i guess from the lack of 3D art recently everyone's feeling as unmotivated as i have   i've barely done a thing in 3ds max for well over a year now. it's sad, but my patience for the medium is long gone. its such a long tedious process to 3D something, and even once the modeling/texturing is complete there's still the problem of technical difficulties with lighting and realism and all of that.. only someone who likes to torture themselves would actually do this i think  

so what's everyone else's reason? similar lack of motivation? no free time toward this time of year? movie 3d too impressive that you feel 'why bother' cos it's impossible to compare? something else like work/loved ones/PS3 stealing all your spare time?

post shots of your unfinished/never-to-be finished work. lets see what could have been  

 

Me and 3d don't get along. Although I highly respect anyone who can do it and can do it good.

I used to have this high tech computer art class in High School, where we had to do 3d animation. Although granted it was a privilege and a blessing to be able to use such programs.
I was told, numerous times, by my art teachers. That regardless of how I felt, the computer did not have feelings and was not out to drive me insane.

All of my work now is 2d, and I am damn well determined to do more 2007 movie fan arts :B

 

My projects aren't dead at all. I'm currently working on a commission for Alphie (a fully transforming extreme detail model of her character Echo), and Redemption II is coming on nicely; I have about 8 minutes of rendered footage now (I do need to recast some parts for it, though). I'll put up some stills when I get the time. I am also planning to enter next year's Botcon art contest.
However, at the moment I am battling depression, anxiety and extremely bad migraines, so I'm not getting a massive amount done.

Talathia, should you ever decide to give 3D another go, remember this: The computer is your SLAVE. It does what YOU tell it to do. As with all programs, you just need to learn how to talk to it.  

 

Hawt Goth Chick????
I never knew you were a girl?

I have done very little 2D (which for all points and purposes is interchangeable with the concept not producing 3D art) since 2004 which was coincidentally the birth of my son.
That's my excuse/reason for producing very little other than a few inked line arts here and there.

 

Every now and then I get a burst of creativity. The last thing was some sketches for some of my WW2 characters a few weeks ago during a really slow morning at work... the last 3d thing I worked on... a real low-poly version of Alt Jazz/ZoomZoom/Shockwave to go with a few other things, my low-poly Motormaster, and a rebuild of my WW2 Ark.

Beyond that, can't say. Been waaaaay too long.

 

Agreed - I haven't seen much from Venksta or Primus recently - I'd also like to see what happened to some of Sledgehammers old stuff like the 3d game sprites and the classics astrotrain.

Here's my current guy stuck in modelling hell -


Oh, and just for giggles after seeing a guys fan character on another site I had to recolour one of my previous models into - Hugslinger:

 

I never have time to do stuff for fun anymore. I only do stuff now when official work comes through(rarely. although I just designed a transformers related toy that will be out next christmas).

I'll post up my 1/4 completed furry Optimus Primal when I get home. I really liked this guy and wish I would have completed it.

 

I'm too busy modeling 15 other projects right now to model any Transformer. I do have two in the mothball fleet that I will be going back to. And soon I hope.

 

I had to stop working on my Classics Prime and Megatron do to the work load at my job. By the time I got home, i was to tired to think about modeling. Though, for the last month, work has been very light, I've got another project painting background sets for a Christmas play. Hopefully once thats done next weekend, I'm hoping to get back to modeling again. Hoping being the keyword.  

Now that I think of it, I did model Classics Bumblebee and G1 Shockwave this year. Only 2 models that I actually finished so far for the year.

Heres some renders of Megatron and Prime if anyone wants to see.







Heres a link to the WIP gallery for megatron.
http://members.shaw.ca/venksta/2006/CMegatron/

 

I've dipped a toe into 3D, but mainly with freeware programs. I tend to run into the problem of knowing what I want to do, and even how to construct it, but repeatedly slamming into overly complicated, badly designed, and/or unintuitive interfaces and really bad documentation.

It's kind of irritating, because I have the projects I want to try, I specifically bought computer monitors with 3D work in mind, but it's just not clicking.

I suppose it's possible that some of the commercial 3D packages might be more polished, but at the moment I can't justify dropping multiple hundreds of dollars on what's really a very low-priority hobby.

