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

[Paul Haynes]

I try to do something every day. Some days I model, other days I watch a video. Even if it’s only 15 minutes – do something.

[Matthew Ullrey]

Nick Seluk’s comic series “Heart and Brain” seems to have a finger on the pulse of this topic. I certainly can relate. Taking Kent Trammell’s BC1-1801 class has helped reconnect my heart and brain tremendously. 

[Michal Zisman]

I too have some days or weeks where I pause, mostly for lack of inspiration. I know it’s not good (I feel rusty sometimes) but I try not to beat myself too much about it.

These days I go to pinterest for inspiration, and open up my project’s file whenever I have time, even if it’s just a few minutes in the evening before bed time.

[silentheart00]

There are a lot of good suggestions here, and I’ll throw my hat into the ring, too.

I started CGCookie because I wasn’t going anywhere I wanted fast.  My Maya student license expired, I had no money, got student loans breathing down my neck, just kind of floating.  I was floating because my SO made enough money to cover living expenses for both of us and I could pursue freelancing.  Well, it wasn’t going anywhere fast, and I needed to learn something free, like Blender, and a community to keep me going is certainly nice.  Things have changed since then once I realized how much time I was wasting in a day (just in a haze, pissing the day away).  I focused on my goals by writing them out, creating a daily schedule with a grading system to keep me honest, and have really picked up my daily improvement.  My SO and I want to go to grad school for game development (because we’re both not achieving our dreams fast enough), and it is hella expensive.  My SO can pay for one person if we nickeled and dimed the one income as hard as possible, but that wouldn’t be fun or fair to both of us.  So, I’ve got to join the 9-5 workforce, hopefully make enough in the next 3 years to pay for anything leftover for both of us to go (not a huge deal breaker, but grad student loans are way harsher than undergrad; don’t really want them), and I’ll be working at night alongside my SO on our skills that we need for our portfolios.  This is a huge motivating force for us.

I’ve found picking up little contests and challenges have helped to motivate me.  I took part in the Artstation challenge called Beneath the Waves for preproduction, and it was so fun and invigorating.  I’m a shit drawer by comparison, so going into it for my own personal goal was way more fun for me and the deadline helped keep me honest.  I would’ve done game production, but I wasn’t comfortable enough in Blender to continue.  The new Weekly CG Challenge was announced a couple days ago, and I think I’ll draw something for that, too.  Having an end goal really helps, take small steps along the way, grade yourself if you think that’ll help keep you honest, and eventually it’ll become second nature.

When pondering if I should start my day, I’ll start with something small, like 1 CGCookie video.  I like starting with small tasks because it primes my mindset for the rest and helps get me in the zone.  Oh, also important, I use a time tracking app, like Gleeo.  It really opened my eyes to where my time was going and how much time I’ve wasted in a day.  I always tell myself when I’m not feeling up to doing something, “If not now, then when?”  I have the time now, why not just do it?  If I don’t do it now, when will I do it?  Also having friends who can critique your work helps keep the motivation.  I showed my friend the hammered metal shader I made, and it inspired him to get back into Blender!

I guess it also depends on how you’re motivated.  Are you best motivated by outside forces (extrinsically) or are you best motivated from within (intrinsically)?  Take a look at yourself so you know how to motivate yourself.  For me, it’s been mostly intrinsic, but extrinsic forces certainly help propel me farther than just my will alone.  So, understand yourself and find what works for you.

[Michael Hazdra]

The things we do to avoid doing stuff we don’t like inadvertantly causes us to not do the things we like.

[sorta]

What I do is I set a time related goal and a minimum time requirement. So for me my weekly goal of blender stuff is 35 hours a week, ideally I’d spend 5 hours a day. My minimum is 10 hours a week which is basically 90 minutes a day.

I get frustrated easily on tutorials when I hit the same buttons and get a different result so I mix the tutorials with little learning projects where I make objects from my home. My rule for the mini projects is simple “don’t try and make it perfect”. Example, I created my desk, I gave it the color and shine it has in real life, but I didn’t make the drawers or the drawer handles. Why? because its really complicated for me and if I try i’d just get frustrated/depressed.

As a noob, what I do is use the tutorials to learn new/hard things and make mini projects to apply the stuff i’ve practiced that isn’t super complicated.

