I'm not about to discuss the artistic merit (or lack thereof) of anyone else's work except my own. As I have developed as a Poser artist I have found my images become slicker, more "eye friendly" and essentially lacking in any artistic merit whatsoever. My best endeavour recently has been a dig at others on this forum, pontificating about - guess what? - artistic merit. It's not that I'm lacking inspiration, either. I have a thousand images I could inflict on you. My built in critic won't let me, though. For every final render I post, I throw another 10 away. It's not even that I am newly come to art, either. I've been a traditional artist since I could hold a pencil and a pro artist for 20-some years. I'm finding that I better express myself otherwise lately; writing and music have always been good to me and I enjoy the immediacy of standing in front of a crowd and making a big noise. That said, I'm really pissed off because what I have in my head should be coming out visually but it seems to be the same old same old. Point of the thread is - anyone else ever get this, or is it just me? Answers on a postcard. First correct answer wins a fabulous prize* *Prize is not fabulous. :)

AKA; Hittin' the Wall I'd say I been there/ don that, But I ent been there...I'm still there

Oh, I get this all the time. I write and I do visual art (and design), and I used to be quite musical (as I've gotten older I've found I've lost some of my vocal range pout). I definitely find that I can think in words, or in pictures, or in lyrics/notes, but not all at the same time. It's like I get a "focus" on one area, and while doing that, there's only just so much creativity to go around. I've kinda gotten used to it. I just go with whatever it is that's currently occupying my creativity and interest and eventually the other stuff comes around and I do that for a while, then something else, etc. Hope that makes sense. It's kinda hard to explain, actually. :-) bonni

How often have we heard a famous recording artist say that many of their biggest hits are songs they themselves didn't like much?

It's probably best to let the audience decide what has merit :-)

I have gigs of content that never sees the light of day. You're not alone.

Yeah. I get this constantly. I worked with traditional media for years, e.g., oils, pencils, pen & ink, airbrush, and when Poser finally got to a point where one could get pretty good results, I was surprised to find that I have not ever churned out the images. I am not sure why, but I think some of it has to do with the fact that a great many of the challenges I faced with traditional media are now all but gone. That's a good thing in a way because I wasn't always up to those challenges, and sometimes got very frustrated trying to get the image in my head onto the canvas or illustration board. But it seems to be a bad thing, too. I think part of the problem is that CG software, and Poser in particular, lets you get up and going pretty fast and able to make something look pretty decent in fairly short order. But then you've got an awfully lot of choices and decisions to make, i.e., tweak this, tweak that, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, ugh! Well that's me anyway. I don't work commercially anymore, as nearly all my attention is elsewhere. But I still like to dabble. Or at least I thought I did. But I've hardly finished anything for months now, and the more I mess around with CG, and Poser, the worse it gets. When I do finish something, I'm never entirely pleased with it. I think it's because in the back of my mind, I know virtually anyone with a few bucks and a little patience and the barest artistic sensibility can get at least something that looks fairly decent, and while I might have settled for that at one time, knowing what is truly possible with CG, my standards have gone through the roof, through the sky, beyond the cosmos. When I really apply myself, I can now do things with CG I would have marvelled at in the old days when I was working with the old media, but I just don't want to settle anymore for eye candy. I want something utterly mind-blowing. It's totally neurotic.

I have the opposite problem. I've got too many ideas in my head and no where near enough hours in a day to get them out. Try finding some new inspiration. Take a look at the world in a different way. If you normally have a radio on while you work on images, change the station or even the type of music. This may sound crazy, but read a book. Any book. You are bound to get some fresh views on things.

Thanks for your input, people. Nice to know I'm not the only one. Kristta - I'm a prodigious reader. My problem (?) is, I can't do the visual thing any more. I seem to be focusing (as bonni put it) on music and writing more. All good, I guess, and since I have 2 bands to take care of, it's probably great news for those guys, but it ain't much use to me as a maker of images. I look at my gallery and I can plot a definite decline which is almost the inverse of my expertise with Poser. sigh My first love is creating images, my second is writing. Music is my third but curse me, I want them all at once. :)

"My first love is creating images, my second is writing. Music is my third but curse me, I want them all at once."

I'd take that as inspiration right there...book & album covers. 8-)

Sumpin' else that strikes me as bein' common, but not said outright in this thread, is the "I'm my own worst critic" ting. I know I'm guilty of it. Can't sez I know a "cure" fer it, or if one is even neccesary, but I honestly can't see that as bein' a bad ting....if I get a "shitty review" on a image that I do post, 99% of the time it comes as no surprise.

