#18: Q&A Learning too slowly, getting distracted and setting deadlines

g'day and welcome to the andrew price podcast the podcast for serious artists who want to learn habits techniques learning curriculums all that stuff that doesn't fit into a tutorial but is very important um this is now on a new youtube channel you might have seen um i spoke to my youtube partner and they said that if you've got content that is different in for two different audiences as in like it might not be suitable for this audience but this audience will like it should put on two channels i'm like all right the podcast it is a little different to my tutorials so i'm going to separate it now so it's all on here the enterprise podcast is its own channel and i've also got a new light uh i go on professional uh people were telling me that the lighting was too hard the shadows on my cheeks were too harsh i'm like all right i'll get a proper light so i got one of those aperture things which by the way i did not realize how bright professional lights are i went from having like you know an led panel thing that you can just buy for 70 bucks or something to like this proper thing and turned it on and it just filled the room with light it seemed hot like brighter than the sun which is obviously can't be possible but like i mean you could seriously damage someone's eyes if you just turned it on and just lit them up like there's just no question that would seriously hurt um so i think i've got it on like 60 percent now the last podcast i did it two percent because with i learned that if you put this giant soft box over it as well that um it needs a lot more light because it's going off of a bigger thing but anyways so it's like hot the box is half the size of the room and it's anyway it's something i learned actually like doing that interview series in la um a few years ago was like you meet the artist and you shake that you know they arrive at the little the shooting location hey how's it going you know come on in yeah great this is just gonna be easy it's casual chat you know sit down we'll have a thing they sit in the chair with the lights on and oh my god it's like deer and headlights like you know and it's it's really like you think like yeah like how does you know it's just a light like just ignore the light but it's really unnatural it feels like you should just be going like this and just going like all right let's talk you know covering covering your eyes but you can't so you just have to sit there with like this light just like making you squint and you just have to pretend it's not there and then i'm actually just sitting across from somebody and we're just gonna talk you know but the lighting is just ridiculous it's painful um so i don't know how they do it on movie sets especially years ago like what did they do before cameras could actually capture dynamic range like the lighting must have been ridiculously bright um or is it brighter now i don't know lighting technology seems to have just gotten ridiculous i don't know i'm rambling um yeah by the way everyone who happens to um what any people who have been just commenting non-stop on twitter and youtube where's the donut nft when's it coming um it's coming all right um it's just taken so long to produce oh the challenges this thing better pay off i mean this this nft price by the way if you missed the thing basically the start of the year i said i'm gonna make an nft of your donuts you send me your donuts i'll render them i'll put it into a mosaic of a big donut and then we'll sell that and then we'll give all the money to blender raise money for blender um didn't realize just for starters like how few people would follow descr the instructions of how to prepare the the donut and then we had to write well i didn't write it um google engineer volunteered his time for the project patrick crawford shout out to him wrote this add-on which will actually read the blend file be able to detect what is the doughnut based on parenting and whether it's got sprinkles or other things what other objects are not part of the scene remove them center it put it on the frame with the same lighting template and then render it so we then rendered the entire thing and um it did work it you know we got through like most of them i think like 98 automated but then i think 10 percent also needed fixes after so um that was not me that was also i recruited uh bill who works for me bill barber i'm like hey bill what are you doing this week oh i'm pretty excited i'm working on this uh this thing for the team hold that thought how would you like to fix a thousand donuts one after the other until you've forgotten why life is worth living how would you like to do that um yeah so he uh he had the uh in mv i mean i did some hey come on give me some credit i did like a hundred but after that i'm like all right this is not the best use of my time i'm going to get somebody else i gotta run a company all right i gotta run polygon speaking of which this episode is made possible thanks to my company polygon the library of assets to help you make better renders and design better spaces faster we're changing our tagline eventually to just be design better spaces because we are going architecture all the way we want to just go all in on that and really the whole point of having like a huge asset library that you want to subscribe to is so you can test out ideas like it's like a exploration phase throw in furniture this material that material and you got to rapidly and you need lots of volume and variety and that is different than just make better renders faster so design better spaces faster it's going to be the tagline in the coming year and a bit as we sort of uh transition fully we're committing to it we were just sort of like ah just i'll dabble put my toe in it we're doing we're kind of doing architecture but we're also you know we're going fully we're going arc this so if you're an arc first professional get ready for some lots of materials and lots of assets related to architecture it's pretty exciting actually we just i mean if you've run a company