The Answer to Any Question Isn't Really Very Helpful

Broadcast

In this forum I have noticed that the answer to any question is "do your own research", "try it for yourself", or "the software won't make you any better of an artist".  Those are all correct answers, but are they really all that helpful? In my mind I think when you give someone an answer like that you are making an assumption that there situation is going to allow them the oppurtunity to do more research or try demos in a timely manner when maybe it won't. 

I'll just use myself as an example. The reason I joined this forum was because I am building a hobbyist studio. I've been doing music and 2d and 3d and game related art and programming for 15 years for fun because I enjoy it. Because of circumstances I haven' been involved with the scene for a while but I'm rebuilding my studio  while also working 12+ hours most work days at my job. And my job has me also doing work related stuff while I'm not even technically at work. 

So while I'm rebuilding my music studio and my game art studio I have a TON of things to catch up and and reaquaint myself with. I can't just try every demo that there is or research every single program. And I think there are a lot of people who have to make a choice about what they are going to use and they just need a quick evaluation of what's what when they ask a question. 

Just some food for thought. When I come to a forum for advice but instead I get a philosophy lesson it's not always quite as helpful as you might think. Like if someone completely new asked me whether they should learn Blender or DAZ3d. I would tell them Blender. I wouldn't say, "Depends on what you want. You should try them both." I would just say learn Blender. Some people might disagree with that. But my experience says blender. That's the kind of answer I'm looking for and I think some other people might as well when they come on here. 

Alex_J

Broadcast said:

 I would just say learn Blender.

First, The quoted text : that's no good answer and demonstrates your real problem.

Why would you tell somebody that? Why would you not explain that Daz and Blender are two completely different tools designed for different missions? Wouldnt the smart thing to do be to ask the person more specifics about their goals and situation before throwing out some answer like that which could potential cost them time and money wasted?

Second, nobody cares about your particular life story. Everybody busy and has their own problems. Somehow everybody made the time to figure things out though. Unless you have a cancer survivor pity story or something I don't think any point in talking about all of that. 

It's extremely helpful for a lot of us that people take time at all to provide their experience here. A lot of answers I got early on I didn't really understand. Then a couple years later I realize how much trouble they really saved me. 

About your idea of a better answer: just having somebody tell you, "do this" is a bad idea. It is worse than having them go at it alone because it kills critical thought. And worse, without knowing the full scope of the question askers specific situation, the likelihood of giving a bad answer is high. Thus, intelligent people either ask for more specifics or give a general purpose answer.

How you make a decision is you try to turn as much unknown into known as possible. Then you make a comparison chart. You consider the risk, reward, time investment, etc. When you've reached the deadline to make a decision or feel your major concerns are adequately addressed, you make your decision.

So people here give you nuggest of knowledge that you can use to fill in your decision making chart. If you want somebody to just make decisions for you, I guess you need to find a community with more dunning krueger assholes maybe? I don't know, maybe I fit the bill because I think I made it pretty clear in your question, "just use industry standard software if you dont got time to figure things out on your own."

Biomag

To be honest I don't think there is a lot of value in answering a question about what to use without going into pros and cons of alternatives. Especially in a field were the alternatives are valuable. Even people that had the same tasks as me, working within the same pipeline never used all tools / softwares 100% the same way, often having very different workflows, each with benefits of their own. So how can the answer be 'THAT ONE'?

I've seen people giving up on things because they got only one way to do it presented to them and it didn't fit them. Never finding out that an alternative was available that might have been more appropriate for them.

defragger

If I've learned anything, it's that sometimes the only / best answer is "it depends".

pior

By the time you finished writing these 4 paragraphs you could have already downloaded the Topogun demo and tried it for yourself. You essentially just wasted your own time ...

https://polycount.com/discussion/219240/topogun-3-looking-good#latest

If anything the most meta answer would be ... if you are sooooo absolutely short on time to the point where downloading the demo of a highly praised piece of content creation software to try it for yourself is not even an option ... then diving into hard-surface models requiring retopo and bakes is probably not the wisest idea to begin with.

Broadcast

For a room full of artists you really don't take criticism very well. There is no need to be rude.  And to bring up cancer so flippantly the way you did is also making another assumption that maybe you should reconsider making in the future. I only put that feedback up because it is honestly the way that I felt. If I can't get a straight answer from THIS forum about game dev software... where else do I go? 

It's just to me if I go to car dealership and ask the salesperson whether I should buy a minivan or a mini coupe for my family of 6 people I don't want tell me "It depends on whether or not you are a family of hobbits".  

defragger

Broadcast said:

It's just to me if I go to car dealership and ask the salesperson whether I should buy a minivan or a mini coupe for my family of 6 people I don't want tell me "It depends on whether or not you are a family of hobbits".  

