I re-read the Frankenstein novel recently. If you haven’t, I highly recommend it.

I’m growing to love reading again. Who you are at the time of reading a book, changes what you perceive from the story and what themes you extract. Recently, I’m thinking about storytelling and my goals to make more art. So I saw Frankenstein in a new way.

To me, Frankenstein is the ultimate horror story for artists. Let me explain.

Book Summary

Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

If you haven’t read the story or have forgotten the plot, let me summarize:

The story actually starts at the end. Frankenstein is found by sailors in the Arctic. Seeing his frenzied mind, they wish to know his story and who he’s chasing. So Frankenstein explains:

He discusses his college studies, particularly how the human body works. Becoming a workaholic, he ignores family and friends to focus on his work: creating a synthetic man. Instead, he creates a monster.

Ashamed of his hideous monster, Frankenstein flees once it awakes. The monster, humiliated at his creator’s shame, also departs.

In later months, Frankenstein finally starts reconnecting with family. Then, he learns his younger brother is murdered — strangled by inhuman hands. One of the servants is framed. Frankenstein is torn, feeling responsible for the servant’s death, but unwilling to confess it was His creation — therefore potentially killed himself, unable to cast vengeance.

Later, the monster meets Frankenstein. In a last attempt at a positive reunion, the monster relays its story the past few months. While hiding behind a house in the countryside, it watches and learns from an unsuspecting family living there: language, writing, culture, love, and kindness. The monster attempts to introduce itself to the family, but is cast out. Embittered with humanity and loneliness, the creature goes on a murderous rampage. It tries to be humane again by saving a girl in a river, only for the girl’s father to attempt shooting at the monster. And then of course, it murders Frankenstein’s brother.

The monster gives an ultimatum to Frankenstein: make a female monster to satisfy its loneliness, and it promises to never interfere with humanity. Frankenstein initially agrees and starts making her. However, Frankenstein worries: if this monster turned evil on a dime, what’s stopping the female monster from doing the same? Why should he trust the next monster to be benevolent, when the first monster hasn’t so far?

So, in an act of protest, Frankenstein burns what is made of his second creation. The monster goes on a final rampage. First killing one of Frankenstein’s childhood friends, then his bride on their wedding night. Frankenstein’s father dies of grief.

Left with no loved ones, Frankenstein chases the monster into the arctic, bringing us back to the flash-forward at the beginning. Frankenstein dies of the cold soon after. The monster visits Frankenstein’s corpse to mourn. With a promise to make a pyre to burn itself, the creature departs to the arctic sea.

The Worst Fear for Creators

I remember reading this story the first time in high school. I’m glad I chose to read it then. At the time, I thought that calling this novel a “science fiction horror” was a stretch. Sure, creating a human is sci-fi. But what’s the horror here? Just making a monster?

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

The horror has grown more palpable as I’ve gotten older. But now that I’ve finished it the second time, I realized the deeper horror: your greatest creation becomes your, and others’, undoing. This can apply to creating life as a parent, but also to creating as an artist.

To create a human, from scratch, was this man’s crowning achievement. If it had went through, Frankenstein truly would have been heralded for generations.

But the horror wasn’t the invention failing. No, He could have continued his life’s work in other ways, and found happiness elsewhere.

His invention succeeded, which led to the destruction of his family, livelihood, sanity, and ultimately, his own life.

Obviously, none of us have created our own human monsters (okay parents, no jokes here). But like any good horror, there’s a warning the protagonist chooses to ignore. It’s cited during Frankenstein’s college life:

Never allow passion to disturb tranquility. Frankenstein’s workaholic-ism and obsession over this project led to his undoing. There’s mention of how he received family letters pleading for a report, even a letter with a single sentence saying he’s alive (remember kids, it’s the 1800s). But he ignored them, and went full force into his passions.

In a modern world, how could we apply this?

Modern “Geniuses”

On a related note: what do Frankenstein and Elon Musk have in common? No, this isn’t about politics.

They’ve attempted to create or revitalize technological innovations. Musk reinvigorated technological and economic possibilities of both the electric car and space travel.

And both have been questioned for their work ethics.

Elon Musk has claimed to work 100+ hours some weeks, even sleeping in his own workplaces. He micromanages his own schedule into minutes, not hours. He’s been known to expect similarly high expectations of his employees. People have noted he believes in his goals and dreams with absolute certainty (noted by Sam Altman, who took a SpaceX tour by him, fun fact).

Even other tech moguls, while leaning towards this direction, are often not nearly as extreme. Zuckerberg is often considered to work 50-60 hours a week, as noted in 2015 by workplace peers. I couldn’t find much about Sam Altman’s work ethic (apparently he has a book now, so time will tell), but he’s publicly said that while he too focuses on (over)productivity, he warns about overcommitting too much.

And another similarity: all three tech moguls have been in legal hearings over what they’ve created.

Zuckerberg at a court hearing

Now, you may believe these inventions are for the greater good. Or that they’re stepping stones towards the apocalypse.

But think about it through their eyes, for just a moment:

Note: I say this without necessarily condoning Facebook, Zuckerberg, Musk, or anyone else mentioned. This is imagery, not my agreeing with them.

But imagine creating what you believe is your finest work, only for people to hate it. Worse, they hate you for it.

Frankenstein takes this a step further: the creator hates his own work. And even the work hates the creator.

I’m sure each of these creators — Frankenstein, Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman — have had a moment of considering: was all this worth it? Is all this hatred against my work, against me, worth the innovation?

What does this have to do with artists?

But this is software and engineering, you say. Not artworks.

How about Michelangelo? Remember his big painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Yeah, “Last Judgment.”

I’m grateful to have seen it in person, over a decade ago now. If you ever go to Italy, see as many churches and artwork as you possibly can. It’ll leave you awe-struck.

Photo by Veer Shah on Unsplash

But why was this one hated at the time? Because many of the characters are nude.

As noted in Angels and Demons, later on, people desecrated many statues and artworks with fig leaves to “cover them up.” Except for the most extreme cases, these have been removed in restoration projects.

Now, this is not as extreme as Frankenstein. But that’s what makes the novel a horror: it’s a worst nightmare for creators. In a way, all artists have this fear, at different levels, to create something that:

1. You don’t like

2. Others don’t like

3. Makes others not like you

4. Shuns you from society

5. Drives you insane, kills you, etc.

Frankenstein literally does all these things, all at once.

Worst artist ever, amirite? 😜😜😜

Takeaways

Jokes aside, here’s the takeaways.

1. There is always a cost to creating — to others and you

I’ve learned that both programming and art are as freeing as they are taxing. Remember Mary Shelley’s warnings, often echoed in other popular stories as well. Take Jurassic Park’s “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, you didn’t stop to think if you should.”

“I won but at what cost” is a common storytelling theme for a reason. And even if you don’t feel the consequences of your own work, others will.

2. You are responsible for what you create

Legal debates fight over “how much” of this is true. If a Tesla crashes, who’s financially responsible? The driver not driving? The software developers who wrote the code? Musk?

Who’s financially responsible for an LLM that costs a company thousands, if not millions, of dollars in damages?

Answers may vary based on how sentient one believes electronics to be. As someone whose dad coded individual computer chips all day, I can tell you they’re not.

So, the creation itself isn’t responsible. And the person using or viewing the creation is at least responsible for their own actions.

Can the creator be responsible? My answer — in some cases, absolutely yes.

While an artist can’t control how something is received, they certainly control what they’re transmitting. Note that I’m mostly referring to technology and artistic content targeted to younger audiences, like children and toddlers. Seeing how my child is transfixed by movies and videos, makes me ever more sensitive to how digital media affects the mind.

That’s not all art, obviously. But just being self-aware of how your art will be received will work wonders for you.

This also comes up with usage of AI. I’ve noticed some people using AI mentally shift accountability to it: “It’s not the AI’s fault, it’s what it told me to do.” That’s not responsibility. Own what you produce, and that includes the tools you use.

In short: be aware of what you’re creating. Be aware of who’s receiving. Act responsibly and with ownership.

While I don’t like just posting links, I’ve been quite busy being sick (don’t worry, I’m feeling better now) and prepping for Blender Conference. I do have another longer post in the works about the horror (and power) of artistic/coding creation, really excited for it.

Talking to an Executive - painful but good read. Don’t plan so hard that you can’t take the conversation to new directions. Often, in a business presentation, your goal isn’t to get to the end of the slides. It’s a discussion.

Also, don’t burn bridges with directors and higher-up managers. As seen in this article, and speaking from experience. I know workplace politics can feel dumb, but even in freelancing work, you’re working with other people who frankly don’t just “go away.” Work relationships can span decades. Use them well.

”Good Taste” is Just Experience - great article for up-and-coming programmers and artists. Don’t worry about “I don’t know” or “I can’t tell if it’s good enough” at the beginning. That’s solved by working, failing, fixing, and finishing.

While we certainly gain some taste from consuming content — viewing artworks, watching animations, visiting websites, using tools — it hits a limit quick. Taste is best gained from creating.

What I Learned From Nearly 1,000 Interviews - great read about interviews and getting hired. Technical stuff feels easier to practice, but “fit” and comfort with the company and manager is one of the main goals of interviews.

Practice giving answers to reduce rambling. I’ve been literally rehearsing my conference presentation for weeks now. It makes a world of a difference.

Practice works wonders. It helps your good personality shine in interviews. The technical stuff already looks good; that was confirmed in the resume.

Continuing my … series? Sure. Continuing my irregular series on, well, playing video game series and seeing how they change between them.

Dishonored 1 (+ DLCs)

What I like about the first game is its depth in morality. Choices really do matter here. Side quests with outcomes that link to each other. Violence spurring more death and rats in the world. Other characters reacting to your violence. And to have so many choices in a “linear” game like this.

And I’m a sucker for good writing. The Outsider’s presence and preachy yet sassy rhetoric in this game is just soo good (“if he really wants to meet me, he could start by being a bit more interesting” and “either way, it’s [her] final party”).

The Outsider

For graphics, it’s meh. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautiful game, and they nailed the painterly style from the get-go. But the first game is very polygon-y. NPC animations are mostly meh.

I recently got to try its DLCs. Honestly, amazing. Probably one of the best DLC campaigns I’ve played for any game (hold that thought — replaying the Half Life 2 episodes, I’ll let you know). And it got to test some nicer graphics. Outsider has great lines as usual (“you’re running out of rope” gave me the chills first time I heard it).

Dishonored 2

The sequel has a lot of great advances. Stellar graphics, insanely detailed and stylized textures. Amazing worldbuilding. Getting to play two characters with different powers and styles.

Great level design experiments as well. But my hot take: I didn’t like the time travel level. Titanfall 2 did it better, end of story.

However, it pulled back on the quantity of meaningful choices of the first game. Makes sense, from a production standpoint. But definitely a more accessible game for a wider audience. To make more money, understandably.

Dishonored: Death of the Outsider

Supposedly this game was meant to be a DLC for Dishonored 2, but its experimentation warranted a standalone game.

I felt it. And not necessarily in a good way.

Sure, graphics go harder. I could feel the VRAM filling up. Combat and kills are way more reflexive and visceral.

Overall, my highlights:

• “The Bank Job” is one of the most satisfying missions of the series. While this game has less missions, it has many “ways to play” the objective

• In the words of Brave, “With one dead eye.” If you know, you know. Loved that moment.

• The witch being tortured was quite sad to hear/see

• Rats screaming is terrifying

• Missions worked around mimicry really well

• The lady asking you to find her friend outside the witches’ mansion — another “if you know, you know” (and reading both of their notes 😭)

• The sound mixing and distortion when killing the Envisioned? Audio perfection. *chef’s kiss*

But it is far shorter than the other two games. I beat it a couple times (hard, “low” and “max” chaos) within ten hours. Great worldbuilding, but the story itself is average. Outsider, despite his name in the title, has surprisingly few lines, even in the final sequence.

