Comments on: How to stay motivated during long projects

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 21:20:44 +0000

I agree about having games on the computer. I don’t have any games on the computer at all. You need to get away from the computer for a break and that would never happen if you was playing games on it as well as working on it.
So I have the XBox 360 for games instead. I’ll be looking forward to doing some coop on Halo Reach when it finaly arrives in the mail. Only for inspirational purposes you understand, to get me motivated.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 04:09:53 +0000

Forgot something in my last coment.
It might help if you go search for “online stopwatch” and set it to about 5 minutes. so you can do something, but if you forget blender is rendering, that noise will sound in about five minutes.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 04:07:10 +0000

About the video games…
I think people can play them as long as they don’t get in the way of what your doing. Like… A long rainy weekend and you want a break from something long (like creating a hi-poly model in blender) But you wouldn’t just fire up hl2 while your on the roll, making your model, and everything is going well.
But I see what you mean. Good vid.

By: Rutger

Rutger — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 20:53:07 +0000

Hey Andrew! I’m starting to enjoy your site a lot! I’m beginning to understand the way Blender works, I already did a little but that was still with version 2.49. Anyways, thank you for putting up this video, as it is really helpful to know how other people think about certain issues. I recognized the thing about playing games, I use to play a lot of games to, both on my Xbox and my PC, but now I just only play once in a while on the PC, and spending the rest of my time learning a lot of graphical programs. I recently finished 2 of my projects, which really feels good! Now I can focus myself on other things like smaller projects. But, to finish this message, it’s good to know how you deal with certain aspects. Thank you Andrew, keep it up!

By: Terrachild

Terrachild — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 20:39:49 +0000

Well, if you want to stay relevant as an artist, then ignoring what’s going on in the world is probably a bad idea. The best art is usually a reflection of the time in which it is created. Albeit, often it is a warped reflection.
Also, you can watch the news and if you see a problem in the world, like a flood, then make a small donation. 5 dollars doesn’t seem like much, but multiply it by millions of people and suddenly, real problems in the world could be solved.
Stay connected!

By: Jake

Jake — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 08:12:34 +0000

Thanks for the advice, especially about the “ignore the news” part – I hadn’t really thought of that.

In response to a previous comment:
Jon: “If you don’t get bored of playing video games, don’t use blender.”
Well I completely disagree with that. I don’t get bored of video games and I still use blender pretty well. You just have to teach yourself to moderate your time spent on video games – you should also have the desire to see the project through, otherwise it’s doomed to fail.
Besides, playing a video game after 4-5 hours of blender-ing is a really good way to get some down time.

By: Keepin’ it Real (in the 3d industry) | Blender Episodes | Blender Guru

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 02:15:19 +0000

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By: Matt Hurley

Matt Hurley — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 16:55:43 +0000

Oh! And losing work. One of the biggest demotivators for me is forgetting to save and then losing a whole bunch of stuff. It makes me feel stupid for not saving, which just adds insult to injury. Losing progress turns something that I love into something tedious and frustrating. SOOOO glad that Blender autosaves! But even that sometimes doesn’t help. Even with an autosave every 5 minutes, the crash inevitably happens at the worst possible moment. Crashing right after a long bake, or a long modifier calculation, something that Blender didn’t get saved, that sucks too.

Again, sometimes you just have to persevere.

By: Matt Hurley

Matt Hurley — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:49:54 +0000

Great discussion. Motivation is probably the single greatest asset. Software can be acquired, knowledge can be learned, problems can be overcome, creativity can be stimulated, but motivation is the only thing that you can’t get from somewhere else.

One thing that I haven’t seen anyone mention yet is getting frustrated by the tedious little repetitive things that sometimes there’s just not any way around. If you’re going to make a gear with lots of teeth, you pretty much have to select every other pair of points. There’s just not really another way to do it, unless you can write a script for it. Sometimes you can’t find a script that will do it. Sometimes finding the script takes more time and frustration than just doing it manually. Sometimes there’s just no other way to do it. These are the things that don’t take much skill at all, they don’t really demand much creativity or ingenuity, and they are boring. The only thing that I’ve been able to come up with is sheep tenacity. I just keep doing it even though it’s boring, and sucks, and there’s GOT to be a better way to do it, and whatever.

When I get frustrated by a problem or bored of the tedious little things that you have to do, I often just do a google video search for “Blender 2.5″ and see what comes up. The nice thing is that most of the videos are really short, so they don’t take up much time, but they also show you what kind of cool things are possible if you just keep at it.

Thanks for your work. You’re really helping the rest of us out a lot. Keep it up.

By: Oscar Baechler

Oscar Baechler — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:55:53 +0000

I totally agree regarding video games. What happened with me was a solid philosophical shift, where I decided things that dealt with an aspect of creation (drawing, 3D projects, writing, even cooking) were more important in my life. As a result, I don’t even need discipline these days–I’ll just play a video game for an hour, then feel an existential malaise as if I’m wasting my life. Television’s similar, although I make exceptions for trying to watch good movies; IMDB’s top 250, AFI’s top 100 lists, the history of the Best Picture winners, Criterion collection, etc.

Two things I’d add: Force it! I recommend Leechblock for Firefox. I also kept cheating and just using a different browser, so finally I uninstalled all browsers EXCEPT Firefox, and added Chrome and Opera’s homepages to my blocked list XD

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476/

Additionally, if you’re a mac user you can use Self Control, a wonderful little program that can let you guarantee a whole day without Facebook.

http://visitsteve.com/work/selfcontrol/

Lastly, do you have a commute? I seriously recommend doing what I do. Request a bus pass from your work, then draw on the bus instead of driving to work. It might mean 15 minutes longer to get home, but it’s a chunk of drawing every day. Much more useful than a chunk of driving every day. Plus, over the course of a year, your body of work builds up tremendously!

By: Jerry

Jerry — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 15:41:44 +0000

Sorry – last link was bad above.. and river was too dark.. fixed:
posted:
http://filmart.wikidot.com/start

well more like a stream..now.. lol

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 14:45:51 +0000

Hehe yeah HF 2 and Team Fortress are big time suckers for me too, I have to limit those.

I also try and balance my time spent on tutorials, and my time spent on making my own stuff. The constant learning of new things can be a benign antidote to problems in your own projects