Or more like starting new projects. As in, yes, more than one.
I have so many ideas for things that I want to create and a few things that I need to create, and it is very difficult to decide what to work on next. Part of that is because some projects are going to take longer than others, some of it is because some projects are more timely.
For timely there are things that are seasonal, and while I might not get it ready before the season ends, the season itself puts me in the mood to work on it. For timely there are also things that are needed, for example, I have a need to re-arrange furniture in a room in my home. I can do what I always do which is use grid paper and cut out shapes and figure out if things will fit in certain spots. Or I can use 3ds Max and create a rough model and layout of the room and see how it will look. Then there are the projects that will take longer. They are projects I just want to do because I think they will be cool, and will give me an opportunity to learn to do something else I need to learn.
Choosing amongst them all is not easy. So this time I have decided that instead of working on one project at a time and only focusing on it, I will be working on three. Yes, three. I know this sounds a bit overreaching for someone very new to what I’m doing. However I
have a madness to my method. So let’s look at the projects I intend to work on.
The Holiday Card Project 2014. This is seasonal. I was going to do something for Halloween and it is so close now that it is just not reasonable. I will leave it in my list of projects so perhaps I will plan better for next year. Not only is it seasonal and timely, it
will give me an opportunity to work more with UV maps as well as learn some new modeling techniques and tricks. I hope to have it completed before the end of December. I hope.
The Model My Home Office Project. This is not going to be as detailed as it sounds, I don’t think. There is huge potential for scope creep with this one. However, I have a need or desire, to re-arrange the furniture in this room. There is a lot of furniture in the room and some very large pieces. I typically do this with grid paper before I start dismantling things and moving them around. Then when I do move things, sometimes the room feels off balance due to too many large things on one side or whatever. So I think a 3D rendering of the space will help. I will have the opportunity to work with making things the right sizes. Not just eyeballing things. If the bookshelf is 7 feet tall then it needs to be 7 feet or whatever measuring units I use. I may not model all the pieces exactly or even in anything more than a basic shape. I am looking to assess the volume and displacement of the objects in the room. And maybe lighting as this is a small issue as well.
The TKD Guy Project. This project is the one that I expect to take the longest. And it is the beginning of a much much larger project. I take Taekwondo, and I draw. I was looking at the little drawing mannequin I have, thinking, it would be kind of cool to demonstrate
Taekwondo moves with one of those manequins. It would be fun and sort of a cartoon like thing. So. I will create the mannequin in some form of Taekwondo uniform and create the studio and the required decor for the studio. This will give me a chance to work on the
modeling, using UV maps, lighting, rigging a character for animation, animating that character, and working with a camera or two. The length of the animation is not determined yet. And I have not decided what I want to demonstrate with this first segment.
I don’t expect to make visible progress on every project every week. Some weeks the progress will be in completing some tutorials on some component of what I’m doing such as rigging. Some weeks only one project will be updated and may show a lot of progress. Other weeks more than one project will get a bit of attention. At some point it may seem that one project has taken precedence over the others. This is a natural progression of things I think. Regardless of how things do progress, I will post about them and they will
each get their own section under projects so if you prefer to follow one more than the others you will be able to do so fairly easily.
This should be exciting.