What inspired you to get into 3D art?

Hi, my name is Ty and i’m new to the forum! I thought it’d be a good idea to introduce myself and engage with the community, so here i am ;p

So, i’m wondering. What inspired everyone to get into 3D modelling/animation/sculpting etc?
for me, i’ve been wanting to 3D model since i was about 14/15. i was inspired by lots of things at the time, current movies, online animations (monty oum, MMD, stuff like that) and occasionally seeing friends creating really amazing art with it!

6 years down the track and i’ve FINALLY picked it up! i only started about half a week ago and i’m so inspired and excited, it’s like a childhood dream come true hahaha. i’ve already done 2 renders and they’re not half bad! i’m really excited to develop this skill because i feel like it’s what i was meant to do. :yes:

Well? You can’t just talk about your two renders, your friends’ art, and inspiring animations you found on the internet and just leave us hanging like that without examples (preferably in link or image form). Come on and share it! And I’m curious as to why it took you six years to start. What made you wait that long?

As for me, I don’t remember why I started. It’s been over two years, but I’ve been enjoying myself by trying to get better and learn some skills along the way. Hopefully I’ll eventually be able to create an animation one day.

Cartoons. Character requirement exceeded.

My digital art journey started with doing 2D images in the early 1990s on the Commodore Amiga computers. Back then, most personal computers were frustratingly slow for serious 3D work. Then in the mid 1990s Apple released an affordable line of computers with the new PowerPC CPU architecture. These CPUs had much superior 3D rendering performance compared to Intel’s Pentiums of the time. Yet, they were just as affordable. So I bought one of those Apples specifically for doing 3D artwork. It was a 75Mhz 603 PPC PowerMac with 8Mb of RAM. I was so impressed with its rendering speed - it was amazing! I could now render 3D images in hours instead of days. So the vastly improved rendering speed was one thing that inspired me greatly.

Another thing that inspired my move to 3D artwork were Sci-Fi images that sometimes appeared in computer magazines that I was reading at the time, especially Computer Graphics World. As much as I admired those images and wanted to do something similar, it was the affordable and fast enough 3D rendering technology that allowed me to do that.

I needed something to do in retirement.

I didn’t think anyone would be interested haha :stuck_out_tongue:



Here’s the first one I did, I followed a tutorial by Blender Guru!


And here’s the second, I have a little logo I designed a while back which is a pill that says PVC (my little nickname) so I decided to make it 3D for practice :stuck_out_tongue:

As for animations that inspired me, there’s one in particular! It’s probably aged quite a bit, but it’s by an animator named Monty Oum who passed away a few years back. :frowning:

He also did a series called Dead Fantasy. Worth watching if you’re into old animation gems from '07.

As for why I took so long to start… I first attempted to learn when I was young and reckless and just wanted to be able to do it without actually studying properly. Naive me. haha… Round 2 and i’m actually glad I waited because my skills as an artist developed in the meantime. Definitely useful in 3D!

Anyway enough about me hahaha, thanks for replying! I love hearing about people’s inspiration and drive for 3D art. I’d love to see everyone’s work as well. :eyebrowlift:

Wow! I couldn’t imagine the hardware and software restrictions back then. I wasn’t old enough to experience them back then, unless I was a child genius… But I can imagine the magical feeling of finally finishing a render if it took that long! I could also imagine waiting that long only for it to fail miserably… Oh god… haha

Ironically, was a friend who modells on sketch up and z-brush. He designed some cabines for a office, printed them and shown it to us, obviusly, with the real time view of sketchup jajajja, it looked more for a cyber-coffe place…

I was on vacation and bored out of my mind, went to a local store that sold magazines that came with a dvd that contained random programs from the web that the editors found interesting. Blender was one of the programs and it even had a tutorial in PDF format on how to model a low poly penguin.

Continued learning it, tried to make some cool things to get attention and then abandoned it for a while. Now i just mess around with it from time to time.

