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Not Meeting Expectations And Tedious Tasks

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by ClaudiaTheDev, Apr 11, 2019.

  1. ClaudiaTheDev

    ClaudiaTheDev

    Joined:
    Jan 28, 2018
    Posts:
    331
    Yesterday i had a really frustating moment. I wanted to create a nice intro scene for my game.
    In my head i had a super cool vision with camera angles - i really felt like a genius regisseur:cool: I was seeing it like a movie.

    Then i started implementing for 1 hour...2 ...4... and it sucked.... I just couldnt make it work like i imagined with timeline and cinemachine. I tried many different camera angles but nothing could live up to my vision so i deleted all... At the end i was so tired of the day so i just did one simple static camera angle for the whole intro to have at least a tiny bit of progress for the game. It doesnt look like complete crap but doing it over 4 hours and getting that result is kinda frustating:-(

    The camera man(me) F***ed up and so the regisseur (also me) really got frustrated...

    Do you have similar experiences with tasks wich you imagine come out epic and you realize that you just cant do it? What do you do in such moments?

    There are tasks in which i am so fast (for example coding) and it really feels great progressing.
    But other tasks are quite hard for me to do and i feel like a snail...
    What are your fast and snail tasks?
     
  2. I think you approach this whole thing wrong. It's not a snail task, you just don't have considerable experience with it.

    Let me expand on this: cinematography mainly is an experience-based art. Which means you need to do it over and over again and fail (it's like game design) and see where you did fail. And as you go, you will learn from it and will know when and what goes together, how to achieve stuff by camera angles, zoom, filters and stuff. It's a painful and long journey with a lot of film (nowadays virtual) in the trash bin.
    I wouldn't think about your 4 hours as "wasted" I would recognized as 4 hours constructive learning curve. Unless you dumped all the experience from your brain and still don't know why you have failed, what you have done wrong. Just try to analyze why you didn't like what you have done. And next time you will be that much better.

    As I'm mostly self-thought software developer (and I came a very long way), my very first code which wasn't a typed-in copy from some old magazine did suck. Big time. But I sat down and tried again and over time I became better at it.
     
  3. Joe-Censored

    Joe-Censored

    Joined:
    Mar 26, 2013
    Posts:
    11,847
    If everyone could get camera angles and framing the scene done well on their first try, movie studios wouldn't be paying their directors and cinematographers so much money.

    You likely have thousands of hours of practice coding, which is why you're so fast at it now. But your first 4 hours you ever coded you probably would be embarrassed today by the results and likely didn't get much final product done in that time. You're just missing those thousands of hours working with cameras.
     
    ClaudiaTheDev, Ryiah, Ony and 2 others like this.
  4. kdgalla

    kdgalla

    Joined:
    Mar 15, 2013
    Posts:
    4,615
    Happens to me constantly all the time. Lately it's with my 3D modelling efforts. I have this really amazing picture in my mind and spend the whole weekend trying to bash-it-out, only to get something really amateurish and stupid that I don't like.

    The worst is that some days you actually do achieve really good results that you're very satisfied with (Makes you think you'll be able to get that same level of quality all the time) but than you can't seem to replicate that success again.

    Just don't worry about it. take a break. Work on some other feature of your game and then come back to it later. There are three ways that I attack this problem:
    1) practice and build my skills and experience so that I'm more capable the next time I attempt it.
    2) Come back with new ideas and alternative approaches for how to solve the problem.
    3) As I get more aware of what I'm capable of, I can make changes to my original plans to play up my strengths and minimize my weaknesses.

    It's normal for a creative project to go through many failed iterations before the final product.
     
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  5. chingwa

    chingwa

    Joined:
    Dec 4, 2009
    Posts:
    3,789
    Everything looks better in your head. It always has. It always will. This is why things only get finished when there is a deadline.

    Just for some perspective... Leonardo DaVinci is known to have "regretted never having finished a single work."

    Now go out and make 50 splash screens and you may be closer to your masterpiece. It'll probably still look like ass to you, but other people will probably like it.

