For some reason, a lot of people often think that I’m a lazy person who has too much time on his hands. And in all honesty, I am indeed really lazy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t do things… I do them in the most optimized way I could come up with, and in that way I am extremely lazy. And really good at it if I may say so myself! I don’t have a lot of time on my hands, on the contrary! I sometimes wish that each day had an extra couple of hours. I’m always busy with something. It’s not uncommon for me to feel that I’m too busy. But I have only myself to thank for that because once I have a specific goal in mind, I can get really focused on it and tend to treat all other stuff as minor things. I guess what I’m trying to put in words here is that I can become rather obsessive when it comes to things that I’m focused in on. Usually I just go with this flow, because I need these moments to get anything done. Being focused is a thing I sometimes struggle with, so once I have it, I want to maximize it’s output, even if it means loosing focus on other things. Am I still making any sense right now?
Anyways, before I forget my train of thought here, let’s talk about what I’ve been up to. The really super short answer is: Learning Blender. But I don’t want to end this blog post like this, so I’ll get into some more details right now. Here are some things that I’ve learned in the last few months:
I’d like to start by mentioning that I finally comprehend the rigging technique well enough so that my rigs actually work. I’m not saying I’ve become good at it, yet. But the success-rate compared to three or four months ago has increased enormously. Also the time it takes me to do build things is nowadays at least 80% faster as before. Perhaps some day I’ll become really good at rigging. But that will require me to follow a course or something to dive deep in the knowledge. My knowledge level right now is what you might expected from a person who is learning his lessons through trials and many errors.
I figured that being able to create things such as fire, smoke, water, wind effects etc in Blender will undoubtedly be very useful. So early on in my learning process I set my mind on learning this sooner rather then faster. The most important lesson I learned here was that I now realize that there’s a lot of roads that lead to Rome when it comes to Blender. I’ve been watching a shit-ton of tutorial video’s while learning these techniques and if that has thought me one thing, it’s that there exist at least three, and often many more ways to get certain things done in Blender. Sometimes this can become rather confusing, for me, and it results in me sometimes mixing different techniques that don’t work well together. A lesson I just recently learned from this is to stop watching every single YouTube video on a specific subject, and just stick to one way of doing things. Learning alternative techniques will eventually happen naturally at some point in the future. I’m sure of that.
The last thing that I’ve been struggling with during the last few months is actually me, or myself, or my brain specifically. I’ll explain this, but it will require a long-ass introduction. Are you ready for that?
All of the stuff that goes around in my head is always high-octane, meaning that by default it’s all really busy. There’s a name for this condition but I don’t feel like I want to mention it. Another way to put it is that my brain is filled with lot’s of unrest, and is all over the place, all of the time. This doesn’t show from the outside, and I’m happy it doesn’t, but on the inside I’m often traveling at a million miles per hour. This makes it difficult for me to stay focused on <whatever> long enough to see it all the way through to the end successfully. I’ve know this for a long time and over the years I developed coping mechanisms that help me with this, to a certain degree. As a kid and young adult I never used to finish anything, nowadays I’m doing a lot better with this. But what I am still having difficulties with is to not loose myself in details. When I’m in my blessed moments of pure focus, I tend to over-focus. Let me explain how this influences my 3D work by the following example:
Imagine you are building a landscape in Blender, with some grass and plants in it, and in the far distance a house. You know very well that the the things near to the camera need to be very detailed, and the things that are in the distance don’t need to be very detailed. Simple enough you might say? You would say.. My brain knows a thing or two, but it does the opposite at times and then it forgets it was even doing it in the first place. So in this example, my brain would probably make the wrong choice on what to start working on first, and somehow end up building a very detailed house. Sometimes it goes so far that the details on such house are so extended that the house won’t even be usable in the scene due to performance issues with my computer. This should tell you something! On a side-note, this also means that I really need newer hardware but that’s a story for a new blog post! To make a really longs-ass story short: I’m working actively on obtaining and keeping focus and to see things all the way to the end. This is still a work in progress I have to admit. But compared to ten years ago, I’m doing a LOT better nowadays.
I feel I’ve taken up enough of your time. No that’s actually a lie. I don’t care about that. It’s actually just my brain that currently wants to jump to doing something else. 🙂 Thanks for reading!