[MarkE Raymond]

Thank you for this question. This is a question I have been asking myself. I wish I could easily grasp the many aspects of 3D computer graphics, but I can’t. Maybe its my age, disability, or process making it more difficult to learn then it had been in the past for me. What I do know is that if I start a lesson here on CGCookie and am interrupted missing several days with no using Blender to experiment with what I was shown in a lesson or not watch more of the lesson videos I have to watch the videos again. Because of this I am trying to commit at least 1 hour a day to CGCookie and one hour to “Lab time” using the skills covered by the lessons.

If I find I am having issues with grasping what is being shown to me in a lesson I listen and watch the lessons and grab the Blender manual to help me try to grasp how to complete a task. If I’m starting to get disappointed or frustrated by not be able to complete and exercise I’ve put it on a shelf for a while and go on to another lesson or lessons. Also being such a noob here I’ve been reaching out to the other beginner videos which is helping me to stay motivated. Also, I’m finding it is helping me to get a better grasp on the processes I need to go through to complete a desired task. None of this is easy. Reminding myself this by saying this to myself some days over and over again is helpful too. Knowing that if this was easy everyone would be making their own games and animations.

Some aspects of this stuff comes so easy and other of the processes seem impossible to do. I figure the more time I spend playing (experimenting) with what is being covered in the lesson and knowing I am not going to completely understand everything the first time I go over it but I will be able to better understand the processes better the more time I spend using the software and keeping close by notes of the steps to perform certain task and using them can only help.

Summary:

1. Commit to a set time to lessons and a set time to software practice time.

2. Complete all quizzes

3. If stuck completing a exercise don’t obsess over it allow yourself to move forward. Try to seek out help and or see if there is another course that will compliment the exercise having difficulties with.

4. Use Blender Manual, CGCookie community, and notes.

I don’t know if this will be useful for anyone other then myself. I do know as I just said answering this question has been quite useful for me. Thank you again for the question. And more importantly a very big thank you to the CGCookie team for all that you offer here and the many hours you’ve spent creating a very useful education tool for CGI. Marke R

[Dore Diskin]

My cases wasn’t a routine, but doing what was needed at the moment, and fixing my path along the way. I never had a schedule, or a plan. I just did it because I really loved using Blender.

About 2 years ago, I was trying to get into a 3D program in the army after showing my skills in Blender at a hackathon (I wasn’t using blender for 3-4 years at that time). My computer was very weak back than to use 3D and couldn’t handle more than 15k verts. Anything more than than and the computer froze and needed a reboot. And so I made for the hackathon only low poly models. A friend of mine who got to the program tutored and helped me in what was needed.

I later on found a local place that let me use their gaming pc for that purpose. It could handle high poly and rendering very well. And so I upgraded my Cgcookie to pro. And so I would spend virtually every waking moment on it. Until I would get exhausted and fall a sleep at some corner of the space.
My projects at the time were : plane, walking animation, and a chessboard 
I highly recommend not doing this.

Upon reaching a certain level of skill. It became a lifestyle and obsession.
Any vacation time that lasted more than a weekend would be spent with at least 7 hours doing nothing but blender. I don’t have a routine, nor a regular schedule. I do it whenever I can because I enjoy it.

Overtime my projects were going aimlessly, doing werid thing in Blender and 2D art. At which my skills paced were staggering horribly as I wasn’t going towards any certain dicipline.
Later on I got into fightning animation. And decided to enter it more heavily and take it as a main dicipline.

[Don Newman]

I started off the year deciding to learn Blender. I wouldn’t call it in a New Year’s resolution, just something I decided to do at that time. The decision actually came about December but with the business of the holiday and traveling I decided January would be my start time. So I started with trying to work through Zacharias Reinhardt’s Mastering Sculpting course as sculpting is what I was really after. At the same time I tried working through Sculpt January. Realizing I needed some more basic training I also signed up for a year of CGC. That was all fine for the first few days before going back to work before I realized I had bitten off way more than I could chew.

In the mean time, I had come across Andrew Price’s video on the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Artists and had committed myself to the first habit, Daily Work. I’ve watched it a few more times and shared it with everyone I knew. Combined with his fourth habit, Conscious Learning, I scaled myself back to just working through the fundamentals on CGC. No matter what, I make a point of coming on here to at least grade new exercises.

