Bad habits are the thoughest to get rid of. Not because we're not concious about its consequences, just because it seems easier to just keep ourselves on the loop rather than break it. And tomorrow we can try again..

During these summer months, I've been making crazy holidays schedules, trying to keep on a balance my bussiness needs, my family needs and my own needs. No need to say that a honest look would reveal that I've (again) favoured my bussiness nuances a little bit. I'm not making hard judgements, I understand this is the way it is.

But some things shouldn't be as they are

During the hard lockdowns that took place in 2020, some mental health experts raised concerns about the impact of such extreme isolation from our usual social activities. Specially on older people.  Younger generations would be eventually able to ease the consequences with an increased use on social media. 

As the pandemic starts to fade out, we're still evaluating the long lasting consequences of this, and specially those related on how we build and maintain our relationships, being personal or professional.

And I'm midly optimistic when I see that the mental health is claiming its place on this new stage. From top sport figures to big companies stepping into the issue.  Lets add here the rising visualization of toxic behaviours on our industry, like cdprojekt red's crushing or Activision's sex harassment lawsuit. It's not hard to picture how much of an impact can cause these behaviours on people working there. Meanwhile its important to start visualizing the true size of this issue, I want to put a focus on the indie dev comunity. Much of the time, these small, even one-man-army people needs to deal, not only with the development of their project and associated risks, but with the community that they try to build around it, and the rampant toxicity of the smaller communities is worriesome, much of the time spurring direct attacks to developers if they don't act accordingly with their wishes. 

Or even a self inflicted anxiety of not being enought proeficient and falling behind your peers. Like you need to stay up to date 24/7 or you'll become a paper weight in no time.

Few days ago I found very interesting this thread from Andrew Hodgson, sharing the new work path that he will follow and the reasoning for that.  Andrew's work is superb and chances are you've already watched it on films during these last years. But he's drifting away from his main field of hard surface modeling, going thru a mostly conceptual field, citing (amongs others) the low cost of outsourcing. I'm pretty sure he's just taking the best path he consider for his own career, but the reason underlying is just a consequence of a trend that dilutes away the necessary link between job and personal growth. 

Ok, these are bussiness doing bussiness things, and I can see the happyness on that outsourcing ecosystem, but we're still pioneers from a historical point of view. This market has been around 30 - 40 years? Kids compared to more mature industries. Oh, now take a look at that part of industrial revolution and minimun wages and labour rights and how we reached these archievements.

Placeholder for a Sci-fi themed Rosie, that I hope to find very soon

To put it simple, we need tools, but also a strong unionized, protective and caring job ecosystem to avoid abuse and lost of added value. The more we fight on this field, the easier the way to stay happy and health.

Let's not pretend that having abusive, low income and unprotected jobs haven't impact on our mental health. And let's fight on it. It worth the efforts

What a exciting moment we live in. Videogames industry reached a noticeable milestone last year and it's not showing any sign of deceleration. Not to mention that the damn bug fueled the industry, but just look at the graph. With or without bug, it was poised to reach these heights sooner or later.

Source: Statista

Then you have all those exciting new toys called VR, Raytracing, GPUs shortages and mighty comebacks (AMD), and the last piece of the puzzle, the tools that artists all around the world are using on a daily basis to build the metaverse where we spend a nice chunk of our lives in.

For those not familiarized, when you see a finished character or asset on the screen, you're probably seeing the combined result of a team of artists and developers along with tools for modeling, concepting, rigging, texturing..

Now I'll talk a bit about my most beloved tool. 

Because I do love Blender, or better said: I've learnt to love Blender.

It's not an easy beast to tame. Full of shorcuts, menus, UI labyrinths... this is not a hammer, But a sophisticated piece of software that aims to cover the full pipeline from concepting to final production on VFX and modeling amongst other fields..

But

Yes, you knew it, there are monsters lurking around. I defeated few of them, but definitively the war is far from over.  As I'm aproaching to the final stages of a high poly model, the monster of performance shows its cruel smile. Because blender is painfully slow in edit mode. Let's frame this a bit more. If you're a low poly guy, just override this paragraph, nothing to see here. But if you're a subd warrior,  you know what I'm talking about. When you go 1M tris upwards, things starting to look like a mud fight. Then you make wrong choices and pull your hair out cycling into edit-object-undo... each one consuming 1, 2,3 seconds... not a good place to be.

And I'm running it on a top of line 5950X paired with a 3090FE.

No matter what you have to crunch polygons, you're due to fight here.

How did I get here?

Things get worse when you know the details..

• It's a regression. 2.79 performance was far better.
• Seems that the root of the issue is deeply buried in parts of the code that very few people knows in enought extension to try to fix it.
• The issue doesn't seems to be a critical task for development team.