You think we sit here and wait for you to grace us with your questions? Like we owe you anything.

This is probably just an attempt to troll. This can't be serious, can it?

We're all in the same boat here, trying to help each other.

Lucaus

Broadcast said:

you really don't take criticism very well.   

kanga

Its not 2000 anymore. People are not as enchanted with the web as they were back then. Gone are the days where you could ask a question and 15 mins later get 3 replies from 3 continents. In fact it would be great if polycount could stick around, what with the social media competition out there.

Anyhow I would call you and raise you one. Next time you post a question that goes unanswered, and you eventually find a solution, post that under your original question. That really helps people searching with the same problem. Do that and your web karma should go through the roof.

zachagreg

Broadcast said:

It's just to me if I go to car dealership and ask the salesperson whether I should buy a minivan or a mini coupe for my family of 6 people I don't want tell me "It depends on whether or not you are a family of hobbits".  

Besides anything else the car dealer will ask you. What is your budget? What does your family of six like to do? How frequently do you drive currently? Do you intend this to be a car useful for something such as Uber/Lyft. What safety features have you been interested in? Do you care about mileage? SO what do you do? You test drive it, look into it a little bit. Maybe shop around a bit for the best price or which model has the features you want.

If you walk onto a car lot and say I want either a mini coupe or a minivan you MIGHT get an answer from someone looking to make a quick sale. If you walk into a huge hypothetical car mall and scream at the top of your lungs asking which one you should buy you'll get questions from people looking for more information on your vague question. For those that give you a straight answer you will receive both.

Does any of that seem helpful? If you came into a thread and asked, "Which 3d software should I devote my time to? I only want a direct one word answer." You will get the following:

-3DS Max

-Blender

-Maya

-Cinema 4d

-Anim8tor

-Daz3D

-Unity

-Unreal

-Origami

-Zbrush

-Modo

-Mudbox

-AutoCAD

-Fusion360

-MOI3D

-Houdini

-SketchUp

So now that you have a list of your available softwares to choose from what will you do with your new found knowledge? Also a lot of the time what works for someone doesn't work for others. The people that tell you to try them know that. We've tried them, hated some and loved some. This comes from experience, it's the test drive, it's the feature list of a car.

I would just like to ask you to maybe re-read your initial post and realize how incredibly selfish it all sounds. Notice how many times you point out what you want or what you would do. Maybe take a step back and ask yourself if making a post like this helps anyone at all, even yourself. It very much reads as, "I am upset that people won't give me the answers I want and they are wasting my time so I want you all to know that maybe you should think like me."

Joopson

I'm a Maya user. I love Maya, and I think it's a great tool.

If you ask me "what 3D software should I learn?", I'll be honest and say "Maya and 3DSMax are the real industry standards; they're safe bets, and are very powerful. Blender is free, so it might be a good one to learn if you aren't sure you'll even like 3D, plus it's a powerful software that's gaining ground in the industry; Modo is very powerful too, very intuitive, and is also growing in prevalence."

The truth is, all these tools do 3D modelling well. The problem is, which will resonate for you, and work with your mind.

If you go to a car dealership and say "I want a car", you'll be asked a million questions; standard or automatic? Sedan, hatchback, van, SUV? What do you plan to use the car for? Do you have a family? Do you drive in the snow a lot? Do you have color preferences, or aesthetic preferences?

There are no easy answers, because really it all boils down to preference and needs. If you just want a 3D software that works, take your pick Franky-boy. They all work, and they all work well. If you need powerful animation tools, it narrows it down a bit, but not much.

Ruz

Talking of car dealerships, wonder if any of them have any ' free' cars ie a blender equivalent?

everything would work reasonably  apart from the really important stuff .  It would not have electric windows, just the wind down type

and not enough coffee cup holders

icegodofhungary

I'm a total noob but there's something to say about good pedagogy. I very lazily pursued 3D modeling since 2003. Kinda stuck in a mode where I didn't study enough and just kinda practiced the same mistakes over again, so I got really good at being bad. Then I changed gears later in life and tried to be a physicist. While I'm not a physicist, I did learn something very valuable. We were taught not to get the right answers all the time, but to problem solve.

Being able to reason your way through a problem is vastly more important than the answer, and it's okay to be wrong sometimes as long as you have a good reason for being wrong. If that makes sense. It's good pedagogy (the art/science of teaching) to teach good problem solving. This develops independence and gives people the tools to become much stronger individuals. Because in life you're not always going to get the right answers, the answers won't be easy to find, and you'll have to work up to the answer over time. It's not going to be as immediate as looking at a cheat sheet or finding a nicely compiled list of answers.

