If you do not want to pay anything and start from free, you could also work on creating assets for game engines instead. That way you can download both Unity and UE and export your blender models over, add materials in the respective engines then sell them on their respective stores. You should probably look at PBR material workflows if going that route.
Unity:
This question seems ill-conceived.
I’d wager that most of the people posting here (including me) are not professional Blender users, they’re hobbyists. There’s way too many people who would like to do CG vs. the amount of people actually needed to do CG. You’ll be at a severe economic disadvantage. The market doesn’t reward what you would like to do, it rewards what it needs. Do you really love CG so much that it must be your profession? That’s the first question you should ask yourself.
You said you wanted to learn Python? Do that and focus on it. Python programmers are actually in-demand, though you shouldn’t necessarily focus on Blender or CG (have some side-projects in another field, like web backend). Blender isn’t commonly used in “the CG industry” anyway, but most major packages have Python scripting built in.
I haven’t tested the waters, but since there’s well over 100 artists to every programmer on these forums, there’s bound to be some money waiting around. Not the best money (it’s a free program after all), but still. Provide a solution to actual problems, then charge for it. Don’t buy into the whole presumed FOSS ideal of “free sharing”. As a professional, you need to ask for compensation (not donations).
Yeah I code because I really like coding,
I model because I like modeling, if money did not exist what would you do?
Find what you like to do and get good at that.
Otherwise go sell stocks or something.
Why you might want to do a movie
Why you might not want to do a movie
***Why you might want to do a game
Why you might not want to do a game
Either way, the best thing to do when beginning is to hone your skills with smaller projects and work up from there.
First off. If I’m doing the work and putting the hours to make a nice working model. It’s not “donation”. That is compensation.
Second. I love all of blender. From coding to modeling. To creating to animating. That said I still have to make a living and I plan on making mine through my passions.
Thanks all. And I’ll be posting progress shots here soon. Back to studying.
Meb88
The thing about making your passion your living, is that a lot of people share the same passion and flood the market. If you choose a job that nobody wants to do you will operate on a very labor demand driven market and will benefit greatly monetarily.
I love video games. So does about 95% of the young male population. I would love to make a living making video games. So would countless of millions of other people. That’s a lot of competition. Even in a growing market, the target segment is one that is not willing to spend great amount of money for their needs. Piracy is rife.
Still, if you love what you do, you will do it no matter any outside consideration. Gamedev is one of the worst high-tech career paths you could possibly choose. Most fulfilling? Maybe. Profitable when compared to pretty much anything else involving expert knowledge? Not at all.
Big studios pull in, put young devs through a meatgrinder and spit them out when they’re spent. Only the most valuable members can stay past one project.
That’s my 2 cents at least. I may be wrong on several accounts. Just my impressions on the topic.
I think it’s pretty safe bet that it’s very similar on the film front.
When I left Uni several friends went to London into the games industry. One bloke who was very talented and hard working said he did all the crap jobs, cleaning up studios, carrying documents back and forth, deliveries in london, tea making! etc. He had a first degree in 3D CAD modelling and animation and 5 years pre uni experience in architectural design and rendering. After a year in the games industry he was drip fed more responsibilities, worked 12 hour days and watched all the senior artists picking up techniques.
He threw down the towel and left before he died of boredom and premature ageing. He now runs his own successful studio. He said it is the most dog-eat-dog industry and be prepared to start on the bottom rung no matter how good you think you are. This was 9 years ago mind so the game industry may have changed. Not one of my uni mates who got a foot in the door stuck it out.
You’re telling yourself that now, but you don’t yet know how quickly you’ll burn up. Don’t fool yourself.
What I mean by “ask for compensation” is that you shouldn’t put out work for free and then ask for donations, you should ask for money in exchange for goods/services. If people don’t pay, you know they don’t really care.
That said I still have to make a living and I plan on making mine through my passions.
You can’t do that. You can try to make your passions a living, but those passions better be marketable. Don’t buy into anything that educators or wishful thinkers are telling you. No matter how hard you believe in something, you can still fail really hard and you better be prepared for that.
Again, are you really that passionate for “art” or “games” or “movies” that you are willing to give up a lifetime of more lucrative opportunities? Are you prepared to make zero money off your passion and being forced to flip burgers or serve coffee instead?
If at least you’re a programmer, your skills are marketable to other sources.
Yes, a lot has changed. The games market is being flooded by independent game developers. Around 40% of all games on Steam have been released in 2016 alone. Meanwhile, the amount of gamers has not increased at an equal pace, so revenue dwindles. It’s a market running on “passion”, for sure…
Yes. I am that passionate about all of what I’m beginning right now and I definitely plan on seeing it through.