before you'll know that you can never move as fast as you want to move because you know there are problems with your business the website the team the you know things that you know people can't log in and they can't get the asset fast enough and they're like how do you fix the download and it just feels like you're constantly pushing against it and then you find the right person you hire the right person and it's like oh everything works so we hired a product manager um late last year and they've spent like the year just like improving the site process individually going through each feature of the site fixing seo fixing the speed like this the site loads like i swear like 10 times faster than it did at the start of the year downloads will start 10 times faster the like the the everything has just been optimized there's dark mode we've got everything and like we're able to like rapidly predict anyways this is a this is a thinly veiled ad but i'm sure that's what it sounds like but um it's just it's great when you finally get that person that can just like make stuff happen it's like damn this is how it should be um all right well that was a ramble let's get into it we are going to be answering your questions so if you have a question blenderguru.com forward slash podcast question that is where you can send in your video so it has to be a video all you do is you get your smartphone you go selfie mode vertical and you go hey andrew my name is such and such i'm from estonia wherever and uh this is my question then you just ask your question within 30 to 60 seconds and then i'll pick the most interesting ones don't feel bad if you don't get picked on the podcast it could be that i'm storing your your aunt your question in a folder and i'm going to answer it soon you'd be surprised there's actually not that many people who submit questions so if you're wondering like should i submit i don't know if it's worth it like go ahead like i i want people to submit because i'm kind of running out of questions but i picked some good ones so let's do it uh let's jump into the first one by our nav hey andrew my name is arnoff pandey and i'm from india and my question is that what is the best practice that a beginner can follow is it that i do one tutorial and one by my own own or something like that uh let me know uh i hope you like the question thank you excellent question anav short answer i i think the one-to-one cadence is pretty good for beginners um but the long answer is like eventually you should really only need tutorials when you either need to learn a new skill or you uh it's one of your priorities it's a skill set that you need to learn eventually um like for example um just 3.0 is about to come out blender 3.0 and uh geometry nodes if you learned all that get ready to relearn it because they changed it they changed it from this attribute system to this field system which is actually more user-friendly it's easier to understand and you can read the node setups a lot easier than attributes but it does require relearning things so anyways i needed to learn it because i was trying to scatter something and i'm like i can't even figure out where's the scat like ah so i gotta like watch a tutorial so that's a perfect case i need to learn a new skill to achieve this skill for this this project um but then as well as that i am learning um for example like color space and color grading theory like understanding how that works because i know that color and like you know the difference between a 16-bit tiff and a 16-bit png and all that technical stuff that so few people understand one of them is troy sabotka on twitter he'll let you know that he understands it he's aggressive he'll tell you when you're wrong but anyways that stuff is important because it you know if you don't learn it you're constantly at the whims of just guess work and you end up making mistakes that'll you know could be improved if you saved it in the right format and then the grading like how to actually you know make pleasing looking grade right for for an image so that's a kind of thing that i i it's a non-urgent skill set that i'm slowly learning because it will be important for my work so that's sort of that that's sort of the way you do it when you get older like when you when you get more mature um you're picking up a new skill for a new project how do i do that thing okay that's how i do it um and then that kind of that like follow it to achieve a result like that abandoned house tutorial that i i published recently on blender guru it was uh you know how to achieve a result like a professional artist might watch that just to pick up a couple of things and stay abreast of techniques or workflows and things like that anyways that was a spiel but really i think i think the one-to-one cadence is pretty good like really all that's important is that you are trying to put into practice what it is that you have learned because if you are only watching tutorials and you finish one tutorial and then you move on to the next one and then you move on to the next one it can kind of feel good because your output is increasing right each new every time you do the tutorial you get like a finished you know uh image that you can share and get likes on facebook etc right and you feel like you're doing something like i'm actually improving as an artist but much like in the same way like if you've ever like read a book or watched a documentary and you've tried to tell someone about it like oh i read this really good book the other day it was like about the economics of like blah blah blah and then someone's like huh tell me about that like how does that how does the trickle-down economics work or something like that and then you're like yeah so it's um and then you like you try and like remember what it is that you read or learned and you realize you didn't actually learn barely anything you felt smart because the person that was teaching it knew what they were talking about and they put it in a way that you could understand but doesn't necessarily mean that you have learned it you've just sort of come away