So many of us continue to be totally out of work, as the Live Event industry just doesn't exist these days. I've been trying to stay active and positive; but it's sure hard. For lots of reasons. I feel fortunate - Currently I'm not being financially bludgeoned the way that many others have been. I've seen a lot of kindness and generosity, and hopefully I'll be able to pay that back or pay it forward one day.
In the meantime I've been back to work with the 3d software. . . I've been doing "two-day challenges" this week. That's when I give myself a project based on a single research image. Then I take one day to do my modelling, and one day to do my texturing, lighting, and rendering. The results are never perfect, and I'd love to take the time to go back and refine things. But that isn't the point (for now). The point is to stay nimble and efficient, while learning new tricks on the way and revealing my weaknesses and places to improve.
Of course I took some liberties at times. Being a designer, I just couldn't help myself. I also added figures; because I can't stand to see an unused environment. Usually, in these exercises, my biggest regret was not having enough time to perfect the materials and textures. You can spend hours trying to get a brick texture tweaked. And, since I didn't use any post-processing on these, my goal was to try and get everything as close to finalized in the model itself (no Photoshop cheating). I also tried to model everything myself from scratch; besides the characters and the furniture (which just eat up time like crazy). I found I spent most of my time actually trying to get the camera angles and architectural scale correct/close. Not having any real data on the scenes creates a lot of trial-and-error guesswork.
While I keep lamenting my shortcomings in these renderings, I can't say I'm completely disappointed. The exercises definitely serve their purpose. I'm energized when I work on them, and that's a great feeling considering the current state of the world. And I certainly learn a lot in a short amount of time. When the bell rings and I have to stop working for the day I look back in the progress I've made and I'm happy. That's an accomplishment. I'll take it.
Thanks for reading!