Your own jobs?

[CliveG]

tbh the best place to flex your creative muscle is on your own jobs and then hopefully that will eventually feed back to you and people will approach you for that particular thing you do. you cant expect to be given reign without first taking risks and demonstrating ability.

 

I've busted out a quote from Nic from the thread "People talking into your creative process" as I think it's a topic on it's own.

 

I'm curious about all of you guns who spend most of your time producing paid viz work yet also seem to occassionally "flex your muscles" by doing personal projects in your "spare time" in order to up your game.

 

Is this right, and if so what sort of work do you do, and how do you leverage off this work to improve the quality of client for your paid work.

 

Is this - choose an photo from the web and replicate it, or choose an admired sort of project "Farnsworth" like and produce your take on it?

 

And how the heck do you find any spare time, how do you rationalise the desire to make a $$ now to the potential $$ improvement that doing personal work might bring in the future?

 

Should I be doing this even though my wife would shred me for sitting working with no money for it?

[heni30]

I look at what I'm doing and what I like (other renderings) and try to see what my shortcomings are. Then I try to fill in the gaps in my technique - both technically and aethetically. I don't have the time to start from scratch so I'll take a finished paid job then try to push it further on my own after it's completed if I see it has potential to experiment with.

 

The main goal is to expand my bag of tricks; both learning new stuff and how to do things faster. Then those enhanced images replace the old ones in my portfolio.

 

As far as your wife goes, weren't we just discussing "cojones" in another thread?

Edited February 27, 2014 by heni30

[CliveG]

As far as your wife goes, weren't we just discussing "cojones" in another thread?

 

No competition - Hers are way bigger than mine!

[Justin Hunt]

First off STEP AWAY FROM FANSWORTH (spelling mistake is intentional) and do your own thing.

 

Easiest thing to do it take an existing project and trick it up. As for time, yea its tricky justifying spending time on personal stuff, but if it does lead to more paid work then its worth it. On the other hand spending too much time in front of the computer is just as much a drainer of creativity. Often doing something completely different sparks more inspiration, freshens you up so when you do get back you see things that you would have over looked before. My wife used to complain about me hiding away in the study night after night. So I moved into the lounge. Much more social.

 

I used to find the Lighting Challenges on CGTalk great to participate in. I soon realized how little I knew about lighting. Sadly they became too time consuming so I put them aside.

[notamondayfan]

To be honest my personal stuff is more experimental, and looking at new and different areas. I always push myself when working for a client to exceed expectations anyway.

 

I think with personal projects, you still need to give you're self a deadline and goals, otherwise it will take months to complete something. Also look at competitions, there's always a lighting competition running over at CGSociety, and many others all over the web.

 

Dean

[Tommy L]

I have at least 50 unfinished personal projects that began with a burst of enthusiasm and ended with a whimper.

[Nic H]

I do a lot of cg based video and still stuff outside of work to keep me happy / satisfied and as a way of learning more techniques and software i want to try. its still very much based on architecture and spaces but with a rougher and darker bent. i think it helps me concentrate more on my day job and deliver work that is what the clients really want and need, rather than trying to inject my own 'interests' into it as much.

 

The downside to this are the extremely long hours and the juggle with day job and family, but if i wasn't doing this work id probably be watching TV or video games...some of my works are here: http://www.nichamilton.info/10659/moving-image

 

The reality is even at the more 'creative studios' (cant think of a better term) the clients are extremely conservative white middle class men and there isn't that far you can push things outside of the accepted norm for architectural film and stills. this is why i think its so important to try and extend yourself outside of what they want and try and serve it back up to them - but on your own time. some of the internal jobs we have done at work in the past have become the basis for a lot of commercial work.

[CliveG]

well perhaps its time for a cgarchitect excercise...base model to be provided, something a little out of the ordinary

6 week limit. lighting texturing, whatever you want.

 

This all across threads.... but good idea.

 

Personally I'm not an aspiring artist. I'm impressed with the personal work of those who are like Nic posted above and many of others, but I see little overlap between this and the "pragmatic" arch-vis I produce. Pragmatic meaning I know my target audience and it's a completely different client to those that Juraj or the other guns here might get, I know what they are happy with and so I'm happy to surf along on the "style" improvements initiated by those guns as they improve their work at the top of the heap, it drags the quality of mine along a bit... in the middle of the heap. My clients remain happy - but frankly they are dumb! They are ignorant of what we in arch-vis go through and don't care what we aspire to, just as long as somebody with money signs up their project.