with the same like a brain dump of that person almost like kind of but you haven't actually you couldn't apply it to a new thing so often you finish a tutorial and you go like oh great and then if you then start your own project and like model the tutorial was about like modeling a lantern and then you know you try to make a sword yourself you realize that this is a completely different beast because i'm not painting by numbers i don't have the exact exact steps to follow so humans are very good at mimicry that's a it's a good thing like mimicking and you know wrote learn like uh sorry not rote learning um copying somebody else you know play for play that's a very good way of learning we're sort of apparently wired to do that but it does not necessarily help you put that into your long-term memory bank so that you can apply it to something else so if you're doing one and then doing another that is perfect i'd say for a beginner or intermediate even like definitely do that um when you do that personal project by the way you'll probably like immediately go like like oh damn i can't even do like you get five minutes into it before you realize like oh i don't even i need to watch another tutorial like if you watch the donut tutorial then you're like cool i'm going to make a spaceship it's like oh what do you start with again go back and watch this thing and oh okay so you start with an object that's similar you know so anyways as long as you're doing you're trying to alternate and apply it to something after you have learned it um you will learn and be so much better off than an artist who just went tutorial to tutorial to tutorial destroyer they might have greater output because they'll have all these finished images that they can post and share with their friends and their friends will go wow you're so good because you don't say in it that you watch this tutorial you pretend it's your own original artwork so you'll produce slower stuff because you'll learn you have to learn and hit these brick walls every single time you do a personal piece um you'll be slow you won't have that output that they will but god forbid that person ever tries to create something of their own they'll realize that oh my god there's 10 tutorials that i watched i didn't learn much right so definitely just you know as long as you're trying to you know alternate i think you'll be i think you'll be good all right um let's go to another question i'm just going to pull up a random one here um let's have a look i've got names on them okay hey andrew my name is teve all the way from south africa my since we are in november my question is about nodes how they work um what would you say is the best strategy for beginner intermediate to learn nodes in blender thank you cool it's good that i i think you sent this question last year it sounds like i'm answering it at the right time uh yes we're in november as you said so what's the best approach to learning notes that's why i don't feel put off that i didn't answer your question it's it'll it'll sit in a folder until it's ready to come out okay all right so what's the best way to learn it look i i mean tutorials for sure because if you just here's the thing tutorials are useful right i could just say like okay no you just gotta like apply it to a new project like a personal project and that is helpful but i've seen people that spend way too long trying to figure something out for themselves because they don't have the information you don't have to reinvent the wheel people have figured it out and they've got answers and you should go to them so for sure if you don't know nodes at all don't try and figure it out one by one like when i taught at the prison i was there for like four hours by the way it wasn't a full term thing or whatever but i went to a prison and they asked me to because they're learning blender at prison believe it or not and it happened to be the only person in the world that's doing this and it happens to be like just an hour from me so it worked out pretty pretty interestingly but um they were i mean i didn't tell them this necessarily but like they are severely limited by the fact that they don't have the internet because it's a security thing and blah blah blah but they don't have access to the internet so if they've got a question or they need tutorials or something like that they ask the person the teacher uh this lady who runs this this agency that operates inside the prison and she does teaching and education blah blah she uh puts all the questions to her gets the tutorials she will i think maybe her computer there or maybe she goes home but either way she puts it on a usb stick and then she comes back the next day and like hears your answers to those questions but it means that when they're working on something like imagine that like imagine if you didn't have the internet and every time you hit a problem in blender and it's like oh why is it rendering black like why like it the thing isn't the material is not previewing what's what's happening if you couldn't google that like you forget like how severely important that is um i'm sort of detouring from your question but the point is is that people have the answers and you are just treading water if you're trying to do it all yourself so you need to have those tutorials okay there is a blender shader course by simon toms on the blender cloud which was recently named what was what's it called now they renamed the blender cloud to something else blender studio it's called blender studio which now it's like that makes me confused of like is that the animation studio because i think that's also called the blender shoe or is that called the institute anyways but there's a course called procedural shading fundamentals and beyond so if you wanted to learn notes i'd recommend starting there it does get very advanced like you follow the first like i think there's a series module one or something and i'm like all right i'm picking this up i'm learning the basic concepts it's a pretty good explanation of everything and then i think module two just ramps up i couldn't