How have you been Challenging yourselves this year?
polycounter lvl 18
In order to get to know a few of you better, I'd be interested in hearing how
you folks have been challenging yourselves with your Art so far this year?
What steps have you been making towards your goals
For me,this year was all about attempting to animate & choreograph a multi-character fight scene.
First starting off with 2 characters and progressing that workflow to hold up under the strain of 5 characters or more.
Midway throughout the summer I then began learning Melscript & Python, in order to adapt some of that workflow I
loved so much in 3dsmax on over to Maya.
you folks have been challenging yourselves with your Art so far this year?
What steps have you been making towards your goals
For me,this year was all about attempting to animate & choreograph a multi-character fight scene.
First starting off with 2 characters and progressing that workflow to hold up under the strain of 5 characters or more.
Midway throughout the summer I then began learning Melscript & Python, in order to adapt some of that workflow I
loved so much in 3dsmax on over to Maya.
Replies
Earlier in the year I had to make a bunch of enviornment art and I didn't really know how to texture or even bake normal maps. But I had the chance to study some good resources, especially with Unreal Engine 4 coming out and all the demo content they had. I also started isolating each problematic area and making tests scenes just to work out those issues before applying it to work. Testing is so important with 3D.
Here's some of the simple tests I did like:
- make a skin shader just for the face
- make a basic metal shader
- make variants of the metal shader
- make a simple environment based off a photo
- bake just a simple hard surface object without worrying about texturing
- model a creature bust to learn how to play with anatomy
Nothing I made is really impressive, but the technical knowledge I gained was pretty amazing and I kept records of my process in pictures and even videos. Also started to build libraries of textures, models, etc for anything commonly used. It makes everything I do build on itself. That's what I like about 3D, the more you work the more you feel like you're making progress not just fighting the same battle over and over as it felt learning how to draw. But drawing is also easier to understand with 3D so it's win-win all around! Got to love the 3D.
I've been challenging myself to make stuff that is near a professional level (edit, I should add, a level that I want to work at). Not there yet but hopefully in the next two or three years.
So far, since Jan (well this folio is from Novermber), I've went from.
http://chrisstone3d.com/index.html
to
http://www.artstation.com/artist/beefaroni3d
I am still trying to improve my anatomy skills alongside with material definition I suppose. But mostly I think I'm trying to work smarter and more efficient... Whatever that means exactly...
I'd like to try some environment and some hardsurface stuff though...
It has improved my pen control in zBrush/Photoshop (because of so much pen-time).
its a hell of a experience I must say, its night and day working on this with near some new challenge everyday, I just hope I don't go mad
[ame="
this is about 2 months work and 1 month theoretical design (my computer was broken lol) a lot of the stuff is just placeholder and stock sounds and the like just while I work in each basic system, I call the level the devils playground for now.
next I will be on to AI systems and logic, more animation improvements, enemies, more back end code for the game, then what I find fun, environment design.
Earlier this year I entered my first contest with the Mini-Golf Project Anarchy/Polycount contest. Needless to say I learned a tremendous deal during the process.
I also made it a goal to become very familiar with Maya and 3ds Max. I feel very comfortable with both of them now!
I've also learned a great deal about proper baking and various new workflows.
It has been a pretty good year!
I have done something similar this summer and have given myself personnal projects all the time, something that can go from a few days to a month. I love games and art so much and it is very frustrating sometimes being at work, and not having full control over my tasks and deadlines so having something on the side, surprisingly enough, makes me feel more inspired and motivated at work.
Praticing stroke efficiency and lighting, I have gone from doing most of the blocking for a design from 3 hours to an hour and half! Very happy about that.
Aiming at having the main feel of an art piece as fast as possible helps tremendously with efficiency, just like the speed animation thread.
I started out the year jobless and working on Dota 2 couriers & wards. Since then getting a job I've morphed my personal work into experimenting and creating animation systems with some sweet C# in Unity.
Of course I'm always working on my animation & rigging abilities, but for me its all about trying to find ways to complete the full cycle from Rigging to Engine Implementation!
Yay for saying no to every random whim I have and trying to stay focused, so far so good!
With UE4 coming out in spring I started learning that and I did some simple scenes and generally finally feel at home there(didn't use UDK at all before).
I also joined a small indie game dev team to do some 3d art and that is going well. Project is in hand painted style so that made me focus on my painting skills.
Biggest thing for me is that I've been able to push myself to do art at home after work pretty much every day. Which can be exhausting, but is also rewarding as my skills have definitely grown. Sometimes its hard to get through some boring parts (like UVs) but somehow as I've gotten older its getting easier to motivate myself.
In future I feel I need to give back more to this community as it kept me going and inspiring me every day.
Re-learning Autocad
Started learning Houdini (loving it so far)
Researching ebooks and self-publishing
Planning on how to tie it all together (ebooks + video tutorials + selling assets) so I can have multiple income streams from my work.