If all else fails, do a NVIATWAS. LOL!

Message edited on: 05/26/2005 00:09

Don't feel bad :) I'm burned out and am at an all time creative low where I have zero creativity in me (about 9 months already). I've been getting offers for web work and I've been turning them down without even finding out what the client wants. I just don't have that creative spark and refuse to commit myself to something that I know I'll end up struggling to get through. I can't be "creative on demand"; it's either there, or it's not.

All I've been doing is making Poser renders to give away as tubes, not really creative, but it's as much as I have in me right now. If and when I do feel creative, I'll have more than enough poser renders to work with though, LOL I write poetry and short stories, but haven't even felt inspired to work in those areas. I just feel creativly tapped out at the moment.

Message edited on: 05/26/2005 00:31

Opera is a combination of all three! Actually, any musical theatre combines visuals, words, and song. Opera usually takes a deeper approach: politics is nastier, love is more tragic, heroic myth is more exalted when sung by costumed participants in the drama. And it doesn't have to be in some foreign language, or about sickly cigarette sellers or cursed ship captains. Example, you are perhaps familiar with Rick Wakeman's "Journey to the Center of the Earth"? Jules Verne told a pretty wild adventure story, and Wakeman took it from there. Interesting music (but the singing can be scraped off the bottom of my shoes). The mental images are wonderful. Poserworks is having an incredible sale right now. I just nabbed the Nautilus. I have no intentions of recreating the scene with the giant squid (that's someone else's story), but a ship like that surely had other adventures? And perhaps the organ would work with Ockham's python script for the calliope? It's got potential. :) Maybe I'll paint it pink, dub it "Rosie the Rivetted", and feature a Victorian heroine and her furry companion obsessed with the search for fabled Lemuria? Anything can be a springboard for a story, but pulling all the elements together... words and art and music... can raise it into another class. Carolly

Poserworks is having an incredible sale right now.*

Thanks for the tip! Off to check it out now.

bonni Message edited on: 05/26/2005 00:54

try doing something purely analytical for a few days (or weeks)...like helping the kids with their math homework. creativity will come jumping out of you. LOL

I know what you mean, Paul. My pin-ups get better and more technically excellent, but there is no heart or soul to them. That's why I stopped doing my calendar girls and guys. It stopped being fun :-( Think about it this way though: all those renders are at least improving your technical abilities to use the software, develop your workflow, put all those little tips into practise. So when you do get inspired for something a bit more personal and meaningful, you've got the ability to produce it. Karen :-)

The problem is that you start thinking. Thinking interferes with the creativity vibes. Before you could simply create and be happy, but now you look from a distance and you see no step ahead. What it's all about in the end is not visual, music or writing, but those odd moments when life becomes oddly "real". When you know that daily reality is a basic banality that lures you into the sleep of certainties. This is usually positive in the end as frustration leads to more energy, and this energy is needed to make a quantum-leap. But the buiding-up of the energy is a very difficult period. What happens now is that you try to force yourself into falling asleep because you think you have to. This never works. It's a question of relaxing. Try to find the root of your frustration and keep honing your skills. Add evt another app and satisfy the thinking part of yourself with thinking work to do. Occupy thinking, and the energy-leap will come in a natural way.

I'll use music for an example. You practice and practice and it seems that your stuck playng the same licks over and over again. Then one day something magic pops out and you have jump the the next level. Everything is fresh and anew, for awhile, then back to the same monotony(sp?). In any artistic endevour, it's the same thing. Just keep at it and sooner or later you Will jump to the next level. Trust me, after playing guitar for over 35 years, it's normal.

I only would like to have time to do all the things that I have in mind ... Im a collection of unfinished works ... or at least to center myself on a single thing ... I draw but bad; I sing but bad; I compose but bad; I pay theatre but bad ... too much topics, too less time ...

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12413&Form.ShowMessage=2268603

I went the other way - I used to be a musician. The last CD I produced had a 3D rendered cover, made in POV-Ray (a 66MHz 486 rendered it in just one night! Wow!). Then I discovered Poser, and music went out of the window, along with my spare time and the rest of my money. Actually, buying 3D stuff is cheaper than buying guitars. So far. :) Or, was my musical creativity declining anyway, and 3D jumped in to fill the gap?