get past one video i was like i have no idea what is going on so anyways module one at least is very good um but yeah so i i would start you know doing tutorials but then try to apply it to a new thing okay because again it's not just good enough to just learn the thing you gotta you know you gotta apply to something new so i mean that's really it like i here's the other thing i don't necessarily think it's a good idea to think like all right i'm going to conquer nodes like for what what are you trying to achieve because for example i never did a photoshop course i never never did but i could probably use most of the core functions of photoshop now because i've been using it for the last 10 years every single time i needed to learn to do something a mask or a clipping mask or alpha lock or you know saving in this format that format i i googled that question and so i've slowly learned the skill and i kind of think that was a smarter way than thinking all right up front i'm going to learn everything because you'll learn stuff you don't need to know or that you will forget quickly um so i i kind of think like in in the nodes case like you should learn some tutorials follow some tutorials on making a shader learning some some textures some shades that kind of thing and then make your own thing and that way you'll just at least solidify it but then like just trying to learn everything and like i gotta learn the vector math and i gotta learn this because that's gonna be important like there's other things you should be learning as well besides nodes and chances are those are going to pay off more than just the nodes thing so um yeah november is a is it's a good deep dive and you'll have a community and you can ask questions and all that kind of thing um but yeah tutorials one for one and uh just keep making shaders from tutorials and and trying to apply it to a personal project that's my answer to that question okey-dokey let's move on to the next one hi andrew my name's max and i have a breath versus depth question so what do you do when you are working really deep into one bigger idea and you have a lot of smaller ideas that start pulling at your attention how do you identify which ideas are worth bookmarking for later which ones are just distractions altogether and which ones are worth going down into that rabbit hole right then and there thank you very much oh i've just been uh hypnotized by your voice max you should consider a career in voice acting or you have a voice well sometimes because you have a face for radios you have a voice for radio uh damn man that's uh anyways all right let's go your question was a weird one what was your question smaller ideas that start pulling it you're into one bigger idea and you have a lot of smaller ideas that start pulling at your attention okay yeah yeah okay so i mean this is the thing that they say what is it uh inspiration is everywhere but it has to find you working that's a someone said that quote yeah inspiration has to find you working and i do think that that is the case that if you're just like doing nothing and you just like what was it there was another quote that was like you know i find inspiration like it just hits me at random times i'll be out in the field and and then they'll just be it's inspiration like a lightning bolt and i gotta run inside and i gotta do something and then somebody was like that never ever happens to me and i relate to that i relate to the person who said whoever this artist or whoever was was like inspiration fine has to find you working because yeah when you're working on a project you just think of so many ideas other things that you could be working on or i could do this or like oh my god like we're learning um for this donut nft project which we'll announce later but a little teaser along with this community nft big artwork thing with everyone's donuts in it i'm also it's going to be part of the baker's dozen so the baker's dozen is going to be 12 doughnuts by me and then this other one this this last little piece this community nft thing so been making these donuts of uh all different types and one of them was a hologram i want to make this hologram because it also makes a good tutorial so i'm going to do a tutorial on it and then when you figure out this process of the hologram with geometry nodes then you're like oh i could do like an led screen right like this separate thing or like with the hologram it's like oh what if we could make it in space and we could have like a planet floating around the thing or the you know and you just end up so it's called kind of like project creep or scope creep or something like that where it's like an idea just sort of build so write it down i mean that's probably the the biggest thing like you got to stay you got to you know don't detour so far off your original course that you you know you never end up where you you never finish right because that's the other thing is you can end up with a project that is so big you end up hating the fact that you took it on and you've just bitten off way too much because you keep adding to it um but if it's if it's smaller ideas that are like completely separate to it like yeah you don't want to be the person that like just starts a project cancels it starts another project gets another idea jumps to that jumps to that and then never finishes anything because yeah i mean following something to completion is important for a learning ability to go through the full process anyway so i think just write it down i mean yeah i used to keep like an evernote of ideas and i just write down when i had an idea struck me while i was working so um yeah anyways let's go to another question oh yeah hello andrew price uh i am nippan podel i'm from nepal and my question to you is how do you complete your started projects faster i started the project of creating a short film one week ago and thought that it will be completed within less than two weeks but since i procrastinated again and again and in order to enhance the quality of my 3d models and the armatures i rather spend more than four weeks and still