Meb88
Okay, if you intend on making a good income from what you want to do, it becomes a whole lot more difficult.
For films, it almost demands a full-length high-quality production (which will take a long time to produce unless you’re willing to spend big on putting together a dedicated cast and team to help with the project). That doesn’t even get you started with the marketing you might need to do to sell a lot of copies (unless of course you hit the online lottery with it going viral).
For games, a successful product would practically need to become viral (usually through clever marketing tactics or through the creation of a ‘hook’ that will naturally keep people clued to your progress), otherwise you will need to market the game to heck and back in an attempt to get your name out there (and you might need to try fundraising sites like Kickstarter to get the money you will need for such a campaign). Even then, part of it is centered around winning that online lottery (where you get lucky enough to obtain that large following), this is especially true if you plan to stick to free channels for product promotion like YouTube).
I’m not making this stuff up, the major gaming sites that cover indie production are filled with stories of people going bust and people having to make major revisions to their dream (which includes having to make the hard decision to make a game based not on their ideas, but based on what is selling in the hopes they have what they need for an original). For every game that makes it big (Minecraft, Planet Coaster, Cities Skylines), there’s dozens of others that fizzle and disappear altogether. Now it perhaps might be slightly easier to make decent sales if what you made was a film instead, but they take a lot more time to produce (so you have to dedicate yourself to a single project for a far longer period of time).
A lot to think about. And all noted. Thank all again a million times for all the amazing info and help.
Forget about this. You are not capable of creating anything in the same league as Skyrim or Witcher 3 even if you think you are. Doing this on your own will result in a game so crappy and buggy no-one will want to play it.
‘Movie’ - If you are so keen to make such a thing then just go ahead with it. You’re not going to earn any money from it but that should not be a driving force in making it. It is only going to cost you time and if you do this in your spare time this will be nothing.
To be fair, he didn’t say he wanted a to make a game like Witcher/Skyrim, just a game of similar size. It’s entirely feasible to create a similarly sized game, or even a 10x larger game, or even an infinitely large game - even as an individual. All you need to do is rely heavily on procedural generation. Whether anybody wants to play that is another question.
Don’t use the game engine. It’s a technological dead-end (no, UPBGE is not changing this). You will learn too many skills that will never be valuable in the future (and never have been valuable in the past).
If you learn Unity or UE4, there is a market for those skills. If you learn how to make games “from scratch”, you will learn important foundational stuff. If you learn the BGE, you will spend obscene amounts of time working on problems that you wouldn’t have had, had you chosen something else.
If you must go the FOSS route (which I don’t think you should), learn Godot, I guess.
Under no circumstance should you limit yourself to Blender. That’s probably the biggest mistake you can possibly make. If Blender is your comfort zone, you must get out of it.
You people are ruthless. And I love it. So maybe steer towards using Unity with my game and make my movie completely in Blender? And then of course I can make my assets and what not in Blender as well. I really was hoping to stay with Blender but if I can’t do what I want to do with it in the end I will definitely dive into Unity. Besides most of the tutorials I find out there are on that exact thing anyhow. Combining Unity with Blender that is.
Was just hoping to stay in strictly Blender. So maybe with all that’s been said I’ll lean heavily on learning Blender’s in and outs seems how I’ve already started. And just produce little 3min. clips of my “movie” on youtube after I’ve mastered modeling everything I need to model.
Feasible? Sounds like it to me. A good starting point to go for. And I’ll work my way slowly into the gaming side of things as I progress over the next few years.
Meb88
And to Richard. I say never say never. Seriously. I and my peers will laugh pretty hard if I do some day pull it off. The game that is. And it happens to hit it big as Skyrim or Witcher 3. Jus sayin…
Meb88
P.S. Never lose hope, especially in yourself.
Or it may take you 5+ years to learn everything needed to even make the full demo of your game idea.
While working a dayjob.
This does not guarantee it will be fun or sell well however.
Read about Mount and Blade. You will see its possible. There are also games which are not detailed but are open world, considered “good enough” or “unique” like “Long Dark”…
As promised. Progress. Yes it’s short, crappy and simple. But hey, for literally starting 2 weeks ago. Bam. I’m super proud. Moving forward.
FPS.blend (849 KB)
Meb88
I might add. Make it to the Blue platform up above to win. Fall and you lose… simple as that. Good luck and enjoy 
P.s. I named it FPS for my own sake so I can reference the logic blocks for later use. I was quite happy about getting the FPS view going.
Thanks again all, Meb88
Anyone know how to convert your game into a file I can send to a buddy? As in not a .blend file that he has to have blender to use and play it?