The Tips in detail

 "I have creativity lurking like hell, but I don't know what to build next."

The situation is like this: You feel, you have to build something but regardless of your efforts you can't get anything onto screen.

From my personal experience there is always something you can do in terms of artistical or creative work. What you need is a mental focus to destilate your energy through to end up in creativity.

Idea: Looking around in your place you might find lots of things you might take as a sample to recreate it inside your favorite 3D App. Don't tell me that there are no objects to rebuild. There is allways some kind of object: a door, a window, a desk, a pen, your computer, a lamp, your clothes, books...

Problem: Either the object is far below your attitude or well above your skill.

Solution: Make a list of items you think of and/or you can see right where you are. Sort this list in order of "want to do it" and "don't want to do it". Think about any item on this list and try to consider a value of difficulty regarding your own skill. You will end up with a strange list. Take the item first you want to do most and you think you could do with least effort. Start building it to become as close to the real thing as possible. After you really finished this thingy by any means tag this entry on your list. Continue with the next in line.

Effect: You will find out where you have been wrong in your consideration of "easy" and "difficult". By staying close to your list (which you should upgrade anytime possible) you train your concentration and increase your skill in solving problems. Remember: doing something for a client does not allways include objects and tasks you like but also a bunch of elements you truely dislike. By forcing yourself to do those you dislike aswell, you will find techniques going around these quickly or even discover you disliked them because you actually did not know how to do them at all. By keeping the list somewhat up-to-date you have a scheduler for the next time you are "missing ideas".

Idea: Read a book, watch a movie and let the ideas of this media collide with your creativity.

Problem: You might tend to start simply copying ideas. You might feel that you have to do way to many things at once.

Solution: Who cares about what you took to start your scene? What counts is that you actually did it. If you can't hold the whole thing in your mind, make sketches and take notes along the sketches.

Effect: You will learn the importance of pre-thinking your work. You will learn how to do storyboarding (and - of course - everything from the idea above comes in here, too.) You will learn to analyse the work of others in a way of dividing it into its basic elements and how they have been (possibly) done. If you take your ideas from a book (any written story), you will have to add your creativity to make your ideas visible. You will learn that this is only possible by doing sketches - provided you are taking this seriously and really want to finish this. You'll improve your skill of sketching.

Idea: Have a walk / ride outside.

Problem: Weather might be bad or you can't leave your place or you don't know where to go.

Solution: If you can't go outside: lean back, relax and think about how it might be elswhere. Take notes, make sketches. If you don't know where to go to: don't care. Just start going. In the end you will see where it took you to.

Effect: You will learn that you can't force your creativity. Creativity is very much like water: when forced it takes other "roads". By relaxing you will discover your creativity being a vital living thing on its own. Care for it. Love it. You will also learn to listen to your imagination by unleashing it without your design-tool. By looking around and observing your surroundings you will learn how things are in the real world. You will notice textures and objects, movements and hierarchical dependencies within really existing objects. You will learn how light behaves or what makes any scene you can see to actually be real.

Idea: Do a randomly selected tutorial.

Problem: How to select a tutorial by random without knowingly preselecting it?

Solution: Go to any website holding a good load of tutorials. Count them. Having a coin, you can do a random-selection: throw a coin. Ie. eagle means even, face meaning odd. Again: count what survived from your list. Throw the coin again. By repeating this you will end up with one tutorial.

Effect: By doing truely random tutorials you'll learn to do things you already know better and faster - what actually firms your knowledge or how to perform tasks you didn't know. In any way your knowledge will improve. By forcing yourself to really do any selected tutorial from it's very beginning all the way down to the end you will train your concentration and mental endurance, especially if you do things you consider boring or "simple".

Idea: Browse your own collection of objects and scenes you've already done. Is there anything you did not finish?

Problem: Browsing your objects and scenes might take a long time.

Effect: If you did not do it to this point, you will discover that keeping copies of previous work at hand is a cool thing for analysing your own work, developement and progress towards perfection. If you have a collection but you discover this being unusable, you might take this as a start to work on a solution you can use for your own profit. Have you already organized your images, your materials, your textures, your models, your scenes, your documentation? By working on anything incomplete you will advance your own objects and this adds to your whole work.