Considering adjusting my approach and getting opinions on making some changes:

Hey all, recently I’ve been thinking about what my initial plans were for things on here more broadly and how I’ve drifted away from them.

So I’ve been wanting to get some opinions on that.

I already posted a bit about this on Bluesky, just to get my thoughts down, and I’ve been going back and forth on what to write for this post since then. How to untangle my thoughts on this. I guess it would be best to treat this as an ongoing thing: getting feedback on how well the Patreon is working with the goals I have in mind and making any changes if necessary.

And, to be clear, I’m still working on finishing blocking in my current animation, and will be posting an update once I’m done with the current round. This hasn’t affected that outside of the time I spent re-working this post over and over.

My initial plans and why I’ve been moving away from them:

So to start with, I’ve been rushing to get as much done as possible in this early stage of things. Focusing on trying to get a lot of smaller stuff (renders and animations under 1 minute) done right now, and thinking I’d be able to make them fairly frequently in the future too, to break up the many months of work the main thing I’m interested in doing (1-5 minute animations) will require.

But the increased workload of all the new stuff I do in Blender (modelling, rigging, materials/shaders stuff, fx-work, simulation-work, etc.) means that even the shorter stuff is shaping up to require months of work too. The only way to have it not do that is to severely limit its scope and that’s something I’m not interested in doing at all.

At this early stage I had set this smaller stuff up in my mind as a way to buy time for the longer animations I want to be making down the line. Thinking I could revisit some of these smaller things later and make the fuller version of them when things are more settled. But now that feels like the wrong approach to take. It feels like wasting time that could be better spent on making a start on those fuller versions right now.

I'm fine with the fact that what I'm interested in making requires months of work to complete. And I'm also fine with the fact that those months need to be broken up to fit within the varying amounts of time I have on hand, both now and in the future.

I’m locked in for the long-haul with this.

But I have become stuck on my assumptions of perceptions/expectations around the time-frame needed to make what I’m interested in, and more specifically getting that to work within the month to month flow of something like Patreon.

And I think that has set me off on the first step of this journey on the wrong foot.

Brief overview of my goals, getting opinions on how well the current setup fits with them, and on making possible changes to the Patreon:

This is a rather long post, so I feel the need to keep things fairly brief. If people feel like I need to expand on any particulars I’m happy to do that, but the three main points I want to get across at the moment are:

1) 1-5 minute macro/micro/size-diff animations are the main thing I want to be making in Blender, as a continuation of the kinds of animations I made in the later days of my work with SFM (Source Filmmaker).

2) I have an interest in making shorter animations and renders too, but mainly as part of the process of making more 1-5 minute animations. I want to use them as a way to experiment with things beforehand. I specifically don’t want expectations around the frequency/regularity of them to hinder making progress on long animations.

3) This is it in terms of the pace of work and posting: it's going to be mainly progress updates and WIPs/previews, one to two a month, until an animation is done (whether it’s under or over a minute long). And then renders every now and again. It’s not possible for me to be any more active than this for the time being.

And then my questions are:

• How well this current version of the Patreon fits with that?

• Does having it set up this way work well for animations, both under and over a minute long, if they're going to take months to make?

• If not, what would be a better way of structuring it to work with that kind of time-frame?

Now, I’m not expecting to get all the answers with just this one post, or just these questions, but I would like to get the ball rolling. So I can start thinking on it more as I’m working away.

Along with that, there's also some changes to the Patreon I've already been considering too:

• Changing the length of early-access to be the same for everything, instead of being staggered between tiers. Will run an all-members poll on figuring out the best length for it. Also cleaning up the messy wording around the full-resolution version of things (they remain exclusive to paid supporters and don't have public releases).

• Having less of a focus on render-sets. Adding early-access to the 720p versions of short animations to Tier 1 (Orcish Juggernaut) to give it more of an animation focus instead.

• Adding a £1 tip jar tier if people think it'd be worth having?

This is also stuff I'd like to get people's opinions on as well.

And as a rule, I’ll always let people know a month in advance before making any actual changes to how the Patreon functions, and then I'll also post an update after the change has been made too.