How much people over here who used to do 3D modelling/animation, but completely gave up for various reasons? (And still sitting here for some reason). Or maybe you gave up, let it all go, but later somehow got back in the saddle and maybe even now better than never?
I burned out on job to the crisps, after that i lost that important spark which got me here, people telling everywhere to do everything without motivation, but without motivation i can’t even do basic thing, i can’t start anything, at the moment i start i already feel that frustration, anticipate all that pain and almost 0 feedback (why i even done this?), and also not knowing what to do not helping at all (do i want to model stuff, or maybe i want to go full animation? Or maybe even go to UE4), then people suggested go to code, but i just can’t, i completely lost that fire which back in the day forced me to do stuff, now it works for some random, completely unrelated stuff.
I’m tired of tearing myself apart and blaming for inability to get back (or actually to do and finish anything), so i just gave up and let it go, I’m in peace now, i see all those tutorials, update videos, all those “50 shades of pain in 3D” or “100 struggles in Blender” or “Animation is pain”, and i finally feel good, because it’s not related to me anymore, no more suffer, no more pain. Though, there’s still something deep down inside me what makes me feel bad for quitting, like i ruined my chance for beautiful life or something (I hoped that 3D will give me chance to get out of my country)
CG work is extremely exacting and labor-intensive. You spend long, long hours staring at polygons. It’s certainly not for everyone – maybe, “it’s simply not your thing.” Therefore, go out there and find something to do which really engages you somehow. Something that you like to do, and want to become really good at, even though it requires a lot of work. (“Everything worth doing requires a lot of work …”)
As someone once put it: “Do what you love, and the money will follow.” Whatever that turns out to be for you. And be prepared for this to change over time. You’re not going to be exactly the same person ten years from now that you are today, and the technology certainly won’t be the same. “Part of the fun of it is finding out what’s fun (for you).”
I tried to do 3d in the 90’s with 3dmax and after a couple of years gave up completely.
I finally came back when I was ready, it was not a decision it just happened, one day I downloaded Blender.
sundialsvc4 Is right you have to do the things that you are passionate about and enjoy, life goes on circumstances change and maybe one day you will start again, or find something completely different that is better for you.
Do not worry too much about having wasted time or “giving up”, the knowledge that you have attained is yours forever. Change always brings new possibilities.
Some scientist (I think in the field of neuroscience) created a kind of graph that explained how much satisfaction you get after creating something. In the orange area you get tremendous leaps motivation and satisfaction as everything looks shiny and new. As for example getting from absolutely nothing to drawing a smiley face seems like a tremendous innovation. However as the time goes by your motivation goes to a flat curve or even starts to decline, the natural law of the brain is that it wants to go entropy.
As far as I have learnt is that after you loose all motivation then you will need superhuman strength to keep going, this goes beyond any point of like-dislike. Is a life purpose.
Also to me it sounds like you could be suffering from a little burn out. You could take breaks and then when you get back in you can go a little farther then you did before, don’t look and compare too much if you can help it, cause like it can feel like there is so much talent out there, but you are also seeing people’s work from all over the world too.
Anyways, I would keep at it if you can, and just work when you can, try and keep it fun and not get too discouraged. For one there are different types of artists. There are some who can work and work quickly and you wonder how they do it, but if your style is slower then that is how it is, and just accept and keep on. Anyways I wish you luck.
I do know it can feel not that supportive at times, and just try not to take it personally. it happens to most I think, where they pour their energy into something, to not necessarily have it be noticed. And just to keep at it. Try to keep doing what parts are fun and interesting to you. And you will get better.
You kind of answered yourself there, your frustration comes from the fact that you are doing everything and anything with no clear end goal, when that should have been the first question you had to ask yourself when you started.
What was that spark that got you here ? what was that thing you saw and said << this is what I want to do. >> ? what part of 3D is speaking to you ?
is it:
Modeling stuff ?
Animating stuff ?
Lighting stuff ?
Rendering stuff ?
Other stuff ?
You might be thinking, I need to know about everything so that I can answer to any kind of job, a “Jack of all trades, master of none”, you might end up getting most of the jobs in the things you don’t even like doing, helping that burnout buildup pretty quickly.
What you want instead is to specialize/focus on one thing and be good at it, knowing it’s ins and outs.
Back to the questions above, let’s say you like modeling stuff, that’s still too broad, are you modeling:
Characters ?
