Article: To Those Learning 3D

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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Whew! Okay, I finally finished the article like I said I would.

To Those Learning 3D – http://glenmoyes.com/articles/to_those_learning_3d.shtml

I wrote this mainly for people who have just started learning Blender and 3D art in general, but even some of the more blender savvy people should read it. It’s not a quick-start guide. Think of it as all of those words of wisdom that I have been collecting from professional artists, designers, other Blender users, and my own personal experience over the past year, conveniently stuffed into one article. It’s all those things that you should know about 3D art that the Blender documentation and most tutorials won’t teach you.

So please read it and offer up your advice as to what should be improved. I want this to be a resource that people will link to often; an article that people will say, “Oh, you’re new to Blender and want to be a 3D artist? Read this.” So, please critique this article.

This article will be revised in the future if I hear something really cool and insightful, and I just have to include it in the article or if something needs to be changed. I’ll also add illustrations and other pretty pictures as time goes on. After I explained “good process” I felt the need to do show exactly what happens when you exercise good process when making a ninja character in Blender. Looks like I’m actually going to do it just to prove my point.

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good, VERY good!
in fact, this article is one of the best intros i’ve read to this date! :smiley:

.andy

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What @ndy said. Definitely one of the best introductions created for Blender yet applicable to any 3d package really.

Maybe a link to your document could be added from Blender3d.org in the tutorials section.

Thanks for writing it.

RobertT

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Cool, I would like to mirror it on blenderman.org or at least be able to link to it, if you don’t mind.

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Woohoo!

Go ahead and do both! You might want to provide a link to the original anyway because the document will change in the future. Or maybe I can just tell the people who are mirroring it when updates are made.

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Saved it! Thanks

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If you can’t draw the object out on paper then how can you expect to do it in 3D? In fact it is easier to draw the object out on paper, and then use that as a guide to make the model. I can’t think of a single thing that I’ve made that wasn’t planned out on paper first.

Well, i never made a single drawing so far and still managed to do the things i want. I started working in 3D mainly because i f****** cannot draw .

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Pleasant article, I kind of quick went through it but it can be a good read.

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Have you tried drawing recently? For your next project, I bet if you spend the same amount of time drawing that you would have spent modeling you’ll surprise yourself.

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No, i cannot draw.
I tried several times, but i didnt manage to draw
even the most simple things. If i had some positive feedback with drawing, then i would instantly stop working with 3D and continue on drawing only.

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Excellent introduction. That should be the first thing anyone reads. It should be in the freakin disclaimer of a first time Blender install!

If you don’t mind my small tangent…

Don’t say can’t. You won’t if you say you can’t.

I know how frustrated you feel. Most everyone starts there. Only a few have a head start with intuitive drawing abilities, and even they can’t get far without guidance. You can go just as far, even farther if you’re dedicated. You just need the proper tools to learn how to draw.

I’m going to give you some advice. Keep in mind, it’s a long road, but if your faithful to it and committed you can make it. I’m in the same boat. You will be able to draw, everything from a cube to a landscape populated with people.

First. Read this book. Get it from the library if it’s too expensive. Almost every library has it.

It’s called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. This book will teach you to see. You are blind right now. When you read this book, you will honestly look at every object in every room of your house, and outside of it, and see it completely differently. I’m dead serious. It will teach you to draw from observation. It gives you the most elementary tools. You will not become an artist overnight, nor will you be able to draw anything and everything from your imagination. Only things you see in front of you. But this is THE KEY to everything else.

After that, learn as much as you possibly can about perspective. Apply the learnings of perspective to your observational drawings, that you learned how to do with the previous book. You will grow more confident. Heres a great book on perspective. It visually describes the perspective process, and is pretty good at it, but don’t limit yourself to just this one book.

There is SO much more to learn than this. But this is the start. It will get you on your way. But you have to be dedicated. It’s going to be furstrating as hell. You’ll get there though. Every time you fall flat on your face, dont look at it as a failure. This is how you learn! Every mistake is a lesson.

I’ve talked to much and I’ve driven completely off topic… if you wan’t more advice, PM me. I’d be happy to share what I know, and maybe what I dont know too. :slight_smile:

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Loken made a good point. Drawing has more to do with being able to see the shapes than how skilled you are with your hands. You may not know this, but you already can draw. If you can make good models, then you are using the same part of your brain that Michelangelo used when he painted the Sistine Chapel.

That is why I suggested that you spend the same amount of time drawing an object as you would have done modeling it as see what happens. Your mind is going through the same process. When you are modeling you are adding and moving points until the shape is right. When drawing you are adding and removing lines until the shape is right. You keep on doing that for hours until the shape is right! Drawing isn’t abount being able to look at a peice of paper and then suddenly draw a human from memory without having to erase a single line.

Drawing is far less time consuming than modeling a 3D object, and the end result will still look like an object that has mass and 3D form. So it is better for you to draw first and then model the object because you’ll spend more of your time seeing than working with the medium.

So, my comment, “If you can’t draw the object out on paper then how can you expect to do it in 3D?” Can go both ways. If you can make an object in 3D than how can you expect that you can’t do it on paper.

Then get that book Loken mentioned or even better take an art class.