I like to watch 3D cartoons in the cinema. Some cartoons I watched several times (for example, the Zootopia was about 5-6 times; I know, this is crazy).
3D cartoons is one reason.
Another reason is connected with my profession, it is connected with OCR (optical character recognition). I had idea to create my own OCR engine (like the Tesseract). The problem is that this is very complex task and probably might be simplified by powerful CPU.
Unfortunately, powerful Intel CPUs cost very much and I tried to find some more cheap.
And I found it! That was CUDA, and for the same price I got at least 10 times more performance (tests were primitive, but they were very illustrative), so, by the way, I have small experience with CUDA programming.
But… writing my own OCR engine would be still very big task, and to be honest, this is not the most interesting thing that can be done with powerful GPU.
I believe that everything today that can be done on GPU should be done on GPU, so the people would not overpay for their processor to Intel.
I also believe that in many aspects for modern tasks (recognition or synthesis video or audio) single-threaded programming is a bit obsolete.
What I wrote above is a bit messy, sorry.
So, finally I found that creating 3D animation is not only interesting idea. I think that GPUs will be cheaper and cheaper and 3d graphics will be more and more available for more artists that don’t know much technical details of 3D technology.

Something like this.

I started in 3D way back in 1987 or '88 (I don’t remember which) while I was in art college (it was Emily Carr College of Art & Design at the time, although it’s a university now). I’m not really sure why I got involved except perhaps I was excited by the possibilities. In my last two years at ECCAD, I did nothing but 3D with DBW Render and then Sculpt-Animate 4D.

I didn’t start using Blender until about six years ago after a long hiatus and it’s been a struggle to catch up on all the advancements in 3D. Sometimes I complain about Blender, but I would likely complain about Maya or Max or anything else I used because, frankly, it’s all pretty overwhelming and my brain has grown tired. With SA-4D, it was all triangles, there was no rigging and only one type of light. Simple stuff that took no time to learn. The drawback being that everything was done by hand (read: dead reckoning), but I still managed to get an honorable mention at the 1989 International Computer Animation Festival in Montreal. I’ve got a long way to go with Blender before I can hit those heady heights again. :slight_smile:

Cute story!

I uh

I liked to make things

Things turned into little comics on paper since I could draw as basically a baby

Then I got a PC

I made Microsoft Paint animations

I never finished them

But then, I got a PC in 2012 that was capable of understanding SSE2 instructions

I installed Blender

My life changed forever

The end.

Oh, Hugs my 2001 Gateway…something, dangit Gateway why did you not specify what model your computers were in the early 2000’s?

How do you make animations in MS Paint? :eek:

I messed with MS Paint a lot when I was a little boy (starting with the version for Windows 3.1), I would make ‘Sonic levels’ where Sonic himself was just a blue cube (no way I could draw him). I also worked on little pixel cities (from side view and from top view, though I never got very far as I was too bored to finish them).

Of course, in 2002 I starting making real video games using a real game engine and many years later, got Blender because it had a game engine (and come to see it, its game engine could produce nothing like the rendered images in the gallery back then. I ended up getting addicted to making things with BI and it all spiraled up from there).

^There’s one way you can animate in Paint, Ace. Just requires creativity and absolutely no social life.

-Open up MS Paint (duh)
-Draw out every frame you plan to use in your animation in a separate Paint file (one frame per file)
-Copy and paste each frame over each other in a new blank Paint file in reverse order. Make sure each frame lines up perfectly.
-Mash Ctrl Z really fast to play your animation and Ctrl Y to rewind.
-You are now qualified to work at a Disney. Congrats.

Of course Paint back then could only undo at max 3 times, but hey, make with what you got, and the technology we got back then sucked.

Edit: Apparently people didn’t realize that it was a joke and took it seriously. Guess the part about “a Disney” flew over some people’s head. Oh well, everybody has their good moments and their bad, but that was just terrible.

“Of course Paint back then could only undo at max 3 times, but hey, make with what you got, and the technology we got back then sucked.”

Software wise, yeah. MS Paint did this to save memory usage, as up to the Windows XP version of Paint it was still a modified version of the Windows 95 Paint release. And as you may not know, Windows 95 was designed to run on as little as 4MB of RAM, which is insanely low for that type of OS.

That’s not quite how you make animations with MS Paint. It goes something like this;
You draw your first frame and finish it entirely.
You draw another frame slightly differing from the last.
It’s like pencil and paper drawing except incredibly precise and made up of pixels.

After you have finished your animation, take your frames to your preferred video editor (mine being Sony Vegas Pro 12, but if I’m on a 32-bit machine then Windows Movie Maker).

Place all of your images (frames) in your video editor and change the playback time on each frame to what works best, as it is difficult to make a consistent framerate when it’s handmade.

Add sound if you want.

Boom, render.

My grandfather inspired me well, he is a soldier and he got me acquainted with firearms. So I became fond of rifle and I started recreating them in blender but then I tried mixing sci-fi to the guns and so I am now designing sci-fi weapons