And I miss the pistol, dangit. A wrist crossbow just doesn’t feel the same.

And I didn’t realize this until I looked it up after playing twice and being disappointed in the endings, but they removed the chaos system. Two endings for a choice at the end, but that’s about it. No real consequences for going guns-blazing, or a nonlethal ghost (apart from achievements).

Maybe this world is meant to be, at this point, the worst outcome anyway? But removing these choices felt like taking the spine out of the series. No meaningful choices that change the story later on.

As an actual DLC, I probably would’ve brushed it off. But a full game? Come on.

My real bone to pick though? The protagonist’s writing. Especially in the first few levels, she makes fun of story beats (“a secret knock? Really?”). It sounds like a young YouTuber afraid to commit to their own bits: “Yeah that was cringe, am I right?” (hey, yeah I know I do that too, that’s why I recognize it) Self-deprecation to protect yourself, which felt off-kilter compared to the rest of the series.

And if you do the optimistic ending, her mercy comes out of nowhere, because none of her dialogue changes to lead her there. I loved how the previous games changed dialogue based on how you killed bosses, so they emotionally headed towards the arc you play for.

I honestly quit the first time I played this over a year ago because of this writing, but managed to finish over a year later. It felt that bad for me.

Deviation From Pillars

One of the hardest aspects of sequels is commitment to the “pillars” of your games.

You need to experiment and expand so audiences don’t get bored (especially your players with the highest playtimes — the same mechanics get old quick). But you also need to stay true to your series so you don’t alienate your audience too much.

Dishonored’s core, if I had to answer:

• Action-stealth

• Moral choices shaping the world and gameplay

• Painterly graphics style

• A dark world, but its fate rests in your hands

Dishonored 2 raised its foot off the gas of the moral choices, but not all the way. It was still impactful. Death of an Outsider, in my opinion, distanced itself from it quite drastically.

The nice thing with having one of your pillars in an art style is that, studio artists can always lean into an art style further. They can make a world feel grittier with the animations and blood splatters and sound mixing.

But gameplay design? It’s not just one mechanic or style. It’s a bunch of decisions that integrate, conflict, clash, play off each other. And it can drastically affect budget + production time too.

Having moral choices from the first levels affect the last ones? That’s a lot of playtesting to invest in. Not to mention level design and finding all the ways to “break” it so you know how to keep it structurally sound.

No game-defining choices except for the ending? Far easier to manage.

Pillars is a common game development term. But this can be applied to other forms of art too. Something I’ve been working on this year is finding “pillars” in my art and content. What makes my work, me? If someone recommended my work over another’s, even if it’s quite similar, how would they justify it?

Something to keep in mind. Your pillars will change and fluctuate; we are human. But it is what people come back to. Keep that in mind.

Thanks for the read.

I have been using Superhive (formerly Blender Market) as both a customer and creator for over 5 years now. Crazy, time flies. While not selling products as a full-time job, I‘m active enough to watch the customer dynamics and economics evolve over time.

But for the past couple years, it’s been shifting. Dramatically.

Here’s the TL:DR, from the Superhive CEO himself —

Jonathan’s goal is to start this discussion with fellow creators as well as customers. Determining if any existing solutions serves both well. If not, what can be done.

Anecdotally, I have seen this shift for other creators, even those not on Superhive Market. Both big and small creators.

Several have moved from a product-oriented revenue stream to subscriptions, often via Patreon or YouTube memberships. This also includes ads and brand partnerships.

While I get some (small) earnings from Superhive, I haven’t really committed to earning revenue from any of these. I can’t even make money from YouTube.

Now, “pay upfront, free support and updates” isn’t a bad thing. Because let’s think about why it’s affecting Blender product owners.

Less Revenue Per Customer

From the analysis on their blog post, creators are consistently gaining customers. Which is good, it means creators and Superhive are doing their job of attracting customers.

Despite that, overall revenue is declining.

From Autotroph’s blog post

This could be caused by a multitude of things. I asked my stats-studying wife, who mentioned this could be customers purchasing more but cheaper products, meaning less overall income despite purchases continuing. The data shown here lacks some context.

Superhive also has adopted the “you bought it, you keep it forever” as the default. And that includes updates. This also means it’s not always sustainable for the many creators dedicating themselves to a single, albeit large, product.

Customers spending less, or creators hesitant to make more expensive products. Possibly both, caused by the other.

I'm not saying this is the cause. We’re all speculating. The point is Autotroph wants to start a discussion around this, with creators as well as businesses.

My Theories

Oh, you mean it? You want to know my theories?

To keep myself from ranting, I’ll boil it down to bullet points:

• In a volatile economy, people less willing to pay more for subscriptions and products. Creators trying to comply with cheaper products. The standard for product costs lower. Cycle continues

• GPL means anyone can maintain code, leveling the playing field. Why pay a subscription for updates when I know I can fix it myself?

• Lack of B2B opportunities, at least non-NDA ones. Not many studios utilize Blender, let alone publicly say so.

What to Do?

But what do you think? Am I wrong?

Let them know. Seriously. That’s why we’re doing this.

Reach out to me, other creators (fine, I see how it is), or Superhive itself to give feedback. They have literally said they’re open to it.

For my content creators (the few actually reading this), ask your audiences. Get some data, even anecdotal. What they’re still buying, what they chose not to buy. And why.

Talk to you later.

Solving Problems

The idea for this post came from Andreas Fragner’s ”Three Ways to Solve Problems”. It’s a short but good one.

It’s mostly talking about solving problems from a career/business/programming standpoint. But I like viewing it from a self-help sort of way. I’ve had a lot of “fixing myself” to do over the past ten years. Changing my mindset, worldview, and simply myself.

Yes, pursue your dreams, change the world. But remember that changing yourself not only can be easier (believe it or not /s), but often leave you just as content.

A Random Walk (no, it’s not about stochastic algorithms)

From this article by Kothari, some of the best things don’t come from productivity. But from random “accidents,” (or more than coincidence, depending on who you ask).

On a side note, one quote stuck out to me:

I’ve had similar feelings about morality and “living with yourself.” When I disconnect from the computer — reading, walking, in the words of Gaston, “starts getting ideas, and thinking” — I feel better, but it also reveals the bad parts of me.

Ooh, I need to work on that. I’m still thinking about that conversation? Probably should resolve this. Need to get better at that.

This time alone helps me realize all the things about myself I need to improve. If I’m unable to sit in a room alone, then it may be time to work on myself.

Not that I consider myself a horrible person, but I try to be self-aware of my faults, and channel that to be better. As I said about becoming “a healthy artist”, improving yourself in one way will show in other aspects of your life too.

Don’t drown your brain with headphones on all day. Maybe you’ll miss something going on inside your head.

Getting Real with LLMs + Not Neglecting Soft Skills

This section is actually from two articles, because they reflect the same topic: AI.

• giladpeleg.com/blog/getting-real-with-llms

• qu8n.com/posts/most-important-software-engineering-skill-2026

They highlight what AI (in programming) covers, and what it falls short on.

As I’ve said in my other articles, my relationship with AI is complicated. I see its benefits, including saving time for more mundane tasks; I’ve mentioned here how I use one locally to generate rough transcriptions of my own videos before I polish and publish them (better than YouTube’s, so worth it).

But it is a far cry from “doing it all for us” and definitely not a replacement for self-expression and gaining experience. These articles reminded me of how necessary it is to work intentionally and thoughtfully. Not just for the final product, but for your own growth and experience.

Whether you have an AI agent or not, responsibility and accountability still falls on you.

Okay, these rants are going on too long. My point from these articles is this:

• Reframe your mind and yourself

• That includes being willing to change yourself

• Because, as technology improves, paradoxically more will be up to you

Thanks for reading. Enjoy the others’ articles. Tell them thanks.

A “healthy artist.” An oxymoron, am I right? heheheh… heheh.

This can also apply to “healthy programmer,” sadly.

Like many jokes, there is often truth to them. Because digital artists are so passionate about their craft, and so sedentary because said craft requires us to be in front of a computer screen, we tend to just prioritize health less.

My New Artwork + Overcoming

I finally finished my artwork this month! It was quite busy, but I’m glad I finished it.

Why 2D with this? Part of it is to force myself to embrace the artistic process. It's easy to get caught up in the 3D and technical aspects, when in the end, all that 3D precision is just rendered into an image anyway. Forcing myself to work in 2D pushes me away from a technical mindset into a creative one. "Get out of my own head," if you will.

The art challenge was around "contrast", which is why I chose this high-contrast, black-and-white only style. I had a thought of adding color, but the artwork doesn't feel like it needs it. And to me, David and Goliath is a great example of contrast.

In some ways, I've also recently been conquering some Goliaths in my personal life. I've been having bouts with health going as far back as two years ago. Sadly, I haven't been taking care of myself as well as I should be.

When I was younger, my body could compensate and adapt just as well. But I've been exercising regularly, getting out of this chair, eating healthier.

And it's been hard, forcing myself to make these choices. But I've seen benefits already. I sleep better. I have more energy. I think clearer; my memory is better than it has been.

While this stage of life needs me to focus on this more than most, let me humor any younger viewers with a few tips on health advice. You may not need it now, but it will pay dividends as you get older.

What Am I Doing to Be Healthy

Overall, just get a yearly physical. With the tests they do, that’ll give you enough to know what you need to focus on.

Diet

• Drinking more water. Along with just being good for me, it fills me up. It’s been a subtle way to combat snacking and big(ger) portions.

• Limiting processed, “frozen meal" foods. Including fried food. Along with having more saturated fats (often as preservatives), they tend to just be less healthy foods.

• Narrowing my eating schedule. I noticed I’d wake up during the night more if I ate closer to bedtime. Turns out, eating late means your digestion can occur during sleep, which could wake you up depending on what you ate. I stopped eating late, had a bigger dinner to feel full, and I woke up less during the night.

The most helpful quote I’ve heard is: “you can eat (almost) anything, but not everything.”

Exercise

• The only important thresholds for good exercise is: raising your heart rate, keeping it there for a while, and breaking a sweat. That’s it.

• Pick exercises you enjoy. It doesn’t have to always be running (although it’s one of betters one out there). Some workouts I’ve found easy to pick up, for me:

  • Skipping rope (you can get ones where you won’t trip over them)

  • Dance

  • high intensity interval training (HIIT)

• You can find follow-along videos on YouTube. Make it easy on yourself.

• Start with the habit, even if it’s shorter than the recommended amount of time. You can always build up the time spent.

Stimulation and Sleep

• Going to bed and getting up at (somewhat) consistent times, no matter the day of the week.

• Do nothing before bed. In a world of productivity, social media stimulation, and “getting everything done,” it’s hard to tell my brain to turn off. But if I am doing something, even “as a hobby” or “it makes me relax (it’s a ranked multiplayer match)”, it doesn’t work. So I avoid doing anything productive to tell my brain it’s time to wind down.

• Avoiding (bright) screens before bed. About an hour before bed, I get off the computer, and read. Along with physical books, I bought a used e-ink reader. It’s honestly soo fascinating to use. The slow refresh rate and black-and-white screen is far less stimulating, which helps calm me down.

Recently, a group chat on Discord took a sad(der) turn. While some artists get steady support on Patreon, others feel guilty for trying. To be “monetary” about their art.

It got me thinking. Is all this truly radical in the world and economy of art? Or has nothing really changed?

What Has Changed

I’m still not really sure. But here’s at least a few that sticks out to me.

Immediate (and eternal) exposure

In ye olden days, artworks were purely physical. They had to be transported to be shared.

Physical artworks have a sort of natural “exclusivity” to them. You sell an amazing painting to a rich home? Who’s going to see it? Well, other rich people invited to the home. Not those poor people outside 😝 (end of being facetious).

Photo by Walters Art Museum

And because these people are also rich, they can become your next customers. Handy.

Nowadays, what is done to share art online? Post it. Repost it. Share it. Forever. Because even if you delete it, it doesn’t stop anyone from downloading, scraping, or reposting.