Don't hold your breath.

EDIT 5/20/2021: Or maybe, yes. https://code.blender.org/2021/05/mesh-editing-optimization-initial-steps/

Another interesting issue that I realized during these years of dealing with Blender is the weird status of its "educational" resources. Let me explain. You can bury hundred of elephants with youtube content and short tutorials on how to make this, how to do that.. also, there are thousands of online courses covering the very basics of the software. Ok, that's not a surprise and you can extrapolate to almost every creative tool under the sun. Oh, and the donut!. 

At this point, you're tasting a long sip of some abundance paradox. There are so many resources.. what's the best for you?

I've no a solid answer. Make your way, try to find someone whose teaching style makes click with you. But something that I want to remark here, don't be fooled: Learning blender IS NOT EQUAL to learn MODELING. Because at certain point, geometry and shading models are basicly the same across all 3d design tools. And learning modeling is far more difficult.. just take a look at this highly technical forum about modeling.

And then, the famous blender addons.

Meanwhile I think there are great addons, and let's be honest, some of them are really fundamental to reach an effective workflow, I don't like how much intrusive can be some of them. They're just adding more shorcuts, more UI elements, more scripted actions.. pressing a key and adding two modifiers, three checkboxes and few edge values..and BOOM! you have a tangled mess that you don't know what's happening on your mesh. So, don't get caught by syren chants. My advice here would be: First, understand what an addon does, and why it does. because sometimes, you're just playing following the mindset of the addon creator rather than learn and develop your own style. 

I know that being a Jack of all trades is not an easy task nowadays. But the performance bit is a bit worriesome right now on my side. Lets wait patiently and be confident on the outstanding work of Blender developers. Hey, I got rid of my fail-safe, dumbproof freemium videoediting software and get things done in Blender video editor in my last project. That counts as a victory! And nobody is perfect, right?.

If writing a blog post on a foreing language weren't enought daring (English is not my native language boom! ) , naming it with such ampulous topic is checking all boxes about how to not retain audience.

So, if you're an experienced 3d modeler, or freelancer, you'd probably already know the topics that I'll mention here, not pursuing a pedagogic knowledge, but just give enought context to be on the same page when discussing some items.

And I'm doing this because I recently had a "premature" end on a project I was working on. Maybe the cause of this was a misunderstanding of some concepts that I should have had explained better.  This whole topic of how to deal with your customer is a world on itself, but lets go with some bullets that I've found interesting to elaborate during my freelance experience.

• Take nothing for granted.

We are naturally inclined to obvey some explanations because we assume that the counterpart knows the field that we're dealing with. And this is one of the first traps you need to avoid. Be sure you're explaining clearly all concepts to people that aren't familiarised with such highly technical terms. At the same time, don't overreact and give your potential customers a tutorial on how to bake from high to low. This sounds very simple but it's always a challenge: to result informative without being pompous, presumptuous, or just annoying. Customers want things get done. But they don't need to know necessarily how and why things are done as they are. 

• I'm focused on 3d Assets for real time visualization and videogames development.

If your project isn't directly related to videogames, we will need to make a tad of exploration prior to go ahead on route. 3d Assets for game development counts with lots of nuances and tricks that aren't useful on other CG disciplines.  Of course, I'm totally able to go ahead and work on other fields, but don't expect an optimal outcome regarding price/performance ratio. 

• I'm focused on Sci-fi, Hard surface assets.

This bullet is very similar to the last one. Don't feel tempted to post a "d'oh" gif now. Few months ago I was contacted by a exciting media company from CA that produces stuff for top tier level players.  They requested me specifically to model some scenery based on real world monuments. I rejected the tasks, not without a lot of pain! these clients are super-important to step up the game!. But in all honesty, it was not my field of expertise. Now, I'm not promoting this way of thinking, because being a Jack of all Trades has its advantages. I'm just telling I don't feel good dealing with stuff that I'm not focused on.

• I've a workflow (it isn´t perfect, but it's mine)

Everyone has deadlines, and I've my owns (probably derived from other customer's deadlines), and workflows aren't an exception. So, when dealing with 3d assets for videogames, there are standard workflows that has been proven to be solid. And they are made of steps and each one needs its sweet time. Meanwhile you can be "flexible", you also need to adhere to your own pace. Being able to adjust on the fly is very welcome on certain tight deadlines, but sometimes you need to say ‘nope’.Deal with some pressure is ‘ok’ but sacrificing your workflow to adjust yourself to unrealistic deadlines is a big ‘no’ on my dictionary. 

Customer relationships is a suggestive mixture of science and art, and there are no absolute answers, but for now, these are my guidelines for few of common questions that arises once in a while on my way as a freelance.

Feel absolutelly free to try change my mind! Cheers!