Breaking away from art and something new is my best way to continue learning but not getting burnt out at he same time....for me anyway
Difficult to pick a favorite, but I'm a sucker for the quick&loose sketches the most!
awesome awesome replies!
I love hearing this kinda stuff - Especially what people are going through & the obstacles they're facing along the way
Everybody has a story, and it's great to finally hear about what some of you are going through and accomplishing :icon60:
your looping fight animations are so metal it's awesome.
this year, i took a job as a rendering engineer at Marmoset.co, it's about as far removed from character art as it can get. it's a constant challenge and every day is a new learning opportunity. i'm learning to program in c++ on the job, and learning more about rendering in general than i ever thought i would.
and i still take on art contracts too, but now i have the freedom of turning down the ones i don't want to do.
This probably means that I'm worse off than anybody with a specific focus in the job market, but I think I'd rather work on my own projects that I can control from start to finish, even if it means not getting paid to work.
I've learned such a crazy amount of new things in the last year. I remember showing off some of my WIPs to friends a year ago and they would laugh at me, but now when I show off WIPs to people, they actually give non-pity compliments! Also, last year I didn't understand a large majority of the code that was written for my team's current project, but now I not only understand all of it, I actually get to write a lot of the new code for our game which makes every day that much more enjoyable in my opinion.
The thing I'm most proud of overcoming in the last year has been my depression though. A year ago I would think about how much life sucked on a daily basis, the tiniest inconveniences would be enough to make me explode in anger and it was common to think about bad things like suicide. I think it was a change in attitude I forced myself to adopt, instead of thinking about the negatives of a situation, I started looking at the positives while ignoring the negatives. While I still have some days where I'm pretty negative, in general I've been enjoying everything more.
Can't wait to see how far I can go one year from now!
So in this year:
What is done:
- Well obviously I finished my portfolio finally
- I cleared out all my courses on my Master's degree( Game Technologies) . Now only thesis left
- Also learned quite a bit about shaders and how they behave in different lighting conditions ( characters like to move around a lot you see)
- I can now rig-skin and animate my own characters.
- Also learned how to do physical animation ( cloth-rope-hair-jiggle)
- I learned quite a bit of C++ ( CryEngine) I can now write my own entities/flownodes by myself.
- I also introduced myself with UE4. A crash course-like one
- I learned quite a bit about other engines and now confident enough to make precise comparisons.
What will be done before Christmas:
- I will get my first "real" freelance jobs ( my previous ones were all in-country and small in scale. I mean real "to-abroad" high quality work )
- I will do a further material study in CryEngine and post it here asking for C&C.
- I will learn how to program gameplay elements in CE and implement first elements of my dream RTS game.
- I will finish %30 of my thesis.
- I will finish one sculpt of a "absolutely" simple character ( It was one of my mistakes I noticed too late. I tend to go for overcomplex characters and completely forget the aesthetics. Need to do this in order to fix this bad habbit)
MOST IMPORTANT: Will set goals for the new year.
So what was the sayin' ? Stand up ! Get up ! Don't give up the fight ! ... was it ?
-Trying my hand at a new art style.
-Taking Polycount to its next level. We're a legit company now with an office and everything. And we're now having the "What's our launch window?" for the first phase of the new website.
To real time game environments
By the end of this year.
Before, I was mostly getting my hands wet in UE4 and learning how to texture. Now I want to be known for more than just props and actually have some environments in my portfolio. My first environment is based on my city which I thought was a fun a choice. How I challenge myself is that I make it a constant reminder: having no art pieces means no job.
Don't have much time or energy for portfolio work at the moment though. I get home at 9 on most days, Which leaves me enough time to cook and get ready for bed. Though I should still be able to do stuff in the weekend, it's just a matter of being lazy I suppose. I think I've started 5 projects since May and haven't finished any of them.
My goal at the moment is to get more into the art and design side of things and finally learn how to draw. Hopefully I'll have the time to squeeze in some personal 3d work as well.
Awesome!!
And so I decided to completely ignore the lost years on gaming and law school and I've started learning 12-16 hrs/day UE4, Maya , 3ds Max, Quixel , Substance kit, Photoshop.
I loved it so much I discovered and amazed myself with how much hunger you can learn something when you love it. I have learned how to model and texture mostly but also setting ups scenes/environments.
I am pushing myself everyday but much less now because I got a few freelance projects and don't have time anymore to learn new stuff.
As a matter of fact ... I actually feel a bit ...strange that I am working now all day long but not really learning new stuff. How do you guys deal with that? I mean yes ... I am still learning ( right now modeling my first car in the little free time and just found out about how I am going to render it with Iray ) but that's not even 1/10 amount of info I used to absorb before working.
You could try finishing up your freelance projects and try and get by with taking on less work in the future? I don't really know your situation. Whether or not you are completely relying on your freelance work to pay bills, etc.