We’ve optimized the convenience of sharing. But that also means everything is shared, which leads to…

Homogeneity in digital art

With the rise of social media, all art we see on a day-to-day basis is put in the same context.

Michelangelo fine art? A wojak meme? A clay sculpt? An animation? All digitized, in the same feed. All viewed from my couch, supporting my (badly postured) back.

(not of me) Photo by Shane

I think that’s why artists crave portfolios and even their own custom sites. We want that context back. Something that keeps our art separate from the often-fluff in feeds.

That’s one of the offerings of paid creator platforms like Patreon: distance from “typical” social media. At the very least, being near other creatives.

Not just commissions

My initial draft of this actually went down a rabbit hole of how artists during the Renaissance worked. In short, it was commissions and contract work. From the rich, including businesses like churches.

Today, contract and freelance work still falls into this. But the audience and methods of payment have widened.

At least in America, the middle class has ballooned with more “spending money” than usual. Over-consumption is (almost) normalized. Many can afford commissioning artists.

For customers who simply refuse to pay for anything? Ads. Yes, I know we all hate ads. But as a society, we put up with them quite a lot for them to be hated. We hate ads, but we also don’t like having to pay for things. Guess which one often wins?

So artists market and appeal to more people, which may not necessarily help their conversion rate, likely due to…

Consumption Fatigue

The term “brain rot” is genuinely so accurate for platforms like Instagram. Even after a few minutes, it gets hard to process, let alone appreciate, what I see.

Photo by Adrian Swancar

I see many lovely artworks on there. But the consuming of 5+ bite-sized videos per minute in our social feeds, and paranoia of curation affecting what we see (and what others see about us), our brains are so dopamine-d up that it’s harder to get me to stop and enjoy an artwork, let alone support the creator behind it.

What’s an Artist to Do?

In some ways, platforms like Patreon alleviate these — creating better context for artworks and offering more revenue streams. With the widening of audiences and consumption fatigue, Patreon doesn’t necessarily do much better.

Regarding “what’s changed?” I don’t think I’m qualified to truly answer what’s changed in the past few years.

While I’m not a successful online content creator by any means, let me share at least advice from what I’ve seen work for others.

Focus on one platform

(I said I wasn’t the example here, didn’t I? 😅🙈)

The most successful creators I follow often pick one platform to be truly active on.

Yes, sadly you still need accounts on other platforms. But they now become a “pipe” to your main platform. Reels become snippets or teasers of your main content, or at the very least a way to notify followers of new videos.

While YouTube and Patreon are among the most versatile, they may not be for you. It depends on a few things:

• Length of your video content (long vs short)

• Primary medium of content (audio vs video vs writing vs interactive)

• Pseudo-social intimacy (openly chill with followers on a livestream vs reply to comments in your own time)

• Revenue stream options (sponsors, ads, direct commissions)

• How strongly you need to control context (algorithm-based platforms, fediverse, separate website or newsletter)

Honestly, you could probably make most platforms work for you. But the point is to pick one, and focus on it.

Develop your (digital) personality

I could just say “branding” and leave it at that, but that’s not really what I mean here.

Here’s two very different videos. I want you to think of their “personalities.” At least watch the first few minutes, if you’re pretending that you’re busy.

While fashion itself doesn’t interest me (this is from my wife’s subscriptions, mind you), it’s amusing to watch. With the fast narration and tightly-cut editing that makes you question if her (and you) are high, I can immediately tell what a Micarah video “feels” like.

Now try this one:

Tim Caine practically never cuts in his videos. Maybe an overlay if he feels like it. He just refers to some notes as he talks, all in one take.

Yes, Micarah has far more subscribers and favors “the algorithm.” And Tim started with an existing reputation among game developers.

But there are examples of creators that are the opposite in both fields: lecture-style fashion designer videos, and high-octane gamedev blogs (remember Dani?).

In short, don’t feel like you have to fit a mold. Think about how you want to share with your followers. How would you tell them?

Markiplier in a recent video talked about the importance of learning (video) editing for yourself. I couldn’t agree more. Even if you end up not doing it or outsource your editing, it gives you a sense of your content’s pacing, and what personality it yearns for.

I’ve been slowly adding (back) more jokes to my edits. I literally struggle with not pulling out all the jokes I make.

Humor is very much part of my life. But it’s hard to embrace showing my personality in my videos. It means being vulnerable and different from a “guaranteed normal” mold you see everywhere.

Practice with unpublished videos, if you have to. But have someone else watch it and give feedback. Don’t just judge it yourself.

Leaning into your digital personality will make your content more recognizable, and help you grow a more organic audience. Virality is great, but only followers will stay, especially if you change or add platforms over time.

Decide which content is worth paying for

And don’t rely on a single method of payment. Some monetary methods I’ve seen, per type of creator:

• Livestreamer: donations, sponsorships, ads from YouTube crossposts, merch

• Blender YouTube creator: Patreon for BTS and .blend files, YouTube ads + sponsorships

• Film critic: YouTube sponsorships (but posting multiple reviews a week)

• Asset website owner: standalone website with paid subscription, YouTube ads on their marketing videos

• Freelance artist: big commissions from companies, digital products of Blender tools or ultra high-res wallpapers of their artworks, paid educational courses on “getting into the industry”

• Filmmaker: pay-to-view their movies (often cheap, $1-2), ads from YouTube uploads of their movies or trailers, investments from producers, funding campaigns throughout process (fundraisers, local viewings outside festivals)

Not all of these rely on making the art what people pay for. And I know freelance artists with “weak” social media presences because they have such a strong network of clients.

As you can see, it’s often very mix-and-match. This is all far more flexible than artists may realize. Try different methods out.

Believe people can show up for you

It’s discouraging when no one comes to see your art. I’ve felt that with some of my artsy videos, and even paid products I spend months on.

You feel like a kid with a little lemonade stand, just watching all the cars drive past.

After a while, to protect yourself, you tell yourself that no one (or no significant number) will come for you. To “only make art for yourself,” which is a good thing, but takes an important part of the equation out: connection with viewers.

Please believe people can show up for you. Also talking to me here. Let that belief change as people find you, follow you, and show up for you.

While on the extreme end of creator reputation, Markiplier made me reflect on this. For context, he’s a game streamer for over a decade now. He’s been working for years on a feature film adaptation for Iron Lung, got stuck in “post-production hell” for a while. But it has finally premiered, going to theaters in January.

You can skip to 1:47 for the emotions, at least get to 5:10 to see most of the waterworks. I’m not sharing this to say, “Look, he’s crying.” I’m demonstrating how important this moment is to all of us artists. What we yearn for.

We want to be validated. To be loved. To be appreciated.

Trust that that is all possible. Ideally, firstly, in your personal life. But along with that, in the work you make too. Yes, make stuff for yourself. But art is meant to be shared.

A different kind of newsletter, as I write this on December 31st. But I know artists get so down on themselves. And if I’m going to do more art, I need to face these feelings head-on anyway.

Happy New Year, and keep showing up. Eventually, someone will show up for you.

A big concern with AI has been its use in the education system. Sure, cheating was relatively available long before AI. But now it’s even more so.

But it’s not only used by cheaters. Some teachers, either believing it’s for the best or just fatigued from trying to prevent its usage, are introducing and even encouraging AI in the classroom.

This isn’t about banning AI in classrooms, or even fully using it (but mitigating its usage in classrooms could help). I’m talking about truly curing the problem; AI is merely the coping mechanism. We have to handle it at the source: the students and their reasons to use AI, or any other method of foreshortening their education.

Sometimes it’s for a scholarship or A+ (or just not a D+). Possibly for approval by their parents. Sometimes it’s the culturally-pressured chase for efficiency and productivity so they can … watch Netflix on the couch?

And the worst: a fear of failure. And thanks to social media, failure can be publicly available and digitally unforgiving. Sound familiar, artists?

This idea came back to me due to this recent video: How to do anything (without AI). The video is less about AI and more just about work ethic. Why we do and don’t do creative things, even if we want to do them.

The tl:dw is ​​​"​Do stuff without the shame of failure." AI is quite tempting as it disassociates you from the result. You’re not really failing if you’re not really doing it either.

Without shame, you’ll try and explore when self doubts would otherwise hinder you. Without disassociating yourself from the creative experience itself.

It saddens me when artists (including myself) get so inside their heads. I remember a girl in my high school art class who was already an amazing drawer at the age of sixteen. But in fits of perfectionism, she would crumple fully shaded drawings that would’ve surely gotten A+’s.

But it wasn’t about the grade. It was about her shame despite it. When a failed creation is considered worse than not creating at all.

But "doing stuff" yourself is one of the greatest sources of joys. Remember the last time you finished a project and shared it with others. Didn’t it feel amazing? Even if you knew it was rough around the edges. You were proud you finished.

Sure, AI enables people to do things they couldn't otherwise. I’ve heard creators say it helps write posts when their dyslexia otherwise prevents them. I’m not talking about those kinds of enabling uses.

I’m talking about those who can and often want do the work themselves. If you can do it, why take that experience away from yourself?

Again, the issue with AI I’m discussing here is not about AI itself. It's people's choices against choosing experiences they could enjoy otherwise, often out of shame.

Happiness in the Learning Experience

Shame is protective, in a way. It can be a driving force to do better, and to get to the end. The successful result.

When it comes to art or any other hard-earned result, there’s plenty of joy to be had in the finishing. The sharing. The prestige of awards and acclamation.

But many artists still work without it. Vincent Van Gogh was famously not successful, despite being widely acclaimed today. But he created art until his death.

I find that the most important source of joy must also be in the experience. Just living in the artistic lifestyle and medium, day to day.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I’ve recently gotten back to creative writing. Something I hadn’t really done consistently since high school. But as soon as I got into a groove after a few paragraphs, it feels amazing.

It won’t surely get me likes, subscribers, or a talent agent. There may be a point where I do those things. But for now, I just enjoy it: checking online sources; tweaking dialogue; solving problems my plot holes gave me.

I’ve never really had the desire to use AI for writing. I love the process too much.

In a way, the struggle is the joy. I didn’t care about making it faster or easier. I just did it.

Saving time is certainly worthwhile. Taking shortcuts is important.

But ask yourself: what are things you don’t want to waste time on? What could you spend an entire day doing without feeling like a procrastinator?

Get yourself comfortable with failing. Fail in the privacy of not being online, if you must. But instead of living in shame of failed projects, cultivate love for the process and change.

Be fascinated. Enjoy learning. Enjoy the process. Enjoy the lifestyle, for crying out loud.

New video is out! I demo the game in the background as I attempt to explain how it works.

It was a rapid turnaround due to another timing it with a release of an interview I did with Superhive. But it was quite fun to make, including the thumbnail. There’s something about making bait-y thumbnails — I know it’s cringey, but at the same time, it’s so ridiculous it’s kinda fun to look at!

And you get to see a sneak peek at the WIP acoustics that are being setup in my office. Hope to dedicate a video to those soon.

I released an early audio cut of the video on my Patreon. It’s rough draft quality of course, and it was right before my computer died. But it goes into some technical and “philosophical” stuff about the add-on that I figured was still worth sharing.

The interview in question talked is about Superhive Creators, and talking about my process. Some of the questions and answers weirdly mirror what I talked about on CG Cookie, but this is more geared towards products instead of Blender philosophy. But I shouted out “Default Cube: The Game” at the end, and I realized I needed to get a video ready in time 😄

Turning Thirty

Yep. I’m old. I’m ye olden Blender user. *thins my lips like an old man* “Back in 2.49, we didn’t have a dark mode.”

It’s definitely one of those birthdays that feels different. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, yeah whatever. I can still be a “cool kid” (which was promptly debunked as soon as I sat down with early 20’s Blender-ers at BCON LA last year).

But thirty … feels different. Things can still stay the same right? Right?

A Plant Funeral

When I got married and moved to Georgia, we bought a plant. Cliche, I know. But it gave us something to do and take care of. Low maintenance.

