Breaking free from the "Hard Plateau"
tsarist
Posts: 1,614
I'm starting this thread to talk about the dreaded "Hard Plateau."
I don't know who coined the phrase, but it means a creative plateau that is extremely hard to get off of and has no readily apparent means of escape.
Your art gets no worse and it gets no better.
If you were on a plateau and have escaped, please share your experience with us.
If you are ON a plateau now, feel free to vent, I know you want to.
Please no personal insults and comments about people wanting a "Make Art" button. That kind of talk is counter productive and just gets the thread locked.
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I recently hit a "Hard Plateau"
I have been looking for a way to generate more income lately. My bills have risen, My income has been cut and I'm feeling the pain. I didn't need easy, but I did need something I can "plug in" to quickly. Something that's already up and running.
I thought I had something. I did a little research into the opportunity. Looked at other people doing the same thing. Decided I could do better than most of what I saw and rang em up.
We chatted, they told me to make a few samples in the style of the genre and email them.
I was told the images needed realistic textures, poses, and lighting. No problem, I use Elite Textures (Carrara versions, with SSS), Tim Payne's lighting (cause he's one of our lighting gods), and Ironman13's poses.
Did a few samples and sent them in.
Now, I never expect tons of praise. Never. I was shocked to hear "Not good enough." "Not there yet."
WTF?!
I'm a child of the entertainment industry. Been doing this my whole life. Like the big studio exectives (don't believe me, look at all the remakes, reboots, etc that are out and coming soon or being discussed) I'm very risk averse. The deck is usually stacked in my favour long before I contact anyone. I know how good or bad the competition is before I even pick up the phone. Also, in my career, I need to know if my work is good or not because if I'm wrong and I put out rubbish, I'm going to have a long unhappy conversation with a production manager or (if things really go poorly) a general manager. I have had very few of those unhappy conversations. So, if it looks like rubbish, I usually bow out before I even begin or at the latest before I turn something in. So, I was shocked.
I'm grateful to the person I talked to for taking time to talk with me, as we have had several conversations. I owe that person big time for their kindness, their class and their time. I hope to do something nice for this person in the future. This post is not an attack against my friend. It's about the plateau my friend pointed out I was on.
Yeah, I appreciate my friend. I appreciate their honesty, I'm grateful for the time they took with me, but all my appreciation and gratitude doesn't put food on the table.
I need to get off the plateau.
As a professional, Hard Plateaus seem to come at one of 2 times.
Either
1). You're doing great, your bills are paid, but you're bored. You feel like you're stuck in a rut.
2). Your rent is coming due, you need a new a new job/gig/project to get you back on track. You apply for something and the person tells you that "you're not good enough."
In the first case, no worries because your money is right.
In the second case, you're screwed.
I probably have 50 people wanting to work with me. Former station managers, independent artists, former production managers, etc and not one of them is "in power" right now. They can't get me work till they get work. The work isn't that thick on the ground for me on my own either.
So, I have to court others and they are either broke and interested or have money and unimpressed.
This is where I'm trying to go.
This is what I want to add to my toolbox...
I'm not one to reinvent the wheel. Why should I spend hundreds or thousands of man-hours to recreate a human figure, rig it and texture it? I have no bias against pre-made content. That being said....
What I did notice however, is that you mention lighting presets and pose presets. To me, those are the things that may be hitting the plateau. Lighting is so scene specific that I find it hard to use pre-made light rigs. Even ones I make for myself and save to the browser tend to get tweaked heavily for any scene I put them in.
Poses are another issue. I'll use a pre-made pose sometimes a starting point, but to get a more fluid look I may add target helpers and other modifiers to enhance the pose. Many times I take the time to make my own pose from scratch using target helpers to keep body parts locked where I want them while I manipulate the rest of the character.
I have no idea what it is you submitted, whether it was a genre or whatever, so I may be totally off base, in which case, just ignore me. ;-)
I can't give a real good way to break free of a plateau or block, except to maybe try and spare a little time away from whatever it is that you are doing and focus some energy in another creative direction. Hard to do with bill collectors banging on your door I know, but I think these plateaus are usually stress induced. Your body doesn't like stress and neither does the mind.
I was typing my response before I saw the images you posted. For what it's worth they look pretty cool to me.
So, are they death-metal or growler album art, or for graphic novels?
I WISH those were mine.
That's where I WANT to go.
Those are death metal album art. That last one is our old friend Stonemason's work.
And yeah, they're pretty cool.
:-)
Hi a few years ago I started a critique group.
I was the only 3dee guy.
Everyone else uses variations of traditional media.
You have to give people a choice when you ask for work to be critiqued.
You can say do you prefer image 1, or image 2 and why? etc
That way people will be more honest in telling you what is wrong.
People telling you honestly what is wrong is the answer to breaking the plateau.
And practice.
And trying new techniques.
Getting up at 6.oo am and working till 8oo pm.
Getting fat because you never leave your work space except to eat and the other thing.
I'm lucky enough to have a literary agent now. Children's books etc.
If I send her work which is not good enough then I am scared stiff because I might lose her.
So everything I send her is as good as I can do.
She doesn't mince words and is my best crtiquer. She doesn't take any crap because it is wasting her time.
And what she sens to publishers must be the 'best".
Because she doesnt want to waste the publisher's time.
So the third bit of advice is, never, ever take it personally.
People who are in professionally are doing it for a living, love and money , so they won't tell you lies, otherwise it reflects on their own abilities, and in the end they lose creds.
