3D Animation and the Future of My Patreon (Patreon)

Tl;dr: I want to focus on more 3D work and will probably be transitioning my Patreon over to that.

As you’ve no doubt seen, I’ve been getting into 3D animation quite a lot lately. There’s a lot more to it than I’ve talked about publicly, so I wanted to sort of tell a little bit of the backstory and what my plans are for the future.

First Patreon—you’re probably seen at this point that I’ve put billing on hold for May as well. My May is turning out to be quite busy, between my birthday, a trip I want to take, and a few other things going on. So it makes sense to wait one more month.

With how much I’ve been enjoying 3D and the positive responses I’ve been getting, I’m going to be transitioning my Patreon towards more 3D work. I’m going to keep drawing as well, but it might be just the odd pic here and there while I work on longer animations. 

Right now I am also planning to continue with comics, so the $2 comic tier shouldn’t change too much. What you can expect with the other tiers:

$6 tier - All art and the comic, plus full res of all 3D animations

$12 tier - All art, comic, 3D animations, and WIPs for 3D stuff. This will probably include screen shots of new models and stuff as I’m working on them.

I’m also considering making either the $12 tier or a higher level tier one where you get your name in the credits of animations I do. This would probably be for longer animations rather than quick loops.

If you’re interested in seeing more 3D work and want to support me, please consider staying! That would really help me out a lot. I am expecting to take a bit of a hit on Patreon income in transitioning to 3D because I know it’s not what everyone’s here for. But I’m hoping to do some stuff that hasn’t really been seen in 3D animation yet, so I hope you’ll stick around. :>

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About the 3D work—A question I’ve been getting asked a lot is, “how did you manage to start doing 3D animation like that after only like a month of practice?” 

To answer this, I have to tell a bit of history about myself. Before jumping into furry art full time, my professional career was as a multimedia producer. I use that as a catch-all term because I’ve done everything from video shooting and editing, to motion graphics animation to graphic design. 

I have professional experience in a lot of things that are adjacent to 3D animation, even if they’re not quite the same thing. Motion design, for example, uses the same principals of animation that 2D and 3D animation does. I have a lot of hands-on experience with lighting for film and television. I've edited easily thousands of hours of video—and I still do professionally sometimes. While I've had to learn or re-learn a lot of 3D workflow, I haven't had to learn anything new about time based media workflow, so I'm building on what is already a pretty strong foundation there.

But as far as 3D goes specifically, well that’s a bit of a mid-life crisis for me. Not in a bad way, necessarily, but—for better or for worse—it’s a path not taken.

Way back in 1999, when I was 16, I got my hands on a pirated copy of 3D Studio Max from a friend at school. I always had an interest in 3D from shows like Reboot and Tron when I was growing up, so when he mentioned that his dad used 3DS Max for work, I pretty much begged him every day to burn me a copy for like 2 months, until he finally did. The good old days—where you could literally just copy a CD and a registration code, and it worked.

I absolutely threw myself into figuring out this software, and I loved it. My friends and I at the time used to make silly (terrible) short films on VHS, and I really wanted to be able to put CG into our terrible home movies. Keep in mind, this was way before YouTube or really video of any kind on the internet. There were no tutorials, or even manuals that you could find online for this sort of thing. A lot of it I learned by going to the bookstore and finding books on 3D animation and then just copying the information out of them right there on the floor of the bookstore, because I couldn’t afford to buy them.

There’s quite a long story here about how this all worked out. But long story short: my school participated every year in a state-wide competition for media production. They always entered in every category except computer graphics animation because no students in the school knew how to do it. And then here I was doing it on my own time for fun and I wasn’t even taking any media production classes. I entered my work, and won.

So here I am at 17 having won an award for, basically, the best high school CG artist in the state. It would make sense then, to look at my options to go to CalArts or SCAD or some other large art school where I could specialize in that kind of thing.

And yet, I never did. It just never really crossed my mind to pursue it.

By that time I had already applied for and was accepted to a local fine arts college. My plan was to go, get a degree in graphic design, and go do a “real” art job. Which is pretty much what I did. The 3D stuff I mostly considered just a hobby anyway. I didn’t know anyone else who was doing it. My parents and teachers didn’t really understand it. Nobody ever suggested to me that it could be a real job.

I kept doing 3D art into college, but eventually I had to buy a Powerbook for school work. My PC was old by this point anyway, and 3DS Max wouldn’t run on the Mac. And so that’s kind of where I left it. I always planned to get back into it, and then life happened.

It still feels weird to type this, but I’ll be 40 in two weeks. Aside from the odd sculpt I’ve done over the past 2 years or so, I haven’t touched 3D at all in the interim 20+ years. 

Now that I’m getting back into it, I’m quickly discovering that this is what I *really* like to do. Drawing and 2D art is fun. But man, it just doesn’t get me excited the way 3D stuff does. Being able to build entire characters or worlds in the computer and then bring them to life is just fantastic.

Now that I’m looking back on all that I can’t help but wonder: where would I be if I had actually pursued 3D? My life would be completely different. I wonder if I’d even have gotten into furry porn full time rather than just keeping it as a hobby.

In some ways I feel like I’ve missed out. I haven’t had a bad life so far by any means. But I do feel like I’ve missed what could have been an opportunity to get right in on the ground floor of what is now a pretty in-demand job. On the other hand, I see people in the film and games industries being absolutely worked to death and I know that wouldn’t be for me. On the third hand, if I had continued with 3D as a career, I’d probably be in a management or creative direction position by now anyway, so who knows.

All that to say, I’ve rediscovered a genuine, deep love for something that I’d otherwise nearly forgotten about. Since I’ve been on my sabbatical, I’ve had the opportunity to explore it again and it made me realize how much I’ve always really enjoyed it. If Patreon gives me the creative freedom to continue working in 3D, I’m not going to miss it this time.

Thanks for reading!