where have all the plycounters gone
polycount lvl 666
you know the ones I mean like bobo, daz,Pior and the like. are you all hiding. we need you guys to counter the tide of
noob snowflakes who are all depressed after working cg for 2 weeks:)
I bet yu are all 2 important now
noob snowflakes who are all depressed after working cg for 2 weeks:)
I bet yu are all 2 important now
Replies
I want a bobo update i know of that new person but who he/she is is a mystery to me if that your child? or your protegee.
Prior seems to be doing well.
Edit:
red wine's fault.
Cya fellows, been fun.
around.
Obviously people like Pior, Earthquake, Eric Chadwick are still doing the rounds but other like MoP, Bobo, Daz seem to have disappeared.
teriyakistyle, you have been around for a while and knock out some decent stuff.
I tend to post my update on linked in or twitter these days, seems to be more of an audience really.
but yeah, there are a lot of new places where people can post their stuff as well. come to think about it, I havnt been in the 3D section for almost a year. if I post anything, its on my artstation, I should probably work on that.
but yeah there are a lots of outlets to post your work these days and twitter seems more immediate,though I am not a huge social media type.
It's funny Pior, now there are so many free game engine about, it somehow is not as fun to use them. I never really get in to Unreal engine
these days. I used to love modding Unreal Tournament characters, digging around in the scripts to see how things worked.
I also loved the progression of peoples work from photoshop/3dsmax to game engine, something magical about that
yeah I am getting really old man , but I am actually enjoying my work more than ever and i think my standard is the
highest it's ever been. The most important thing is to maintain that enthusiasm over the years and I think i am really
starting to enjoy my work again after a miserable few years where I just couldn't be arsed with it
Anyway I bet most of the 'old gimmers' on the forum are actually management types now and they are not allowed on the the forum anymore:)
(except for Pior who escaped from the machine)
back to my tax return and freelance work i go( hi ho)
Also well sponsored competitions have started showing up from software companies and artstation etc which drags the crowd away from the forums a bit.
for discussions where else do you turn to these days? i find discussion on facebook to be usually very light on substance. the format doesn't seem very suited to longer posts,dealing with replies and try to find anything from last week on there. skype et al can be quite intrusive for my taste if you have a large contact list. plus they are blocked at some workplaces.
Stuff gets buried very easily on the boards now, I posted a tutorial that got 291 views before sinking out of sight, same tut on artstation reached 23,000+ views and is still visible.
It's just not my primary destination for game art anymore, moving to LA game me a bunch of game artists to chat and be friends with, and I don't like talking to people unless I'm drunk, so the social aspect isn't so important to me either.
I do get that the volume has changed, and that does have a large impact on the community. But at the same time it seems like there's quite a bit of rose-colored glasses going on, people pining for the days when they were young,and had to walk uphill, nine miles through snow drifts, to get to school.
The community is different. Nothing lasts forever. But is it worse overall? I'm not so sure.
I briefly thought what if we made an invitation-only section, to get some of that small-community feeling again. But that wouldn't work. It would be weird, first of all. It would be seen as elitist. But it would also get stale without new blood. And I'm not sure that kind of attempt at social engineering would work anyhow.
It does seem too big now, compared to what it was. Not sure that's fixable, or even if it's actually necessary. Hypotheticals I guess.
Back then you had to actually add Earthquake on Skype to ask him how baking works if you wanted to be one of the 7 people that could do it properly without seams or artifacts. Now he wrote it all down, people made scripts and tools that make it better and easier, most of the rules are now common knowledge in the industry atmosphere.
In a growing network it's harder for any node to stand out. But it's also easier to get the skills you need to start drawing an income... that part's great.
Alpha made that Slain game a little while back.
I'm thinking about going back to doing smaller scale stuff just so I'll get something done. Doing full projects at the highest quality bar takes months, and digging out that time at home for me feels near impossible sometimes heh, it's like I'll look at something and estimate I'll finish this half a year later and won't bother haha.
Thank you Polycount!!!!!
Back when I started on PC and CGchat, I would get my work destroyed by some of my favourite artists.
B1ll was one of the most helpful to me personally, and while he sort of faded away from PC, he kept guiding me on msn messenger/Skype (and I recall he was helping out several of us - Hazardous, Hntrluc, Gavin, Dur23). I was probably also one of 20-30 people Grassetti used to give regular paintovers.
We each kinda managed to create and maintain small but manageable feedback loops, but the size of Polycount just grew larger and larger.
I was doing a bit of mentorship to a few artists, that number grew from 2-3 to 20, then now to well over a hundred.