couldn't complete even the half of the project so my question is how do you complete your project faster or not procrastinate during projects and just make projects better in lesser time damn dude i relate to that so much um i had almost the exact same experience of that um when i when i was a young whippersnapper and i was learning blender living with my parents my parents house maybe like a decade ago and i was like so inspired and i was like i feel like i could do anything and i and then i'm like i'm gonna make a short film in 24 hours and the idea for the short film was it was going to take place in an underground car park and there was going to the door was going to open and all this water was going to flush in there and it was because with the fluid sim i think just came out and i'm like i'm gonna do it i'm gonna do it i think i stayed up till like 3 a.m or 4 a.m or something crazy i might have actually gone right through the night because i really did think i could do it and then i eventually like hit the thing of like i'm not gonna do it i'm not gonna finish this and then i'm like okay new goal not 24 hours but two weeks i'm gonna finish this project within two weeks and i think i posted the work in progress on blender artist or alyssian or whatever whatever the forum was called at the time uh as a work in progress and i said it was gonna be coming soon never finished it got distracted by other things or it might have just been too too ridic i could never get the fluid sim to work properly and the fluid cinnamon blender still kind of sucks i think um manta flow i haven't really fully delved into it because it's buggy and i haven't fixed it it came out with man to flow the gas manta flow thing it's got these two crucial bugs in it they still haven't fixed it and it's bugging me because i spent six weeks in preparation for an explosion tutorial that i was going to make for blondie guru and uh and then i eventually realized there was four bugs they they fixed two of them these other two still outstanding the adaptive domain does not expand fast enough so the the smoke gets clipped to the edge and then there's glitching in the smoke it kind of like i think it uh there's like problems with the shadow or something like that like pretty big bugs and they just haven't been fixed yet so i'm kind of bugged at that anyways sorry that was a tirade okay so really i think your question is about expectations of time because that's what i have learned um that uh i think you're asking about like procrastination right like how do you stop procrastinating or work faster i can't speak on procrastination but probably you're procrastinating maybe because you weren't working as fast as you thought you were and things were taking longer than it was and you're kind of like losing motivation so that could definitely be part of it but working faster i don't think that is that's the thing either um as for like better workflows and better techniques so that you can produce things faster you'll get that with more time but like your problem is just you set an unrealistic expectation for achieving something much like i did i thought i was gonna do it 24 hours then two weeks and then maybe i think i said a month never did never did finish the thing um but uh that wasn't going to say so so uh predicting and and setting this realistic deadline it is something that if you speak to any producer or production manager product manager anyone like that if you ask them like how do you set a realistic time frame for a project they'll go like all right i can recommend some good books to you right there's there's different frameworks there's different workflows it is a whole thing it is basically people's job is to figure this out and they get it wrong and you know engineers talking about web development they get it right they've been doing it for 10 years and they still can like set unrealist like their expectations can shoot out 3 to 10x what they said and i'm like dude you've been doing this 10 years you said it was gonna take two weeks to do and we're up to three months now like what's going on it's like well there was all these extra challenges we didn't expect this we also didn't look at it and it it's not okay it is kind of their fault because this is the thing with with uh setting uh expectations sorry predict what do you call it re setting a realistic deadline setting that realistic deadline part of that is addressing what you do not know your unknowns right like let's you know old school let's say one of the the pioneers the people who were conquering the earth at the time that were jumping from country to country on their ships and they go we're going to land in australia right in the british land in australia and then we're going to go we're going to chart a course from across here to the other side of australia right we predict it will take two months let's just say right they don't know what's out there okay they have no idea okay it could be day one they hit a river they can't cross okay they have to go around the river that adds a month to their thing then half of them die of heat stroke half of them die of getting bitten by snakes and spiders that they had no idea were there they get lost on the way like all of these things could just by the way i don't think this happened to that degree i'm sure it probably did a lot um but that that is just an example right you're looking at a map and you're going okay from here to here i think we can do that and whatever right but you don't know the unknowns because you haven't started the thing yet right so when an engineer starts building this feature for a website or something like that they don't know all of the variables they don't because they haven't delved in to the structure of the assets or the database or you know hosting issues that the plan differences that kind of thing so they haven't done that and that is okay okay because you can't spend so long scoping something because then you end up just doing the thing you will only know the full time it will take when you've actually finished it but you have to be aware of