Plus, if everything goes right, you'll get so good that nobody can help you. There will be nobody to ask who has your level of experience. What good is polycount.com then? You need to be able to find answers on your own.

It's also not crazy to ask that people read the existing body of information first, before asking questions. And not just read the existing canon, but to absorb it and try to understand it. I see a lot of people asking the same few normal map troubleshooting questions that were 100% for sure answered dozens of time before. Because people don't read, they create the work without understanding what they're doing. They run into a problem. They can't find a solution for their exact, unique model/texture, so they come here and ask. They just don't know how to extrapolate from existing information. This is a problem. It's not enough to get the right answer, you have to know why you got the right answer. So just giving people the immediate answer (which the pros here still do), you're asked to read the wiki, absorb the wiki, then ask questions from there.

That's your philosophy lesson on "do your own research." Teaching people problem solving is more important than giving you an immediate, rote, answer.

Now, your own post kinda contradicts itself. You said you did things as a hobbyist for a while. Certainly you can't consider that as some sort of credential for advising aspiring professionals, right? Then you said your experience is suggesting blender. But your experience is dabbling off and on for 15 years. You even said you have a ton to catch up on in terms of best practices, techniques, etc. So what does your experience really mean in the grand scheme of things compared to people who do this for a living? I don't mean to sound harsh, I too have dabbled since around 2003. My portfolio literally says I'm a hobbyist. But you're implying that your suggestion of using blender is somehow equally informed and valid as a 10+ year industry vet who says it depends on what you're trying to do. Think about that.

Eric Chadwick

https://polycount.com/discussion/63361/information-about-polycount-new-member-introductions/p1#asking

and specifically How To Ask Questions The Smart Way :

What we are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem to be unwilling to think or to do their own homework before asking questions. People like that are time sinks — they take without giving back, and they waste time we could have spent on another question more interesting and another person more worthy of an answer. 

This quote isn't strictly true for Polycount (we tend to be quite a bit more forgiving) but the underlying sentiment is fairly wide-spread.

That article is worth its weight in gold, well worth the read. Explains much of what you'll find in online technical forum culture.

FrankPolygon

It's no argument that there's incomplete and invalid information out there. The problem is it takes time to sort through it all and try to set everything straight. Writing up a couple pages of technical information, cross checking it, validating it and packaging up examples takes a lot of time and experience. The question then becomes: what is a detailed answer really worth?

Using my own posting history as an example: if it's more than a couple paragraphs to answer a question (usually because there's conflicting or incomplete answers) then it's easily a 2-8 hour investment to go through, properly validate everything and create samples. Average that time out, multiply it by the number of posts, multiply that by a competitive industry rate for technical consulting and that's the answer. This is why my personal policy is to only reply to things that are within my wheelhouse and align with my interests. If the answer isn't going to bring value beyond that particular question then I generally won't attempt to answer the question.

Sometimes it makes sense to respond to common issues that can be expanded on but that's only with the hopes that we eventually get to a point where there's sufficient coverage to fill the knowledge gaps and overpower the outstanding volume of inaccurate or incomplete information. Time is valuable and outside of work most professional artists also have families, hobbies and other obligations. Most professionals can't reasonably afford to invest that amount of time on something they won't ever see a direct return on.

So now that we know what the cost of a detailed answer is... What's it really worth? On a forum it's only worth what you paid for it. Without a discrete value exchange the only way value can be added to a question is if work went into an attempt at understanding the material before asking the question. This is why questions with specific parameters tend to get better responses than those without.

Wider context and technical depth is important but it's also a two way street. Being upfront about skill level and posing a specific question with detailed information about what was attempted, what the desired results were and what went wrong goes a long way towards getting someone with more experience or knowledge to step in and advise. That said: the less specific and more general a question is the more work it is to try and cover every single contingency. This is why professional artists tend to avoid investing a large amount of time in answering overly vague questions and tend to look less kindly towards demands for broad coverage on rudimentary topics.

Working with students, hobbyists and Jr artists: self directed motivation issues and self directed learning issues are probably two of the biggest artistic challenges that people face on the road to proficiency. Some professionals will say it with flowery language and some professionals will say it with stark rudeness but there's something of a universal truth here: Taking the time to research, test and evaluate something is a courtesy to other artists and an investment in your own personal growth. It's also important to be self aware enough to provide broader context by describing (as best you can) what problems you have identified, what remedies you have tried and how you would like to improve the results.

