During my first animation project I made quite a few mistakes, largely due to a lack of experience. Animation, more than nearly anything I’ve done with Blender, has a lot of potential for a change here messing up more than you anticipated in the scene. Yes, if you change a model that already has textures, there’s a good chance you’ll need to re-texture some of the model. It just seems that in animation, a change in a scene can have many more implications.

An aspiring 3D artist is likely to take on a short animation at some point. It could be as little as 30 seconds. Hopefully it won’t be more than five minutes of screen time. This could be an assignment from one’s school, something one’s doing for themselves, or even a freelance project. I’m still undertaking that first independent, non-tutorial led animation. It’s for a paying customer, though I underbid it quite a bit.

In Time For Halloween One of the things that amuse me about 3D animation are all the outtakes reals. Not the scripted ones, but the ones where a character’s fur explodes to a ridiculous inverted characters. One of my first experiences with that was A Beautiful Disaster. A simple walk animation where the legs weren’t keeping pace with the body, based off of CGCookie’s Animation Bootcamp. Today’s accident involved the Blender Human Generator plugin.

I was recently asked what I’d make as a Blender tutorial from a company that already has a ton of great, in depth courses. At the time I was stymied. A lot of what I’d teach was already covered by their lessons. I know now what I’d teach. A tutorial specifically about proper scene management in Blender. It’s one thing to create an animation or two, but even a relatively short animation can involve scene management.

Well, I heard back and I didn’t get the job. I’m pretty sure they had a lot of applicants, and I’m happy to have had the interview, but I can’t help but think that I may have messed the interview up a bit. Also, I am not yet as productive as I’d like to be. I’m working on a paid for project, which has slowed my contributions to the CGCookie Gallery and paused my own development of this portfolio site.

Man, I really need to focus a bit more on this site. My landing page is a bunch of blog entries when it should really be a “wow” portfolio page ala Lewis’s site. In order to have a “wow” page I actually need to organize and upload a bunch of my work. Another site I’m really impressed with is Dolph’s site. I also feel like I want to do a fair bit of work on the “organization” tools of Hugo.

Interviewing I had an interview today. One for a job I’d really like to get. I did reasonably, but, man, it’s been a minute since I last interviewed. There were a couple of things I focused on that I really wish I hadn’t, and one or two things I could’ve put more emphasis on. The first is that I really am excited by the opportunity! Working for this particular group, even in a correspondence role instead of a creative role would be a great opportunity.

I haven’t even announced my availability, or put out a portfolio or demo reel, but somebody reached out to me with a potential job offer! They want a one and a half to two minute animated product visualization commercial. Likely they reached out to me because the prices for even a small professional shop to do this would be prohibitive. I like that they were realistic about the time-frame, and realize that I’d be using pre-built assets for nearly everything except their product itself.

The Garage Office I recently moved my desk, computer, and everything I need out to the detached garage to be my office. I setup some cheap lights and a green screen for my streaming experiment. I have a few things I still need to do: Instead of WiFi extenders, I just bought a 200 foot Ethernet cable and ran it out to the garage. I need to get some plastic guides to attach it to the wall instead of just having it run along the floor, then I need to get some stakes to guide it along the edge of the yard.

This year has to be about money. The last year has been a nice learning sabbatical, but now I need to focus on getting a revenue stream going. I have other goals, but I think this one has to be foremost. On my mind: Money Putting the house on the market in April of 2024 Moving to Portugal Learning Portuguese Making sure I understand the Visa situation This includes visiting without ruining getting a freelancer and/or digital nomad visa Health Insurance Whatever intricacies are involved in renting or buying a flat Tons of stuff I’m sure I haven’t investigates Weight, and health I purchased more Huel Now I have to drink it instead of my 4 Ego Waffle 2 Egg breakfast I have to cut back on evening snacks in front of the TV No Pepperidge Farm Cookies No Cadbury Fruit and Nut bars No chips, Doritos, or any other super high calorie snacks If I have to have snacks, fruits, or some veggies, could replace them I’m 315 pounds.