I'll try to start from the exciting part… though to me, it's exciting just to be getting somewhere.
After finding a friend who relates to where I am, and appreciates what I'm good at, I've made a cute 3D fox for him 😃 I sculpted the head/body in Sculptris (free), topologically traced him in 3D Coat (not so free), and finished in Blender (very free). My friend made better paws, rigged him impressively and painted him, and now has a test animation going, for you all to have a look at now!
[NSFW]
We hope to get around to lot more in due time, to show that this is just the beginning; eventually we could grow into a serious team of budding animators. For now we're a casual collective of friendly Teamspeak furries teaching each other forward, with hopes about how to make something more of ourselves. I'm glad to have some leadership (under someone who's already good at pushing through the technical stuff), because I've once again started running into the kinda things that freeze me up, but this time I have someone working through it with me.
He's supporting me well through how down on myself I am, but I wonder if anyone has further tips on escaping confidence-related traps, like the catch-22s of not having confidence in general. Currently, I rarely ‘finish’ things on my own because I don't innately have a sense of what's ‘good enough’, nor a sense of when I've spent long enough. But so far I figure, if I anticipate a review of my progress every so often, I'll know to at least give everything a try before that point, and then scale my expectations according to the reaction to my work.
Unrelatedly Happy St. Valentine's? I suppose those ‘Singles Awareness Day’ types can relate to the above animation though.
Years ago I was making good progress on re-creating character models like Tails & Klonoa but 3DS Max was so unstable it was futile to rig them for animation. Errors would accumulate, joint area envelopes would violate their bounds and cause unrelated parts to bend or spike out, and frequently randomly forget the movements set for the animation frames. All that effort lost over a dozen times, so gave that up. =/
Maybe I can try again someday if life lets me.
I'm not sure if this is a tip you wanted, but for me I tended to be more productive when not bogged down by stress and expectations, just doing things for the sake of doing things, wasn't concerned with limits and I let the projects take on a life of their own.
That's not a bad start, kinda reminds me of http://www.furaffinity.net/user/cj 's early work. Yea