The other thing is a lot of people go "Oh I never do post work etc"
That's like running a race naked blindfolded and with no shoes, while everyone is zooming past you in Lear jets .....
just my tuppence :0
Yeah, I have been stuck. Broke, figured I would try making some content to sell, never comes out right at all. I model stuff in blender, looks awesome, take it into daz studio or carrara, all of a sudden mesh looks like shit with artifacts and such. I haven't been able to finish a piece of art in a long time. It sucks bigtime, makes me feel like I have been wasting time all these years sometimes. I have never been a pro at art though, my real trade is construction.
oh and a great way to get better is to be given an assigment and do it to the best of your ability in eight different variations
try the challenge we are doing.
it won't waste your time.
pretend it is an assignment for a big advertising job
you might just get the job :)
I am gonna try my luck in the challenge if I can finish the art piece I am working on now in time. I made it a new point to finish every piece I started no matter how long it takes lol. Part of my new life strategy.
a good strategy
:)
other suggestion I can make is to court an audience
when you know you have an audience you try and do your best work
one way to do this is with Illustration Friday....
http://illustrationfriday.com/
you won't see heavy metal mona lisa there, or maybe you will :)
you will see how other people approach the same problem though in different ways
Hi a few years ago I started a critique group.
I was the only 3dee guy.
Everyone else uses variations of traditional media.
You have to give people a choice when you ask for work to be critiqued.
You can say do you prefer image 1, or image 2 and why? etc
That way people will be more honest in telling you what is wrong.
People telling you honestly what is wrong is the answer to breaking the plateau.
And practice.
And trying new techniques.
Getting up at 6.oo am and working till 8oo pm.
Getting fat because you never leave your work space except to eat and the other thing.
I'm lucky enough to have a literary agent now. Children's books etc.
If I send her work which is not good enough then I am scared stiff because I might lose her.
So everything I send her is as good as I can do.
She doesn't mince words and is my best crtiquer. She doesn't take any crap because it is wasting her time.
And what she sens to publishers must be the 'best".
Because she doesnt want to waste the publisher's time.
So the third bit of advice is, never, ever take it personally.
People who are in professionally are doing it for a living, love and money , so they won't tell you lies, otherwise it reflects on their own abilities, and in the end they lose creds.
The other thing is a lot of people go "Oh I never do post work etc"
That's like running a race naked blindfolded and with no shoes, while everyone is zooming past you in Lear jets .....
just my tuppence :0
Agree about postwork. The amount I do varies. I recently had to force myself not to do postwork when I made promotional images for my Fantasy Village environment.
yes my motto is to disguise the genesis of my image as much as possible
My main reason for getting into 3D is that I thought it would be great for making reference images faster than it would take to google some and try to get similarly lit photos :D
Little did I know lol. Kinda glad I did now though, google image search really really sucks these days.
I've been a struggling artiest since i was old enough to pick up a crayola. But I have had this on going issue, lack of talent. The only 2 art forms I excelled in was sculpture and CG.
The only audience I try to please is me. I enjoying staging, not modeling, not rigging, staging. I can model, I can rig, I do enjoy texturing. But I lack talent and knowledge of the tools. So I'm a novice modeler at best, even though I have been doing it for over 15 years.
Content is what inspires me now. Often when I feel like working in Carrara I'll just go though my rather vast selection of content; not just poser or DAZ content because carrara can pretty well use it all. I don't start with a picture in mind, my muse left me years ago; the pictures are gone from my head, and the music doesn't play there any more. But I still enjoy staging scenes.
I let the scene build it's self. it tells me what it wants in it, I'm just the enabler. So I don't do this for the end result., the quality of my art does not need to improve to make me happy.
This also means I have hundreds of unfinished scenes; literally. I work on them till the scene quits talking to me or I get frustrated by something; lack of talent, lack of knowledge of the app, or simply because the app can't do what I want done.
Thing is, an artiest is always their own worst critic. With CG art an artiest can see all the bad points in a work they have done, but may not know what to do about it. Having a plateau in CG may mean no more then hitting your present understanding of the app.
Thanks for your comments everyone!
If you excel in sculpture and CG, then you don't have a lack of talent.
Hmmmmm, I guess at some unknown point, it stopped being fun, and turned into a ball of frustration lol. I think maybe I am focusing way too much on an end result, rather than the process.
When it stops being fun, even things we enjoy feel like a chore.
Hopefully, it will become fun again.
Thanks for responding Head Wax!
This is true.
Hard to follow advice, but true.
Since I have worked on both sides of the table, I should add to your advice this thought...
Professionals want your work to be good almost as much as you do. It is very satisfying to have quality work come across the desk and to give artists good news.
It sucks having to tell an artist bad news (at least it was for me, because I knew how it felt to be on the receiving end).
That's like running a race naked blindfolded and with no shoes, while everyone is zooming past you in Lear jets .....
I have a friend that says "I never do post work." When Adobe was giving away Photoshop, this guy was probably the first to download it. I asked him why he was so excited by software he told me he never uses. LOL!
All kidding aside, I am going to try to pump up my post work. I have been impressed by the promo photos in the Daz marketplace. Those all claim to be done without postwork. I wish the artists would explain how they do those without any postwork.
pleasure
I guess I should say that I have shared a studio with the same group of artists for 12 years.
we c and c each others work
so I am used to having my feelings hurt :)
I've also been in about 21 art shows in t hat time
if people don't like my work I just figure they have no taste :)
sometimes they are right though
!
othertimes I might do something I don't like, and it is the first piece to sell at our shows
so it's not what we ourselves think is good
is what other people think is good
as far as spending t heir cash on your work at least
it's like when I went to uni I quickly learnt that if I told examiners the truth then I failed
when I told them what they wanted to hear, I passed.
so I guess we have to give people what they want, not what we want (sometimes at least)
remember, if it's good just ignore the critics - they don't know nuffin - unless it's their money you want, then they know everything!