How to stay motivated and finish that project!
Staying motivated enough to finish a project is one of the biggest issues for 3D artists of all experience levels.
This isn’t something that’s just unique to us though, it applies to everything. Pretty much everyone I know has a pile of projects that were started with enthusiasm and then over time left behind on the unfinished heap. And that’s fine if you’re just playing around and trying things out in your spare time.
Now, if you’re already working in the industry, dropping personal projects doesn’t matter so much. But for those starting out, if you want to make the leap from hobbyist to pro you need to complete the work to build up your skills and ultimately your folio.
Think about what companies want from a professional artist.
Do they want someone to just play around with different projects and software packages. Would they really be looking to pay someone to do that all day?
So all those projects you started and then stopped when you got to the unwrap or whatever, because it was boring, or difficult. Guess what? As a professional artist you just need to get on with it and get the job done.
Please don’t misunderstand this. I'm not saying it’s not a great job, it is. But it’s a JOB. Its work, and it can be demanding work too. There will also be parts you don't enjoy so much. That’s what makes it a job.
So what can you do to help you keep going till the end?
I would suggest approaching every project as though you were making the asset for a client.
Set timelines. Make these achievable though, don’t set yourself up to fail.
Break down large projects into smaller tasks and set times against those. With large projects the end can see so far away and this in itself can cause you to give up. Breaking it down into smaller goals can help you find an estimated end date and give you more achievable milestones along the way.
Announce your project and end date to a wider audience. This helps to create accountability. Use Polycount, family, friends, etc. and promise to post or show them updates by specific dates to keep you accountable and moving forward.
Don't obsess over it. Keep one eye on your schedule and do what you can in the available time. If you get feedback on your progress you need to decide what can and can’t be done to meet your dates. Better to finish work and learn from it, than never finishing at all.
Set mini time limits. If you hit a part that you know you will struggle with then set yourself mini time limits. Work on it for 5 or 10 mins then take a quick break. Then back for another 5-10 mins, then another break. Continue like this till you push through the block.
This is how you would work in the industry, though the times and accountability will come from others on your team, like your lead artist, etc.
As a professional artist, it’s rarely about creating the absolute best piece you can. If those were the constraints, nobody would ever finish anything. It can be really hard to let go of something, call it done and move onto the next stage.
Instead, it’s about creating the best work you can in the time available and within any technical or aesthetic constraints the project has.
So, approach each piece as you would if it were a job. Your hobby doesn't make you employable!
P.S. What is the biggest issue that causes YOU to give up on projects?
Replies
When I was learning, I spent much longer on portfolio pieces. The camera in my portfolio was maybe 2-3 months for a pretty simple prop.
I believe that learning the fundamentals and not rushing through projects is more important than hitting an arbitrary deadline. I see tons of people ask "Well how long does this take in the industry?" Then they try to match that time and end up with a piece of artwork that is sub-par and cannot even be used in a portfolio.
For example, on the camera in my portfolio, I took my time and made sure my normal maps were almost perfect. I looked through the baking threads on here and really tried to figure out the method behind baking instead of just rushing along.
I wasn't too good at high poly modelling either, so I took my time to re-do a few pieces if the topology wasn't flowing correctly.
For the texturing, I had learn PBR and what I needed to do in order to get a good result.
At the end of the day, the extended amount of time on that project helped speed up my workflow much more. I knew the steps now to get to the final result, I just needed to speed them up. I think the danger in setting arbitrary deadlines is that you end up not knowing how to get that portfolio quality result and then when the art test rolls around you won't even know how to hit the quality bar they're looking for.
I believe following a method like yours leads to really bad portfolios and I've seen it happen over and over on here. "Hey, I'm going to do this deadline!". Then they rush through textures and lighting and don't really learn anything.
Myself and a few friends have followed the "take your time and learn the fundamentals" and we were all hired maybe a year/year and a half after we started really working on our portfolios.
Don't obses over it - I disagree with this. If it's a portfolio piece and you're learning and you're trying something new and experimenting etc. then you should obsess over it. If you don't obsess over it and can't get it done in that alloted time you cast it aside and then NEXT time you try it , i.e. you can't get hair cards right the first time , you put it off for next time and don't learn anything. Then next time you have to do hair cards , voila. Same thing. Can't get it done , again. Etc.
So you should obseses over it.
Mini Time Limits - I disagree with this as well , this is a weird approach. You should just power through , research research research , learn about it instead.
Here's a nice blog post about research which I think is relevant to that point.
http://project-discovery.com/blog/2016/10/13/research
I did this whole RUSH RUSH RUSH PUMP OUT WORK thing for a while and eventually stopped doing it , because the quality of my work was garbage and I didn't really learn a whole from pumping out work every other week.
"Announce your project and end date to a wider audience. This helps to create accountability. Use Polycount, family, friends, etc. and promise to post or show them updates by specific dates to keep you accountable and moving forward."
I disagree with this. This tends to create a fake feeling of achievement (similar to new year's resolutions) and at the end of the day this is just a carrot on a stick - not to mention that it makes one look kinda foolish in front of other artists when said deadlines are repeatedly not met or the results are just subpar.
All that said I do agree that setting some challenging deadlines can be interesting in the case of fun little exercises (like giving oneself one day to solve a specific tech issue) ... but as Beef mentioned this is most likely not really relevant to high quality portfolio content.
Now the one thing that I see happen over and over again with not-so experienced artists is bad production planning - for instance, not taking the 5 minutes required to setup a mat ID bake for perfect region masking, resulting in having to spend hours lasso-ing it all by hand after the fact. This goes back to Beef's point about researching techniques and learning how to do things right, rather than bruteforcing through things.
