Thanks for sharing those notes on your character animation background.
I'm curious what drove you to be interested in mixing CGI / live action. Jurassic Park, perhaps?
When I was a kid Roger Rabbit and Cool World were amazing to me. JP's CGI seemed different, as though the dinosaurs were real.
> what types of topics or projects drive you to use Blender for conceptualization?
So I often have hobby projects (that I sometimes complete, heh) where I would rather sketch it out in Blender so I could more easily figure out what it is I want to build. Sure, I could be using something like Solidworks, but I've just never felt like I needed a full on CAD suite to do what I need. The process helps me design physical objects and decide what parts I'll need to either buy or 3D print.
One such example is a 16mm film scanner I've been meaning to build. I have a 16mm projector and collect 16mm films, and some films you can find on eBay are kind of obscure. So I thought it would be fun to build something to scan them since it would use my programming talent and involve controlling stepper motors.
That was actually where I gave up on Maya completely. I had used Blender for some things already so the transition was pretty easy, but I have more experience in Maya overall. After having it crash on something basic, not even potentially weird operations like booleans (which every other 3D software package gets right), I decided to abandon Maya entirely and hopefully I won't ever have to look back.
I never really got to work with it in a professional space, but before software development I wanted to do character animation and went to school for it. Outside of assignments, I did a bunch of hobby projects both with just animation and sculpting. I was particularly interested in mixing CGI with live action, and there were some things I did with modeling and rigging things like monsters, filming footage, resolving camera motion, and compositing rendered animation into the video. Was both a lot of fun and horribly difficult. These days I it's much easier since software for resolving camera motion has improved by orders of magnitude.
There was a studio I worked at briefly, but it was a pretty crappy deal and I decided to just ditch that field for software development, which I am much better at anyway.