One of these days I should just sit down with Blender or something and force myself to chew through the docs until I can at least put a basic model together.

 

I joined a band, and never really had time to do any art at all, I put all my time into music and performing.

But now that you speak of it, maybe I'll try my hand at modeling something while I'm up in Ottawa for a bit. I was working on Cybertron Primus, but that got lost, and I don't feel like starting it over again   I'd post pics, but I don't even have any rendered pics anymore, I'm sure you guys remember it anyways. I had the torso just about done, and had started working on the shoulders.

 

lol did you actually put fur on it? I tried that once, it looked funny as hell. It was kind of a pain in the ass trying to comb the fur as well, it never went the way I wanted it to  

 

Well, this isn't really a "dead project" as I'm working on it while at school. But once we're past 3DS max it'll probably be left to rott in my folder  

This render is from an unfinished model, without the metal texture and unlinked limbs (fixed both in class today, didn't have time to render a new sequence)

 

Lack of progress and proper planning. I also have a tendency to do poorly in actual design or make it so complex that I can't think straight. Either way, my Transformers related projects are sitting on the backburner and only God knows when/if I'll ever return to them.

Also, for what I want to model in terms of authenticity, design, etc., it's too time-consuming. I need to do projects which I can hammer out in a week to a month...not year long projects.

Also, my workflow is fubar in that I have a tendency of automatically doing things the hard way because I can a bit anal-retentive when it comes to employing certain techniques.

 

Quite simply 2 jobs, a video project, and some woodwork to finish, a garage to clean and re-clean, a desk to clean and re-clean...

However, I've started sketching out an Arcee based on my wife's '04 Dodge Neon. Trying to make it movie detailed, yet realistically transformable without resorting to the cheats that ILM resortet to makes me stare at the paper more than actually putting lead to it.

That, and I decided to waste almost a year learning Blender 3D. However, as much promise as it seems to have, I can't even model a decent Death Star. So screw it. I'm going back to Truespace.

 

Have you tried out Google Sketchup - pretty easy to learn the basics, good video tutorials online and the free version is the same as the full version except you can't export to other file types (there is an exporting plugin to Kerkythea though)

I know the feeling - I take way too long trying to get little details right that you can't even see when zoomed out. I've got a bit faster and less fussy since i've been doing models from drawn designs though.

 

I'm not sure if I had posted this already but we'll do it again in the spirit of the thread.

This is a model I started of Hard Head probably 3 or 4 years ago when I first sat down at a serious attempt to model a Transformer. I just managed somewhat of a alternate mode but never got around to making the robot mot.

I don't think I've improved a whole lot (haven't figured out textures yet) but I still liked this one anyway.

 

I used to do a fir bit of 3D stuff years ago, but it's too time consuming with working long hours and raising a family.

 

I started a project on Blender of my idea of how Dinobots sword would look based on my tattoo of it. I never finished it. Here's as far as I got.

 

King lurker here.

I spent a big chunk of this year and last year in the same boat Draven stated. Depression, severe anxiety problems, BAD problems in IRL that took over priority of everything else and being screwed over this year by my ISP (connection and email problems. When you start getting people asking you why I never responded to their emails and are like "what emails?" and then sending people emails that they NEVER recieved ALL because of your ISP SUCKS and is an ARSEHOLE kinda screws up your all your important contacts/people when important stuff comes up they or you need to know about) and it all added to a complete breakdown.

Basically been a BAD period that I've just FINALLY gotten out of, and I also moved away from 3d/cel render and focus solely on 2D animation-inspired artwork. On the plus side, 3d stuff is still a big part of what I do now, I still utilize it for sets and props and is still a foundation in much of my finished pieces, but its all used for 2D stuff now. I'm basically a "digital fusion" style using some 3D modelling, pencils, and the other 95% of the art used in Macromedia Flash. Adding a graphics tablet to the mix in January. But "true" 3d is out of the picture though. Too much frustration with stuff I NEVER figured out (like texture mapping, modelling stuff that WASN'T robots, etc)

Just basically now stuck figuring out where I'm supposed to go from here and what I need to do.

I dont even really remember half the stuff I was working on. Lost a lot of old stuff in several massive computer crashes (had a dying computer all 2006).

There's my way too long ramble.

- Kris Smith (formerly known as DeathWind13)