Hi everyone,
I’m fairly new to blender and completely new to the forum.
I was wondering with all the premade assets out there like Makehuman, DAZ3D, and turbosquid is learning to model still important in the video game industry?
If so what should I focus on most when learning to model?
Thank you in advance for any advice l,
Josh
Hey Josh,
Welcome to the forums.
This is a reasonable question. And there are many ways to answer it.
But I will focus on the most important answer. And that is no matter what job or situation you find yourself in, you will have gotten there based on your ability to create.
This is the most important asset that you will ever have.
So become a modeler and become a good one. Nice thing about all of these asset libraries is you have plenty of material to study and learn from.
And remember the only way these asset libraries exist is because people like you learned how to model and can.
While this is a huge subject. And many things can be said, there is only one thing for you to focus on and that is getting not just good. But strive to me amazing!
This will keep you employed no matter what.
Professional game companies don’t use makehuman or Daz. MakeHuman is ugly and low quality and Daz isn’t really meant for games (and can’t legally be used for them at all without purchasing an additional “interactive license” for every asset). Reallusion Character Creator seems to be more game friendly and I’ve heard of a small number of indie devs using it, but professional studios have their own character artists or hire out to other studios for massive projects. More likely the studio will have it’s own base meshes shared by artists throughout the project.
Third party assets can be tricky, you don’t really know what you’re getting until you’ve paid for it - a good promo can hide all kinds of issues with the mesh, shaders, or textures. Other times, it’s may simply be obvious they were made by different artists as they don’t look like they belong in the scene together. Many assets won’t be designed for games all, and so will be poorly optimized, broken, or challenging to adapt to your project. Technical needs change for different projects over time.
Which is not to say third party assets can’t be useful time-savers. But the reason studios hire artists is so you can custom make the exact asset they want to the exact specifications they need.
For your learning journey, start with the kinds of models that interest you to make, or start with a variety until you find out what kind of artist you want to be. Your early stuff probably won’t be good enough to go in your portfolio so don’t worry about that yet, but it will be educational.
Hello !
Yes you should know how to model, even if you use pre-made assets you should be able to modify them the way you want, since it’s rarely a perfect match, and each project has always very precise needs.
As for what to learn, if you’re new to 3D I suggest you learn a bit of everything first, don’t focus too much on modeling for video-game but try to learn a bit of everything to a point you start to make good looking stuff without help from tutorials. Knowing a bit of lighting, animation, rig at least to a very basic level will always be helpful even for a modeler.
And once you have that basic , broad, knowledge you can start to focus on specializing and if being a 3D modeler for video game is still your thing then go for it.
To sum up really quickly, some people works for small companies therefore small projects but they’ll be able to touch a lot of different things ( small teams).
Big companies looks for people much more specialized.
As for modeling some artist specialize in characters / organic modeling, then they should know digital sculpting, anatomy, and a few other things.
Next to that, there is hard surface modeling, if you like to model robots, weapons, vehicles, then it’s different tools that are used and obviously anatomy knowledge won’t help you there 
You can also be an environment artist, which is a bit different from these 2.
But none of this is really important in the beginning and it’s great to try a bit of everything first, it will strengthen your skills !
If we talk about characters specifically, what others said about (a) artistic quality and (b) licencing is true. It makes sense to use something if possible and allowed, in order to cut down work time from something else.
You see the catch here is that if you want to become a modeler then you can’t use premade assets by principle. At least you must minimize their use as much as possible in order to promote your own work first.
On the contrary, if assets are a burden and you just want to skip them entirely, then it means that you prefer to go to the final meaning of your work, such as to make the animation, or the game, then it makes sense to use them. However as expected since the final result will be a sum of everything put in it, so kinda your work blends with everything else. You will have to create extra effort to isolate and promote your own elements in separate videos, that breakdown and analyse stuff going on in there.