2023 Reflections & What's Next for 2024
Version 1.0, Updated December 2023
About This Post
A Little (OK, a Lot) about the Process
This is a post to reflect on the last three years of writing these guides and lay out some plans for 2024. You will probably learn absolutely nothing about Octane in this one, or if you do, it’s purely by accident.
PDF
This post is not available in PDF format - why would you possibly want that?
Intro
This marks the end of the third year of this project with 37 completed guides and one fully rewritten one. I’ve learned a ridiculous amount doing this since I first set out to make sense of the Universal Material. In this post, I’m going to go over why I do this, what the process is like, and what I intend to do going forward.
TL;DR: I’m still going to keep doing this, I’m still going to release them for free both through Behance and on Otoy’s site, and I’m probably going to spend a bunch of time updating existing guides before breaching new topics.
Why I'm Doing This
When I first started using Cinema 4D, I spent a lot of time jumping from topic to topic trying to understand everything there is to know about the program. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably had a little experience with 3D and are probably thinking “duh”, but we were all young and naïve at some point :). I ended up with a patchwork understanding of the program and always felt like I was spending more time troubleshooting than doing the fun stuff.
In 2021, I decided to knuckle down, scrap the FOMO, and learn one render engine as well as I could. I settled on Octane because I love the look of the renders, even if it didn’t entirely make sense to me (yet). I’m so glad I stuck with it - it really is a gem, and there are some crazy smart and dedicated people working on it. It’s also one of those things that makes more and more sense the more you learn about it, but it assumes you have a pretty good understanding of certain sciency and technical concepts (which I absolutely did not).
So how to learn it?
Even though I’m a designer and motion graphics producer by trade, I’m not a visual thinker. I’m a reader and a writer, and feel far more comfortable putting a virtual pen to virtual paper rather than narrating or being on camera. 3D is also very complex - there are thousands of settings that can make or break an entire scene, and it’s difficult to remember them or find them buried in videos. I’m patient when I see the need to be, but very impatient when I think something can be done better and I don’t understand why it’s not (scrubbing video, for example).
After a bunch of trial and error, I decided to produce guides in a format that I would have wanted to have when I first started learning 3D. Long-form, topic-based written pieces that go just far enough into the hows and whys to explain the underlying concepts - but not too far as to be overwhelming, irrelevant, or rambling - is the sweet spot for me.
Three years of satisfying my curiosity later, I’m just now feeling like I have a handle on how the engine works and how to effectively use it, and I’m actually enjoying the process along the way.
Why it's not paywalled
It’s a selfish project, and I want to do it exactly the way I want to do it. I know if I’m paying someone to make something, I want input as to how it’s done, and I’ll have expectations of milestones and what a finished product will look like. Conversely, if I have clients, I need to cater to their wants.
For this project to work, I need to be my own boss, explore and tackle problems and concepts that I’m personally having difficulty with or find interesting, and reserve the right to kill an entire guide, rathole on a concept for two months, or fully change direction midstream if a better approach presents itself. This freedom has kept me motivated for 3 years, and I don’t see it changing soon.
I’m still more than happy to share the results with you with no strings attached :)
Why my headers don't Have Consistent capitalization
Sometimes it looks better in sentence case, sometimes I Like Title Case. IDK what to say.
I use a Razer Blade (currently a 2023 16” - 64GB/2TB/4090) running Windows 11 to author all of the guides. When I get a new machine, I spend a lot of time stripping away as many nonessential programs or processes from the OS as I can so I can give resources to the apps that should have them (C4D and Octane, not WinSAT or telemetry). Yes, I’m one of those people that would run Linux if my tools were made for it…
Anyway.
I typically start out by running into a problem or finding a topic that’s interesting for whatever reason.
From there, I set up a project folder that has a guide number and temporary title (this changes as the scope of the guide grows or shrinks). Inside, there are Affinity Source, C4D, and Images subfolders that will contain all the source files. The whole structure is stored in a folder that’s synced to Tresorit. Tresorit is not cheap, but it’s fast, secure, seems somewhat private, and doesn’t impact the system resources much.
Then I crack open TextMaker (part of SoftMaker Office), which has a startup template for a guide ready to go. This has a few styles like Title, H1, H2, line spacing, etc. TextMaker is cheap, stable, seems somewhat private, doesn’t impact the system resources much (see a pattern here?), and does everything I need it to do.
I write down a synopsis of what I think the guide will be about in the About This Guide section, and then explore which portions of Octane are likely to be used. Next up, I get C4D open, make sure I’m on the latest version of both that and Octane, and create working files that try to recreate and isolate the issue or topic.
Eventually I get enough written down that I start organizing it into parts and chapters. Some topics end up ballooning out so much that I need to split it into several guides. A good example of this is the recent Color Management series. That started out as a simple question: “How do I make sure #FFCC00 stays #FFCC00 when rendering?” The answer ended up being 36 pages of color management theory and techniques split across two guides.
Eventually the guide takes shape and I put in 2560x700 px placeholders for images for every section. All of my images are 2560 wide - this seems to work really well for Behance and doesn’t interfere with the flow of reading. The height is variable depending on content, but is always as short as I can get away with while still maintaining a reasonable margin so it doesn’t look claustrophobic.
All of the guide illustrations are produced in Affinity Designer in a single file with multiple artboards. Affinity is - wait for it - cheap, stable, and doesn’t impact system resources terribly much. I can usually have it running alongside C4D with smaller renders without GPU/VRAM issues. If I need to point the firehose at C4D/Octane for whatever reason, I usually end up killing all open apps anyway. Most of the graphics that aren’t screenshots, stock, or charts are from Noto Color Emoji. It’s a good base set of free illustrations at the ready so I don’t need to waste time drawing little smiley faces and stuff and can put more effort into writing and rendering.
Once the guide is finished, I PDF it, and post it to Behance. I settled on Behance because it’s targeted to designers and artists, and displays the long-form content nicely.
What's Next?
Well, this system is working for now, so I’m going to stick with it.
Octane has changed a lot in the last three years, and so has my understanding of how it works. I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of stuff in the older guides that’s either not explained well, has changed, or is just flat out wrong for one reason or another. My plan this year is to revisit them all and update as necessary (and also build PDFs for the ones that don’t have them).
It’s also at the point where I think I need an index or “guide-guide” so someone hitting the Behance page for the first time or trying to find something specific would even know where to start.
Feel free to dump ideas into the comments - I’m always interested in problems others are having. I can’t promise I’ll write about it, but if it sparks interest, it may well become part of a future guide.
Wrap Up
New Year’s Eve seemed like a good time to reflect on this guide project and get my thoughts in order. Hopefully it was of some interest :)
Author Notes
OG000 2023 Reflections & What's Next for 2024, version 1.0, Last modified December 2023.
This postoriginally appeared on https://be.net/scottbenson
All rights reserved.
The written guide may be distributed freely and can be used for personal or professional training, but not modified or sold. The assets distributed within this guide are either generated specifically for this guide and released as cc0, or sourced from cc0 sites, so they may be used for any reason, personal or commercial. The emoji font used here is