It was weirdly resilient. We moved several times. Multiple apartments in Georgia, and even in a moving truck across the country to Utah. Survived a couple winters inside our Utah apartment.

How? We have no idea.

Until this month. Baby became a toddler, and we moved into a house. Toddlers will go after anything at eye level (and even above eye level), and our plant is no exception. We figured it could go outside, get more sun anyway.

The dry weather didn’t do it favors, but with a few regular drinks of water, it survived.

Then the Utah cold got to it. One morning, it just drooped. Permanently. Must’ve gotten below freezing one night, and it just couldn’t handle it.

We gave it more water, put it in the garage to warm it up outside the toddler’s view. But part of me knew it was too far gone. So we gave it a proper eulogy over the trash can.

Didn’t expect to get emotional over a plant, but here we are.

How about a fully inanimate object?

“What happened to the fan?” “It died.”

Right before my debut of “Default Cube: The Game”, my desktop tower’s graphics card started sounding strange. I took it to Best Buy, who confirmed the fan was barely holding on. It needed to be replaced.

They recommended just buying an entirely new graphics card. The whole PC was only a few years old, even then I was unsure. But after some convincing by helpful people on the Fediverse, I bought a replacement fan shipped from China.

And waited. For nine days.

It was frustrating. Why wait? Why not just buy the gaming PC at Best Buy, ready to go, literally sitting there all day? Why pay $25 for a week of unproductive time instead?

But the fan finally arrived. As soon as I got it, I sat down in my office and spent over an hour fixing it. Disassembled, replaced, reassembled.

And in a moment of truth, it booted. Boot screen. Then the login screen. My login screen.

I broke down. Surprised I didn’t cry, to be honest.

We’re so attached to our devices. And even then, I nearly abandoned 100% of my computer for 10% of problems. I admit; it was ridiculous of me to think like that. To be so unforgiving for fixable, replaceable stuff.

As every artist and programmer has asked themselves, after going down a rabbit hole of investment in a project: what’s worth fixing, instead of just moving on?

What is worth quitting on?

Kelsea Ballerini

So how does she play a part in all of this? No, I haven’t met her personally. She did open for a Kelly Clarkson concert I was at, but that’s another story.

Well, she released a new song this past week:

If for some reason the link doesn’t work (or you just don’t want to listen to it — first of all, how dare you), she sings about living the life of a showgirl (which also dropped recently, but we’re not talking about that) while wishing for the life of a, well, wife and mother:

For context, she was married, got divorced, and dating someone now. So it’s not from a lack of trying, really. But it poses interesting thoughts.

The Yearbook Effect

I remember feeling so cool coining “the yearbook effect” as a kid (not famously, just to myself). Girls with straight hair would curl it for pictures. Curly-haired girls would straighten it for the big day. Neither changed it permanently, but both still wanted to be remembered for something they didn’t have.

This back-and-forth with our wants and what we have. How we use our choices and what’s given to us. And continuing to choose leads to investment.

Our brains give us little choice but to be invested in ourselves. It’s survival, really.

With other living beings, we get invested either from our own choices or emotional attachment from being together. Death, separation, or bad choices (our own or others) can all strain that. Non-living things are not that much different.

Kelsea vocally wonders if she invested in the wrong lifestyle. I (thankfully) invested in the right fan instead of a new graphics card, let alone a new PC. Investing in the companionship of a plant gave us unexpected grief.

Investment and longing. A common struggle among us human beings. When to invest in something or someone. “What if I invest in the wrong one?”

As someone currently living the family life, I worried a lot about “losing” everything I had before a family. Time. Artistic endeavors. Freedom. So on and so forth. I’m sure some worry the same thing.

In my experience - yes, you do lose a lot. You miss out on things.

But I chose to invest in it. So far, it’s worth it. More fulfilling than anything else I’ve done.

I think we all get FOMO (fear of missing out, for future historians). Sometimes it’s just the fear of lost freedom. It’s safer to keep all choices “open” instead of actually choosing one. Why fight for freedom if you keep limiting it with your choices?

Okay, now I’m just being facetious.

But as Kelsea put it, life makes choices with or without your consent. Your biological clock. Electronics failing. Seasons. Missed opportunities.

But there is no life where you can take every opportunity without losing other ones.

So choose to invest. Sometimes that means letting go of what you have for something you hope to be better. Sometimes that means holding onto what you already chose. Sometimes it means holding onto what life gives you.

So I’ll hold on to being thirty, optimistic for the life I’ve invested in.

If this is (somehow) the only way you’re getting notifications from me, well here you have it: Default Cube: The Game is out and available!

It’s a native Blender add-on where, if you choose to delete the default cube for good, it haunts you. Just a fun spooky add-on I’ve been off-and-on working for the past year, which has been a fun way of tackling an add-on differently.

I meant to do a video, I was editing it this week, to release today. And a few days ago, my GPU fan started whining and rattling on idle. I took it to a PC shop, who said the GPU fan was dying (apparently the display failed while they were testing it). I found a matching fan online, ordered it, and will try to fix it next week, at least until cyber sales if that fails.

So enjoy the spooky add-on, have a happy Halloween, and I’ll talk to you later.

(a little rant after (re)playing some games as I’ve been recovering, here you go)

You ever played a game with a really cool mechanic? But still, somehow, didn’t keep your interest? Or maybe it did, but no one else seems to share your enthusiasm?

A few games from my youth come to mind when I think of “killer mechanic, but not much else”: Split-Second, Fracture, Haze, Section 8, and Middle-Earth: Shadow of War. Let me go over them, why they fit that criteria, and why the studios were not rewarded with success.

Split-Second

Imagine a TV show following a series of races, taking place on “sets” rigged to blow. Racers trigger them with “power plays.” These power plays can change the track dramatically — from construction cranes opening new routes to an airplane or battleship crashing on top of you.

I played the heck out of this game on my Xbox 360. Also bought and played the heck out of it on the PC port. A surprising variety of levels “tied” into each other.

So why did this game not last? True, the studio collapsed soon after its release (same goes for many of the others on this list, but regardless, none made enough money for a sequel except Section 8).

One thing I quickly noticed during a replay: tension is quickly lost once the few big power plays happen. Apart from the simpler power plays, most can only happen once.

And like a whodunnit movie, the “magic” indeed fades once you’ve seen and played through most power plays. And once that fades, the racing that’s left is pretty mediocre. Drifts aren’t even necessary for time trials; just get a car that “bounces” off railings and learn your lines.

It’s certainly fun, but the game is more of a “a yearly weekend binge” than a "play for hours every day.”

Fracture

Fracture takes place in a future, where the world utilizes terraforming to save itself from the effects of global warming. America is thrown into a new civil war, split into two ways of improving the human race: genetic engineering, or just “cyborg”-ing ourselves (…wait a minute, is this just Deus Ex?).

The key gameplay mechanic is the terraforming. You can raise and lower any solid earth to your liking, accessing new areas and manipulating the battlefield, gaining cover or throwing enemies out of cover.

I heard lots of people online rave this game. I remember the marketing being cool to see at the time. So why didn’t it (or its company) last?

I recently gave it a try. The terraforming certainly is a new angle and makes for a few interesting platforming puzzles. But the firefights (singleplayer and multiplayer) become either a grenade fest or just circling each other, shooting a hail of energy bolts, until enough lucky hits grant a kill. Zooming for long-range combat is clunky.

In short, the terraforming doesn’t “wear off” like Split-Second, but it doesn’t affect the core gameplay too drastically.

Haze

Haze has an interesting premise. This profanity-laden sci-fi military game (you are a soldier, after all, but this one strangely has more F-bombs than any other I’ve played) is about soldiers who use … uh, how do I make this kid-friendly-ish … prescribed injections to make themselves perform better.

These injections give the player benefits: easier targeting, better resistance against bullets, etc. However, if you take too much and “overdose”, you start losing control of your character.

Fascinating idea, and the world is initially interesting. But it doesn’t last. Despite overhyped marketing, it failed to meet expectations, with its subpar graphics (huge letdown for a PS3 exclusive release) and otherwise mediocre gameplay. Enemies are mostly cannon fodder, and the “overdose” side effects rarely come into play.

Wish I could say I finished the campaign at least, but I wasn’t even motivated to do that.

The studio, Free Radical Design, fell into bankruptcy. Even sadder, not the biggest surprise.

Section 8

I really liked this one as well: a sci-fi battlefield-like shooter, all about capturing command points and reducing enemy’s reinforcements. Its biggest mechanics:

• No spawn points; you just drop from the sky. There is a fun gamble to either fall fast and land quickly while taking a hit to your shields, or fall slowly/safely but risk getting shot.

• You could also orbit-drop different tech like AA guns, mechs, tanks, etc.

• You traverse the big maps by super-sprinting, called “overdrive"

However, this game is otherwise a pretty generic shooter. Not to mention balance issues, either no particular differences between weapons or drastically OP (one particular machine gun was both highly accurate and high damage).

Timegate Studios actually managed a sequel soon after, with Section 8: Prejudice released to Xbox Arcade. But to no avail.

Middle-Earth: Shadow of War

I recently got to play this classic. Yes, its (famously patented) Nemesis system blew everyone’s minds at the time, and in many ways, it still does.

Some of my favorite features:

• Diversity of enemy immunities, strengths, and weaknesses balanced button-mashing with strategy.

• Orcs cheating death or swearing vengeance for their dead blood brother adds a nice dynamic.

• Middle-Earth swordplay hasn’t been better.

• Cutscenes are very well done, especially the backstories regarding how the Nine became Nazgul.

As I played through the main campaign (normal mode — I don’t have time for grind), I learned quickly:

• Nemesis only feels as vast as its diversity of orcs. After conquering a land or two, I quickly found captains with the same names, titles, and/or voices. One could argue that a species used as war fodder should have little genetic diversity, but lore isn’t a good argument for gameplay.

• After ranking up, you can kill most captains and warchiefs by just juggling a few methods (only so long as they’re not immune to all of them). Or just upgrade your gear to OP status. Or distract them with a ton of reinforcements.

• Speaking of gear: apart from a few choice perks, gear soon becomes meaningless thanks to countless currency.

• Story is underwhelming. Characters grant little emotional investment, with one notable exception (Brûz —if you know you know — but mostly irrelevant to the main story). Ending has some twists, but that’s about it.

• Lore is thrown out the window. How important is Middle-Earth lore consistency? Up to you, to be honest. I just assumed this was a “what-if” scenario and didn’t lend itself to the LOTR storyline. But it may bother some more than others.

• Despite a great diversity of locations, some feel unnecessarily big. They all have a same-ness too due to lots of reused assets (despite the 100GB storage I mentioned earlier).

I am being a tad picky. But despite its patent, sadly this series does not have further sequels. And at a time when lootboxes became infamous, the game’s initial use of them wasn’t helping.

That game was released in 2017. In 2021, Monolith Productions were supposedly working on a Wonder Woman game. It never happened. The studio closed down this year, in 2025.

Why did these all fail?

These games all have a few things in common. The big one is that they are high-concept games from small(ish) studios, trying to break into a well-laid genre.

It’s hard to market past Halo, Battlefield, and Burnout to get people to buy your game. Being an underdog, you have to really market other things. Like uniqueness. A killer gameplay mechanic (Split-Second) or a fascinating new world (Haze and Fracture) often fits the bill.

These were all certainly unique, and fun enough for some players who did play them.

So why have we (or at least, most of us) moved on? What else was needed?

Mechanics must (drastically) affect gameplay

I noticed this while playing Haze. While the injection mechanic is interesting, it never really changed how I played. It just highlighted enemies from otherwise hard-to-read graphics and made me survive longer. My play style never really changed other than “inject yourself every once in a while.”

Same with Fracture. Terraforming is a cool platforming mechanic applied to a shooter, but I often just ended up shooting and jumping to dodge rockets till enemies dropped.