Environments ?
Props ?
Other stuff ?
What kind of modeling technique ? is it:
Hard-surface modeling ?
Sculpting ?
Subdivision surface workflow ?
Low poly style ?
Other type ?
The more questions you ask early on the more focused you will get and the less noise (from the other parts of 3D) you will face.
Just looking at those awesome games/animated films long tailed end credit can tell you a few things about “specializing vs generalizing”.
For me, having no goal means to approach things with a more experimental and open mind. Which means that there is complete freedom to explore things in a more relaxed way. Supposedly that would not have a negative impact on someone’s mentality.
However when a goal is established the anticipation and anxiety skyrockets, and it just brings more trouble. However the only way to manage anxiety is to work on possible goals that can be completed with the current set of skills and the specified timeframe.
I was interested, and even studied it at degree level, but…um, I CAN’T model. After 3 and 1/2 years of trying it, I can’t make anything like a human or dog or whatever. It was never what I wanted to do anyway, my inspiration was mainly that ONE video, Texas’ In our lifetime. To this day, more than 2 DECADES later, I haven’t figured out how it was done. There were others too, remember Alanis Morissettes So Pure? What about Tori Amos’ Caught a lite sneeze? Remember Bjork’s All is full of love? What about Chemical Brothers’ Let forever be and also Star Guitar? Amazing, amazing videos, all, and till today I’ve never done anything in that area. I then decided that programming is more important, so spent a loooooong time trying to learn web dev (which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing), but then Google got the world used to apps and killed the smartphone, and now AAAAAAAALL the new stuff is here, which is going to decide our lives from here on, the greatest revolution HUMANITY will ever experience - AI, IoT, Blockchain, Quantum computing, etc. So now trying to learn those. Can’t be sitting around making cartoons (of which there are already what, HUNDREDS of thousands, on Youtube?) while THAT happens.
I spent 3-4 years trying to make characters, I really was into it. Though everything I created was awful, we talk about real junk here, all of them useless.
I really quit at some point, and eventually after 1-2 years with the prospect of deleting useless stuff. I revisited these files, and would open them and spot lots of mistakes. Actually spent the next weeks doing nothing but corrections.
This really opened my eyes into a new way of working. That the creation process is not a smooth ride from start to end. But much more dynamic and random process. That creation is only about 10% of the story, the rest of 90% requires correcting and fixing errors.
Without any doubt lots of experienced modelers or sculptors, have achieved a high level of skill, to become masterful, but they avoid making mistakes like avoiding holes on the road while driving. This is what makes them really good and efficient.
“Maybe 3D work just isn’t for you.” Or, maybe you have unrealistic expectations of it, and/or you are trying to do everything “yourself” when you need to partner with other collaborators.
3D is extremely meticulous, exhaustive work. It is also almost-always team work. (Look at the closing credits of any movie and tell me what is the one section that goes on forever?) You may or may not turn out to have the personal disposition that makes you actually want to do certain parts of the work. But, maybe there’s another specialty which will be more suitable.
But – "never take ‘anything job-related’ personally." We are all very different people. It is never a personal reflection upon yourself that you try something and discover that it’s really not working out for you. Feel free to reconsider your approach … and, to consider whether you really want to be doing it at all.
For instance: my Dad used to take our car apart in the front driveway and put it all back together again and “he was happy as a clam.” (He was good at it, too.) As for myself, I do not attempt to do any work on our cars. You are also wasting your time giving me a Home Depot® gift-card as a Christmas present: I hire local contractors who I think really know what they are doing. I focus my time and energy onto other things … such as computer programming, computer graphics, and now, computer project management consulting and software project rescue. I use these things to pay to have my car and my house fixed.
Once I had a blend file in which I had more than 60 monsters made to settle in mind and consider them for rigging. But after that, the availability of shape keys kept kicking my brain along with make single user options so that individual instances of same assets spawned into scene several times can be functioning separately. So I kept deleting all of the monsters. And started modelling and keying my first model of fish which will serve for many many fishes of my Aquatan. And see if i can make a frog out of it and even more as some fishes have wings so i wont wonder that the same object may be even all of the bird family of my project.
