Past Halfway - Stop Thinking of Cool Stuff and Do Cool Stuff

I managed to miss all of September (started writing this in the first week of September). I have recently come to a conclusion about personal projects that I was told over and over, I thought I was listening to the advice but now I don't think I was. It was very easy to convince myself of possibilities when in student life which even if incredibly busy has a feeling of "there's time".

One of the main things I'm always worrying about is the future; getting as good as I can get, improvement and not seeing the desired improvement and recently missing a term of Uni. My brain tells me that the 2.5 month term would allow me to play with more cool and different things so that I could fulfill my desire to be a T shaped artist being fairly strong at a lot of things with one real strong side. In reality the term would likely give me an extra environment for my portfolio and probably allow me some time to improve my FMP ideas, which I hope to write up into a blog while I work them into presentations.

Life will happen and I will end up somewhere, I know I am dedicated and will strive for what I want. I just need to strive positively... have an adventure!

Talking about work after work, onto personal projects... I know that I am an ambitious person and I am an excitable person. My somewhat naive approach to personal projects seems to have become more and more clear with the worry of losing a term. Because of this I have tried to shrug that concept that "there's time for that". I don't really want to think about all the projects, or ideas as I'm now going to refer to them, that I've come up with and have fleshed out in my brain and talked about with people and got excited about and then just simply not followed through on. However here's a nice list: Quivering Quacks (stylised pub started at the end of first year and looked at a bit in second year), Dockyard (BMW art test environment), Breeding Pool (small environment based on a painting) and Caligula's Palace. Almost all of these have been started but not got vaguely close to realisation, the reason seems now to be an over-reaching idea, too ambitious and too much of an "idea" rather than a project.

I have been told multiple times that an entire environment is really difficult for a personal project and maybe to focus on a small area and do it really well, I thought "well I know how to do it and I reckon I can speed some processes up so I can do it". The other problem I've found is that because I'm still learning new techniques and processes and I'm trying to do things to the best of my ability things take a lot longer. On top of this there is a lot to organise to create an environment, all the different assets and different elements, it can be rather overwhelming when you can only spend maybe a couple of hours every couple of days. After getting more and more frustrated about how poor the Caligula's Palace environment was progressing and after talking to some "5th years" about personal projects I decided to take a bit of a break from Caligula's Palace.

Instead I spent September working on one asset which I will try and make as highly defined as possible, I will really focus on the material definition, high poly modelling and hardsurface detail techniques but mainly just have one project to focus on so that when I get home from work or have a couple of minutes at work I can sit down and know exactly where I am and just continue. I'm also planning on doing this as its a smaller project which will show results quicker and also teach me things, too often have I learnt a lot without anything to show for it. Hopefully I'll return to Caligula's Palace with slightly less expectation, different techniques and a new desire to make something complete.