Your CG routine - how do you keep up the pace ?

Hey, it may be different from other members of the community but whats driving me is really my standards and dreams,s.

Im currently a media design student, that said, i prob have more time than ppl having to work in their jobs. But since it is really my passion, i want to be an expert in every aspect. What i think most people don't realize is: Success isn't a straight line. Once you commit to succeed the line gets all shaky. 

I really searched a long time for a thing in my life which really sets my soul on fire.

Its CG, its creating worlds and influencing peoples emotion with it.

That said, i did realize that i really started to hate going to sleep. I sleep for 6 hours. Wake up in excitement and go on improving skills on this website. Seeking answers, asking questions, researching information on other websites. Trying to fix problems on my own.

After i get back from university around 5 PM, i Review the stuff i learned from university, then i just open blender and start working. I realized that i at least spend 3 hours learning and improving my skills. EVERYDAY. On the weekends i wake up early just to work on blender, reviewing the things i learned the days before, maybe rewatching videos if i don't remember something. On weekends i just split my time in two 3-Hours session. One in the morning and one in the evening. 

Dosent sound very healthy since my sleep schedule is messed up right? But i can see my progress and feel better everyday. I realized once i get started, which is the hardest thing for many ppl, it just takes over. I forget the time and have fun. 

All in All its a combination of dreaming, and working towards it with everything i have, and accepting the fact that it isn't easy. On some days i don't feel like it too but u just have to start.

Also im not someone who is sitting all day in my room as u may think, i am able to keep my social contacts going and have a loving girlfriend in a happy relationship.

Time Management and sacrifice is a part of it.

It inspires me how thorough schedules some of you here have, currently I'm learning Blender and I'm almost done with the fundamentals learning flow (I love the learning flows btw, they're great for when you need guidence) so far it's been about about a month since I've started CGC and I've been doing generally about 3-5 hours a day, what really slowed down my progress was that I would take through notes of each lesson, but I found myself growing tired of doing that and instead have just decided to do many small projects that incorporate what I've learned so they settle in my mind better. I also generally tend to put alot of time into the exercises because I generally enjoy them and like to put my own spin on them as well. I'm hoping to get into CG professionally and CGC is defintely a nice stepping stone to getting there.

I have a normal job in security (I work 3rd shift, 11 pm-7 am). I have been learning 3D for about close to a month now so (obviously) I am very new and green lol. I am in a somewhat difficult life situation right now because of trying to fit in life responsibilities, family time, and personal learning. (No kids yet, just a wife.)

I get home around 7:30 AM and i get started on my courses whether its here or from Udemy. I learn and do as much as I can until 11:30 AM where I put up shop and go to bed. I then get up around between 3:30 and 4 PM, get myself situated to go to my mother's house for dinner and time with my wife. To explain, right now my wife lives at my mother's house because they work the same hours and same shift and my wife doesn't drive so my mom is her only transportation. The only time she gets to live in our apartment is on her days off.) So after dinner I spend much needed and limited quality time with my wife before I get back home hopefully before 8-9ish PM where I take either a power nap or get household (as much as I can) before I leave for work, about 10:20 PM before the cycle starts all over again.

On my personal days off (my days off and my wife's days off don't sync up) I like to keep to my schedule so I stay up the time when I'd normally work and I crack open blender + Udemy or Youtube and learn as much as I can. So I pretty much start my Blender kick from 10:30 PM is to 11:30 AM with pizza roll and Game Grumps breaks in between to keep myself motivated.

 I realize my time management needs improvement but there are a lot of personal history with me, myself and my discipline to persist and finish what I start. Recently I have become fed up with myself and I really want to finally do what I've always have put off and said "tomorrow" for the past 5 years. So right now I'm on a a educational sprint to learn and improve as much as possible but man am I really starting to feel the candle burn at both ends. I know I'm at risk of total burnout but I'm tired of my job, I'm tired of not achieving my dreams, I'm tired of putting things off, and I'm tired of not getting good. It's just really hard for me to put the wacom pen down whih I suppose is a good and (really) bad thing? I'm just afraid of slipping back into my old ways. I've spent the last month on Udemy+Youtube(Blender Guru) so my CG cookie stats and progress is on the leaner side but I hope to change that.

I'm so sorry for spilling my guts out to you guys, I know you guys didn't sign up to hear my life story so again, sorry guys..but thanks for hearing out my story if you stuck with me this far. I guess telling someone my story makes me feel better, a little more hopeful motivation that someone out there knows whats going on.