"I am not sure why, but I think some of it has to do with the fact that a great many of the challenges I faced with traditional media are now all but gone. That's a good thing in a way because I wasn't always up to those challenges, and sometimes got very frustrated trying to get the image in my head onto the canvas or illustration board. But it seems to be a bad thing, too." I got exactly to this headspace with Poser. I missed the actual "drawing" of what I was creating. It just did not feel like art to me anymore. So, I took up modelling in Lightwave, and, alas...the challenges are back. (First you "draw" the character/scene you want to make...on paper...scan it, and make it in 3d. It is much, much more rewarding than Poser ever was.

I think, SamTherapy, that you should focus on what comes to you. I formatted my hard drive the other day because I wanted to. I have yet to re-install Poser on it. The reason: something else temporarily caught my interest. The something else: Kids got out of school for the summer and this is the first one in a long time that I didn't have to get up and go to work. We've been playing which has sparked another ten billion ideas in my head. As long as you don't run out on art altogether, you are still doing something. Now days, people don't do enough to create. It doesn't matter HOW you use your imagination as long as you use it!

You can always "up the ante" by creating animations - including scripting and soundtrack. That way you are dealing with visual art, words and music. They don't have to be complex. You can focus on the story or the music instead of the visual aesthetic if you want. Heck, you can use the low poly characters that were introduced in the PPP package so that you focus on storytelling rather than character design (which is probably part of the 'rut" you're in). Animate a joke you know. Make up a joke and animate it. Animate women jumping on trampolines "singing" rap songs about carcinogens. Select a character from your library. Open up your animation timeline. Select a new random pose for that character every 30 frames. Write a short narrative that explains why your character is moving that way. Put it to music. Animate a short feature - less than 1 minute - about bad art. Make up some bad music to go with it. Any of these will allow you the opportunity to be creative using a breadth of disciplines.

Bobasaur, "Animate women jumping on trampolines "singing" rap songs about carcinogens." You do know that Seattle used trampolines for their production of Wagner's Ring Cycle? Imagine a bunch of very overweight Valkyries jumping up and down with spears and singing at the tops of their lungs! I was listening to the live broadcast and could clearly hear the audience snickering and giggling. It is fortunate that nobody got stabbed... not even the Director. ;^) Carolly

I use to do 3 pictures a day, now I'm very lucky to get one done. Most of the time I have serveal going at once, and more than once I've delete them all. :O)

"Animate women jumping on trampolines "singing" rap songs about carcinogens" Kevin, what are you smoking, MAAAANNN ???? o.O Carolly, nothing can surprise me in modern operas productions ... :(

I've got a one track mind. One image...weeks of work. Hubby says I'm too much a perfectionisit. My main problem is that when I like the way it looks, I hit render and the picture comes out and I'm so thrilled by how it looks.....and I post it. Then, I realize, should have rendered larger or changed some render settings and it would have been better.

Just trying to throw some things out there that SamTherapy might not have thought of. Who knows what he might find inspiring?

Sam's Trampoline Song

Sweet and low,
Sweet and high,
Substitute until I die.

Bouncing low,
Bouncing high,
I'll inspire SamTherapie.

Sweet and low,
Bouncing high,
Picture this in your mind's eye.

Sam Therapie,
Sam Therapie,
I want you bad you studly guy!

[/end song]

Ok. It's not much, but it's a start. And yes Sweet & Low is carcinogenic. If you take enough.
[grin]

That Seattle Opera sounds completely cool!

@Kristta,
Once you've got everything set up, you can render it again all you want. You can also re-post.

Message edited on: 05/26/2005 11:24

It's not over until the fat lady springs..;)..don't take it so seriously. One of the worst mistakes people make is thinking that creativity can be turned on and off like a switch. Just relax, let you mind wander, get bored, doodle...y'know.. the usual stuff..
Rick Wakeman's- dang, there are people old as me in here..;)used to be able to thrash my way through playing some of that, though not nearly with the dexterity the ex-Yesman could..;)

I, personally, tend to try to do personal work. I don't post it all here, usually because I'm too lazy to make a thumbnail g. The main reason that I don't always post (not really here, but more elsewhere) is that I will do somthing to get out some pain inside, and some jackass will come by and say something about the boobs or whatnot. However, what outweighs the stupid comments is when someone gets it. I mean, I'm not asking anyone to understand every mood swing I go through. Just, if you get that there's a bit of what I'm going through in an image that I've posted, and you've commented as such, it completely drowns out the random "I need my nipple fix" comments. I'm a huge fan of pinups. I have done a few of my own. I'm just not in a place where I can do eye candy and pull it off. One day, maybe. For now, I'll stress out, and I'll post some of what I'm dealing with for you all to either get or not get. Besides, keeping the finished images on my hard drive is like hurting inside and not letting anyone know. It hurts more. That's just me, though. Everyone does whatever they do for their own reasons ;) MS

