Could anyone offer any advice and guidance on how to cope when your work isn’t fully appreciated by an audience as one might think. 1. Because the bar is set rather high and 2. Because goalposts are constantly changing?
My latest work has forced me to step out of my comfort zone and push myself. Spending many hours go over and over making tweaks, adding additional detailing only to have people state the work is crap.
It’s heart breaking, bearing in mind a lot of the modders I’m aware of use third-party assets and take the credit for work that’s not their own; yet there are some who actually spend the time and energy doing these themselves only to have mods bomb and are constantly compared to other modders with years and years of experience using third-party assets.
The opinions of others that sh*t post about your stuff, absolutely deserves to be filed down a toilet bowl where these conceited dicks typically hang out so don’t let their comments get you down or better yet even take the slightest bit of notice too begin with.
Now what you’ve described, can hardly be anything I personally would voluntarily be a part of and I’ve dabbled for a while back when Day-Z was an ARMA mod plus copped my share of flak as a noob, attempting to emulate an acknowledged standard. Nevertheless afaik there’s no rule which dictates one can’t look around for a community based upon a more constructive learning ethos which goes without saying like minded audience, as well.
Note:
They do exist by the way.
Edit:
Actually, would love to see how one of these ‘supa-dupa-experienced’ modders, handle a AAA games studio art test - sweating bullets doesn’t even come close…
If anybody can tell you why your stuff is crap then you will learn something (constructive criticism)… everthing else isn’t even worth spending one single second of your precious lifetime. Even just saying but is too much. Just put this person on your mental ignore list.
Apparently my work is crap because my models and textures aren’t polished enough and my work pales in comparison. From what I’ve seen 90% are all retextures of vanilla meshes using third-party assets from either megascans or cc0textures.
The most basic answer to your problem IMO is to seek fulfillment not in the acknowledgment of others, but by making you accountable for the amount of work you are putting in. You will always find someone that does things better than you, and it’s a fool’s errand to try and surpass them. Nothing will ever be enough if your goal is to constantly better yourself. There is no magnum opus you should be thriving for.
You can take notice of some of the mantras of software development. Fail fast, iterate, reflect. Obviously if you’re starting a new technique your first few works will suck, it’s an universal law of creation that all artists experience. So you should try and invest yourself emotionally as little as possible in your first few pieces. Set a deadline for yourself. Do it in one day, or in one week, then call it finished, even if it objectively sucks. If you really want to share it to others, be prepared to be critiqued, sometimes harshly.
Also note that people will hold you to the same standards if you produce work professionally and sell it, or if you work on your free time and distribute your work for free.
But please be aware that the dopamine rush of a like on instagram, facebook, twitter, etc. is purely artificial and it is specifically designed by teams of social engineers to create an addiction. Same thing for mean comments.
If you know your piece of art is just a stepping stone on your journey to creativity, it probably won’t hurt you as much when a total stranger says it sucks for X or Y reason.
I’m not doing it for the approval others but more of way of expressing myself. It just hurts when you’re constantly being compared to others, even when you have no intentions of competing against them and simply putting your touch on things. Double-standards and toxicity.
I’m rendering my new mod in blender as we speak and I am more than happy with it, I tested and expressed myself and learnt a lot from the process. Yet, when this mod gets published later today, no doubt it “will suck”.
May I ask why are you doing 3D , and what you like/enjoy about it ?
I think you should enjoy what you do first, and try to improve step by step.
From there, some people will like you work and give constructive feedback, and some other will always have something to say… You shouldn’t take too much credit from the positive and negative feedback, but it’s great to try to learn from it.
One thing that really changed the way people look at my work was learning about the Wow Factor.
That is , how to take what you’ve done and make the most out of it, so people say “Wow!” when looking at it.
What I mean, is sometime it’s not about improving the model you’ve made, but knowing how to show it in a good way. With good lighting, composition etc… add all the little bang and whistles that makes an image stand.
From there, with exactly the same things, I started to go from “so-so” comments, to “that’s really cool” ones.
At some point, you may think that’s a scam. And it’s all about making it look good rather than doing good work… But I think it’s at the heart of our work, things don’t need to be good, they just need to make people believe they are !
All that said, I’m not telling you that CG isn’t about hard work. Clearly it is ! And we need good skills to be able to do something. But the “Wow Factor” is a good skill to learn too !
But really you should enjoy first what you do, take some pleasure in learning and improving. And at some point people will recognize your hard work !
