ask in a forum where everybody also uses that specific tool you already useā¦ ( ā possible way to isolation) and donāt bother with all this quite-nice-but-far-away-of-being-an-answer-or-anything-helpful-phrases (āgoogle is you friendā 
).
I noticed a weird theme in a lot of these replies. It seems that a lot of people see online communities as a kind of volunteer help desk. I get that, I really do, hell, I probably use them for that more than anything, too. But it seems like there is wasted opportunity there. The last few years Iāve reached out to people across various communities to get an idea of what they do, both for inspiration and to see if there was somethign I would like to collab with. But it seems that people either prefer to collab with someone very close to how they see themselves (3D artists like collabing with other 3D artists, gamedevs with other gamedevs, etc.), or they just shun the entire collab idea and work alone. It makes more sense to me that a 3D artist would collab with, say, a musician, to create something with graphics AND music, or a stage actor to get an idea on some cool acting or moves that could be turned into animation (with or without mocap). But people seem weirded out by the idea of reaching out to those who do very different things, or to be reached out to.
Well, the idea was to reach out to people, but as mentioned, this seems to be a very disturbing subject to those people, for reasons I cannot fathom, and which make me a little sad insideā¦
Maybe itās the same issue as with overpopulation. In smaller communities people know their neighbors and what theyāre up to. But the more people gather in the same space, the more they tend to keep their head down and mind their own business. And internet is a HUGE place right now.
Itās not that communities are isolated from one another, but more like isolated individuals. At least itās a little easier to start talking with a person who has some of the same interests.
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This is a great discussion, Iāll pin it for better visibility.
@Embassy_of_Time please create a new topic for your chat plan as itās moving away from the main topic here. Thanks!
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I would say as a general answer āyesā we are are too isolated. Unfortunately I would extend that to many aspects in life.
We all tend to gather together with other people that have something in common with ourselves, creating different ābubblesā in life, like a blob of foam that extends, contracts and sometimes floats off completely in the wind to create its own nucleus far from the original blob.
Maybe we need more wind!
As others have mentioned it is ourselves that create these bubbles (or blobs of bubbles) and we also have the opportunity to expand, exit or fly away to enter new unrelated ones. It is an enlightening experience to go out of your ācomfort zoneā, travel, talk to strangers and search new points of view.
āIām forever blowing bubbles,
Pretty bubbles in the airā¦ā¦ā¦ā
Coming down to the ground, at least this forum has given me the opportunity to discuss with others that have similar interests to my own, for years I have been telling the people I physically know about my interest in 3d and showing them my renders but I have yet find one who uses any 3d program at all (be it Blender, Maya or any other!)
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I agree on most of that, yeah. I think the chance to find likeminded souls online is a bit TOO alluring, and we seek out echo chambers because we can. I have tried breaking out of it for years, but the world seems to enforce it a LOTā¦
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Comfort zone and economic too. If you say Cycles or a joke that have Cycles you donāt need to explain it . Everybody around you knows. Being with people that is in same āworldā is much more economical.
There is even the issue of āworlds collidingā 
Of course too much comfort zone can make your brain shrink.
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I think a form of isolation comes from focus. When we are focused on a goal or a method of doing things or a tool or something that very focus means we are excluding other things. I donāt mean focus is bad. It is good. It is a path to accomplishing what we have imagined. But that imagining, creativity, invention is often a synthesis of a multitude of parts. Focus can blind us to inspiration that is around us.
I went on my yearly Inferno Hike into the dunes. I set a goal of reaching the flat beyond the dune field. Realizing that I was traveling and not fully aware of the things around me I stopped. Observed. I saw how wind forms dunes and dunes guide wind, the stories told by tracks, of colors, beauty, circles in sand made by grass in wind, light and shadow on distant mountains. Silence. Silence.
I had experienced all these things here before but my goal made them nearly invisible to me. Keeping awareness of here my journey to there was enriched.
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