 

Nevertheless I think for my sanity I would like to improve faster and am curious how personal work could facilitate this, I've gone back to old projects but seldom achieved anything more than tripling the render times and tweaking the composition and they still look average to me, when compared to the gun's work. I think if I kick off great personal work it'll end up like Tommy's too - with a whimper.

 

Maybe I'll just get used to being average then....

[RyderSK]

Well, to the improvement, there can't be large improvements to be expected after single project, personal or commercial. For myself, I've noticed I learn the most in commercial projects, simply because the limitations and pressure facilitates outside of box thinking, new methods or other things. Still, the improvement is in small increments, and it's the quantity that creates largest difference over time.

 

Personal projects bring other benefits for myself, they satisfy my need for self-realization due to presented freedom and craving ambition. They usuallly aren't money-loss as thought popularly, as they can bring attention of clients who experience style they might adopt for their commercial projects, thus fulfilling circle as you end up doing for commercial project something you wanted.

 

I have a credo of only publishing projects in spirit that I wish to continue doing, the rest will rot on my harddisk unseen to the world :- ). Doesn't matter what their original purpose was.

Edited February 28, 2014 by RyderSK

[Justin Hunt]

Sorry but why are they dumb? Why should they care about your aspirations? Its got nothing to do with them, unless you can clearly demonstrate that a more "artistic" approach will help them achieve their goals quicker, easier or whatever else that is important to them.

 

Having said that, there have been a few occasions where I said F' it and gone over the top artistic expecting the clients to hate it, and then they dont, they love it. This is often very early in concept stage, so maybe its easier to get away with it. Other times it just plain backfires.

 

Why be complacent with being average? Make efforts to improve with every project, increase quality, add be bit of flair (but not lense flares , get the composition perfect etc. Slowly but surely you'll get more and more artistry into your work, which hopefully will lead onto more appreciative clients.

 

I once read somewhere a comment by Peter Guthrie, where he said something along the lines of if we saw most of his other projects we'd be very disappointed, in that they just weren't as beautiful as the ones he does post.

 

jhv

[heni30]

Maybe I'll just get used to being average then....

 

Well................on the other side of the coin, if the price you pay to get better is too high, maybe it's ok to be average. One of my teachers would say "architecture will not love you back" talking about hard work and long hours.

 

In my case I play guitar seriously; put in an hour plus every day; time I could be diligently experimenting with lighting and Photoshop filters. But it feels good to keep the other senses active - maintaining a balance of sorts. Especially because it's an instant gratification activity.

Edited February 28, 2014 by heni30

[CliveG]

Well................on the other side of the coin, if the price you pay to get better is too high, maybe it's ok to be average. One of my teachers would say "architecture will not love you back" talking about hard work and long hours.

 

Absolutely.... It is just a job after all.

 

Sorry but why are they dumb? Why should they care about your aspirations?

 

I wasn't really suggesting they should care about my aspirations Justin, I guess the point I was making was that they have limited aspirations for the overtly creative elements of the work that I do for them. Indeed there would be resistance if I pushed the envelope to much. Dumb probably refers to our eternal dichotomy between the creative side of the architectural profession and the financial imperatives. They are on the financial side of the coin and if they could persuade their customers to want a soul-less box, they would love it, they care not a bit for the the things we, on the creative side of the profession, do care about.

 

Why be complacent with being average?

 

Well I don't think I am, that's why I started the thread

 

But I do see a balancing act, as I suggested the sensible pragmatic business approach for me is to just keep delivering to my clients, what they want. Somebody has to service the middle of the market, those who don't want high end top $$$ work. Why should I try and bust out of that.

 

But at the same time my own sanity dictates that I try and improve.

[Justin Hunt]

I get what you are saying and to some extent I agree, not every job needs all the bells and whistles. That not to say that you shouldn't try to push each image that little bit further, especially if you want to improve. I am not suggesting that you go to Bertrand Benoit's level of fine tuning, that would be inappropriate to say the least. I am suggesting that getting the lighting or playing with the composition to get something that bit more interesting can take the average to something special, with out freaking clients out with something artsy fartsy.

 

Honestly I've seen more really crap artsy images than good ones. Similarly Ive seen lots of average images that have heaps of potential to be amazing with a few tweaks. Which is what I meant by being complacent with the average.

 

On a side note, in terms of technical improvement, http://www.cggallery.com/tutorials/vray_optimization/ , this has been one of the best tutorials that has taken my learning and understanding of Vray to the next level. It has raised my quality of rendering and halved my render times. I cant recommend it enough.

[CliveG]

I'll give it a go, thanks Justin.