Why I chose cgcookie was mainly Blender course.

Not many choices when I wanted to learn 3D software. 

I wanted to develop games and create animation on my own, and had little fund for living and not much for industry standard software. So I wanted legally cheap or free software.

With searching, I realized Substance painter and Blender could do professional jobs enough for me. Substance bundle is less than $200 when it's on sale.

Another problem was difficulty of learning Blender. It seemed less artistic and more mechanical than others. I learned Unity Editor and C# for few months, Blender was still hard to understand.

However, after watching Andrew Price's video and some cgcookie tutorials, I feel comfort to learn. (Funny point is Andrew have his own site and recommended cgcookie. Blenderguru is also awesome, but It doesn't offer all fundamental things)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPwdia3gAnk&t=2s

So I started membership, decided to be a 3D artist, bought display tablet.

So, $1000 for getting started(substance + membership + tablet)

It's less than half of 1 year subscription for Autodesk things.

I believe that dedicated artist on this site can surely succeed.

I'm starting to wonder if our "buffet" approach to offering training is more negative than positive.

Buffet style is fine for me. Just doing beginners course by force is maybe boring and offer poor vision for result. If I want lip sync, I look over it first. If I'm not ready to do that, I'll go more fundamental. Motivation initiates like that.

Maybe it could help if community members share his or her own progress on courses. I would share it and it's what community is about.

Showing some statistic data will help people feel overwhelmed. Though I don't need it and I just do what I want :D

I'm starting to wonder if our "buffet" approach to offering training is more negative than positive. A huge collection of courses can be distracting and overwhelming, as you imply. It makes me think that reformatting course offerings into guided learning flows is best. I.e. Learning Flows on steroids.

Do you think that could help keep you on pace and motivated?

I definitely fall into the "hobbyist" category. I have no plans to be a professional 3D artist; I've done the pro designer thing as a theatre set designer (why I wanted to learn 3D in the first place -- soooo much easier to visualize that way) and a freelance graphic & web designer. It was a ton of fun, and I still play in that sandbox, but it's cured me of any need to insert myself into a full design pipeline. I like working quietly out of my own studio around my family's schedule. Most film or game dev jobs don't allow for the flexibility my life requires. 

That said, I still like learning new things and have found digital art to be a great way to visualize my "real world" projects -- not to mention more easily explain them to others. (It's also a whole lot easier to clean up after than a full paint easel or maquette build.) I'm also a "grazer", so I don't actually find the "buffet" style to be a problem. But, then, I tend to digest one thing at a time and come back for something else later, once I've satisfied my current needs. Consequently, I work on stuff here on CGC in fits and starts, "as the spirit moves", so to speak, but always with a goal of learning something specific pertaining to an off-site, unrelated project I'm working on. Once I've found what I was looking for, I go back to that original project. So, you could say I use CGC as a sort of library, rather than a college.

Thus, I find the Learning Flows as they stand really helpful. Most of them are concise enough I can scan down, find what I need, and implement it in fairly short order. When I have the time, I go through the lessons in sequence. I don't always complete the exercises, because I'm extrapolating and applying what I learned or refreshed to an off-site project, but when I know I have a good block of time, I go through the videos and resources. (Christmas vacation for the next 2 week! Woohoo!) 

I, for one, though, would like some of the Learning Flows to be fuller -- or at least to point to "where to go next" in a more sequential or even a branching fashion. I'm methodical (and somewhat completionist) in my approach, which means I ultimately go through even the most basic courses in sequence, even if I'm already very well familiar with and practised in the techniques they cover (e.g. a lot of the concept art traditional art techniques and colour theory stuff), before I go on to the intermediate or advanced courses that are closer to what I'm actually looking for or the level I'm actually working at. And sometimes, I pick up a technique on CGC that I research elsewhere for a fuller or deeper dive into the subject, if I haven't grasped it well here. 

(E.g. I've recently been poking around the Unity flow, but find that jgonzalez can sometimes speak too fast for me to easily follow... and I get impatient when I have to rewind and listen too many times just to sort out what's being said. So, I go back to the Unity site and poke at their tutorials for a while, before I come back to CGC and pick up where I left off.)

TL;DR:

Basically, I like the "buffet", but I'd love to see some fuller, deeper Learning Flows, too, to improvethe somewhat hit-and-miss coverage of topics.