So I realized that if You shift the existing location data of objects vertex points by keying stuff , and thinking where to place unconnected armature bones, You optimize Your game to something like e-lite
while in this way optimizing and crushing variety with as less as You can leave space for more options and implementations along with other bits and bobs for the whole context. Which allows to go for things like bones of characters and creeps as well as their muscles in order to implement them for inspections of skills like veterinary or anatomy and consider to set transparency of armor, clothes and skin to barely visible so that the inspection can be made to action healing of traumas and gain useful parameters towards the context as availability of something like unity points by which if spent You could control allies to give You a bump to get to unreachable places. While their separate armature bones can move the actual keyed bones and muscle mesh for so much of rtfx use as fire fx, poison and other nasty things as blood and gore… and things like that. And that’s called multi purposing once the inspection is not in use. With this way of thinking and approach You replace crowd of single shaped assets or monsters with as less as You can and leaving plenty of space for ram to rage at other things. I’ve got a single sword which changes into at least 40 types of decent weapons as well as bows and crossbows and soon there will be rocket launchers and many different types of guns while some weapons are not even blade type of weapons. And soon I am going to add some bits of mesh which will work as pressure valves to spray blades and weapons with poison, flamable liquids and even blowing liquid nitrogen clouds so that these things can work to support elemental resistances in context.
IT is far from the amount and looks of what the app has on layer two, it is all about approach of geometry by keying it and rigging it correctly… And if You model anything by using mesh of object which has no other purpose or shape - You’re pretty much wasting Your time because there’s so much to pack in as for example map, skill tree. Buying or selling and not just for user but so that bots can do the same what the player does and even so that they can decide what to stock and what to sell by making posts in black markets of the project.
Imagine a pipe which consists of 18-30 cicrles with 6 verts in every cicrle. If You add armature correctly and even key segments of the pipe in many shapes or by armature. It can serve for most of the spells or ways of damaging stuff as effects because the gap between every 7th ring can be made transparrent and keyed down by armature and keys themselves to make flames, poison splats, Electricity sparks, and tonnes of more stuff all ran by a single keyed and armatured pipe.
And If You manage to run uv shifting scripts for the pipe, You can rig its shape along to object keyframed to enter inside of fire simulation domain to make mushrooms and explosions for 3d effect by pausing the fire or smoke domain and rig the pipe along.
While the make single user option for keyframed stuff will allow to use variety of its actions as there wont be tonnes of junk on layer two.
And it is worth to reminisce a tutorial in which the material gets dissolved by two types of colours.
And by the way, if You follow this tut and eventually set Divide nodes Greater than to Divide.
The second green colour becomes smooth and bends in with the first colour.
Then if You animate colours to needed variations of Your gas or smoke,
You can easily make mind blowing multi purpose mushrooms with one single object
and it will work perfectly for fire beams or good looking flame fx.
Sry for my squeezed up typing but these things which I’ve learned about blender kind of keeps me going.
And I’m glad that people still answer my questions about python which is another reason which keeps me going.
Began hard surface modeling just for the sheer fun/interest and sense of achievement creating what I thought at the time was really badass…when 2.40 was a thang
Which eventually led to working partime freelance (product-viz) in doing so kind of morphed that ‘rose-tinted-glass’ outlook into pure drudgery. End result, jumping back over for a number of years todo traditional portraiture on commission.
However, the bug once more bit deep almost a decade ago it would seem and thus far having a total blast hobbyist style, again making ‘badass stuff’
I used to work at Foundation Imaging on Voyager, the Starship Troopers series, Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog, Max Steel, and Dan Dare. I then went to Threshold Digital and worked on the Borg Invasion ride film, and that was enough to make me give up on being an animator. I still write and do software development on Howler perpetually, but I don’t care to be in the animation trenches again. I basically went from the best job in the world to the worst and it destroyed my health and my mind. So sad.
I have been hearing this narrative since day one I started looking at 3D development. And over the years I started getting more interested into how things are done.
The same thing that all stories have in common, over-ambitious criteria as set from the managers and most important being understaffed.
Instead of hiring one person, perhaps the job requires hiring four of them, thus each one works by 75% less.
The real problem lies however for those people who are not pure artists (in a sense that they do not care for art or for the fairness of the ecosystem), but get into the field as opportunists to exploit people and circumstances to get the big bucks, and in return make the life miserable for others who really care.
It’s certainly not for everyone – maybe, “it’s simply not your thing.” Therefore, go out there and find something to do which 
