Procrastinating, I’m really good at it. Let me share how good I am at it. Though, to be fair, it’s turned out to be not such a bad thing it took so long.
Two years ago I bought a new PC with as much power, memory and such that I could afford, or reasonably justify, at the time. It really is the most powerful machine I’ve owned.
I bought the machine with the idea that I was going to try to redevelop whatever computer graphics skills I might have once had, oh so long ago when I finished college. That was the story I used. Though at first I was really only putting the machine through it’s paces by playing video games. I wanted to see how it would handle things that I had previously had trouble with.
I finally started doing some research and looking into the programs that I thought would be good to use. I was reading a few of the 3D art magazines and computer art magazines and narrowed it down to a few that I thought would be good. I also looked at the price of them. Some are a bit more costly than others and a bit out of my reach.
I finally decided to spend the money and get Zbrush from Pixologic. This is really powerful 3D sculpting software. It is like working with digital clay. I started trying to do things in it. I got a book. That didn’t really work out. It looked like it might but no. I tried some online tutorials. That helped. I was able to do a few things that I hadn’t been able to figure out before.
As great as Zbrush is, the truth is, I really had my heart set on the Autodesk products like 3ds Max or maybe even Maya. Alas, this software was so far out of my price range that it just seemed like torture to even trial the software to find out if it was as cool as I remembered and if I could pick it back up. Confession; when I was in college I learned 3D Studio Release 4. Yes, you read that correct. Release 4. Before it was called Max. So like reminiscing about the good ol’ days when you thought you were a great dancer or ball player or whatever, I had the illusion that this was the software I should be working in. That if I had 3ds Max I could make great pieces of digital art.
Fast forward some, a year would be good. I decide to invest in a subscription to online tutorials for computer graphics. I watch a few and learn some things. I try another iteration of the first project, a dragon head. I get farther with it and it looks much better than the first 3. I even try a project for a story someone has written. It’s ok. It still needs to be polypainted, and the dragon still needs teeth.
A few more months and Autodesk has announce a software subscription/rental program. And now we’re talking. I can rent/subscribe to the software I want for a monthly, quarterly, or yearly fee. This is much more affordable. Ok, now which one do I want? Maya or 3ds Max?
I finally trial Maya, and I actually try to work through one of the tutorials to hopefully get a feel for how it would be to use the program. My intention was, after I finished trialing Maya then I would do the same for 3ds Max and then I would decide and sign up for the subscription. Things didn’t flow as I would have liked. And I kept putting off getting the trial for 3ds Max. I kept hitting mental roadblocks. What if I got Maya, and didn’t like it. What if I got 3ds Max and it was harder than I remembered and I should have gotten Maya. When it finally clicked with me that I was considering a monthly subscription that truly was monthly, not monthly with a commitment of a minimum number of months then it seemed silly that I was being so reticent.
The only good reason I thought I had for putting off getting the trial was trying to make time to really get to use my 30 days and really try the software. So I decided to procrastinate a little more and watch a really long series of tutorials on it. I finished the tutorials for 3ds Max 2014 just in time for 2015 to be release. It was very tempting to use new development by deciding I needed to watch the tutorial series for 2015. It was tempting and I do have it queued to watch. However, I did not. Not that I got the trial software right away. I was still waiting for a few things to get themselves straightened out before I did it. I still want to maximize my trial time.
Just this past week or so I was on the Autodesk site looking at things, and seeing what they had done with the subscription for the creation suite, since they had removed one piece of software, and I looked at the subscriptions for Maya and 3ds Max again. This time I discovered that the subscription fee for each has dropped by $10 and now you can get Mudbox for $10 a month. At least at the time of this post. It looks like it is time to stop procrastinating and do something. The excuses are falling away right and left.
So here we are, way into a blog post that is much much longer than you want to read. And this weekend I finally downloaded and installed the 30 day trial of 3ds Max. And I have used it.
I did this in 3ds Max, It’s not very fancy or complicated but I didn’t even get this far in Blender.