Hi Kent,

I have been taking your courses since a year and a half now. I feel at the very beginning the big offer of courses was a little bit overwhelming but by the other hand I decided to become a citizen because there was a lot of courses. When you are paying, you want to take advantage of your money, so the big variety of courses from the selling point of view I think is attractive.

Once I started to take classes, I was totally a newbie in Blender and Unity, I didn't really know what to do, the offer is big and confusing, so I was taking all kind of classes, from modeling to sculpting, and I didn't really know how to use what I was learning, so I discovered the Learning Flows, and that was really helpful because organizes the classes and gives you a goal. So you know what you will learn.

As a conclusion I would say, for a beginner the flows are great, it's probably the best way to go, for more advanced users, when you exactly know what you want to learn, the single classes are better. So maybe you guys only need to communicate that in a clearer way, so when you get to the site you know which your options are. 

And to make everything a little bit more complicated, hehehe, I would like to suggest even a new format of course. I realized I often don't have enough time to take a full course, but I do have time to take 10-15 min classes, it would be great to have really short classes explaining for example how to sculpt a nose, eyes, etc. not in detail obviously, but to have a good foundation. And then those short classes can be a part of a flow, for example anatomy.

Hope it helps :-)

I like your spirit but keep in mind that you need at least 6 hours of sleep a day.

And if you don´t take breaks regulary you will start to lack efficiency in your work. As a human being we can only concentrate 100% for 45 min. After that we need a 5 min break to refresh our brain. The longer we work a day the longer the breaks should get.

So keep in mind to refresh your energy and take a day off. The sunday is there for a reason ;) 

Hi Kent,

I am new to CG Cookie since a month and I have to say, I am really in love with this. I don´t have a problem with the buffet of tutorials. It gives me the freedom of choosing what I want.

But I would appreciate more learning flows as additional option. Some structure for newbies isn´t bad at all.

I guess the major problem with people loosing the motivation is not your structure of the side. Moreover it is their organization talent and mindset. We all get overwhelmed by the demands of our daily life. Sparing some extra time for self development can be too streßfull in long term. It is not their lack of motivation that makes them loose track. It is their lack of knowledge how to organize and/or schedule themselves. Because all good will is meaningless if you don´t have the tools to make it.

So how about you and your team try to give your students this tools of selforganization. Help them to relocate their mindset and priorities. Maybe by an well writen article, by introducing the people to your daily routine and organization methods or even by a own tutorial. 
We as artists have one of the most demanding and stressfull work. If we don´t master ourselves and our work we going to work incorrect, loose motivation and loose track of other important part of our lives such as family, relationships and time for ourselves. But these are essential to deliver quality continuous.

I personally use the time around christmas and new year to reorganize myself and my priorities. I try to establish a schedule for tutorials, studies and exercises so that it correlates with the demands of my daily life. It is a time consuming work to get your own priorities and values straight. But it´s worth it.

So - As mentioned before I am currently working on my selforganization and I´ve done some research for that. So let me share with you the method that I found myself useful:

• Get your values and priorities straight. Define what you want to achieve and what you want to learn. Write it down. Get from general to more specific. Do that for all areas in your life: "I will learn blender" (specific: "I will improve in modelling." "I will become a master with color and lightning."), "I will take care of my relationships" (specific: "I will spare some time of the week for my wife...")  ...
  Once you know exactly what´s important to you, you will have an overview of your tasks that are important to you and you will stay true to them. Take your time with that and really find out, what´s important to you and what really matters.
  
  
• Prioritize and sort your tasks. There´s this method. It sorts the tasks we have to accomplish in a matrix of four sectors categorized by "urgent" and "important".
  "important" means all the stuff which has value for yourself. Like investing time in your skills, spending quality time with your family or doing some exercises.
  "urgent" contains all task which the daily life is demanding from you. Things that need to be done as an adult :)
  
  - The first sector is Important and Urgent. This is the place where all your running deadlines which are coming closer belong. Thing´s that need to be done! And quick! This sector is the most streßfull and many people overload it. They are doing crisis management and are stumbling from one streßfull project into another catastrophy. Don´t overload this sector and plan in advance.
  - The second sector is "not important but urgent". This one contains all the task we need to get done but are not important to our life goals and values like going to the doctor, answering urgent mails and paying the bills. Try not to spend too much time there.
  
  - The third sector is "important but not urgent". This is where CG Cookie belongs and all that stuff that will pay of long term if you invest in it. These are your heart projects and your skill development.
  
