As an excuse for a post, I decided to share my plans for the next few months (or possibly longer). This is also a way to pressure myself to commit to these things that I want to do, as this post serves as a reminder to myself.
I started volunteering at a computer recycling centre, and I absolutely love helping out there. I plan to keep going for as long as I can.
There are a lot of things I want to study. I'm unemployed and currently not going to school, so I have abundant free time. I'm not going to school is because I learn slower compared to most people. School moves too quickly for me. What should take a few hours to learn for other people usually takes me a few days. Oh, and post-secondary education is expensive. The resources I need to learn stuff is available freely on the internet, so I'm going to make use of that.
It has been way too long since I've studied any sort of maths, so I really need to get back at it. My focus would be linear algebra and geometry, as they are essential for understanding graphics programming. I want to learn more about circuitry and computer engineering (which I'm learning a lot while volunteering for a computer recycling centre). I need to relearn a lot of Computer Science stuff as well (such as data structures and algorithms).
My main focus for now isn't to study languages, as much as I would want to. I'm going to spend less time with linguistics and more time with the maths and tech projects.
I'm planning to study a lot of films (not only animated films) to better understand film making and animation. I plan on diving deeper, far deeper from where I left off in my Blender learning journey a few years ago. I'll start learning scary things like Sculpting and Compositing.
The projects are mostly for reinforcing the studying, but there are some things I want to try out and experiment.
I will be working on a few projects to better further my understanding on graphics as a whole. My goal by the end of this is to create a graphics engine for rasterizing and raytracing. I also want to experiment a lot with shaders. They used to scare me when I was younger but now I'm probably older and less scared of shader programming. I think for these projects I'll work in OpenGL.
I'm going to be using the knowledge from my animation studies (and assistance from the ✨animation sibling✨) to make my own animations. I will be working mainly in Blender.
I have a few game development projects in mind (in particular, Slugbury 2), but I'm going to focus more on the graphics programming projects. I'm going to spend most of my game development in Godot.
I want to learn music but it seems very scary. The only musical instrument I played was a recorder in 2018 and I sucked at it. I'm going to try to dabble a bit in LMMS and Audacity. There's also an electric guitar of the ✨music sibling✨ I can borrow and learn that but that's going to take too much effort and time.
Okay, so I have a lot planned (as vaguely as they're written here LOL). How am I going to do so much in so little time? I don't know, honestly. A lot of my future projects and studying require a lot of time. I'm having a hard time finding a balance between all the things I want to do, and with the way things is going I seem to be doing things based on how I feel at the time. I'm going to try to set myself a schedule, with a focus on learning maths and a mix of graphics programming and animation.
I expect a lot from these plans and I hope follow through with them. There's a high chance I end up not doing a lot of the things here, and that's fine (as long as I study and understand the maths and make a few animations). I'm not sure how to end this but I hope you enjoy whatever I make in the future.
Tschau.