Since I started working more on 3D projects, I found that the periods where I felt like I had something I could call finished started to spread farther and farther apart. Some of that was due to the fact that learning 3D is pretty hard, another part is that 3D things take a lot longer to make than your usual drawing, something I hadn’t realized before I started learning. The other thing that kept me from being able to have finished work was that I was just plain incapable of finishing it. Not truly incapable, but lacking any kind of patience required to get stuff done, like waiting an hour for something simple to render out or having to restart Blender to be able to preview my animations at full speed to make sure they even look good. Recently, though, I’ve realized something. That slowness and poor performance… the inexplicable crashes I’d have to deal with when doing menial tasks… those aren’t bugs on Blender’s end like I’d started to assume. No, my computer was actually just terrible to do 3D renders on.
Stump and I built a new desktop computer this summer, and the instant I plugged in my Blender files and got to work on them, I realized how sorry my situation really was. A huge amount of frustration I had with my work evaporated near imediately because I was finally able to just… do things. Make edits. See things in real time. I’m able to just… do my work now and get it done. That’s crazy to me.
The first thing I did was take this gloomy beach scene I had been working on that had gotten to the point my computer would hardly run when working on it, and it rendered out in minutes! I even took all the same assets and started to arrange them in a different scene with a more sunny effect, but that one’s been put aside for the moment because I don’t know enough about ways to manage lighting yet.
Since then, I’ve been digging into old models I was unable to finish and animate like my farmer, chicken, and cat: refining the geometry and textures to look a bit nicer, and repainting weights for animation which had been a challenge since I couldn’t previously tell what was going wrong very well. I’ve finally finished a set of animations for them that you can see me testing in Unreal Engine here.
Speaking of, I’ve finally sat down and started to learn how to use UE to make games, so hopefully I’ll have more things in regards to that to share before the end of the year! Here’s my horrible failure at trying to make a character face the direction they walk in while the camera is static, where I instead somehow make the worst tank-controls known to man.
Last point of interest for this update is that after a year of being closed, I’ve reopened the old Patreon account. I’ve made a post there to explain things in more detail, but the short of it is that Joe Biden shorted me and I could use a little extra cash. The plan there is that I’m going to have monthly polls to determine what kind of model I’ll make next, and as far as I’ve been able to discern, it doesn’t have to be locked for non-patrons, so anyone will be able to vote if they want to! I haven’t determined what I’ll be doing this month yet, but it’ll probably be pretty simple to start with. So if you’re interested in what that will be, keep an eye on the account!
Thanks for reading!
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