■1: Focal plane, Big projects, and Chasing success

There seems to me to be an epidemic of chasing success in our community. The community of commercial art or whatever we call it. I don’t think it’s healthy and I don’t think it makes any sense. But things often get tense if I bring it up.

The trouble is that no one seems to be happy with where they’re at. That’s at all levels. I know students who can’t wait to become freelancers, freelancers who just want to land a job at a studio, and people at a studio who wish they could be back in school.

I know this statement belongs on a tacky fridge magnet but I’m saying it anyway: we only have this moment. It’s dumb to live for the future because the future never arrives. That point is obvious, but it’s easy to miss as we keep busy. The people who do think about it seem to beat themselves up about it: I know I should be enjoying this, but I’m not.

But usually we don’t think about it. We hold on to a vague sense that we will get there eventually. We live life constantly leaning forward. It’s as if we can’t really enjoy ourselves until we’re there. Usually, there is poorly defined.

Myself, I have this vague sense that my life is supposed to amount to something. That in some way I have to live up to my potential, and that the potential is very high. Who demands this of me? No one but myself. And what reason do I have for demanding it? I don’t even know. It’s stupid, the whole thing. And only recently did I notice that I’ve had this feeling my whole life. Not until now did I question whether it’s true.

To anyone who’s like me, I want to gently challenge you to think about it for a minute. For me it was uncomfortable, because it felt like giving up my drive. But man am I on a better path now.

There’s nothing wrong with chasing success, but there are wrong ways of doing it. I was doing it wrong.

I still have a lot to work through, and I’d love to keep sharing as I do. If you guys like this kind of stuff.

Discuss this post on Substack.

Boy is this video good. It’s so useful to see someone break down how they complete a big project like this. To get perspective on the time and skills required.

He said something that will stick with me:

To build something, name it

This rings so true to me. Naming it means you noticed it. And something with a name can have a bullet point, a folder, and a time slot.

Think about the words you have that the average person on the street doesn’t. When you look at an asset, you see roughness patterns, UV seams, particle distributions. Having names for all those things somehow seems to make them more apparent to your brain.

This is a camera rig I made a while ago. In my opinion, the only useful camera rig you can have.

Make two scenes. In the video sequencer, add both scenes as strips. Render from the sequencer to automatically “queue” both scenes for rendering.

It’s a kind of quick and dirty render farm queuing system.

When do you have multiple scenes in one file? It’s so damn useful. I often use linked scenes instead of view layers because you get to change render settings between them. Now I have a way of easily rendering all the scenes at once.