I’ve been obsessing over one particular spaceship model for Tinselfly lately. Mostly, I’m trying to prove to myself that I can make this product look as good as I want it to be.

You can view this in 3d here. (It’s updated from yesterday’s model, if you happened to see that.)

This is rather uneven, sort of by design. That main body is pretty funky looking, because I’ve been ignoring it.

I slip into a bit of a weird workflow, when I really don’t have any faith in my skills. Sure, a decade ago I made this design, ostensibly for this project, and it still looks pretty nice… but since I made that, I decided to make the switch from pre-rendered scenes to realtime 3d, and  I have a long way to go before I can say I’m good at making models for realtime 3d projects.

So I’m shooting for adequate here.

Trouble is, my standards for ‘adequate’ are pretty high. And what I’ll do, when I’m not sure I can make something that meets my standards, is just focus on one small piece of my model or illustration or whatever, and see if I can get it looking ok. Here, I’ve been concentrating on the big disc in front and those shiny lattice-like sails curving around everything. And I hereby declare those things adequate. I’m pretty sure now that I can give everything else — the main body of the ship, the rings in back — a similar level of detail and visual interest.

I sort of wonder, if I’d gone into this confident that I’d eventually get something I liked, if I might have picked a more efficient workflow. I wouldn’t say I’ve done a lot of second-guessing my decisions, but jumping into a challenge expecting to fail probably isn’t a great mindset to have.  That’s how I went into another recent illustration project, and I’m pretty sure that killed my efficiency.

Generally I tend to be pretty optimistic, and that’s been waning a bit, much to my surprise. I think it’s time to reclaim some of that. Being stupidly optimistic can be helpful sometimes.