As the title says, whether it’s a weak ability to visualize an image in your mind or you can’t seem to decide what values to apply where, it would seem to me like it would be quite rare for anyone to have absolutely no weakness in any possible department when it comes to putting images or animations together, even though we have worked at it for years and years.
I would start with what I say may have hobbled me somewhat for years and makes things take longer than the amount of the time they could’ve been done in, and that is I have a tendency of thinking that the way to get the result I want is more complex than it should be (and can sometimes be pretty severe). This could be in part that in cases where I put Cycles node trees together, I would plop in a bunch of nodes and make connections everywhere, I figure that I would later find out how to simplify things and make the results even better, but it has a tendency to be a slow process as times and I even regress to more complexity now and then. Another factor is that I might not be aware that Blender actually has a more elegant solution in the form of a node type or tool that would overall give more power in terms of what I am after, so I end up using more than what is needed which leads to an un-necessitated difficulty in thinking things through.
It’s also the same when I write Python scripts for BGE game logic, but in this case I tend to start simple, then get overcomplicated, then simplify later, another weakness is the tendency to be somewhat scatterbrained at times as to what elements I need in the scene yet, I could have a render going for a couple of days when I remember a detail that I thought of before, but now thinking it really should be in there.
Everyone has at least one thing they could construe as a weakness of some sort, no one can say they are perfection in art, what is yours?
I would say my inability to draw. I’m working hard on it, but that sort of hand skill is just not there for me. Being able to sketch out ideas and do concept art would be super helpful.
I guess that’s not really blender per se, so modeling is my second choice. Of course, I have plenty of room to improve in all areas. But hey, it wouldn’t be as fun if I wasn’t getting better!
For me, It’s the detail spiral. I start blocking out big shapes, but then before I’m done I just want to add in this little detail here, then that needs a texture, then I need to set up a node group, then I need to tweak the lighting. and all of a sudden, I have a rough blocked in shape with a single incredibly detailed bolt on it. Keeping things moving in even passes is something that I am really trying to work on, but it is a struggle.
Not just Blendering, sometimes it gets my programming too. Waste too much time coding the “perfect” interface (which when finished is nice, but time could have been better spent).
Being SOOO imperfect in many things. I mean, I know how to model and even sculpt and retopologise pretty well, but texturing and creating the shaders really gets the best of me… And lighting… AND, I haven’t got a clue about animation. But, I sort of become better, at texturing a least… Still, so many holes to fill.
Laziness, procrastination and short attention span/too many ideas going through my head at one time as well as shying away from things i’m not good at. The feeling of a result being less than what i expected/want and not posting it due to being embarrassed about the result also doesn’t help. I haven’t completed (modeled, textured and rendered) a project in nearly 2 years and unfortunately most of that time I haven’t even touched blender. I can’t help but wonder what stage I would be at now if I had been working hard for the past 2 years.
The version of that I have to deal with is taking careful to add detail only to the point where the image does not look too busy, I think the image looks too empty and later it looks too packed, part of the ‘too little, then too much’ weakness that can still get to me from time to time.
Also, the idea of me forgetting some last remaining details is, in my case, an extension of my tendency to forget that ‘one last thing’ that permeates nearly every facet of my life (as if my brain is just wired in a way to make me prone to it, kind of hard to completely overcome it).
Building a one-click compile option into the patch tracker that spits out a usable build on your end would require a lot of developer time and resources that the BF does not have at the moment.
For one thing, it would require a server farm with many threads so it can handle a bunch of simultaneous build requests and build them all at once. Then there would be the work in making sure the software knows how to integrate a patch successfully and know when to spit out an error if it’s not possible to do so.
You might be thinking then ‘the buildbot already gives daily builds’, but that is just once a day and for the master branch only, and even that took a lot of time to setup and debug when it debuted.
Have you ever thought about the notion that your big ideas might be more complex to pull off then you think when you look at the contexts of resources and all of the smaller details that often come with them? I can see this with me at times as well when making an image and finding out it involves a bit more than connecting the thingamabob to the doohickey.