what you don't know and when i was starting that short film project much like i'm sure you were there were a lot of things i did not know but i just wasn't aware of it so one of the best techniques i have found for figuring this out for calling attention to the things you do not know is to break this instead of thinking of it as a like a project of a short film break that down into the individual steps the tasks that are uh required to complete it okay so instead of going it is a short film that i'm going to finish in two weeks how long are you going to spend creating the story okay how long are you going to spend making the concept art how long are you going to spend the modeling the texturing the rigging the animation the layout the lighting the compositing the rendering all of those things okay now you you probably haven't thought through it that far to be honest because most people like it's it's exciting you get like and then it's like all right now think about each one of those things it's like mew just like knocks all the wind out of yourselves you're like oh i don't know like how long is the story going to take i don't know um okay so you've got question marks on a lot of those blocks and that is normal that's fine okay um and as you mature as you do more more as you become more experienced as an artist a lot of those boxers you will have a better guess okay but what you need to do is give a sort of a margin a buffer on um how confident you are with your guess okay so sorry the opposite how how like the more confident you are on something like if all you know is story writing because you learned that in school and you've written several scripts and blah blah blah you might go okay i know with pretty good confidence that i could finish this story within two days but i'm going to give it a 50 buffer i'm going to leave it up to three days okay concept dial i have no idea i've never done concept art so that is a big question mark um i might start it might take four days it might take six weeks right if i don't like it or i have to learn a new skill or tutorial i don't know rigging for example i don't know animation i would have to put big question marks on those i would have to learn that skill and every time you have to learn a new thing you gotta have like just at like the biggest buffer right no idea how long that is gonna take to to rig a character i'm sure i could do it badly in a couple of days right as a guess but if i wanted to do it proper to the point that it would stand up in an animation and wouldn't look terrible and cause all these issues down the road i don't know two weeks two months it's a big question mark but animation same thing got no idea so i'm gonna put you know okay but but i can make a guess right and when i'm breaking it down at least it's helping me think about all of the things and and work through it um and and put that that buffer depending on how little i know and how the lack of confidence i have for it so rigging okay a character i'm gonna say two weeks okay but big question mark so it could go up to four weeks just for rigging animation depends how long the story is depends what the character is depends what they're doing um but let's say it's a minute short he has to do dialogue and running uh four weeks could be six could be twenty i could be totally off i don't know anything about it so i gotta learn the basics i gotta go way back and it's gonna look terrible but you know so these these breaking all this stuff down will you'll quickly realize by the way that your expect your deadline was way off you'd be like okay there's a lot more to this than i sort of initially did so that's why it's a really good exercise um it's breaking it down so yeah that would be my advice to you and by the way that's a really common question i was going through the questions this morning and like yeah there's a lot of people that were asking some variant of setting realistic deadlines so hope that was helpful to all of those people who asked that question before we jump to the next episode a little advert for myself me handing myself some money uh this episode is brought to you by my company polygon professional artists are aware they're trying to do everything by themselves is a fantastic waste of their time because they already know how to do it they know how to model a chair so making their own chair for this one little scene is a complete waste of time you need to pull and utilize the resources that are available to you so that you can finish work the client is happy with so most professional artists are subscribed to an asset library many subscribe to multiple i myself has some scroll subscribe to two or three um and polygon is one of those so polygon is a library of textures models and hdrs held to the upmost highest quality standards we inspect all our models and textures and we've we've figured out workflows and processes to maintain consistency so that all the textures have the same you know lighting level all that kind of thing you can use them together in a scene there's a level of details for the models there's all these processes so that it is it is watertight it is ready not watertight the model that's a separate thing it it is it is ready to use in your scene and uh you don't have to worry about it right because you can let down i've seen scenes be let down by poor assets all the time so you've got to have good stuff so polygon is focused on the architecture industry so we go out there and find the stuff that arc fizz artists say that they need so things like terrazzo uh terracotta tiles a light tile um zeles and terraza they were on the site semi recently and in the coming two months we've got a whole bunch of releases down the line because we've just figured out how to finally scale up our asset production so in the next two months we've got a bunch of new stuff coming firewood flowers plants the terracotta tile as i mentioned we've got cinder block is that what you call it cinderblock i think that's what we call it here we call it besser block in australia uh anyways you get the idea so so we we go out there