It's been a minute. Life and work consume most of my time these days and without some dedicated time to myself it can be hard for me to get in the proper head space to create. I lucked out here because I happened to fall asleep really early then wake up in the middle of the night when my two little incredibly loud and distracting shadows are sleep. So I woke up at 2 AM refreshed and ready to continue working on this piece I started earlier today.
If anyone ever reads the text in my posts you'd know I usually do my 3D work in Cinema4D and Octane render, but I did this one with Maya and Arnold. I've been experimenting with the Arnold toon shader and it's so damn cool. The Octane toon shader is trash and Cinema4D has a really powerful native toon shader, but it has 5000 knobs and sliders and I can never get exactly what I want. The Arnold one just works. The downside is I have to do CPU rendering which is literally something like 50x slower on my machine.
Along with Maya and Arnold another tool that I've been trying to integrate more into my workflow is Black Magic Fusion. It's a node based compositor and works a lot better than After Effects if you're primarily doing 3D compositing work. Nuke is the industry standard for this sort of thing, but Fusion is free and I think it's great for indie peeps like myself.
I think I'm in a bit of a weird place with my work currently. Most of the things I've wanted to learn in regards to skills and techniques, I've learned. Of course there's always more, more, more, but I'm really feeling like I need to chill out on learning new stuff and just produce a ton of work with what I know.
Considering my skillbase is super broad, I feel like I need to consolidate and hone in on what it is that will make my work mine. How I can incorporate all this stuff in interesting ways. How I can be honest in my expression. All that jazz.
So with this piece I'm trying to explore that a bit. There are 3D elements, 2D elements, but I'm thinking mostly about the graphic design and just making something appealing. I'll probably hate it tomorrow, but I don't today, so gotta take the wins where you get em. Anyhoo...
I'll probably try to brave the gas fees when the sun comes up on my side of the world and tokenize this. Hive fam gets the first look as usual. Hope you like! See you on the next one.