Your CG routine – how do you keep up the pace ?

Resilience is important if you wanna progress.
Take a course you really wanna finish and stuck to it.

Bookmark your pratice routine as if it was a sports training or so.

For  exemple, allocate 3×2 hours in the week like monday, wednesday and thursday from 7P.M to 9 P.M.
Keep on having free time to meet people and have a social life. But force you to follow your program.

Then you’ll see that once you’ve started working, these 2 hours will go very fast.
Then if you can work 2×4 hours on the weekend that’s great.

I use to train 4 hours every night and 15 hours on week end when I was employed.
But try to be more reasonnable as it’s not good to get too tired, you’ll go burnout.
Also training when tired is not as efficient as when you’re fresh.

If you switch one day to full freelanceing, then just pratice in your office hours whenver you don’t have any commissioned project.

Main motivation for me still is to get into the industry full time. That is the driving force there. however, it also means that I realised things won’t happen overnight. 

for me cgcookie has been tremendous resource, and ofcourse i’ve scoured other places too, the more you have resources the better you are learning wise. 

since i do got fulltime dayjob and around hour long commute with a bus, I’ve watched lot of videos during that time. so doing the course gets bit double take that way, I’ve already watched the video when i’m rewatching them on the evening and continuing which ever the course is going. looking back the first year, I pretty much did everything cgcookie had to offer. results weren’t that great though. what I realised though was that i could really lose track of time if it werent our dog that comes to poke me when i need to take him out and 5 hours had gone past. 🙂

So having healthy obsession of this also helps, you don’t get de-motivated so easily. 

Lately though, since i got part time intern for 3dconcepting and ue4 shading, my learning has tend to gone towards what they need and i go about and try to learn it as fast as i can and get something that might be usable. 

how i manage all this; wish i could say its easy, its not. having deadlines helps though. and when you are doing work for someone else, your ego must go, if something needs to be changed, you’ll change it and move on to the next task. and speaking of deadlines, they are easy when someone else sets them, if you do you own work, putting a deadline for that is different, since you can always talk yourself out of it, beware of that. 🙂

this next is more for the cgcookie crew. Personally its bit hard to answer which one really is better, this learning flow or the previous version of cgcookie. Problem to articulate is that both worked for me at the time i was learning. and oddly enough, i’ve gone and re-watched some of the really old ones when I was thinking that “hell i remember seeing this problem in one tutorial” and found it pretty easily. for example the scifi paneling tutorial, though i’m not using it exactly same way but it had the base stuff i needed to solve. and then there is the scifi helmet series, as a flow that whole thing works brilliantly.

so many good stuff in here that i forgot most of what i was going to post, however, one last thing i’d say: It’s A Journey, embrace it and enjoy it, it takes its own time.

and patience, which i’ve gotten lot more these past three years, and progress. which i hope this next 2picture set shows. 🙂 Thank you Cgcookie!

Yes, you’ve mentioned a briliant thing: just try to launch Blender, and you’ll see – all these vertex and edges will hold you for hours! Even if your are not in a proper mood for practicing, just listen to a very beginning of any tutorial. Because sometimes the only first 3 seconds are the hardest

I’ll link to an article I wrote a while back that might help others: https://blog.cgcookie.com/i-don-t-have-time-to-learn/

Even before I started working with Unity and CG in general on a more full time basis I always tried to keep a schedule going for things I wanted to learn. I think one of the big things to help you out is having an actual deadline to get something done. When I finally decided to really pursue this more I was teaching through videos on Youtube. It was a weekly thing and I wanted to teach something new. I always tried to do bigger and better things and that pushed me to continue learning. Even now it’s a continuous process of learning. If you have no real reason for learning something it’s much easier to put it off. 

Above my desk I have this quote, I like looking up at it whenever I’m feeling like I don’t want to continue with something:

I post it because the more engrossed you get into something the easier it’ll be and the more you enjoy it. You don’t have to spend hours a day working on something. We all have busy lives, but you must be willing to give something everyday. If you really do want to become a great artist, create something small everyday. Even if it sucks, if it’s hard, just do it and feel good that you accomplished something that day that moves you forward. 

Start small, really small. If you said, today I will just delete on face on this model, would you do it? Once you get started you start to realize “oh I can do this too”. Take the pressure off by ensuring you’ll do something incredibly small, anything else will feel like extra. I do this with game projects I work on. I say “I’ll just add this one idle animation”, soon enough I have a fully functional moving character because I had already started.

Whereas we’d like to think most members are like Z zickkie in that they’re trying to develop professional-level skills

@theluthier In that case, wouldn’t it make sense to teach professional software pipelines? At least for people trying to get a job in the 3D industry, I would think their chances would be better if they were learning things like Maya, Nuke, ZBrush etc.

More than anything, I think Blender shines for independent artists and independent game developers. While it may never give you the best looking results on its own, it works amazingly well as a jack-of-all-trades kind of 3D software and costs nothing. Bearing that in mind, instead of focusing too heavily on highly detailed, professional-standard, sexy models, I think there should be more focus on utilizing Blender for what it is: a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. I also think emphasis should be placed on video game related material, because gamedev is starting to become very popular and there are too many newcomers in that market looking for good learning material.

Er what was this thread about again?

Hi Thibaut,

I have experienced and still experience your pain. I was deeply engrossed in CG as a hobby a couple years ago. In fact, my engagement in CG has peaks and steep valley plateaus where I won’t touch Blender for months at a time. I have a 40 hour a week job and three school aged children. 

Here is what I noticed personally: I will start learning something specific. Like modeling, for instance. In the course of modeling, I want to delve into some other discipline, like texture painting, or sculpting. I think, because I expend so much engagement in modeling, when I go into something else, it feels overwhelming. After all, I just came out of developing muscle memory for all the keyboard shortcuts. But when I expand into another area, I just quit. 

But then, I pick it up again, because it is fun to create things. So I wake up early in the morning and I have some “things” that I want to make. So I get back into using Blender. I hone different skills to reasonable competency and then I get trapped in this weird space. With my limited amount of time to develop these skills, I also find I’m engaging with the CGC community or digging into a new tutorial that comes out.

Now I’m back after about an 18 month hiatus. I want to make a game and I am doing it presently using Blender and Blend4Web. I create. Then I realize, I don’t really texture paint things so good. I have to learn that. So it has been a balancing act of working on my project and yet, learning something new. And when you lean on tutorials, there is a comfort in the tutorials and it’s hard to escape. It gets better as you gain competency.

So what I need to do is time blocks. I evaluate on a daily basis. I have the mornings and the evenings after the kids are in bed. I will use those bookends of the day to either plow forward on my game or engage in an exercise. I can certainly stand to do this better as I fall to the temptation of catching up to @theluthier on the CGC Leaderboard… (shakes fist vehemently)

Do you write your goals down? When you are not motivated so much, is there something small you can do? Often, when you start doing something despite not feeling motivated, you’ll find the drive to keep going with it. Try to get away from doing tutorials if you can. I know, it’s so tempting. I see all sorts on BlenderNation via my twitter feed that are enticing.

Sorry for the ramble. I feel like something in my experience for the last 7 years as a hobbyist with a full time job is not uncommon to other folks out here. And, I just don’t know how to “fix” it. There is probably not a magic solution. It will take self-discipline and just pushing for your goals. It ain’t pretty. 

I’m rooting for you!