Sounds an awful lot like Halo without the terraforming, huh?

Sometimes the mechanic does affect play style, but inconsistently. Split-Second power plays drastically affect the race outcome and track. But in the doldrums, when most of the big plays have happened or just no one is triggering them, it becomes a basic arcade racing game where it’s really hard to catch up to other racers.

If you have a killer mechanic, a good tip I heard is to ensure your game can’t be played the “normal” way. Or make that more acceptable on an easy difficulty. But games often require learning to play a certain way.

While certainly an extreme, Dark Souls is revolutionary for creating the “souls-like” genre because it enforces a certain unforgiving, but rewarding, playstyle. Even multiplayer shooters like Call of Duty and Fortnite play very differently due to their mechanics.

A lack of polish

Sometimes, the mechanic itself is fine, but the rest of the game just isn’t.

Haze is dramatically guilty of this with its graphics, let alone gunplay. But even with Section 8, you can tell the difference of gunplay compared to something like Battlefield: time to kill (TTK), balance of accuracy to damage, gun “feel” between weapons, etc.

High concept games like these prioritize their gameplay mechanics over other nuances (these are smaller studios, after all). However, it’s these “little” nuances and polish that often keep players engaged once the big mechanics’ flare starts to wear off. They also help keep multiplayer balanced and fair.

Game Balance

Speaking of, balance is an important part of games, especially shooters.

Super Smash Bro’s creator talked about game balance in one of his videos. In short, you have to be okay with being overpowered in some areas, so long as there’s equivalent weaknesses. With Mario Kart, the blue shell is overpowered, but it only applies to first place racers. Mario Kart does this intentionally to be a more casual game. But it does have a strategy.

Game designers often talk about making weapons or enemies “orthogonal”, or play so differently such that there isn’t one that’s always better or worse. By having each weapon and enemy require different play styles, it forces players to think more on their feet than just “shoot longer.” Doom’s enemies are great examples of this.

Doom enemies. Image courtesy of Doom and InspiredPencil.

I noticed a struggle with orthogonality in Shadow of War. Nemesis system’s immunities force players into different strategies. However, you can still juggle a few strategies to handle nearly all types of enemies, nullifying the need to truly diversify.

Conclusion

To be clear, some of these are great games. I would still recommend Split-Second and Shadow of War to others. If these were created in an indie scope and budget, they might’ve had a better margin of profit.

But that wasn’t the goal of these studios. It was to break into the industry.

The kind of success to survive, let alone “break in,” is changing. Profits and margins are changing. Studios, even small studios, risk so much more by going big nowadays. Same goes for films, animation studios, and other creative mediums.

So, what are we to do?

Think of modern successes in indie music, podcasts, YouTube, or Twitch. What do they all have in common?

Niches. Niches, thanks to more discoverable social media, can survive. You still need to have polished work, but you don’t have to appeal to everyone to get success.

For art, games, and movies that appeal to the broader, bigger audiences (from Marvel movies to Call of Duty), leave that to the big studios. Focus on your little community, your little band of followers. Work within your limitations.

Then, if you do break into the industry, you’ll have the flexibility to further expand on your ideas and execution.

Keynote

You can’t not do the keynote. Especially when it’s Ton. The big news from this year is that Ton is officially stepping down as CEO, passing the torch over to Francesco Siddi.

Efforts to transfer the responsibilities started as early as 2019. This isn’t a big surprise, at least for me. Ton will still be in an advisory role. But having met Francesco last year and seen his work the past couple years, I have faith in how things will continue.

Inside Blue Zoo’s R&D: Building a Digital-First Toolkit in Blender

A London-based animation studio (also in Utah, where I’m from!)

import bpy: modern add-on development

This is “Blender add-on development for dummies” by the amazing Sybren. If you’ve followed his “Scripting for Artists” tutorial series from a while back, this is quite similar. But if you’d like the basics to get started, this is a great free follow-along.

Love, Death, Robots and a little of Blender

I usually avoid the “big businesses flexing Blender” type of talks since they tend to be more portfolio-esque, but this has some great backgrounds and insights regarding utilizing Blender in the conceptual and art processes, even when the final result is to look more 2D than 3D.

The Optimization Iceberg - Making 3D run on any device

This is more about running 3D on mobile devices like phones and whatnot. But if you want to optimize your Blender scenes, try to give it a listen. It overviews optimization basics. So you can even apply some of this methodology to your own Blender scenes: baking lighting, simplifying or culling geometry, simpler lamp types, reducing texture sizes, texture packing, etc.

Bringing Real Cameras to Cycles

Ever wanted photorealistic, true-to-life camera lenses? Custom camera lenses has been in development for Cycles. I have been following this on the Blender repository, but this is a great summary and demonstration in one place.

Extensions are Coming: Rethinking Add-on Development by Unlocking Python’s Full Potential

Jan-Hendrik and Brady give an amazing talk on add-on extension development. It’s more on the advanced side of things, but full of useful tips. It gives great examples of utilizing GitHub Actions for add-on testing and building.

It’s a bit of a plug because he mentions my talk:

Automated Add-on Extension Testing

Because I was scheduled to speak this year! Sadly my talk got cancelled (screenshot in case you don’t believe me) due to my getting sick a couple days before my flight.

Last year’s got cancelled for the same reason, sadly.

Since Brady’s talk mentions mine and my slides, I recorded myself so others can find it. It has a beginner’s introduction to scripted unit testing, and code examples. Resources are linked in the video description.

Have a great week!

With last year’s end-of-year video, I had planned to give a mini-bio about me, how it all started. But I felt that was a little long-winded and uninteresting for most viewers. And it would translate just as well in text anyway. I swapped to just a year wrap-up and sharing some of my art instead.

But I decided, to celebrate my 1000 subscribers on YouTube, to share my story as a Blender enthusiast, and all the stops along the way.

How it All Began

I loved programming. My dad was a programmer, so definitely a bias there. But the application of my interests went a different direction: video games.

Unity 2.6 (source: iClarified)

Unity was free at the time (at least, it had a free version). With a little convincing, my parents let me download it.

But I also needed an app to make the 3D models. I had used Google Sketchup at school, but it’s not well suited to objects that aren’t architecture or CAD-like.

That’s when I found Blender.

Being also free, Blender got my parents’ approval. The version was 2.49. I remember watching Sintel. As an insecure teen, it definitely made me emotional.

I don’t remember the first thing I modeled. I know there was a snowman in there somewhere. The game needed fighter jets, so I made one of those.

Then I kinda gave up on it. Blender, and the game. I remember taking a long break, doing other forms of creativity. Writing, programming, drawing. But I did follow the versions as they got released.

Blender 2.5 (source: BlendTuts)

2.5 was promising. The user interface is a lot more bearable, honestly pretty recognizable by today’s interface. I tried it some more, made a few renders.

But the game changer was Blender 2.6.

Visual Effects (VFX)

Blender 2.6 (source: Steven Powers)

You see, 2.6 was all about VFX: motion tracking, 3D reconstruction, and more advanced compositing. Ian Hubert’s Tears of Steel showcased these changes.

So I experimented making home films with friends. One was Taken-esque (the interrogation lasted about ten seconds). Another was a murder mystery, involving twins (the other twin, the only other character, was the murderer).

And I had an idea for a sorcerer knight with a helmet. I didn’t want to physically make the helmet, so I figured I could make one in Blender. This was also the Iron Man era, where helmet VFX became quite popular in the Blender community. So it’s no surprise that there were many Blender tutorials of the sort.

So, with the help of a piece of cardboard, a string, and green circle stickers from Staples, I had a way of tracking my head for the helmet. Apart from some jitter, it worked quite well.

That was Red Knight, my first “finished” Blender project.

Me, wearing cardboard for a helmet, for Red Knight 2 (I don’t have any original footage from the first one)

I remember following tutorials in between projects: Andrew Price’s rendering hair in Cycles, CG Cookie’s car shading + compositing tutorial, BlenderHD’s on smoke sims (who I later learned is Jonathan Lampel!). But they were either intentionally pointless doodles and experimentation, or intentionally building towards a specific project.

A year or so later, I made Red Knight 2, which extended the VFX to (cringey) magic spells, moving a car through the air (I didn’t make the car), and breaking the CG helmet (okay, I’m a bit proud of that one). And with the help of simple compositing, I could fake lighting on myself from the CG car headlights.

Yes, there were many many frustrations along the way. But I wasn’t trying to make Tears of Steel. I just wanted to tell stories accessible to me.

College

A few months later, I made it to Brigham Young University, well renowned for their animation program.

But I had to apply for the major with a portfolio. Surprisingly, Red Knight made it into that portfolio (and promptly removed as soon as I had better material), along with artworks made during those first two semesters.

For those who noticed my saying “Brigham Young,” yes, I’m a Latter-Day Saint. “Mormon” is the more colloquial and familiar term to most, but few of us call ourselves that anymore. I say this because, right after I applied to the animation program, I left to serve as a missionary for two years.

I only found out I got into the animation program a month after leaving.

It did worry me, to be out of practice with Blender and art and VFX for two years. But I feel that by investing time with God, I’ve received dividends in return. I’m very grateful for that time in my life; it gave me life experiences I would have never otherwise.

After two years, I was back at college, and officially started the animation program. Technically, the “Computer Science (C.S.) with Animation Emphasis,” which is really just a C.S. degree with animation- and film-related electives.

I absolutely loved it. But it put me in this weird position: I wasn’t really an animation major. I wasn’t really a C.S. major.

I felt like I couldn’t fully relate to most of my peers, because we wouldn’t have all the same classes together. And the animation students were very tightly-knit socially. That small group goes through the entire program together. Then here comes us few “emphasis kids” every once in a while, if the class is important enough.

The point is, I felt like I didn’t really fit in. But I did gain many opportunities.

Me running a script AND render in Blender for a short film, across two computers.

I connected with the college’s film department and got gigs for VFX on some capstone short films. Yes, I worked for free. But sometimes that can open up to bigger paid opportunities. Filmmakers lean really hard into their networking, so doing one short film opened up to about half a dozen after that.

I helped on the animation capstone film, Salt, as a pipeline engineer. My first exposure to that job title.

In my free time, I made Blender add-ons, sold on Blender Market (now Superhive Market).

All this opened up a job at the little TV network, BYUtv. First as a website developer, then a VFX artist and compositor for one of their shows (perhaps you’ve seen clips of Studio C online, a family-friendly SNL wannabe?).

Leaving College

I had a full-time job lined up, graduation date set, and engaged to my (future) wife. However, I had a problem: I missed a single class to graduate. I would have to wait an entire year just to take it.

I didn’t want to wait. I had things setup for graduating in a month.

After calling universities and professors, my only option was to drop the animation emphasis, take a few other classes, and graduate eight months later.

So I only graduated in Computer Science. No animation emphasis.

I remember crying for a long time. It bogs me down every once in a while. But I’m grateful my career path has continued regardless. And I still got to marry my beautiful wife.

Us in front of the Provo City Center Temple

As a fresh newlywed, I moved down to Georgia with her. I worked at General Motors (GM) for a couple years as a web developer, particularly DevOps (meaning, I helped code, build and release the websites) as she finished her schooling and worked.

Really loved my team and manager at GM, couldn’t have asked for better. I liked a lot about General Motors. If you’re interested in working there, I highly recommend it.

Path to DreamWorks

So what got me to DreamWorks? I’ve mentioned things I’ve learned from the DreamWorks recruiter before, but as to what led me to seek a new job in the first place:

Firstly, around this time, General Motors started following the “return to the office” movement. Thankfully, I only had to go in one day a month then. But that could change anytime. My wife was working hybrid, we were planning for a baby, and we only had one car.

But the big reason was to have a job more art-oriented, focused on all the film and animation I learned and love. At GM, my final product is internal websites used by company directors. Very important, but less compelling to me, and not utilizing everything else I learned.

I looked for openings within the company. Always check that first; lateral moves, even across departments, can be far easier for you and your current company than going somewhere else.

