I love just modeling by reference. If the client sends you a reference, you can more or less just turn your brain off and do pretty straightforward work. But this is the kind of work that can be easily done by people that cost little, or even some kind of generators / AI in the future.
If you want to set yourself apart from 90% of your competition, then, being creative really is a big level up, especially in terms of the rate you can ask for.
But you probably know that already, that's why you want to get into projects that are more creative.
Creative projects are hard! If we compared this to what writers/editors do, it's like the difference between editing a text that is already there, and creating an entirely new text.
Your brain needs to kick into overdrive to do it well, and that's where one's weaker self comes into play, because we like doing things that are easy.
I like doing creative stuff for myself because then I'm the client and I love the stuff I create. I hate it when I am creative for a client and get really invested in a project, and the client just doesn't see it the same way.
That's why I love doing less creative stuff for clients (stuff that pays well, but doesn't scratch my creative itch, and doesn't disappoint me if the client wants to go a different way). I then scratch my creative itch with my own personal projects. E.g. portfolio pieces, animated shorts etc.
Music does it for me. If I listen to some movie soundtracks or trailer music or even some romantic classical music from Rachmaninov and such, my state of mind is just plunged into a different world. Emotions are much closer to the surface that way and I just come up with great ideas and solutions to creative problems, but they relate to what I am listening to.
Browsing Behance to see what others are doing is another source of inspiration. After all, everything is a remix. To be creative you need experience, you need to have seen a lot of art, renderings, animations, and when creating stuff the brain just sort of picks parts from things you already saw or combines them to make something new. It's problem-solving really.
The thing is, there are so many facettes to being creative, you have to structure them into parts, really.
If you create an animated short, you need an idea, a character arc, a story arc, a script, a storyboard, environment, models, lighting, texturing and so on. Each of those can again be split into 10 sub-tasks that you can be creative in...
I often turn it around: I get rid of all the structure and how it's "supposed to be done" and just do stuff that's fun in 3D. I experiment with features and see what I can create, and the story then follows the form. "Hey that's a cool abstract generated landscape, there could be a little 3-legged in there that has lost his marble"..
