Skunkfrakker's Sexy Party

Sweet!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKfxMuNdqsU

Howdy! <3

I’m glad you like my stuff! 3D is a super fun hobby that I’ve found a lot of happiness in. Here’s my thought on how to get into it:

1: Have a reason to do it or you’ll get frustrated. I have absurdly deep reasons for making the stuff that I do. Some people will send you hate mail, so your reason has to be good enough to want to deal with that unpleasantness from time to time. 

2: Think of it like any art. I have a background in theater and therefore I think about animating in that way. The characters are actors on a stage, and I get to decide where the audience sits. If you want to model, think of it like sculpting as you might do with clay. The end result will be more aesthetically pleasing. The tools are just that. The stuff you make has to come from your heart. SFM’s a terrible tool, for example, but look at the beautiful things that Argodaemon puts out with it. If you make something to stimulate an emotion, it doesn’t matter what tools you use. A terrible musician will still be terrible on the best instrument, and the same applies to art tools.

3: Learn lots of stuff about art. Your absolute best bet is to study fine art in school, but there are other options. If you want to animate, get yourself a video production textbook from a university so you can learn the basics of photography and camera work, and then learn the tool of your choice. It helps to watch good artsy movies, too, and not that Michael Bay pop-culture type crap.  If you want to model, an art textbook is probably useful but you can probably jump straight into the tools for that one. 

4: Get good with the tools you like. If I was starting from scratch I’d learn Zbrush, Maya, After Effects and Photoshop. I use Blender, GIMP, Vegas, Unity and SFM. Video tutorials are the best for me. Lynda.com has the best tutorials out there, but Youtube’s OK most of the time.  Once you have a baseline of experience and know the tools pretty well (20 hours?) you’ll know what to Google when you’re trying to do something specific. Watch people do it on Picarto so you can see other people’s workflows, too, but don’t do that until you’ve studied on your own for a bit.

5: Care about what people say. If somebody’s writing you or offering feedback, he or she might be wrong, but it was still nice of that person to take the time to look at what you created. A lot of artists are mean to other people, and I don’t like when people do that. Artists set the tone of fandoms, so why not make it a happy one?

I hope that’s helpful to you and anyone else interested in trying this hobby out. It’s a lot of work, but I think it’s worth it. <3

I’m making it in Unity, so the concept there is that I develop it once and then can deploy it in multiple ways. I have the alpha running on the PC with higher complexity models, for example. The problem with the PC though is that I don’t have an Oculus Rift to test it with, so it’s kind of guesswork on how the tracking system works, there. A good buddy of mine has one, though, so what I figure I’ll do is shoot over the game when it’s in beta stage for PC (few weeks?) and then I’ll see if the tracker works/makes sense. I’m doing Android VR first because I have all the hardware already.

Side note for my beta peeps: Thanks for writing! Remember to connect via Skype and not here, because I can’t keep track of things with the Tumblr messenger system whereas Skype puts everything in handy conversations.

I took the day off today to put together a Halloween special! It’s rendering now! Yay! <3