'Sup all you art gangstas?!
So I finally got around to tapping out another long ass article for anyone who fancy's a read. It's my response to the hundreds of motivation threads that get posted here and in other facebook groups, a kind of evergreen pillar article I hope I can just blast off like a BFG round next time one pops up
as always its a bit of a long read, but I hope it addresses some heavy hitting points a lot of people tend to struggle with. https://www.polygon-academy.com/tips-for-artists-struggling-with-motivation/
But seriously, it's a problem almost all of us encounter with from time to time, and if you wanna get super meta I was half writing this article as a message to myself after being a bit of a lazy slug-rat for the past few months. It's pretty much the key ingredients and process I used to get back in the swing of things and start producing content again, so boom, I kinda "Inceptioned" myself hopefully.
I posted it here in general discussion because I find it is such a wide ranging issue rather than just a career related one, but mods can feel free to move it to career and education if they think its best suited there.
finally, I just wanted to say a huge thanks to everyone who has been giving feedback, posting links to the other articles to help others out and all that fun stuff. I got a bunch of heartwarming PM's from people saying they helped them out with some sticking points or got them fired up, which is super awesome.
As always, thoughts, comments, crits all welcome below. If you think there is another heavy hitter point that needs to be added fire away!
I remember a couple years back Dustin Brown posted a dope article about motivation as well, I couldn't find it to add a link to it unfortunately
-Tim
Replies
I feel that is quite an issue facing many people that try to pursue a career in the games industry.
I've bookmarked the link and be sure to give it a read.
Great advice, I'm sure this will help a lot of peeps
If people only rely on motivation to drive them to success/finish something then they'll never finish anything. As you mentioned, a lot of it goes into self discipline. Forming good habits, and most importantly simply enjoying the process of modeling.
There's nothing more i enjoy than modeling. Sure sometimes it can be tedious work, but that's almost part of the fun in a weird way. It's hard to explain but modeling for me is just something i snap my mind into. Zone into it, listen to music and enjoy the process.
Your advice will be very helpful to those new to modeling for sure!
Like with sports, you need to practice pretty much daily. Sometimes a break might be necessary to give the muscles a rest, but at the end of the day its only a small group that makes the cut and that group is most likely not unknown (at least their work isn't). Don't get me wrong, I am not one of those saying 'Do just art!!, I think there needs to be as much of a balance as possible for a healthy life, but if you want to get into AAA-productions, like with pro-sports you only get there with sacrifice. No shortcuts. So better get real about if that is the life you want.
https://www.dustinbrown.com/blog
I like your quote:
"An amateur waits for inspiration to strike, a professional just gets to work"
It made me think of this quote:
"The Strong finds a way, the Weak finds excuses."
I really agree with the deleting old work, these are thoughts that have weight on your mind even though you don't realize it, be light.
Here is something I learned from my experience if this can help some artists:
The worst thing I used to do is to plan tooooo much. Having a strict schedule even if I am the one who made it, doesn't work for me. Why ?
Because I found out that I run on "What my soul tells me to do". This is not about feeling but more about "Is this action will reflect what I am to be a whole or not ?"
AND once I know the way, I start to plan accordingly.
To stay motivated I have one major thought:
"It has to be personal."
Heart first, plan next, results will come eventually.
But planning without heart will create a burn out.
I found after a few annoyingly long unwraps that a bit of forward thinking can save a lot of trouble. So if you can identify which elements of your model may be mirrored of duplicated early on, go ahead and unwrap them at the beginning. The principle here is : if something sucks a lot and you hate it, find a work-around. 3d doesn't need to be torture.