In 2022, back when the air wasn’t quite so thick with talk of AI, I was searching for a way to earn money remotely. I had planned a now-abandoned emigration and figured I needed something that combined IT and creativity. That’s when I decided to become a 3D designer.
What motivated me to spend hours glued to my chair, clicking unfamiliar buttons and following tutorial after tutorial like a robot, was the idea that mastering this profession would allow me to create shoots in locations that don’t exist in real life. I could also design mind-blowing sets on a minimal budget—essentially, on my own terms.
That’s exactly how my learning process went: sitting for entire days, going through lesson after lesson. As with any new venture, there were emotional highs and lows—moments of triumph («I managed to do it all on my own without a tutorial!») and moments of despair («Oh God, there’s still so much I don’t know… It’ll take me years to master this skill.»).
Yes, 3D is no photography—you can’t just click a button and call it a day. I can confidently say this because I do both.
I had cornered myself into a situation where I had to become a super-pro as quickly as possible. For the first six months, I didn’t complete a single project to the rendering stage. That’s when I realized I wanted to focus on product rendering and animations for cosmetics. My renders started to look like this:
Three days after creating these images, all my plans were turned upside down. I returned from an academic leave I hadn’t planned on ending. A week later, there was a fire in our apartment, and I found myself waiting for the great minds at MSU to let me move into the dorms. During this time, my dear friend Vika took me in and let me experiment on her. That’s when I began bringing my dream to life—integrating 3D into my shoots.
That was the turning point. I believed in myself and decided: That’s it! I’m going to create WOW shoots like no one else, and I’m going to make serious money doing it!
I was so confident in myself that I pulled together a large creative project. To say it was fun would be an understatement. The results looked like this:
But, of course, alongside the beautiful moments came challenges like this…
Not my finest moment, right? Honestly, it took me a long time to recover from the embarrassment—probably way longer than it should have. Winter came and went, and by early spring, I finally thawed out, ready to take on my next project.
I’ll share more about that one—and the ones that followed—in future posts! Stay tuned.
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A dream that came through
