Let's talk about weekends!
polycounter lvl 10
Since it's already Monday for me and it's quite sad, I want to ask you guys and gals about your weekends. What do you do when on the final days of the week? Do you even have weekends or you prefer to do art till your eyes start to bleed?
I'm poor and lonely, so I spend my weekends resting at home playing video games and, hopefully, eating some fine apple pie.
Tell me about your weekends, Polycount.
I'm poor and lonely, so I spend my weekends resting at home playing video games and, hopefully, eating some fine apple pie.
Tell me about your weekends, Polycount.
Replies
Weekends - personal work
I try to work the rest of the time.
"I want to believe" - Fox Mulder's poster
That and I do personal artwork.
No real difference between them.
And because the hard and cold german winter closes in, i´m trying to handcraft some beanies
Sounds pretty wild.
keep up that lifestyle and you wont live to see 60
Yup. Saturday watch epl games and maybe go out with co-workers. Sunday is generally a chill/do something day for me too.
If I'm not loaded up with work, I take the weekend to relax. Day in bed, walk around Boston, night time games...some personal work if I can. I work 10-12 hour days during the week most of the time so it's important to take my weekends and enjoy them before it becomes super cold.
Is it an Igloo
My only ritual is on Sunday, I go to Chipotle and get a burrito, then I go to the Butchers Market and get 3lbs of chicken breast, and some other kind of meat to try. Usually, I'll grill the stuff for the week, or try other preparations to learn more about cooking.
Saturday and Sunday I like to keep unplanned and do whatever takes my fancy...sometimes it works out well, sometimes it doesn't
I always try to make sure I get exercise in on the weekend, and do SOMETHING productive artistically, even if it isn't what I should be working on. I went to a figure drawing session this past sunday, for instance. Sometimes I'll get really caught up in a personal art project, or a video game, and that will eat the whole weekend. Other times I spend the weekend completely drunk.
In any case I try to relax and be a bit easier on myself, since my weekdays are so tightly packed and scheduled.
Daaaaawg, you into circuit bending?! Post some videos of that! I love that shit!
For me personally, my weekends are the flipside of my weekdays, where I try to get as much of the routine stuff outta the way and leave my weekends open for spontaneous fun
Likewise and +1 to you sir, value of life is king.
CHIPOTLE.......so good
Saturday is sleep in and then most of the time do something with friends in the day/night. If crazy shinnanigas are going down it would be on Saturday.
Sunday is always random. Sleep in a bit, hangout with my roommate, go for a drive up in the mountains with my car, go photograph some stuff and hate every picture I took, play some video games, mess around with some 3d art if I'm feeling it or just lounging around and relaxing.
for me its important to do something as far as sitting in front of a computer as possible. going out, dancing on clubs, walk in nature, meet new people. my ideal is that every weekend should be an adventure. i want to have a new experience and new impressions, and if i can squeze in somekind of thrilling challange were i get to test myself aswell, i would be happy.
if im going to be preachy i would say that aiming for less is wasting life a bit.
At least weekdays don't suck as much weekends for me, except Thursdays, fuck Thursdays.
im not saying that you have to enyoy clubs or dancing, just suggesting that you should consider excluding the weekends and your free time from your 3d schedule. try to seek new experiences, maybe get another hobby that makes you use other parts of yourself. i think its important to push yourself, to do things that you are afraid of, and that its a way to develop as a person.
Why is it wasting life? You could argue the opposite. Do you not see art as something that may introduce you to awesome people, provide interesting experiences, etc?
I'll just throw an example out in a different field. Some of the coolest car garages I've been to are guys that work on cars 24/7 (not literally). During the day, they work on customers cars. At night and on the weekends, they build/tune their own cars, travel around the country to compete and meet new people.
And, to answer your last statement, they incredibly happy too. They love what they do. I think that sums it up.
There's enough in the field of art and 3D that you can seek out novelty and challenge yourself on a daily basis.
That being said if the artist wants to spend their majority of their time working then they shouldn't be made to feel bad about doing so, just saying it's good to keep an open mind
but also another point;
i think in general, people tend to focus to much on what they are good at. like. if you discover at an early age that you are talanted at art. then a lot of people would identify with that, thinking of themselves as "artists" or the person-who-are-good-at-art. i do this a lot myself.
then the problem can occur when someone suggest going to a football practise, or gokart racing or whatever. you think to yourself, "i cant do that, im a 'art'-person, i dont do sports" and effectivly excluding activities that could have been really fun and beneficial. i see this happen mostly to so called "nerds", that spend most of their time in front of the computer, and it seems to be really limiting.
sometimes the impression from polycount can be that to succed working with gameart, you have to devote all your time to it. and that in my opinion, would encourage a unhealty, detached lifestyle.
and yeah regarding the working-on-cars example, i think its a lot broader than doing gameart. you would talk to new customers everyday, would change body position a lot, lift heavy stuff, use your motoric skills to fine tune small parts of the engine, and think of solutions on technical problems. thats a lot different from doing 3d in front of a computer.
i also guess it would be a lot different if you were some high level art director, going on lectures and seminars, leading teams of artists, and managing a studio. that, in my opinion, would be a lot more fullfilling than grinding at 3d art 24/7 in your room by yourself.
heres another reason aswell;
you could say about writers, that they have to have lived to be able to tell a story. they wouldnt been able to write about meaningfull, engagig and emotionally touching things if they hadnt experienced those in some way.
the same should be true about all forms of art. 3d art included. i would image that we could all be better artists if we had bigger experiences and impressions to inspire us. and that stuff is very unlikely to happen to us if we stay in front of the computer most of our time. im not sure about this, but i can say for myself, that i get a lot of inspiration from real life.
alright, when reading trough my comments, i can see that i sound condesending and preaching, which i apologize for. obviuosly, people are free to live how they want. so let me just say that the stuff i have written worked really well for me, to live a varied life and so on, and i hope that it coud be usefull as advice to anyone struggling with that.
what i wrote last though, about the writers, i still belive is true.
Anyway, when I finally settled on to play Tiberium Sun, it turned out it doesn't work on Windows 8.1. All fixes over internet I could find didn't worked.
After that I just watched movie.
In mean time I spend good deal of time, researching about Voxel Cone Tracing, which I can say was quite wasted, since I understand at most half of it, and I don't know how to code GPU on that level. I probably should have started from reading more about DirectX, OpenGL and data structures supported on GPUs.
just make sure you don't forget to drink
generally work on my own art or code for 2 hours before work, go to work writing more code than end the day with my personal projects again.
Than once Friday hits im pretty burnt out so i generally intend to go out but end up just having drinks with my GF and falling asleep around 9 or 10.
Weekends are generally just running errands and trying to make a good amount of food to last me into the week. I also have been trying to fit in a few new experiences where i can, and most recently that has been rock climbing.
Hey, I can always dual boot or install on virtual machine. Though I was not at this point of desperation. Yet