Taylor Brown

@FrankPolygon man i love your posts.

throttlekitty

This is why professional artists tend to avoid investing a large amount of time in answering overly vague questions and tend to look less kindly towards demands for broad coverage on rudimentary topics.

I think this is worth repeating, and depends on the topic. Personally I feel that if someone's first instinct is to use someone else's time for something they could have discovered for themselves, or even found the exact forum thread had they looked, they'll do it again while showing no signs of growth or thought.

To carry on a bit, sometimes you take the time to give a more detailed reply than usual, and you're met with silence. Or worse, a snarky reply from the OP, chiding you for not giving them the direct answer that they felt was owed, or even complaining at you for asking for more information about the problem. Sometimes that makes you question how much of your time you'd like to spend on answering threads.

monster

@Broadcast My actual consultation rate for professional studios is between $200 and $400 US an hour. I'm happy to answer any questions as brief or in-depth as needed. I can even tool and document your whole art pipeline.

Even though that's true, I still love answering questions in the Tech Talk the Coding forum. But in my 20-ish years on Polycount I kind of just know who's trying to help themselves and who's trying to con a tool out of me.

For example: https://polycount.com/discussion/221082/script-does-not-work-in-maya-2020#latest

OP there needs help, and I can probably fix it. I downloaded the file and the ReadMe.txt says to email  him if there is a problem. Should I email the original author for the OP? No. What if the original author other already updated their tool, or offers to fix it in a few minutes since he knows his code? Why should I devote my until I have all the information?

So to sum up...

In this forum I have noticed that the answer to any question is "do your own research", "try it for yourself", or "the software won't make you any better of an artist".  Those are all correct answers, but are they really all that helpful?

Yes, they help me help you.

Domslice

This whole thread seems to support the point that, longer, more considerate replies are in fact worthwhile. There's already been so much gold (and+ badges, I see you people) and we're only a single page in! 

I wonder if the OPs desire for quick, and to the point, is symptomatic of a more "TLDR" attitude towards traditional forum posting/trolling for information, that by contrast can be replaced with succinct (potentially more helpful, if time is a factor for you) advice that you'd receive on, say, Twitter. 

Alex_J

Domslice said:

This whole thread seems to support the point that, longer, more considerate replies are in fact worthwhile. There's already been so much gold (and+ badges, I see you people) and we're only a single page in! 

I wonder if the OPs desire for quick, and to the point, is symptomatic of a more "TLDR" attitude towards traditional forum posting/trolling for information, that by contrast can be replaced with succinct (potentially more helpful, if time is a factor for you) advice that you'd receive on, say, Twitter. 

I think it's just a simple matter of poor work ethic. Always is, once you hold up all the excuses to any scrutiny.

Biomag

I don't think its necessarily poor work ethic. To me it just seems like someone who underestimated to complexity of the issue. Sometimes you just want the answer and not a dissertation about an issue. In some cases its even legitimate as there is a definite answer. But in cases where there are several equally valuable options available or issues are more complex the answer shouldn't be cut short or oversimplified just for the sake of brevity.

DavidCruz

read this when it started do not have time to re-read so if anyone said this already.shrug.

Critical thinking, if you can not learn how to do it or do it at all - sorry to say your value drops(to some employers,if i was one especially).  Like i had to figure something out i felt no-one has shared or achieved yet, how do i get the answer to that if it doesn't exist? I had to do it myself and i did twice already.

I try my best to be informative, other times i do keep the solutions to myself if no one else has achieved it,(to debug make it the best there is ect.) 
I once read on this very forum some years back that "i put in the time to learn how to do things and to do things the right way takes time and trial and error and i find that information usually is profitable for others, if i put in the time so can they." Something along those lines and it stuck with me and i am talking years back, probably pre-update/move/change.
When you are forced to get into the business mindset (which everyone seems to be on lately in this new decade.) and understand some knowledge can profit you and understand studios frequent this location to gain an edge / knowledge or to jump on a new "trendy tech/trick/tip" and exploit it for profit people become very hesitant on sharing information.  Just my unwanted .02cents.
Also agree with frank, some knowledge out there isn't very helpful and misinformation in this new mis-information age... I guess learning from someone who has a proven track record of being very helpful is the best course of action to take when looking into finding solutions to challenges you want to complete.
Edit for consideration to op.
(Going to be considerate, yes time is rare, if you have other obligations that take it up.  I have plenty, it isn't fair & yes in a way you have a point, however since we do not know how you conduct yourself and what takes priorities over other things.  We can only speculate the excuse is lazyness or you wanting to give other things not so important time, say gaming or some nagging significant other, we do not know.  So the default is, be very informative when you create a concerning question and use as much accurate information as possible to avoid running into a back and forth issue.)