When I started to make characters more seriously, I knew I wasn't going to be able to make stunning stuff right away, my first goal was to 'create results'. I made lots of mistake, my sculpts were soft, crude, with anatomy errors and wrong material definition. My texture were plain, with visible seams and what not. But I got it done in reasonable amount of time... Reason being that I couldn't improve it further even with more time... Meaning that I used my at-the-time skills to finish the character.
Then I repeat the process, again and again with new characters/projects. Mostly relying on my skills at the time (with extra helps from other artists, of course.)
Result; I've made many characters that are not good enough for portfolio. Well, I've been learning, so it 's what I've expected. But I also see the progress. Because after each project, I've learned something new.
Right now, I'm still learning... Duh. But I know I can make more quality stuff now. I can spend more time with the characters, and they will look better. But goal is not to just 'finish it' anymore. Now my goal is to keep raising the bars for myself.
Mini time limit..... Disagree. If I'm not in the mood, 5-10 mins is not enough to even warm up yet. I would spend maybe more like half an hour on it at least (depends on what I'm doing... let's say sculpting character's hair), then judge its quality. If I'm not happy with it, I would do it again on a duplicate. Then compare results, and see if I have to do it again the 3rd time or not. In the end, I pick the best result.
@pior
... Can't just re-bake again with color vertex ??
But this is just an example anyways, to illustrate the fact that what most people need is not deadlines, but rather, a willingness to research efficient workflows in order to not waste their time and other's going forward
Often times looking all over the web for a new source of inspiration, buying up concept art books thinking it is going to make you better artist or watching tutorials is a subconcious way of self sabotage that your brain will do for most areas where you feel you are not a "professional" yet. personal finance, dating, art, business etc. It is actually a self preservation mechanism that keeps you in comfort vs pushing your boundaries. It can also be akin to mental masturbation where dreaming about being an amazing artist is actually more fullfilling than doing the work itself. watch out for that, it tends to creep up on almost everyone from time to time.
brute force work and putting in the time is what is going to make you a great artist. Motivation is that 1% that will maybe get you started on a project or help with the final push....self discipline is the other 99% that actually gets shit done. There have been plenty of threads on this already, and most of the other industry pros will sing a similar song.
simple answer, put your ass in the chair and work, regardless if you feel like it or not
About obsessing - not sure. You can make a decent looking environment without spending tons of time on a simple column, right there in the far left corner, which nobody will even look at. Focus on the main piece (if it's environment). The other stuff, not so much. In production, it all comes down to deadlines. If you have a week to do a scene, you need to make sure, that you're not going to spend too much on a single prop. Otherwise, you will finish that prop in a week and you will have nothing else. Don't spend too much time. Be realistic. And don't lie to yourself.
My point being, don't be a perfectionist. Nothing is perfect, never will be.
Careful with the (unintentional) strawman here - when people earlier where talking about obsessing, they didn't mean it as in "wasting time and energy on a tiny unimportant detail ", but more as in, obsessing over doing a fantastic job overall, striving for excellence, researching how to do things right, and so on.
Well, in that case it's not such a bad thing. It's better to be obsessive than not to care about how your work is going to look like in the end of the day.
Overall it's always a good habit to make sure that we agree on terms
Just wanted to respond on this one as I don’t want people getting the wrong end of the stick.
I certainly don’t advocate rushing and just pumping out sub standard work. That’s not going to help anyone. If that's what you took from this then that wasn't what I intended.
Maybe the line about approaching this as you would for a client caused this confusion but I was really talking about the process rather than setting industry timescales.
As I said, set times but don’t set yourself up to fail. If you think you need 3 months, 6 months, whatever, then fine. That’s the time you give it, but I think having some sort of target to work to can help.
If you are starting out then its probably best to start with simpler projects, but as your skills need to develop, even those may require substantial time.
I’m not asking anyone to agree with me but the points I put down were suggestions for helping those people that really struggle to finish anything. I believe the best way to learn is to go through the process, then go through it again, and again, and again. Each time you do this you will learn more and improve.
Of course if the goal of your project is simply to finish a sculpt then fine. Do that, then do another, etc.
Better to try and finish what you started and learn from it than continually spin your wheels starting stuff and dropping it for something else.
As for the mini time limits like say 5-10 minutes. Yes, that probably isn't enough to achieve a lot but it’s a psychological trick. If you REALLY struggle with something and you keep putting it off then setting a really short goal like this feels much more achievable than 1 hour, an evening or a whole day. It's about getting started and building some momentum.
The funny thing about this is that often once you get started you will find that 10 minutes passes and you are now in the zone so you end up doing much more than that. And if you don't, well at least you have made some sort of progress.
You climb a mountain one step at a time but you won't ever get there if you can't start at all.
Recently I have improved on a lot of my techniques,so have started to finish more stuff
Multiple passion projects is a terrible plan for me.
The other lesson I've learned, is that there comes a point when you just need to move ahead, even if the groundwork isn't perfect. You can fiddle with pre-production forever. Literally forever. And the longer you do it, the less likely you are to ever think it's good enough to just move ahead with the next stage. Accept your lack of perfection and continue.
Yes and yes!
Much better to get through the process and learn from it, than constantly restarting or jumping to something else, seeking 'perfection'.
Quite often, later phases of your project will reveal issues with the early parts and you wouldn't gain that knowledge and understanding without going through the full process.
This will set you up better the next time around.