September 5th - Just married & Update

My wedding is over and my wife has now moved in with me. Life is starting to settle down and trying to establish a new routine. 

I've looked over the courses in CG Cookie and it's definitely going to help in learning how to make better characters in Blender. Just the recent course I did focused on creating a character head and learning what makes for good topology and general modeling theory was already super useful.

With character creation as the focus, I've selected a bunch of different courses that I think will be good for me to complete. I made a quick estimate at the number of hours needed to go through all of them and if I can keep a steady pace I might be done by mid October. I'm hoping by the time I've gone through all of these courses I'll have a fairly decent knowledge foundation on character modeling. Here is a list of the courses I'd like to complete. 

• Fundamentals of Digital Sculpting in Blender - 3 hours
• Introduction to Retopology - 3 hours
• Introduction to Hard Surface Modeling - 6 hours
• Creating a Jellyfish - 2 hours
• Sculpting the Wrangler Game Character - 6 hours
• Introduction to Character Modeling - 12 hours
• Modeling Realistic Characters(?) - 1 month
• This would be great to complete but would take a pretty significant investment in time. I might revisit this in the future after I've finished learning a foundation in the other skills I think are necessary.

This is just learning about modeling and doesn't touch upon rigging and animation... Still so much to learn as I haven't even started focusing on what I'd like to learn in Unity yet. Regardless, each step should improve my VR Storytelling skills so hopefully in a year or two I can look back at how far I've come. 

I'll be attending Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) for VR and AR again this year towards the end of September. It'll be my second year attending and I'm looking forward to learning more about how the industry is doing and seeing what others have created.

What I learned from starting a YouTube channel

CreateBonds my YouTube Channel on Relationships

How it began

At the beginning of this year I made it a goal to launch a YouTube channel called CreateBonds focused on relationships. I bought some online courses to learn the basics of how to do it, listen to podcasts and eventually launched it halfway through the year with a goal of making 26 videos which represents a video a week for the remaining half of the year.

Here are the key lessons that I learned from starting a YouTube channel.

Public Speaking tips - Three points to help you improvise your speech

Life rarely goes according to plan and the ability to improvise can help steer you back on track. Especially on the night I was invited to be a speaker for the Kwantlen Entrepreneurial Student Association (KESA). Here are the top three public speaking tips that helped me improvise and change my pre-planned speech so that it matched the tone/expectations of the event.

Source: Bruno Belcastro

My Personal Development Plan

The slight edge was a perspective changing book for me and can really be summarized through one key lesson. Developing a habit of consistent daily effort towards personal growth over time leads to success. With that in mind since the beginning of this year I have created my own personal development plan and this post will detail what’s been helping me achieve daily personal growth.