I only partially qualified for a few jobs, all in-person. In Michigan.

So I marked myself as “Open to Work” on LinkedIn. I wish I could say I had more helpful tips to have recruiters find me, but honestly, some just showed up in my DMs. Including DreamWorks.

While the job is mainly for programming, it is artist-facing and I get to meet their needs pretty directly. And I get to enjoy the end product: movies.

What’s Next?

Some of you may wonder what my next steps are.

Currently, I don’t have plans to change anything. With a family and new house, stability is the name of the game. I know that’s less interesting than “chasing after any and every dream,” but I don’t live in a black box. There’s more to my life than how things affect me.

Many of my personal goals revolve around telling stories and solving problems. But I also want to make sure I’m not sacrificing my family or other priorities just to do that.

I’ve decided that I want my family and my faith to be there waiting for me, even if that means not getting to everything I want.

Achievement is certainly something worth striving for. But there’s more to life than just achievement.

Thanks for reading.

A Parable, of Sorts

My toddler is finally getting confidence to walking without us holding both hands.

At first, she doesn’t even bother walking and just crawls. Once we started holding her hands, she’d slowly walk for a few steps before wanting to be let down. It took time, and seeing us walk gave her the desire to do it more. Soon she’d try to run while we held her hands.

Not my toddler, photo by Nathan Dumlao

But her confidence was low. She did have some falls, who doesn’t? But I worry they may have scared her for a while.

Until she started going to the church nursery, an hour-long daycare. Seeing kids her age run around without a care in the world definitely gave her a social pressure; perhaps even a temporary discouragement.

But my parents told me this: younger siblings tend to walk and speak faster than older siblings, often to keep up with other kids. I had an uncle who was late walking; his mother worried, only to find him one morning just walking around without a prompting.

Every once in a while, we’d see my toddler’s potential. While inspecting something she found on a shelf, we’d find her not holding onto anything for a few seconds.

I would also (un)intentionally put her in new situations. I’d tickle her, play with her, throwing her into a mound of pillows and blankets. In the words of John Mulaney, I had “thrown her off her rhythm.”

While not directly related, she became more confident trying new and uncomfortable things. She starts walking with us, only holding one of her hands, even taking a few steps without any help.

Far from perfect. But she’s getting the hang of it.

Everything I Learned, I Learned From Walking

While I assume few of my readers are parents, I hope you connect with this parable beyond that. With your path in growing new skills, trying various artistic mediums and techniques.

Seeing a child grow has been so fulfilling. Parenting gives so many insights. Not just in how tiny steps are real progress, but also what really builds confidence and the importance of feedback.

Starting with the Basics

While slightly before my time, The Karate Kid epitomized the importance of learning the basics. “Wax on, wax off” may seem mundane. But it also gives the protagonist the physical rigor and mental preparation for the actual karate he will learn.

I’ve seen artists bemoan the thought of “having” to make a 3D donut. Or sculpting a human face. Or UV unwrapping a prop.

Photo by Tim Gouw

A toddler that starts with running will just end up falling on their face. They have to crawl. Then prop themselves up on tables. Then walk assisted. And so on. Then they can always have something to practice further if the next step seems too daunting.

This type of learning doesn’t end with adolescence; I hope you understand that. We’re all, in a very meta way, learning to “crawl” then “stand” then “walk” with our jobs, social lives, and relationships.

Be okay with continuous learning. You’ll get to the fun artworks and productions, I promise. Just let yourself learn to get there, and learn more after that.

And believe you can get there. Believe in the skills you already have.

Building Confidence

You’re really not going to like how to get more confidence though…

Failure.

Yes, really. My toddler had to fall to know her limits, how to detect a potential fall and catch herself, in the words of Batman Begins: “so she can learn to pick herself up.”

But there are ways to make failure more comfortable.

One key way is to facilitate it in a safe, low-risk environment. Our baby contagiously laughs after falling ... as long as it's straight into a thick pillow or blanket. The tickle fights, the safe “roughhousing” (such a weird term, but it’s correct here) helps her know there’s ways of trying without face-planting onto concrete and causing long-lasting pain.

So what are safe, low-risk (and potentially fun) ways to learn as an artist?

Photo by Nechama Lock

1. Keep projects small and quick. If you end up hating it, you can at least end it quickly while still having a final product.

   If I have/want/need a year-long project, I try not to overwhelm yourself with high pressure or a ridiculous ambitions or deadlines.

2. “Doodling” instead of high-quality portfolio pieces. It turns the high-pressure notion of making only portfolio-worthy pieces into a fun tangent that never lasts more than a sitting. Plus, generating a high volume of work is easier with this. Especially if you can do it with others.

3. Avoid fear-based motivation. Some artists prefer more punishing incentives: “If I don’t get X likes on my artwork by the end of the month, I give $1000 to my ex.” (yes, that’s a joke, but I’ve seen similar ones online) Those can work. But that doesn’t mean it’s ideal. I worry about incentivizing with fear as opposed to confidence. Don’t scare yourself away from failure. Rather, get so comfortable with failure that you can only be confident as you pass through it.

4. Social media can facilitate this when used well, with the right people. I started sharing my art online (Google+, RIP) where few were even active, so I got comfortable with the process of creating and sharing with a small crowd.

   Social media has certainly evolved to be harsher with the sheer volume of engagement online (or lack thereof). If a social media platform or community doesn't feel safe or "low risk" to you, then don't bother. But I highly encourage sharing with someone, so you can get …

Constructive Feedback

Recently, someone commented on my recent render challenge submission and said, “Good concept. Tho definitely need to work on lighting and composition”.

Like many artists, I checked their profile to see if their words match their artistic prowess. They had made some VFX … that could also use better lighting and composition. Can’t learn from them by example, at least.

And yet. Their criticism was correct.

Photo by Jon Tyson

I firmly believe the correctness of a criticism is independent of its source. Someone who has never drawn a human face before can rightfully say my character’s face looks uncanny. Many non-artists have enough of a taste to tell when things are off.

They may over-articulate it into something incorrect (“the nose is too big”) or propose the wrong solution (“could you make her nose small and skinny? Like that one actress…”), but the underlying criticism can still be true (the proportions feel off).

The key is to try to find grains of truth in criticism, however difficult to find. Most comments or critiques I get have enough truth in them to be worth acting on, to some degree.

What about the criticisms that seem irrelevant, or just have no artistic basis? Don’t worry about them. A good rule I’ve heard is, “if it just feels wrong or off for your art, then don’t worry about it.” My only nuance would be: so long as you can’t find a grain of truth.

But may I share a few other peeves I have with giving feedback:

1. If someone has finished an artwork, don’t critique the artwork unless they solicit feedback. If they are moving onto the next project and don’t plan on changing anything, your feedback — unless applicable to their future artworks — is likely falling on deaf ears anyway.

2. If you are writing the first comment on an Instagram Reel or YouTube video, try to be positive. I’ve seen nothing else stagnate further online engagement and discussion like an early-bird critical comment.

3. It doesn’t hurt to ask first (“would you like any feedback?”). I’ve seen people decline, so it’s worth checking.

(Not) being an artist (sometimes)

I don’t endorse the motivation/hustle/productivity culture on social media and in Western societies. The idea that you should always have your next portfolio piece, your next product, your next big cash flow coming in hot.

This is probably derived from an actual quote, but I’ve heard something along these lines: “artists communicate the human experience. That’s hard to do that if they haven’t experienced anything lately.”

The artist stereotype has grown more and more reclusive in modern media: coffee-drunk, very single, starting at a computer/phone screen 12 hours a day. Half of that time just on social media.

Go outside. Touch grass. Spend three hours talking with friends when it was just supposed to be a lunch. Blow bubbles with your child. Do the “meaningless” stuff.

Photo by Toa Heftiba

Because it’s not meaningless. At the most cynical, it’s material for your art. At the least, it’s material for a meaningful, fulfilling life. And your art will show that.

Mental Exertion

When all is said and done, you still have to make something.

Whenever I hear "motivation," it reminds me of missionaries that would listen to Steve Jobs sound bytes over and over again. That, if it weren’t for that, they wouldn’t be out talking to people.

Most of my creative endeavors have only required a mid-range computer. So the only real roadblock is the one between my two ears. The computer is on, music is ready to go, keyboard below my fingers. Nothing physically stopping me.

But my brain, oh so easily distracted, so often discouraged, so certainly tempted by the path of least resistance.

So how do I get yourself to do it?

As I said, facilitate that safe, positive environment. Fail safely, boosting your confidence as you gain experience and feedback. Then take a break, and come back.

And just start typing. Or painting. Or moving a 3D cursor around. You’ll get something. Maybe not what you want, hope, or expect.

That’s what “trying again” is for.

Yeah, you read that subtitle right. Nanite should not be in Blender.

Strap yourselves in.

I see feedback posts on devtalk and RightClickSelect saying Blender should put Nanite or a similar mesh optimization in Blender, and apparently “solve all its problems.”

Well, I'm here to say: not only should they not, but it's even unnecessary.

So let's make it like Squints from The Sandlot, and dive in.

What is Nanite?

Firstly, a quick summary of Nanite and how it works. Let me keep it high-level.

Nanite is an automated level-of-detail (LOD) manager. It eliminates level-of-detail "pops" you see in video games.

Notice the distant building and tree “popping.” Seen in ARMA 2

Upon importing a mesh, Nanite breaks it into chunks and organizes a hierarchy for its LOD management. At runtime, these chunks are selectively displayed. Need more detail? Select more, detailed chunks. Mesh gets smaller onscreen? Fewer, less detailed chunks.

From Unreal Engine Blog

This lets Nanite preserve an ideal density of geometry detail per pixel. Cool, right?

It's ideal on photoscans, or any high-detail mesh you won't be editing. That becomes important later.

It should be no surprised that Nanite adds performance overhead. But this scales far better as more geometry is shown onscreen. Lot of optimization relies on this: take some time upfront, save more time later as input gets bigger.

I'd highly recommend watching the official Nanite presentation. I'm not even asking you to understand it all; I certainly don't. Just see how massive an undertaking Nanite is.

Before I get into my opinions on implementing it in Blender, I want to first say that Nanite is far from perfect. Nanite's biggest optimization is not just render times on huge scenes, but also development time. It isn’t just about the gamer. It is less performant than more direct optimizations, and often requires combining with other optimizations.

But let's put those aside and just say there’s a "Blender Nanite" implemented in a similar way. What’s stopping us?

Not a Simple Code Change

This is not just changing a few lines of code. Nanite is not just implemented in one place of Unreal Engine. It handles all aspects of rendering meshes: culling, instancing, even file storage (you don’t want to store a billion-triangle mesh in plain text, do you?).

A “Blender Nanite” would require changing the entire rendering architecture so optimizations can flow throughout the 3D pipeline. And it would have to be supported by both Eevee and Cycles, let alone third-party engines like Octane.

Slower Editing

But let's say developers finally take on coding "Blender Nanite," and you get to test it.

The viewport is much faster now. But this optimization is short-lived; it ends the moment you edit any mesh.

If you go into edit mode for a, say, 10 million triangle mesh, Blender has no choice but to make all those triangles available for you to edit. How can it know which polygons you want to edit?

This isn’t even a million triangles, and I preemptively get a headache.

Nearly all optimizations are a trade-off between memory usage and execution speed. In this case, Nanite increases memory usage (building a Nanite-compatible mesh) for faster render speed. But that performance improvement is wasted if the user keeps changing the mesh, repeatedly building and wiping that memory.

So why can Unreal Engine take advantage of this? Because in Unreal, you rarely edit mesh files within Unreal. You either edit it in a separate software (like Blender) and re-import, or it's a photoscan you never edit anyway.

Meshes are (for the most part) locked within Unreal Engine. The engine can then do whatever it wants with it, optimizations and all. Unreal Engine's goal for quality is shadowed by its need for performance. It is primarily a game engine, after all (for now).