The thing is, they are habits and habits take time to develop before they just become second nature. Sure, some days I might only come on here and grade a few exercises, but most days I’m watching lessons and then on weekends when I have more time going back to do the exercises.

The result has been its own motivation. Friends and coworkers continue to encourage me and find it hard to believe I’ve only been doing it for a few months. Many of them are artists themselves that went to school and now do it professionally (I work at a marketing company but creative design isn’t my job, I’m a software dev by day).

Another source of motivation has been looking at portfolios and demo reels. Not just of established artists. That can lead to telling yourself “but they have been doing it for years, I will never be that good” but also of student compilations from different art schools like Gnomon. Sure, they have access to some tools like render farms that I don’t, but seeing what they pull off as just students feels much more attainable.

Because of seeing the work others are doing has shifted my goal from wanting to just sculpt things for 3D printing to something much bigger. I’ve now set a goal to create a full animated short forcing me to learn how to do the whole pipeline. And that has all come full circle back to helping me be better at creating characters for 3D printing.

Building skills has reinforced other skills. My biggest regret was waiting until my 40s and getting cancer to realize how much time I wasted wishing I was artistic before doing something about it.

[John Crawford]

Required viewing:

[Catherine Irkalla]

Personally I just try to do SOMETHING related to CG, art, music, or game development every day. Some days this means just watching GDC videos on YouTube, some days this means playing Rocksmith for 6 hours straight. Some days its no computer at all and just doodling. To me these things are all related and even if its just watching a GDC video that is a step forward. Those are easy to binge watch too!

[Ryan Brewer]

Just to throw in my 2 cents, I was immediately drawn to the cgcookie site structure. With the new learning flows (like MMBootcamp) and live-classes, I’m happy with where the site’s going.

Compared to Plural Site, Lynda.com & (one from my industry) Egghead.io, I haven’t seen any other site formats that come close to what you guys are doing.

[Ryan Brewer]

One thing I really liked about Kent’s Live Class this month was that he helped us lay a bedrock of motivation for ourselves by asking us to 1) find a piece of 2d artwork we liked, and 2) write a short backstory for it.

For me, because I took this to heart, I immediately flipped from “Meh, I’m not into sculpting yet, I might drop out of this class.” to “I really want to do this!”.

The Backstory Strategy is fantastic because it’s a small time-investment upfront (our backstories were capped at 200 characters or so) that can help motivate you for the long haul that is a 30, 40, 100 hour project (that won’t be all sunshine and roses).

[Wilco Wilbrink]

I also just started on CG Cookie. I would also dig the even more Learning Flow minded approach. I always feel lost in the loads of video’s on most learning sites without a structure to guide me through my learning experience.

[Mark Brown]

I’m starting to wonder if our “buffet” approach to offering training is more negative than positive. A huge collection of courses can be distracting and overwhelming, as you imply. It makes me think that reformatting course offerings into guided learning flows is best. I.e. Learning Flows on steroids.

Do you think that could help keep you on pace and motivated?

I have been going through the courses for about a month now. I originally joined with a specific goal in mind. After seeing all of the content and training available, I started to get excited and overwhelmed. However, the learning flows have been the jewel here allowing me to put a plan together for which courses I want to take and in which order depending on how it is recommended in the learning flows.

Regarding keeping on pace and motivated, there are a couple of things I have taken note of so far. 

First, and again, the learning flows have really helped out. Seeing myself progress through not just the courses, but also my progress in the entire learning flow is reassuring.

Second, the length of the videos are generally appropriate, with 10 – 15 minutes being the sweet spot for keeping my concentration. Shorter than that and I am left with a feeling of “was that all?” while more than that finds myself thinking about how I will apply what I saw to project x.

Third, the biggest speed bump to me keeping pace is the scope of the exercises. This is not the say there is a problem with the exercises, and in fact I look forward to them. Rather, I know that for each exercise, I will be spending hours or days completing each one as I plug away at whatever issues comes up as I try to implement what I just learned for the first time. When I balance the time it will take to complete the exercise vs going through a new course and learning something new, I find myself struggling.

On one hand, I want to complete the exercise and reinforce the knowledge there by tattooing the knowledge in place rather than just applying it like a stencil. On the other hand, I very much want to get to the next course and learn the next skill that will bring me closer to my ultimate goal.

This very well might just be me, but I wanted to at least add my notes for consideration.

[Author]

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