Not too long ago I didn’t think that I would be a decent artist at all. A year ago I was deciding what I was going to major in after completing all of my general classes in college. I composed music originally, and I did some graphic design stuff, but I was undecided as to what I was going to declare as my field of study. As it turned out I was doing more work in graphic design then anything else, so I figured, “Heck, might as well get a formal education in it, just to see what happens.” Due to some scheduling problems I couldn’t take Introduction to Graphic Design first, so I had to take Drawing I instead.

Best decision of my life! I saw people that had little/no experience with drawing start making portraits, landscapes, you name it. I didn’t think I could make anything worth looking at until an instructor taught me how to see the shapes, and then transfer it to paper. All it took was a teacher and some time to set aside for just drawing. Guess what my major is now.

When you first start out it is time consuming, but it will probably be less time consuming than making a model with similar detail. Just remember it is okay to re-draw the same line 10 times until you get it right. It’s okay to have a photo as a reference (in fact all artists do that if they don’t have something they can look at from real life).

Just give it a try. Drawing is something that you can learn. I couldn’t do it well enough until I took classes.

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excellent

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Wow, great stuff :stuck_out_tongue:
Very inspirational :smiley:

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I agree. This is an exceptionally fine article. Well-written, thought provoking. “Straight from the hip, and straight from the heart.” I hope that it gets a lot of exposure, and not just in Blender circles.

You know, Glen… you could do a book. The writing is excellent as is the organization. The engaging conversational tone you have set, e.g. in “take an art class,” really is solid and professional. Maybe you should expand this into a book.

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Now posted at blenderman.org also.

http://www.blenderman.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=50

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In photography circles, we have a saying: “Look at the light.” This is the art of detaching yourself from simply “looking at a picture” or a real-world scene, and actually studying it. You observe how the light falls in the scene in front of you; what color it is, how intense it is, and so-on. In one of Charles Schulz’s (Peanuts) autobiographies, he made the comment of how he’d “draw with his eyes,” observing almost-compulsively just how the shadow of a man’s shirt-collar fell on his shirt as he moved his head.

Even if “you cannot draw,” you can still observe and you can still plan a shot. One way to do this, that I find particularly helpful given my own fairly-challenged hand drawing skills, is the very heavy use of animatics and simple geometric stand-in shapes.

Don’t pour your attention into super-detailed modeling at first; not for any scene, and regardless of your modeling abilities. Start out with simple shapes, like cubes and cylinders, making each one of approximately the right size and proportion. Do this on-screen if you like, or buy some children’s toys, using a cut-out piece of cardboard to frame your “screen” and maybe a large cardboard box to arrange them in. What you want to do first is to block out the scene, and experiment with camera angles. You want to do this quickly and cheaply, so that you don’t feel any regrets when you change something.

Blender can do “animatics.” On the lower right-hand corner of the 3D window is a button that says “Render this window (Ctrl for anim).” Zoom-in so that the frame-indicator (the lines that show you how large the TV image will be) fills the window, and push this button. Voila! You now have a very low resolution version of the shot, correctly proportioned with respect to the camera, and you have it almost instantly. You can put animatic “placeholders” for still frames and even render “placeholder” animations as you work out ideas for your project.

When you have blocked out the scene, add cameras to it. Position each one, switch to it, and do an animatic from it. Leave the camera there for reference.

The core notion is that you work out ideas first, doing them as quickly and cheaply as possible so that you can experiment freely. This is where you get to be not only a technical artist, but a director, choreographer and cinematographer. But the name of the game is to put off, as long as possible, the truly detailed work that will eventually be necessary to turn this shot into reality.

This is simply a worthy goal of “minimizing the scrap rate.” If you spend eight hours of your time doing good work that you wind up not using … then visualize that you just dumped $400 down the toilet, because you just did. If you spend twelve hours rendering a minutes’ worth of film that you do not use… well that’s not $50-an-hour but you will never, ever get those 720 irreplaceable minutes back.

When the time comes to do the final production work, all of the planning should have been done ahead of time and in “exquisite detail.”

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The page is designed so that the main content is close to the 66-character line (which is regarded as ideal) and the font size is such so that it will read well on screens larger than 1024x768 (in other words, most of my potential employers :D).

Just remember that my web page was designed so that typographers and graphic designers will hire me. And if I made a 160-char line I would be hunted down by my typography instructor. But I do hope no one still runs their desktop at 800x600, because at that size the font is a little big.

I am planning on making a PDF of this at some point though, after I proof read it some more. No matter how long I worked on it or how long I proof-read it, there’s still some errors :).

And as far as sundialsvc4’s post, yes, that’s why planning is so important. That’s why I brought up “having a good process” in the article. You really are saving a lot of time the more you plan. I was amazed when looking at the special features of The Incredibles. I’ve seen a lot of animatics before for cartoons and animated movies, and I was amazed at the amount of work they put into their animatics compared to what other studios do. They planned it out so well that I doubt any scene they had an animator working on it got cut. They already got the pacing down, they already edited the film, and all they had to do is say, “make it pretty.”

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Great article man! Definitely a must read for anyone wanting to get started in 3D. And a very good reminder on prioritys for even the most seasoned artist.

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Wow, this is a really great article. I linked to it on my page.
I am a beginner in 3D graphics. I am still learning the software. A good possibility for doing this are the weekend challenges here at elYsiun.com. I think I could follow your suggestions in futures works. I hope it helps me a lot. Thank you for writing it!