That is not Blender’s goal. Direct interactivity are important. It expects you to be able to change mesh data. So Blender optimizing the mesh for you becomes wasted effort when you keep changing it.

In one post I found, Nanite takes 15 seconds to process a 1 million triangle mesh, assuming decent hardware. Imagine having to pause 10-15 seconds every time you leave mesh edit mode, or sculpt mode.

Some of you don't have to imagine, sadly. I really hope you get a new computer soon.

Hat’s off to you. (From Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl)

In summary, Blender relies on users being able to change a scene whenever and however they see fit. And more importantly, Blender will only display the scene like you told it to.

More on the “told it to” part later.

Nanite for Renders

But what about Nanite for renders only?

Now, this is something I actually agree with (partially). Automatically reducing (or adding) subpixel geometry? That can make a big difference. But a few points I need to share:

You Lose Detail

"Spencer, it's subpixel, the detail won't show up in the render."

Offline render engines often sample the same pixel multiple times. These samples slightly change offset and direction for clearer renders. While often very subtle, those subpixel details can add up to more nuanced pixel-size details, including clearer edges.

Example with Blender’s microdisplacement. Left is the RGB difference between 1.0 pixel dicing rate and 0.5 dicing rate, right is the subdivided cube (0.5 dicing rate) with noise. While subtle, it adds up along edges and crevices.

Stating the obvious, reducing detail reduces detail. Sometimes it’s not a big difference, sometimes you don’t care. But sometimes you do. It's a balance, and a conscious choice.

Separate Render Pipeline

Many performance slowdowns seen in Nanite examples online is because developers may be using both Nanite and Unreal’s default render pipeline.

Running two render pipelines is certainly slower than one.

So for best performance, either run everything on Nanite or nothing. But what about third-party engine compatibility? Or low-poly meshes that run far faster without Nanite?

Sorry, too far. But you get the point.

You Can … Already

Yep, this already exists in Blender. Well, kind of, in a few ways:

You can fake level-of-detail with modifiers and geometry nodes.

If it's geometry via subdivisions, you can automatically manage it with manual viewport-vs-render levels or adaptive subdivisions. The latter has been experimental for over a decade in Cycles, but will finally be available in 4.5. In the right circumstances, this can be a big performance boost.

From “How to Use Adaptive Subdivision Surface in Blender”

“So Blender is just Perfect Then?”

No, I'm not saying Blender is perfectly optimized. But if there's one thing open source developers love coding, it's optimization. If you have been around for a while, Blender has come a long way in performance, just in the past few years alone.

One of the latest changes, supporting Vulkan, makes a huge difference this alone.

But if you have a slow scene, I firmly believe the last thing you should do is just give up and blame Blender.

I want to give you something you can do about it.

Record and Report

Suggest new features on Right Click Select. If it's a bug of an existing feature or slower when it wasn't before, report it on Blender's issue tracker.

Those are the places developers look for issues and ideas. Not YouTube videos. Not social media rants.

Optimization by Users

Now, everyone wishes a new feature just magically optimized their scenes. I get it. Optimization is tedious and painful. And working on an old, slow computer is even worse.

My first big render, over a decade ago now, rendered overnight on my graphics card, with 256 MB of memory. Not gigabytes, megabytes. On my current PC, it's only a couple minutes.

For an old computer, that's a painful difference.

Now I’ve made optimization related add-ons like nView for Blender. As a result, I have also helped customers troubleshoot many many unoptimized scenes.

With this experience, I have come to a realization: the best optimizations are ones you define yourself. I believe optimization must be a choice.

Yes, there are automatic solutions already in Blender, but they are always for specific use cases. Maybe yours fits. Did you know:

• Eevee has per-material backface culling for camera, shadow, and light probe volume. Memory usage for shadows and light probes can also be adjusted.

• Cycles has frustum and distance culling in the simplify panel. This mostly affects indirect lighting and global illumination. You can also manage tile size or persist mesh data to save time recalculating.

• Workbench has backface culling as well. But if you're having problems with just workbench, you might need a new computer.

Not every use case requires these optimizations. Some users may not want them. That's why they are and must be optional. Users must opt-in manually, know it's being used. And most importantly: understand the pros and cons, the “why,” the use case.

That's a problem I see with Blender content online. Countless Blender optimization tutorials. Few adequate, well-rounded explanations of settings. Most say, "Press this button," without telling you there are times you shouldn't press it.

I've watched videos straight-up contradict the Blender user manual (please read it. It is invaluable in understanding how Blender works).

Why is good info hard to find (or understand)?

I don’t believe it's inherently the content creator's fault. It’s partially a lack of documentation on Blender’s side (which is improving), but not all.

Most Blender users are not professionals in studios working with multiple 3D softwares. They are beginners. Beginners to 3D graphics, with low-end computers, who just want to create some cool stuff.

And Blender is the cheapest, most accessible way to do that. Open source makes that barrier of entry to be very, very low. That's a good thing.

But it's a scary-large audience to cater to.

Content creators naturally focus on their biggest audience: those beginners. And to keep retention and engagement, creators cut time and only share which buttons to press, not all the reasoning and nuances behind it.

But Blender isn't trying to just appeal to beginners. It wants to appeal to studios and professional artists, with decades of experience in more commonplace 3D applications like Maya and Houdini. And so Blender adopts existing 3D workflows, standards, and user experiences to streamline that adoption process.

(and yes, I am implying that “intuitive” is subjective and relative from person to person)

But you are making art and stories possible with Blender. And you can only do that if you have an understanding of the software, manage your scenes, and optimize them to suit your needs.

That is the missing piece of the puzzle: optimization and scene management. Utilizing proxies, object visibility, view layers. The list goes on.

Of course having the hardware for a real-time viewport and a what-you-see-is-what-you-get experience is ideal. But that's just not possible for most artists.

Studios rarely do that. Studios are not buying RTX 5090s for every single artists' computer, rendering scenes at full resolution in real-time. No, they optimize their files so artists work with responsive viewports, and leave the slow stuff for the render farm.

That is why I did my Blender optimization series (did, doing? I’ll add more as I go). Not quick tips. Not "just check this box." Not "it can only be done with this expensive add-on I'm an affiliate for."

Like I said, I have optimization add-ons, some free and some for sale. I’m even coding a new optimization add-on in collaboration with another add-on product owner.

But I want to make sure you know how to optimize by yourself first. By educating you on how to change your workflow and mindset so you can tell your stories more effectively.

Instead of waiting for your computer to update the viewport. Let alone your render.

Be safe.

With sightings of malicious Blender files online, even the Blender community isn’t safe from viruses and scammers.

I share a few quick ways to prevent yourself from running malicious scripts in .blend files or other “fake” .blend files:

I’ve been hacked, last year, on Discord. I didn’t remember of one of these 5 common signs of a scammer (which I’ll get to, don’t worry). Thankfully, most of my friends didn’t fall for my converted account, which was quickly saved by Discord Tech Support.

I even gave their tech support the scammer’s usernames. Amusingly, some scam messages were mid-conversation when the scammer got banned.

But enough of that. Let me share these 5 common signs. Note that these are not guarantees. Some interactions you’ve had recently may fit one or two of these, but they may not necessarily be scammers. They are just common indicators that you should keep in mind, and verify the user yourself or notify a moderator if necessary.

1. Vagueness

Scammers rarely say anything specific about you. For example, the message greets you but not by name. Maybe they don't mention your name, your company, your product, they say "I love your work" but no specifics or the specifics don't make sense with your art or products).

Just saying “Hello” instead of your name. Photo by Szabo Viktor

Scammers usually send these to multiple recipients at a time, so they tend to be more vague to try to catch more people without wasting time crafting each message.

To combat this, I try to ask a question specifically about me or them, and see if they can answer it correctly. Most scammers either miserably fail or (more likely) just stop messaging you.

2. Suspicious Links

Scam messages often have hidden or suspicious links. Sometimes the link deceivingly goes somewhere else.

Most web browsers will show you the real destination of a hyperlink if you hover your mouse cursor over it (usually in the bottom left or right corner of the browser window).

If it seems especially different from the displayed text or otherwise seems suspicious, don't click it. Ask the user what it is, and see what they say.

3. Escapes Moderation

Scammers may ask you to message them through another app. Scammers often prefer unmoderated methods of communication: email, text, anything easier for them to dodge security.

A way to combat this is to either verify the user with another contact method you can trust (in-person, another phone number or email, or social media account), or just say "I'd prefer to message here."

Sometimes scammers stop messaging me just after that response.

4. Payment

Scammers may ask you to transfer money to them. If it's a business, it has to profit somehow, right?

Always a transaction. Photo by Nathan Dumlao

I've even seen this for art commissions where they're paying you, but scammers say the payment "failed" and they need you to pay them to "verify" it. Or sometimes, they will “pay” you extra (they actually didn’t), then ask you to refund it back.

Be very careful, don't transfer money in a case where you normally shouldn't need to. Use trusted sites where you may be able to dispute the transaction if things go wrong. If they said they paid you, check that a transaction went through before doing anything else.

5. Account Info

Scammers may ask for account-sensitive information. But keep this in mind:

No official website admin or IT support or Discord user will have good reason to ask for your password, multi-factor authentication, or any other information to gain access to your account.

No IT support needs it to do their job.

This is also why websites don't change or access your password for you, and use a "reset password" workflow that goes through your email instead. Websites and IT intentionally don’t touch your password, because for business (and legal) reasons, it’s easier to just never touch the data directly themselves.

So if any IT support says they need your password or 2FA, they don’t. Because they’re not IT support.

When in Doubt…

Contact the user through a different app or method of communication. Report to a website moderator or admin.

Don’t click the link. Don’t pay the amount.

I don’t say all this just to have you be paranoid and reclusive. In the words of (at least the movie’s) Dumbledore, “Curiosity is not a sin … but exercise caution.”

Connect with others. Photo by Brooke Cagle

Please, connect. Network. Share. Just remember that the Internet is an easy place for someone to wear a mask. Focus on those you trust.

In between weeks of work, I decided to replay my Assassin’s Creed games I’ve enjoyed. The roller coaster that is the success of these games is pretty interesting. So here’s my (opinionated) visit of these games, and how they fare in comparison to each other as sequels.

Assassin’s Creed 2 (AC2) (Remastered)

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Story-wise, a solid game. The revenge story is (slightly) more nuanced and thoughtful on how it’s affected the character and those around him. The wider Assassins vs Templar lore goes quite deep here, especially the ending. Overall, satisfying and surprisingly long story with more interesting characters.

In comparison to the newer games, the parkour here is much more clunky in this gameplay. There’s no fine control of whether you traverse up or down. No fast mantle like in Unity. And leaping up for a ledge requires two button presses (the parkour is more a game mechanic in this one as opposed to just getting around, so I’ll let that one pass). Combat is hit-and-miss (pun intended). There is some weird balance issues with some of the weapons: knives don’t feel useful, fists and hidden blades are sometimes more effective than swords. Using the hidden pistol for assassinations can feel like a cop out.

Graphics aged the worst. Characters and faces are noticeably low-poly and low-resolution. Some crowds look especially bad. The hard low-res shadows look blocky on larger screens. The color grade in this game (desaturation + wash out?) feels weird compared to more vibrant graphics nowadays. I did try a popular mod that enables higher resolution shadows + better LOD management. Despite some glitches, it definitely helped for most cases. Animation is still smooth.

Content, while less than successors, isn’t small. There’s “The Truth” videos to discover, weapons and armor to buy, feathers to collect (which are a lot), and contracts to fulfill. It’s honestly pretty comparable to the sequels. I found myself quite busy for a couple weeks.

Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag (Remastered)

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Story is by far the most interesting in the series (that I’ve played). Kenway’s character arc is revolutionary and dramatic in the best way. The “modern day” missions, however, are frustrating interruptions (with embarrassingly shallow characters compared to the main story) that just make you wish you could skip them.