Not having an artistic job, I find myself more limited by time than creative impulses. The one dampener to my creative juices are those long days at work that leave one too energetically wasted to be creative. One of the things that's nice about Poser is that an image can be quickly laid out, things moved around, camera angles changed, and so on. This leads to a much more organic process where elements of the work can be drastically altered without starting from scratch. I've found working in Poser this way, without very hard images in my head, is creatively liberating. The images grow on the screen instead of my trying to force Poser to emulate what's in my imagination because the latter is more difficult to do based on the limitations of Poser, the content I have, and my ability to fully use Poser. I don't think SamTherapy is experiencing anything that other artists haven't in their careers--the creative doldrums. It's not as if he isn't being creative, he's just found other outlets to perform. There's nothing wrong with putting one creative endeavor aside for another. Eventually, that creative avenue will seem to grow stale and Poser will still be waiting there to be used again. "That said, I'm really pissed off because what I have in my head should be coming out visually but it seems to be the same old same old." Without trying to be a smartass, this reminds me of the old Henny Youngman joke, "The patient says 'Doctor, it hurts when I do this.' The Doctor responds, 'Then don't do that!'" My immediate gut response when I read the above comment was, "Then, do something different." Work in an unfamiliar genre. Enter a contest with rules that constrain what's wanted. Sometimes, restrictions force a person to exercise their creativity in different ways. Some of my favorite images came from contests that forced me to think of a unique way of satisfying the contest requirements because the result wasn't typical of something I'd do if left to my own impulses.

I had the same thing happen to me a few times. I did something really hard at that point. I did a portrait in poser, printed it out on heavy stock paper and mounted it on a board. I then got out my oils and painted over it. It became like a paint by numbers thing. afterwards, I felt so relaxed, almost cleansed. can't explain it, but I was taking something I had done simply and remade it by hand..... have no idea why, it just worked.

Some interesting and amusing replies here. Thank you all. :) Animation really doesn't interest me. I like to see the results that others produce but creating my own leaves me cold. I guess working in the games industry knocked that right out of me. I've loved writing and playing music for donkey's years - almost 40 in all. The thing about music is that it's permanent and even if I haven't written something new for a while, I can always pick up my guitar and go through my back catalogue, or learn songs by someone else. Visual arts are different. Once an image is done all you can do is look at it. Looking through my gallery here doesn't provide me with much because - apart from seeing the shortcomings of my earlier images - I said what I had to say at the time and moved on. Most of my "traditional" work isn't available for me to look through, either. I have either sold, given or thrown away most of it. I don't get sentimental about old pictures; it's just more stuff to drag around. Maybe I should try the old Philip K Dick method - get completely off my head on every narcotic/hallucinogenic I can get my hands on. ;)

Sometimes I sit in my chair and spin till I get dizzy. Really. p.s. You can save "Sam's Trampoline Song" and use it in the future. It's my gift to you. And no, I wasn't dizzy when I wrote it! [grin]

Thanks, Bobasaur. :)

Sam, I was thinking about your dilemma. I think a big problem with what you are experiencing is your need to top yourself... to be bigger and better with each image. It comes to a point where you just can't keep it going and you burn out (points to myself). There was a point where I would do some graphics as a favour to friends or their friends. At first it was fun, and then it became laborous because each time I made something, I wanted it to be even better than the last, and I felt I had a "standard" to live up to. Soon I was spending sometimes spending 20 hours or more working on one graphic for someone. It got to a point where I just couldn't keep up that pace. I finally came to realize that art is art and it's meant to be spontaneous and fun, not plotted out and agonized over. Unfortunately I didn't come to that realization until I had already burned myself out of creativity. Stop trying to best yourself. Just be creative and make things that appeal to YOU, and not things that top earlier projects. The only one judging you is you.

Bobasaur, "Animate women jumping on trampolines "singing" rap songs about carcinogens." You do know that Seattle used trampolines for their production of Wagner's Ring Cycle? Imagine a bunch of very overweight Valkyries jumping up and down with spears and singing at the tops of their lungs! I was listening to the live broadcast and could clearly hear the audience snickering and giggling. It is fortunate that nobody got stabbed... not even the Director. ;^) Carolly Hey, maybe this could be the theme to a next challenge or contest?

Bobasaur...just reinstalled Poser tonight so I will see if I somehow for some reason, still have the one image that I really want to resize and all!