Glad You Could Join Me

Hi There,

Welcome to my little corner of the web. I’m glad you could join me on my new journey. I thought I would start off by telling a story about where the name of this site comes from. It is from a dream both my wife and I have had many times… don’t worry I’ll keep it short. In the dream we are wandering through our house and discover a new room previously unknown to both of us. I bring this up because in many ways, this new venture is like finding a new room — like finding that within the boundaries of the world, there is something wholly new that up until now was undiscovered. This whole act of creating something new from nothing, creating form out of the ether, is always liberating to me. I find it hard to describe how excited I am to be taking the first steps on a new path and I am glad you are able to join me. Welcome!

Along with this excitement of the new comes something that is inevitably terrifying to me, the question of where to start. As a way of allaying these fears, I will be starting by continuing along a path I have been traveling for a while. For starters, I will be continuing with the type of work that I have been doing with the Low Poly Coop for the past three years. Namely, making game-ready 3D models and giving them away. The main difference between what I will do here and what I have been doing there (and will continue to do there) is that this is a journey I am traveling myself. I’ll also be running this more like a business. With the coop, we had flirted with various methods for making a little money to support the site, but always backed away from any sort of solid revenue generation. We figured, it was a project that was supported and maintained for and by a community of artists and developers and should remain free of commercial involvement. Plus, the basic fees we incurred for the hosting of the site were manageable by a small group of donors.

I have found, especially over the last year, that this has been limiting me. I am limited to the amount of time that I can donate to the cause, all of it carved out of little bits and pieces of my life often stolen from my already attenuated sleep, and my ability to donate this time has varied greatly over the years. I have always come up against a wall — a point at which I say to myself that I love creating artwork for the community and that I could do a lot more of it if I only had the time. Here now is a turning point, where I go a different direction. My lack of time is pretty closely related to money. If I made more (or some) money off of this work, then I could be devoting more and more of my time to providing great artwork to the community of indie game developers, artists and students out there. I won’t talk a whole lot about it after this point, but I do want to be up front about this going into this new endeavor — part of the intention of this blog will be to make some money for me and my family. I’ll be trying out any number of different ways of doing this, but the core of what I am doing here is providing you all with free stuff. The more I make off of it, the more time I can devote to making more.

I’ll be starting out with two goals during the first few months here. First and foremost I will be working up to getting a solid schedule of releasing free game-ready environment models — right now I am shooting for creating a model a week and I hope to be up to that schedule by the beginning of the year. Before I can get to that point, though, I have some updating of my skills that I need to do. In particular, I want to do a couple of steps better than the work I have been releasing with the Coop by creating work that is up to next-gen specs, with normal maps and whatever other texturing goodness I can muster. The other step will involve me learning a program that is new to me, GIMP. I feel that this is an important step in continuing to provide work that is truly open source and it is important to me personally as a way to hone my learning skills. I’ve always been a huge proponent of using Blender for creating 3D models for the indie community, but in the past year I have come to wonder if my love of Blender comes from the fact that it was the program I learned on. Now is the time to put my open-source ideals to the test by turning away from using all commercial tools and going fully open-source as much as possible. Blender, GIMP, WordPress. It just makes the most sense to me. If I am providing work for free, everyone who can get my files should be able to use free tools with them. That’s the thought anyways.

Here’s hoping that you all will find my work as useful to you in your work as it is to me in my development as an artist.

Stay free.

~shs~