Black Flag was revolutionary in its gameplay, particularly with the Jackdaw. I don’t think anyone expected to have as much fun as they did on the high seas, raiding other ships, searching for treasure, and of course, singing sea shanties. Combat is more interesting and balanced than AC2.

Graphics are definitely a middle ground between AC2 and Unity. Colors are fixed, lighting and the character models fare better. It’s no Unity, but definitely an improvement and still runs fast.

Content increases dramatically with a larger map: fighting the ships in the four corners of the map, lots of treasure. While the content may not seem quantitatively more, it feels like more since you have to travel further to get to everything.

Assassin’s Creed: Unity

(note that this was the first Assassin’s Creed game I played, so note my bias)

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The best summary I can give of the story is “cliche” in the absolute worst way. Love story is typical, revenge story is more watered down, and lore rarely builds on previous games. You won’t get anything special in that department.

The gameplay, however, is far more polished. The variety of weapons and equipment each have their own uses, making the combat far more diverse and engaging. This game is also by far the smoothest parkour experience. You can quickly force your character to go up or down (which allows for fast mantles of low objects, something I missed in AC2) or take the most forward route, all based on the button combo. It feels the most natural out of them all.

Graphics are still quite stunning. The engine uses baked lighting which, while it takes up a lot more disk space, looks spectacular in interiors and runs decently well. Some then-experimental Nvidia features (HBAO+, soft shadows, AA methods, tesselation) still hiccup even on newer machines, but overall looks and runs great. Animations are fluid as ever.

Content? Lots and lots of it. Co-op missions, raids, hidden symbols, and contracts. Not to mention the (very) high difficulty DLCs now included. Detective missions are surprisingly difficult and require you to be thorough (although it is frustrating to spend 20 minutes on a case when it really was the first person you talked to).

Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate

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Sadly, the story did not improve much. Evie is a great female protagonist (note that technically she’s not the first in the series), but overall it did not rise beyond “eh, it’s nice.”

Gameplay is very similar to Unity. Parkour is mostly the same, but I think what makes it feel worse here is the level design. London’s wide roads makes it really hard to navigate from building to building with just freerunning. You have to use the zipline, vehicles, or go down then back up. It’s just not nearly as fluid as the tighter city blocks of Paris. Combat is still great, especially with the boxing matches.

Graphics is pretty similar to Unity. The engine hasn’t drastically changed, but the art and assets themselves have (better textures and models, faces are more human-like). Apart from some new graphics settings (better soft shadows, more AA options), it runs about the same performance-wise.

Speaking of which, there is still plenty of content, and my favorite section out of all the games: World War 1 London. It just works so naturally with guns + melee combat. I do appreciate that the side missions tend to be more relevant to the era (Jack the Ripper, child liberation, boxing) as well as engaging. “Liberating” London was a great way of exploring the city.

Overall

Story wise, Black Flag takes it all. AC2 had great lore for the series, but Black Flag’s pirate arc was far more engaging for me.

Gameplay is a close call between Unity and Syndicate for me, mostly because they are very similar. But Unity’s location makes the parkour more meaningful, so it will take the trophy.

Graphics is another close call between Unity and Syndicate. I think Syndicate will take this one since the lighting, environment, and character details are far more refined.

Content is a tough one: quantity or quality? Black Flag had some engaging missions and quests, but requires a lot of grind and traveling around the map (I am sound old, don’t I?). So back to Unity and Syndicate. It’s a close call: I could honestly pick either. I think the feeling of relevance to the main story and worldbuilding leads me to Syndicate.

So for graphic and content, Syndicate takes the cake for me. But gameplay and story goes back to earlier games in the series.

Is Story Doomed to Fail in Sequels?

I think Syndicate and Unity was their sign to quit or pivot. They knew the gameplay and more modern settings was stalling, and they needed to pivot to Origins (while I haven’t played it all the way through, I’ve played some of it on others’ consoles).

While I haven’t played the first game, Black Flag beats AC2 in terms of story. It’s a rarity to see sequels succeed in story, let alone be better than a previous game’s. However AC2 is more high-concept with its modern day lore. Would be worth studying when sequels do the story better.

What do you think? Even outside of Assassin’s Creed, what sequels tell a better story than the original?

I’ve a had few long articles, let’s keep this one short. Start with the big one:

GPU Usage

Not everything in Blender utilizes the GPU. The main things that do are:

• Rendering. Blender attempts to fit all the data to render your scene on the graphics card, otherwise it has to go back and forth between the CPU, RAM, and hard drive (worse case scenario). This is also why VRAM is so important.

  • Material and Render Preview shading modes in the viewport utilize the GPU too in a similar way

• Compositing, if hardware acceleration is enabled

• Subdivision surfacing, if GPU subdivision is available and enabled

• Drawing Blender’s user interface (UI), which is why rendering from the command line can save you time and memory usage

In terms of tips in better utilizing your GPU, many of the same tips as for saving VRAM, which I discuss here, apply. I could just save my breath here and say to read that article, but to summarize:

• Reduce complexity of anything needed for rendering: geometry count, texture resolution, and complexity of procedural textures

• Reduce load on your graphics card by closing other apps (in other words, maybe don’t game or do a Discord call on the same computer while rendering)

• Render from the command line instead of loading the entire user interface

• In worst case scenarios, either lower your screen’s resolution or refresh rate, or refresh/update your drivers

Also, optimize your viewport. While using material or render shading modes are certainly helpful, they do eat up resources. Use solid shading mode whenever you can. Did you know you can even preview textures in solid shading mode?

Click the dropdown next to the shading mode while in solid view, and click the Texture option. More info here.

Some users complain that their GPU is not at 100% usage, which apparently means Blender is not using it correctly. Unfortunately, you cannot force Blender to use 100% of your graphics card. Blender developers have to code Blender to specifically support graphics cards (including different types of graphics cards) for different operations.

If you're unsure, collect as much info as you can about your computer and the problem, collect even more, and report it as a bug.

CPU Usage

The same complaint about Blender using 100% of your graphics card could also be said about your CPU. While Blender tries to use hardware acceleration and multiple cores when it can, it will not be the case for every operation in Blender. Many operations work on a single core, including much of the user interface.

Photo by Olivier Collet on Unsplash

So, how to improve or manage your CPU performance? You can decide whether the CPU or GPU is utilized for:

• Cycles (and usually just pick one or the other - CPU + GPU tends to be slower)

• Compositor

• Denoising (or just turn denoising off entirely)

So be sure to check Blender's render properties and preferences under the systems tab for those.

One more big tip for the CPU: disable add-ons. Nearly all add-ons rely on Python only, which is mostly run on the CPU. And some add-ons run functions every time you change something in your scene or even update the viewport, making even simple tasks slow. So be sure to only keep the ones enabled that you really need enabled.

That’s it for now, thanks for reading!

Several weeks ago, I discussed with others about how Blender, despite being open source, relies mainly on donations and personal contributions.

But many don’t donate. That conversation stuck with me.

Others in the Blender “universe” make lots of money in the name of Blender. Some add-on developers and website owners make more than a full-time Blender developer.

It feels unfair. It got me thinking about open source. And of hypotheticals.

A Hypothetical

What if (in a very very dystopian universe), Blender ran ads? Like just had pop-up ads every few minutes.

How much money would Blender get?

I tried an online calculator. Mind you, none of this is evidence-based. So if you want to go full business on me with more accurate numbers, feel free to reply with your analytics.

Ton guessed between 2-4 million active users for 20 million Blender downloads. Let’s go with 3 million, and 1 million of those users are active and willing to view ads.

If each of those people used Blender for, say, 2 hours a day on average, with a 30-day month, with a new pop-up every 3 minutes, that comes out to… beep boop beep 1.2 billion views of ads. With the online calculator, it comes out to several million dollars, heavily depending on the conversion rate.

Again, a very generous calculation. But it’s more than Blender’s earnings in 2024, based on the keynote.

I’m not endorsing Blender to do this. Don’t get mad at me. It’s just a hypothetical!

How dare I consider ads

But think about apps like Spotify. For the end user, it’s a free app where you are “paying” in viewing/hearing ads. For some, that’s fine. Spotify still makes money from ad revenue (also by not giving enough to artists).

And anyone paying Spotify Premium pays more than the ads are worth. Even bigger profit!

The Customer’s Consent

Why talk about all this? Because we consumers (at least, enough consumers for companies to be sustained by) underestimate the convenience and our economic acceptance of ads. You view a virtual billboard or listen to an ad, maybe click on it, but then you don’t have to pay for the app at all.

Other places in the Blender universe use ads too. Blendernation? Absolutely. Blender Artists forum? Definitely. Your favorite Blender content creators? They run ads via sponsors and YouTube to make an income.

I’m not saying this to imply that anyone running ads are evil (you may think that, but hold some space for a moment). I am actually saying something about (most) consumers: a product being free is more important than the method of the creator’s income.

The growth of pro-privacy consumers on the web has certainly affected the growth of open source. “Free open source software” or FOSS has a lot of meaning behind it, but to most users: it’s free, no ads, no tracking (or at the very least, you could find and/or build a version without ads or tracking).

So if more of Blender’s audience is pro-privacy, what does that mean for Blender?

“Anyone here use ad blockers?”

There was a comedic moment when Ton said that they can only track Blender downloads if the user is not using an ad tracker. When he did a show of hands, most in the room ran ad blockers.

I get the usefulness of an ad blocker, but at least put blender.org on its whitelist.

So the open source community is growing by the day, and many of them want respect of privacy and from solicitation. Blender running ads would not go well for that very reason.

If a consumer is unwilling to watch ads, are they willing to support sufficiently any other way? What are our options? If a customer is unwilling to view ads, and the product is openly free, what is the owner left to do?

• Subscriptions and paying for a copy of the software fall short when GPL allows anyone to redistribute it. If someone does not want to pay, they can just get it from someone who did.

• Blender Cloud is a subscription model for Blender education and assets. It’s separate from Blender — perfect from a license standpoint. But its audience is not nearly big enough to pay for Blender.

• I have already talked here about Blender Foundation selling add-ons. It would become a paywall of features, which undermines the point of open source.

• Valuable feedback (which I talk about here, regarding data collection), while ideal, very few are willing to do it.

That leaves us with…

Donations

And that’s what Blender is asking for. Go figure.

Because when users expect to get something for free, asking for anything else requires holding something back in the product itself. The owner’s hands are tied in manipulating the product to financially incentivize customers.

So, Blender should still put all its features out there. Not part of them. For free.

And the best way to contribute is to donate.

Photo by rupixen on Unsplash

The good news is not everyone has to donate, and not even that much, to make it worthwhile for Blender. But we do need to donate. I do, and I would highly recommend any avid users of Blender do the same.

Who is responsible for open source?

Open source is an ideal, but not within a capitalist economy. Before I go any further, I’m not anti-capitalism or anything like that. Let’s not regress back to the “Red Scare” of the Cold War, shall we?

I’m only saying that open source de-incentivizes capitalism-based methods of earning money. You’re not paying to get the product. You’re not paying to keep the product.

You just keep it. Any further support for Blender is purely your choice.

A New Kind of Customer Obligation

But now we got a different kind of complication.

Customers can create their own version of Blender (like the Blender Game Engine did once it was deprecated), support with their own money, report bugs, or make fixes.

Just like the product owner.

Now we got a level playing field. The customer (and therefore, the entire community) becomes just as responsible for the life of the product as the original creator.

But some customers don’t like that. They want to be separate from the product. “The owner should take care of it all, not me. I’m just using it.”

Which brings up an interesting question: do customers want to take responsibility for the product? Or do they just want to use it?

For those who do not have the time to participate in development, just donating every month is easier. But now they’re back to a pseudo-subscription model, which is one of the very things these people are running away from!

So is it really cheaper?

Or are we asking the wrong question?

Be it supporting Blender financially with donations; educating its community; or participating in its development with fixes, features, and feedback.

So here’s the better question: how will you own Blender?