Let these kind people who expect everything for free, to know that if they think that they can get triple-A quality of assets for free, visit a bank first and sign for a loan.
In other words, if you manage to reach high quality of producting, probably you would be working full time in some company.
Without going into the “Competition” of your mods, and all the other retextures and re-colors that exist…
Your images, in a nutshell, are " Boring" and I say that as a critique, not a put-down, it boils down to your Composition and arrangement of the objects which when looked at individually are very nice!
Considering the mod audience, if placed into a more Skyrim environment would come across better than a rather bland Studio environment. Perhaps placing the items on a Skyrim Styled table and adding in the background…trying to match a Skyrim environment in your renders, would be far better than a "Studio Shot"regardless of how well done it is… The “Studio Shot” with more emphasis on composition would be more suited to the Blender Crowd, and the Skyrim to Skyrim…
I hope that helps in furthering your 3d endeavors!!
I would take in-game shots and have approached other modders with good quality images and asked what mods they use for the screenshots. They never get back to me.
I don’t know how they look in Skyrim, but your gemstone models/materials/textures look good in your Blender renders. You may need to tweak the materials more for the Skyrim version, or perhaps you need to compose better screenshots/ingame renders to make them look their best, or maybe you’re just dealing with assholes who enjoy putting things down and need to find a better modding community. If you expect a mod to be poorly received, you aren’t any obligation to share it. Just have fun with it until you find a better modding community.
I’ve seen some shitty amateur work before, but I can’t imagine thinking it’s okay to tell someone that’s what I think of their work. It’s natural to be upset when someone insults something you’ve worked hard on, but these don’t sound like worthwhile people to listen to or share your hard work with.
Retextures and model replacements for stones seem like they’d be pretty niche anyway, so it may be hard to find an audience that appreciates them. I think that’s why you haven’t had a lot of commentary on your work here either: the gemstones are a nice enough looking bunch of rocks, but not a particularly interesting scene to look at.
The ingots and ores however were a little too saturated and the ingots had chipping that looked unnatural for metal. I still wouldn’t say they’re crap to you because I remember what my first mods looked like, but they were fun for me and that’s what mattered. And the gemstones look better anyway, so you are improving.
I’ve been Blendering since 2014 and trying CGI since 1996 (in DirectX) as a hobby. (I was a software engineer). I do short animations and lately have published a new video every month for 33 months.
And I still am quite inexperienced in my opinion. But man, IT’S BEEN FUN!
I find it reasonable that if some kind of work has flaws, there can be some feedback that can be used for improvement and correction.
If the person who looks at it, knows a thing or two about what’s wrong with the piece, can throw a bit of insight so things make sense.
Not that the person should be a master painter. But at least should know how to compare two images (work+reference) and write simple sentences in English.
If they said, as mentioned above the ore textures are too saturated or the roughness and detailing looked unnatural on the ingots I’d be more receptive to their criticism but by stating that my work is crap because it’s not as good as another artists’ work is kinda of a bullshit excuse but that’s the kinda audience one has the deal with. I mean, I’ve been asked countless times to release the ore and ingots in 4k and 8k. That’s a massive overkill for clutter assets of a game.
In your case, I would recommend the really old Jaxonz Positioner.…
It would allow you to set up a scene, say in Lakeview Home ( if you built it )…you could just move some of the stuff on the upper deck table and set up your shots there…
Screenshots don’t really have any tools…there are Bat files you can load a string of commands then it will Freeze action, remove the Hud and get you Freecam and in one input to the console… the best thing to learn is the Camera Controls for the free-cam like the DOF and Lens settings…also the built-in COC locations that you can only get to if you know they exist ( Developers Play Areas for Testing ) … and a really good ENB ( I personally use Pi-CHO ENB N7.0 Cathedral Weather) allows the use of LUTS and comes with a ton of them!
From what I learnt, that artists back in the days, were playing tennis back-and-forth constantly with scientists/philosophers/religion to extract themes and think of new ways of thinking.
As for example if you see the melted clocks of Dali, you might consider that the sun heat is so intense that melts the clocks made of jelly. Also art critics would give you a philosophical interpretation that everything is fluid or so.
All of these are nonesense, what the government doesn’t want us to know, is that Dali (1931) extract the main theme of the painting from Einstein’s theory of timespace curvature (1915).
Before you would see some melted clocks, now you see an entire new world.
