Earlier this year I set out to model a character a month; and too say the least, it hasn't gone very well. For a short time I was on a roll! I created the boy and his dog model inside of a month. After that I started work on the female character with the body armor.
But then opportunity struck. I was approached by a guy from England who was making a game and wanted me to model his main character! His concept art was fantastic and I was very excited to jump on board. We wrote up an agreement and I was going to model 4 characters for him, as well as rig and animate them. My quote for each character was about 900 dollars. He told me he didn't have that kind of money (which was understandable considering he was just a small start up that was looking for funding from another company) but he assured me that he had big plans for this game and that it was going to turn out wonderfully. It was going to be on XBLA, he said. Eventually he agreed to pay me $900 and then pay for the rest of the characters with profit sharing once the game was released. We signed the agreement and that was that.
Obviously, I dropped my current portfolio plans to work on this game. The new plan was to use all of these new characters in my next demo reel. However, as time went on it became more and more apparent that this guy barely had any knoledge of game creation. He was just a traditional 2D artist and it seemed making a 3D game was a bit over his head. Nonetheless, I worked through the murkiness and finished the first character (the main character) and animated him in around 60 hours. The dude gave me a 50 dollar bonus for completing it quickly. The rest of the money would come in 300 dollar installments at the end of each month.
I then sat and waited for concept work of the remaining characters to be sent to me. A few weeks came and went. I decided to jump back onto my portfolio work and put some time into my armored female character, but this game project continued to loom in the back of my mind. The end of the month (when the first part of the pay was due) came and went. The guy ignored some of my emails but finally responded. He said simply that the game wasn't going to work out (I assume he didn't get the funding he was hoping for). I asked if I was still going to get the 900 bucks for the first character I made but I never got a single reply back from him. That was months ago now, and since he's over seas, I'm not sure how well pursuing him would do.
Putting all of that behind me, I jumped back onto my portfolio work. But as my models were becoming more and more detailed, it became more and more apparent that my 6 year old computer was straining under the pressure. Seeing as a lot of my friends had built their own computers for a lot cheaper than a pre-built one, I was advised to try building one myself. I then embarked on a 3 month journey to collect the parts necessary to build a monster of a machine that was sure to chew up any amount of polygons I could throw at it and spit out beautiful renders in a short amount of time.
The day finally came to start building and I took all of the parts to my friend's basement. The whole thing went together fairly smooth and with great anticipation we fired it up! Everything turned on but the screen was blank. The motherboard indicated there was a problem with the processor. Upon further inspection, we found that a number of the pins in the CPU bed were bent, twisted, and missing. This being my first computer, I didn't even think to check on that kind of thing before hand. I still believe with all of my might that I had nothing to do with those pins being damaged, but i'll be damned if ASUS will ever believe me. With the bent pins voiding the warranty, I was instantly out 200 bucks.
During this time, my grandmother had passed away and my family fell into a small depression. After the motherboard failure, the family dog suddenly passed away and everyone got a whole lot worse. Everyone is still trying to recover from that loss. The house has felt completely empty since then.
Once I was sure that getting a replacement board from ASUS was hopeless, I decided to bite the bullet and buy a brand new motherboard. This time I went with a Gigabyte board because I never want to give ASUS another dime of my money. The new board arrived within 2 days! Everything was great. The pins on the processor bed looked pristine. My hopes were so high! ...big mistake.
We went back to the basement and carefully assembled the new machine. Nothing. This board wouldn't even boot up. It had power but wouldn't stay on for more than a second. We unplugged everything except for the power and it still had nothing. The little LED codes at the bottom of the board were trying to show us a signal indicating what was going wrong, but the codes it was displaying weren't listed in the board's manual. Looking online we couldn't find a single listing of this happening for anyone else and couldn't find any explaination of the strange codes the board was giving us.
At this point I gave up all hope. For weeks I've had over 1000 dollars worth of parts taking up my friend's basement and absolutely nothing I could do fixed the problem. Every bit of money I tried throwing on the fire would not put it out. So it wasn't much of a surprise when I went home and my current PC's graphics card started to die. The fan stopped spinning on its own and started moaning loudly. I can no longer use anything of high graphical intensity in fear that the card will fry, meaning that all of my 3D programs are out of commission.
This is currently where I am. I am sitting here with barely any computer at all. My portfolio is no where near completed AND I have to go back to the same old same old job tomorrow. I have no directions as to what to do now. Nothing works. It's completely baffling!
Because of all of this, I am a tad depressed. I hate venting and complaining online, but I seem to go ahead and do it anyway, so take it for what it is. My apologies to anyone whom actually read through all of this. If my problems seem petty, I'm sorry. I realize everything could be a lot worse, but for me, in terms of my life, I think this sucks. I hope yours is better.
No comments:
Post a Comment