we research the top trends we speak to uh interior designers um arcfas artists and then find out what it is that they need that clients are asking for so their next project they've actually got it ready so if that is you if you're interested in architectures that you can design spaces faster polygon is where to go p o p-o-l-i-i-g-o-n.com you can join a million artists you can sign up for free and you can start using polygon today in your work and designing better spaces faster hope to see you on the website and with that out of the way let's move on to our next question hey this is max uh in amp idaho i'd like to ask um is there like a specific computer that you recommend for rendering in cycles for animations like um because the current computer i have is an imac and it's taking about sometimes a day and a half to render an animation with like a hundred frames in cycles and i'm wondering is that normal [Music] something funny about the way you finished it was like a punch line it was like one of those videos where a guy's telling a story and there's like a punch line right at the end is that normal um i almost feel like i was getting uh what is it like rick rolled or like um tree fitty or something anyways uh okay that's a okay so that's a really common question what hardware um don't let anyone tell you that hardware doesn't matter by the way it does you will achieve more with a faster computer however it is not the reason that you are not a good artist so there's a two two things like some people like yeah that's the reason my art isn't very good i just need to spend three grand on this thing get this new card then my art will be great it's like no but it'll help you get there faster you'll learn lessons faster because when you've got a faster card let's say for an example you can iterate creatively you can get that result in like five seconds rather than you know two minutes and therefore you can get that feedback you can improve the scene and you can then you know do 800 refinements a day versus 50. so you will improve a scene faster and you'll get better faster but it's not the reason you're not good um i've seen amazing artwork done on really slow machines and in fact all the pro here's the other thing right all of the professionals and people that you look up to today just think about what they were using when they started 15 years ago right my first computer was a pentium 2 i think or something like that and like the earliest version of blender it had like nothing right and so we had to make do with what we had so it's not the reason you're not able to achieve it but again if you've got money if you want to invest in your future and you're really committed to this 3d art stuff it is a good investment to to upgrade your computer now thankfully there is a there is an answer here because you said what would you do some people go on forums they're like oh what computer should i get what about this what about this and they ask their friends it's like the answer is right there it's open data.blender.org go there opendata.blender.org this is an open benchmark that the blender institute or foundation put together it is basically a benchmark file it's like an executable it's 12 megabytes you download it and it will run it will render some of the production scenes i think that they did um for for the movies it'll render a bunch of bunch of scenes and then it will give you the final um uh the speed how long it took for each of those things so that'll tell you where you actually fix you said like you know it takes like a day to render such and such a thing it's like i don't i no idea if that's good or bad right like i i sometimes spend two hours per frame on a render is that good or bad well it really depends it depends on what's in it this one was a forest with a cabin on dual titan rtx's so it was a lot of processing power that needed it if you're rendering a little blob a little cube bouncing across the screen and it's taking a day yeah that's a problem okay so if you go on open.blender.org you can do that benchmark test and most importantly you can see the graph of other hardware that'll show you the fastest cpus available today and the fastest gpus available today so i'm looking at the site right now if you're curious faster cpu as of recording this 4th of november 21 it is the dual amd epic 64 core processor doesn't surprise me how much is that 7 h12 7812 amd what is that i've never heard of it the epic is set wow eight thousand dollars on uh australians i don't know six sixty thousand us and then you got the thread ripper 3990x 64 core 3970x32 core after that um but damn that that epic one is like almost as fast as the fastest card so the fastest gpus you can probably predict it you almost don't even need to know it's the uh it's the 3090 the rtx 3090 that is the fastest then the 3080 ti then the 3080 then the set the 370 ti then the 3070 and then the laptop versions of those um for some reason they list them twice they got like the rtx 39t and then the 390 rtx hey they got to clean up this graph but um but anyways it's it's cool you get to see you know how long how your computer is performing in relation to what is available today i learned that um you can actually get a 30 90 now 30 90 rtx like they're available i can buy one at the shop nearby how about that so the shortage is slowly fading away which is which is nice so you can start buying hardware again hooray and it'll only be like i don't know that's the other thing it's like because of the pandemic and like we couldn't buy the hardware because of the shortage of chipsets or whatever it's like i know for sure that they're working on the next card and like i haven't been able to use the card for the last year so like should i buy the 30 90 now or should i wait for the next card because that's going to come out soon is it anyways so just go there a lot of people don't know about the site but uh it's it's great so i would go there okay okay let's go to the next question what's up andrew price uh huge fan of yours despite never seeing the donut tutorial um i recently graduated art school