  - The last sector is "not important and not urgent". Put all the unnecessary daily tasks in there. Don´t waste your time with them and throw them away if needed.
  
  I set the goal to spend at least 1/3 of my time in the third sector "important but not urgent" to develop my skills and spend time with my family and friends. I really need to discipline myself not to waste time with the sectors two and four.
  
  
• Make a weekly schedule. Plan your time on a weekly basis and set a specific date to think about your week. A weekly schedule has his advantages. I take my time to relax and do stuff for myself on a Sunday. This is the time where I get inspiration and look at some art magazines and other artists. I need to work in a supermarket during the week. So I have created a schedule to get a small amount of exercises and tutorials done each day.
  You can and have to adjust your weekly schedule on a daily basis.
  
  
• Do the unpleasent and biggest tasks first. We all have limited energy throughout the day. At the start of our work day we have the greatest concentration so attack the hardest work at that moment. Don´t waste your time and energy with answering mails or doing phone calls.
  
  
• Treat yourself. Doing creative work is a lonely job. If you don´t treat yourself and take breaks, you will loose motivation and your passion.

I try to do something every day. Some days I model, other days I watch a video. Even if it's only 15 minutes - do something.

Nick Seluk's comic series "Heart and Brain" seems to have a finger on the pulse of this topic. I certainly can relate. Taking Kent Trammell's BC1-1801 class has helped reconnect my heart and brain tremendously. 

I too have some days or weeks where I pause, mostly for lack of inspiration. I know it's not good (I feel rusty sometimes) but I try not to beat myself too much about it.

These days I go to pinterest for inspiration, and open up my project's file whenever I have time, even if it's just a few minutes in the evening before bed time.

There are a lot of good suggestions here, and I'll throw my hat into the ring, too.

I started CGCookie because I wasn't going anywhere I wanted fast.  My Maya student license expired, I had no money, got student loans breathing down my neck, just kind of floating.  I was floating because my SO made enough money to cover living expenses for both of us and I could pursue freelancing.  Well, it wasn't going anywhere fast, and I needed to learn something free, like Blender, and a community to keep me going is certainly nice.  Things have changed since then once I realized how much time I was wasting in a day (just in a haze, pissing the day away).  I focused on my goals by writing them out, creating a daily schedule with a grading system to keep me honest, and have really picked up my daily improvement.  My SO and I want to go to grad school for game development (because we're both not achieving our dreams fast enough), and it is hella expensive.  My SO can pay for one person if we nickeled and dimed the one income as hard as possible, but that wouldn't be fun or fair to both of us.  So, I've got to join the 9-5 workforce, hopefully make enough in the next 3 years to pay for anything leftover for both of us to go (not a huge deal breaker, but grad student loans are way harsher than undergrad; don't really want them), and I'll be working at night alongside my SO on our skills that we need for our portfolios.  This is a huge motivating force for us.

I've found picking up little contests and challenges have helped to motivate me.  I took part in the Artstation challenge called Beneath the Waves for preproduction, and it was so fun and invigorating.  I'm a shit drawer by comparison, so going into it for my own personal goal was way more fun for me and the deadline helped keep me honest.  I would've done game production, but I wasn't comfortable enough in Blender to continue.  The new Weekly CG Challenge was announced a couple days ago, and I think I'll draw something for that, too.  Having an end goal really helps, take small steps along the way, grade yourself if you think that'll help keep you honest, and eventually it'll become second nature.

When pondering if I should start my day, I'll start with something small, like 1 CGCookie video.  I like starting with small tasks because it primes my mindset for the rest and helps get me in the zone.  Oh, also important, I use a time tracking app, like Gleeo.  It really opened my eyes to where my time was going and how much time I've wasted in a day.  I always tell myself when I'm not feeling up to doing something, "If not now, then when?"  I have the time now, why not just do it?  If I don't do it now, when will I do it?  Also having friends who can critique your work helps keep the motivation.  I showed my friend the hammered metal shader I made, and it inspired him to get back into Blender!

I guess it also depends on how you're motivated.  Are you best motivated by outside forces (extrinsically) or are you best motivated from within (intrinsically)?  Take a look at yourself so you know how to motivate yourself.  For me, it's been mostly intrinsic, but extrinsic forces certainly help propel me farther than just my will alone.  So, understand yourself and find what works for you.