    #artistproblems
     
  6. BIGTIMEMASTER

    BIGTIMEMASTER

    Joined:
    Jun 1, 2017
    Posts:
    5,181
    My latest 3d model took me 9 months to make. Over 2000 hours. I wanted to achieve a good quality, and that's how much time it took to hit that quality. I redid things over and over and over and over and over.

    Once I finally finished, I have a nice portfolio piece. Worth the effort. But the real magic is that things that took me three months to create, I can now do in 3 days -- and better. Once you know, you know.

    War story: when doing land navigation, most people fail at the point they let their emotion take over. They make a good plan when they are rested and calm, but 20 miles later when they are crawling through thorn brush for the thousandth time, they're dehydrated and exhausted, they got blisters and chaffed butt cheeks, what happens is they start deviating from the plan. Trying to make life easier by going around some obstacle, or losing confidence completely after making a few mistakes and just flying by hunches and whims. Then they really suffer when they become hopelessly lost. If there is an option to quit, there is where most people quit. This is where you quit.... but you can always redeem yourself.

    You can achieve your goal. Only question is how much time it will take and how far you can extend your patience.

    also, don't force the art. let your vision guide you but try to sit back and just look without any judgement. You might find a better way of doing things than your initial plans.
     
    Last edited: Apr 11, 2019
    Joe-Censored, ClaudiaTheDev and Ryiah like this.
  7. aer0ace

    aer0ace

    Joined:
    May 11, 2012
    Posts:
    1,513
    I'm experiencing exactly that, @Gor-Sky. I've actually spent months (well, hours in hobby time) trying to get great cinematics working in my game. My first pass wasn't great, and I restarted different approaches at least twice. But each time, I drew upon my previous failed attempts. Orchestrating all that happens in a cinematic clip procedurally, through code is taking a lot more effort than I thought I was going to need. At this point, my code has things like Scene, Sequence, CameraDirector (Cinematographer. I may eventually have a separate Director to choreograph the entire scene if CameraDirector isn't enough), CameraShots, and Rigs, and several other support classes. My plan is to have some cameras fixed to some models, or floating/drifting around in creative arcs and motions, depending on the dynamics of the focus objects. It just takes a lot of effort. Breaking these down took quite a lot of time for me, and I'm still not 100% sure about my approach, but I feel good about it.
     
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  8. angrypenguin

    angrypenguin

    Joined:
    Dec 29, 2011
    Posts:
    15,614
    I think your problem could be that you were hung up on one particular vision, rather than using that as a starting point and seeing where some experimentation and iteration and learning takes you.

    Keep in mind that your imagination doesn't take into account all of the details that reality will impose upon you. This means that it'll often be impractical, and sometimes downright impossible, to create something exactly the same way your minds eye saw it. To begin with this is frustrating, and I think the only way to get past that frustration is to get enough experience that you can pick out the missing details before implementation rather than during.

    And that's probably how people who are really good at things appear to get them right on the first try. It's not that their vision was perfect from inception, but that they've been able to rapidly churn through a bunch of iterations in their head, refining the idea before they put pen to paper.
     
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  9. TimmyTheTerrible

    TimmyTheTerrible

    Joined:
    Feb 18, 2017
    Posts:
    186
    I remember when i started digital sculpting in zbrush. i thought what i made was amazing. i would rush onto zbrush central to share my latest "master piece"... really blow their minds...then i would see all the amazing zbrush sculpts on that site...and i would alt tab back to mine... and realize it looked like balloon animal some circus clown accidentally dropped in front of a lawn mower that then caught on fire when a lightning bolt from the sky hit it because god thought that such an abomination should not be allowed to exist....

    So then later i would open the file to work on it hate everything i would make...

    But then there came a point where i would hate what i was making while making in, then a few days later i would open the program and think, wait a second, did i actually even make that? it looks...good...

    Don't get me wrong, those zbrush central guys are still 1000 times better than me, but nowadays i actually make stuff i like. It took a while to get there though.
     
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  10. AndersMalmgren

    AndersMalmgren

    Joined:
    Aug 31, 2014
    Posts:
    5,358
    For our trailer I acted as cameraman inside VR, pretty funny. Its not perfect at all, but pretty cool what can be done with VR

     
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