um applied to maybe a hundred places so far and the five percent of them that have gotten back to me have been rejection letters so i just kind of wondering what advice you would offer artists sort of just starting out their professional careers um thank you so much uh enjoy the podcast and keep up the good work i already answer that question i feel like i've i've already answered that question on a previous podcast either way chances are mostly listen to this haven't listened to every podcast episode so you know what i'll just answer it again uh you said you you applied to was it 20 studios or something like that and you got only five percent replied and they were all rejection letters um look man that's normal it's uh don't feel down on yourself i remember doing that i had the phone book and uh back in the day because i'm old i had a phone book and i would go to the studio and i would call him up and say hello i'm just i was curious if there was any jobs available and they're like all right we'll send through something and then i'm like alright send it and then they're like okay but thank you not about not not right now though at least nice you know um in your case okay so you sent it out five percent you got rejection letters it just means you're not at the employable uh level yet you haven't hit the mark yet you're not at the uh what's it called the threshold the benchmark you haven't hit the benchmark so that you you are employable yet but that is fine dude don't feel down on yourself okay do feel motivated to improve okay don't like congratulate yourself for nothing but like just know that every artist does that okay you have to improve and you won't know until you get feedback and most people find it very hard to get feedback so it's it yeah it's just you will you it is expected that that would happen okay so i would say if you can afford it pay to find a mentor okay so there are some sites i think i mentioned before mentor coalition by josh lynch uh you can go on there and i think it's like 600 bucks uh or 400 bucks a month or something like that which is by the way dirt cheap compared to what a school will be charging you for probably less to be brutally honest um because you're just paying for the teacher's time when you're not using it and you could just be learning from a tutorial when really what you need is just small targeted feedback at the right time to help you figure out what your weaknesses are so that you can then go and do that you can spend a few months yourself doing tutorials trying to improve it like okay they told me composition is my weakest part all right i'm just gonna focus on that do that do that do that and then you could pay to see another mentor or something okay you can go the the free route by the way um if you can't afford that i understand um it's just gonna take you longer and the feedback will be like hit and miss because you won't know if they are telling the truth or if you should listen to it or if it's just a random person that's the other thing like a lot of people are giving the feedback they have worse experience than the person who's asked for the feedback like actually a lot on twitter i asked for like when i asked for feedback on something i'm like can anyone help me with this and i guess it's people that are like okay i've only been using blender for a day but i think your weakest part is you know it's it's like all right bold bold man it's brave i appreciate you uh replying i don't know if i could treat your feedback with much weight but you know i did ask for it so hey you know i i'm not you know anyways um so so that's what i would do okay so go to forums when you can um and if you can afford it pay for a mentor and and do it because they will they'll really they'll help you when you when you go into a forum by the way just ask for honest feedback those two words honest feedback and say i really you're not going to hurt my feelings okay because i invite it i invite criticism because that is really important because a lot of people don't realize this on an r forum most people are not there for feedback okay so if you go in uninvited and give somebody feedback they can meet you with hostility okay they'll start defending themselves ah no i did it because of this and that's my style and this and that and fair enough like they didn't ask for the feedback and here you are giving it i would say don't you want to improve you know you should welcome all the feedback um but you know but but fair enough they didn't invite it so by clearly saying you could even put it in the title feedback wanted um so that people really know that they should come in there and just rip it to shreds right because that'll help you improve you could even say i applied recently for several jobs and got zero response or zero acceptance so please help me improve my work my portfolio whatever it is help me improve this piece what are my weaknesses what am i not seeing and um and that should hopefully help you improve um but you know what guys i think we're going to make this a semi-short one at 45 minutes or something like that uh if you enjoyed this episode please give it a like and hit subscribe on this new channel the enterprise podcast and uh you can find me on all the usual places subscribe to the main channel blenderguru of course and look out for that nft donut project that i think is going to come out in january because i don't think i can get it because the blender 3.0 is coming out and i got to do that donut begin a tutorial series again i don't think i got time to also release it and do all the other stuff so i think january but look out for that that's going to be exciting one and they're going to be a bunch of tutorials i think you'll be you'll like it on blender around that time so thank you for watching and listening and i will see you in a future podcast episode bye

Channel: The Andrew Price Podcast

Views: 24,746

Keywords: podcast, blender, andrew price, advice, andrew price podcast, help, q&a, answers

Id: SdSbDU5ncL0

Length: 50min 47sec (3047 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 15 2021