As the interest and community of polycount grew, the more and more time I realized I was spending helping my ever-growing unmanageable group. All this while simultaneously losing regular contact with the loop of people who would help me to improve my own work.
So in some regard, I'm assuming what they put into this community, and what they got out of it became largely out of sync. That said there's some pretty awesome Polycounters still in the mix. Ysalex, Tits, EQ, AmsterdamHiltonHotel are a few who I think do a pretty good job of keeping it going.
edit: my mistake, it has been a year already! damn i'm slowwwwww!
Also youre not really slow, I think lifes just like that sometimes, Im getting married this summer so Im super busy - I started a cyberpunk agent but Ive got no time for it at the moment. 2 kids would keep anyone pretty busy haha
Thats at least what it is for me for the most part.
He also has a family now so naturally the focus changes
There is also a ton of entitlement with newer folks these days. Demanding very specific tutorials and tips. Shitting on feedback experienced people give them. Asking the same questions over and over and over again. Not using google... Most of the threadtitles are perfect google searches.
It just becomes very straining to see the same stuff all over again.
It feels like there is too little curiosity and trying to find your own solutions or putting some time into the search for answers. Failures are not considered valuable, maybe its an age thing - nobody likes to fail, but every failure is a valuable lesson that makes you better.
Instead a ton of throwaway threads pop up "how do i ...?" once answered they die, it's just a ton of noise going on, but little substance.
And this in a time where information is so easily obtainable, but maybe thats also what changed it so hard. Back when we started out, there was little info, we had to help each other to find out better solutions.
I try to post on Polycount as often as I can, I try to focus on not dumping art but giving valuable input, or at least give some input when i would just post art. Because thats what polycount always was for me. But i also do this stuff on a daily basis here in the studio, so the amount of energy for that is limited.
I hope it will shift back a bit, especially for the younger folks, facebook is a horrible platform to preserve information/knowledge.
But I applaud people who stick with it, help people out. For me it just feels good to share, help others get closer to their goals. Sometimes the best way to do that is to teach them how to learn, instead of directly answering the question. But it takes a bit more effort, that.
Now a days, game development has increased significantly in popularity. Damn near every college / university have a game dev course now. Polycount is way more popular. There are multiple P&P subs, which divides the user base based on their own interests. Not a bad thing though. Even in those subs, because of the increased traffic, your thread barely lasts a day on the first page. The top tier people no long have time to comment on everything. There's just too much. Especially when a huge chunk of the threads are complete newbies who are asking questions that can easily be found in the wiki, or on google.
When you ask a question you can easily google, you`re essentially saying your time in more valuable than everyone else's. You want them to do the googling, or to explain in a TL:DR fashion while you do your own thing waiting for a reply. The more experienced people aren't going to waste their time on most of it. This stuff takes hard work and dedication. If you cant dedicate yourself to read through a long website explaining your question, vets won't dedicate their time to helping you. It's really as simple as that.
Yes, some of the vets have moved on. They frequent artStation more, or just aren't on the net as much. That's fine. People change. Careers change.There are still vets around though, and in time, our wee noobs will become vets as well, increasing the ratio of vets : noobs. We`ll get more responses. We`ll have more people becoming friends and creating those crit circles that Jacque was talking about.
The overall feeling of Polycount has also changed partly based on people just growing up. I know I've matured compared to when I first started posting. I see a few others in this thread that have matured an incredible amount over the years as well. I won't name names, but I`m sure they know who they are.
People change. Websites change. Communities change. If it's changing for the worse, ask yourself what you`re doing to help it get better. I personally try and give good, long critiques on animations because that's what I know. I've dropped off a bit the last bit because of my social life and what not, but I've also noticed that my crits can sometimes spark conversation or someone else to crit as well. And it's the same for others. When I see a good crit, I join in. Or I think ok, that user has that thread, I`ll crit another to help the community along. It's a community. When people act like it, it grows. When people don't, it doesn't.
Just my 2 cents. My personal opinion and not that of the other mods/admins.
"People change. Websites change. Communities change."
"I started a cyberpunk agent but Ive got no time for it at the moment"
I agree with both statements, but at the same time an interesting thought experiment would be to ask : how long would it take to wrap up this cyberpunk agent using current current specs ? And : how long would it take to finish it if it was made under a 8k triangles budget... without sculpting ... with a 512 for the head and a 1024 for the body ?
I think that's an important distinction to keep in mind ! Nothing prevents anyone from working with specifications from 5/10 years ago - that stuff is fun, light, manageable and fast.
Now of course that won't help with the fact that a gazillion amount of things will still be posted every day, but at least that can help with the "no time to make art" part ...