What One Month Of Straight Geo-Nodeing Does To A Man
Wireframe #005: The start of many great (procedurally generated) things.
Momentum is a measurement in physics that describes the product of an object’s mass and velocity. Basically, the bigger an object is and the faster it goes, the more likely it is to plow right through any sort of obstacle that gets in its way. Which also works really well when you borrow that term for describing the seemingly exponential motivation you can develop when you start immersing yourself in a newly-found passion.
I’ve started to track any new hobby that has resulted in some completed work by how much momentum I achieved with it. For example, by all accounts switching my entire setup from Windows to NixOS & Linux probably shouldn’t have been as easy as it was. Obviously part of my success came from the fact that Linux has gotten considerably easier to get into, but that wasn’t the only factor. To be completely honest, I think it was the fact that Linux isn’t a monolithic user experience like Windows is. I had to learn the differences between the core Linux kernel, the operating system NixOS, the display protocol Wayland, and the display compositor Plasma6. While the boundaries between them aren’t always obvious, it required me to learn where the gray, murky areas started to set in.
Then I figure out if there was any specific behaviour or pattern I inadvertently used to help me do it. For Linux, it was playing with config files almost every day for a couple months. Mostly they were small tweaks, but every modification built up to knowing that there was a next step. Research wasn’t as segmented or disparaging because of the previous point. I knew what issues were caused by what area, and so I managed to keep going until I was comfortable in daily driving a Linux workstation after only two months of creeping around it.
A final component of momentum still eluded me though. What is it that inspired that action which led to me actually accomplish what I set out? Or, what led me to stall and breakdown, resulting in nothing being accomplished?
Over the past couple of years I’ve kicked destructive habits and began building healthier ones to help me figure out that fundamental mystery. So far, my takeaways have been that a maintaining a healthy body facilitates a healthy mind and that learning is always going to be necessary, so figuring out how I like to learn will make the process a lot easier.
It’s these two lessons that led me to my concept of momentum. Linux helped me set the groundwork, game development made me realize how the necessary habits developed, and finally, this newsletter has motivated me to keep going to point where I’m seeing results. Whether they succeeded or failed all stemmed from the effort I put into them and the benefits and consequences I felt as a result of their outcomes. But I say this as someone who’s gone through a couple attempts.
If you tried to apply what I’ve described in the last couple of paragraphs to your own pursuits, you probably wouldn’t come out with the same outcomes. You might not even know if you’ve successfully applied it or not. What does momentum look like to another person? I can’t say. All I know is that it’s the force that keeps you pushing forward while making sure you’re big (passionate) enough to crash through anything that holds you up. Momentum, baby.
Alright, I won’t just leave you on some vague analogy.
Over the past month I’ve been deeply immersed in Blender’s Geometry Nodes, if you couldn’t tell. The node-based procedural toolset has kept me wrapped around it’s little finger, and I’ve made a lot more progress than I had initially thought. So much so that I might even be able to wrap my focus on it up and move onto another topic a lot earlier than I anticipated. I went into Geometry Nodes with a handful of guidelines. First, I needed to learn enough to put out an article about a mostly defined topic. Second, I had to make more projects so that I would actually learn Geometry Nodes. And finally, I had to stick to what interested me about it. I wouldn’t look at a certain area unless I found something that naturally inspired me to do so.
On top of that, I also had a couple of factors that were working against me. This newsletter was sort of one. Writing a useful article every week on an unknown topic is daunting enough. Writing an additional article every other week for an in-depth guide seemed downright impossible at first. Other than that though, there was also just a lack of motivation on my end. I love proceduralism, but I didn’t know if I had it in me. 3D art has always been touch and go, and I was really only looking at it from that angle.
As it would turn out though, combining both of these was what drove me to increase my writing while allowing me to build momentum towards Geometry Nodes. You can’t write a good article on a topic without knowing what you’re talking about, and you can’t know what you’re talking about without doing the work. In thinking like this, the pressure of maintaining this newsletter forced me to improve in Geometry Nodes. I would say it’s generally worked.
So how does this transfer to you, dear reader? Think in terms of momentum. What can you do to force you to improve? What keeps you accountable in making improvement? What does improvement look like for you, and how can you show it?
For me it was sharing what I’ve done in this newsletter every week without (mostly) missing a beat. I wasn’t thinking about how I could improve at Geometry Nodes, I just wanted to write a good newsletter. It just so happened that in order to write a good newsletter, I had to improve at Geometry Nodes. Funny how that works.
I’m sure this is just another form of accountability, but it’s something I didn’t know was an option. So go and find whatever holds you accountable. Make sure it’s not an overbearing weight that drags you down, but more importantly make sure it’s something that helps you build your momentum so that even when it starts feeling heavy, you’re able to blow right past it to keep going forward. Once you get going, you might gleefully find it hard to stop.
- Adam