The things we do to avoid doing stuff we don't like inadvertantly causes us to not do the things we like.

What I do is I set a time related goal and a minimum time requirement. So for me my weekly goal of blender stuff is 35 hours a week, ideally I'd spend 5 hours a day. My minimum is 10 hours a week which is basically 90 minutes a day.

I get frustrated easily on tutorials when I hit the same buttons and get a different result so I mix the tutorials with little learning projects where I make objects from my home. My rule for the mini projects is simple "don't try and make it perfect". Example, I created my desk, I gave it the color and shine it has in real life, but I didn't make the drawers or the drawer handles. Why? because its really complicated for me and if I try i'd just get frustrated/depressed.

As a noob, what I do is use the tutorials to learn new/hard things and make mini projects to apply the stuff i've practiced that isn't super complicated.

My cases wasn't a routine, but doing what was needed at the moment, and fixing my path along the way. I never had a schedule, or a plan. I just did it because I really loved using Blender.

About 2 years ago, I was trying to get into a 3D program in the army after showing my skills in Blender at a hackathon (I wasn't using blender for 3-4 years at that time). My computer was very weak back than to use 3D and couldn't handle more than 15k verts. Anything more than than and the computer froze and needed a reboot. And so I made for the hackathon only low poly models. A friend of mine who got to the program tutored and helped me in what was needed.

I later on found a local place that let me use their gaming pc for that purpose. It could handle high poly and rendering very well. And so I upgraded my Cgcookie to pro. And so I would spend virtually every waking moment on it. Until I would get exhausted and fall a sleep at some corner of the space.
My projects at the time were : plane, walking animation, and a chessboard 
I highly recommend not doing this.

Upon reaching a certain level of skill. It became a lifestyle and obsession.
Any vacation time that lasted more than a weekend would be spent with at least 7 hours doing nothing but blender. I don't have a routine, nor a regular schedule. I do it whenever I can because I enjoy it.

Overtime my projects were going aimlessly, doing werid thing in Blender and 2D art. At which my skills paced were staggering horribly as I wasn't going towards any certain dicipline.
Later on I got into fightning animation. And decided to enter it more heavily and take it as a main dicipline.

I started off the year deciding to learn Blender. I wouldn't call it in a New Year's resolution, just something I decided to do at that time. The decision actually came about December but with the business of the holiday and traveling I decided January would be my start time. So I started with trying to work through Zacharias Reinhardt's Mastering Sculpting course as sculpting is what I was really after. At the same time I tried working through Sculpt January. Realizing I needed some more basic training I also signed up for a year of CGC. That was all fine for the first few days before going back to work before I realized I had bitten off way more than I could chew.

In the mean time, I had come across Andrew Price's video on the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Artists and had committed myself to the first habit, Daily Work. I've watched it a few more times and shared it with everyone I knew. Combined with his fourth habit, Conscious Learning, I scaled myself back to just working through the fundamentals on CGC. No matter what, I make a point of coming on here to at least grade new exercises.

The thing is, they are habits and habits take time to develop before they just become second nature. Sure, some days I might only come on here and grade a few exercises, but most days I'm watching lessons and then on weekends when I have more time going back to do the exercises.

The result has been its own motivation. Friends and coworkers continue to encourage me and find it hard to believe I've only been doing it for a few months. Many of them are artists themselves that went to school and now do it professionally (I work at a marketing company but creative design isn't my job, I'm a software dev by day).

Another source of motivation has been looking at portfolios and demo reels. Not just of established artists. That can lead to telling yourself "but they have been doing it for years, I will never be that good" but also of student compilations from different art schools like Gnomon. Sure, they have access to some tools like render farms that I don't, but seeing what they pull off as just students feels much more attainable.

Because of seeing the work others are doing has shifted my goal from wanting to just sculpt things for 3D printing to something much bigger. I've now set a goal to create a full animated short forcing me to learn how to do the whole pipeline. And that has all come full circle back to helping me be better at creating characters for 3D printing.

Building skills has reinforced other skills. My biggest regret was waiting until my 40s and getting cancer to realize how much time I wasted wishing I was artistic before doing something about it.

Required viewing:

Personally I just try to do SOMETHING related to CG, art, music, or game development every day. Some days this means just watching GDC videos on YouTube, some days this means playing Rocksmith for 6 hours straight. Some days its no computer at all and just doodling. To me these things are all related and even if its just watching a GDC video that is a step forward. Those are easy to binge watch too!