The human gap in 3D artwork

[Kologe]

It’s late(ish) sunday afternoon, the weather around these parts is kinda meh and I’m feeling a little philosphical again.

So here’s

The Claim

From my obervation, it appears as if 3d CGI, by and large, as a form of visual art, seems to have a clear tencency towards a certain sterility and lifelessness.

More precisely, this is to say, such artworks seem to either fall into the category of,- broadly speaking - character studies, where (usually one single) character constitutes typically the entire extent of what is being depicted or is at least the clear focus of the work, or else they [the artworks] display a remarkable void of any human beings (or other kinds of, usually at least anthropomorphic characters) in the frame.

There might be landscapes, cityscapes, all sorts of environments, but those are almost always either void of people or 2D.

What I mean is there is no storytelling to digital art, if we talk still images, especially if we talk 3d stills.

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You will find an equivalent to still life:

Breakfast Table with Blackberry Pie - Willem Claesz Heda (1631) || Dinner of the rich _ Still Life

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To romantic landscape paintings:

The Course of Empire: The Savage State - Thomas Cole (1834) || https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lDemNk

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To portraits and character studies:

Portrait of Prof. Pyotr Kapitsa and Prof. Nikolai Semyonov - Boris Kustodiev (1921) || https://www.artstation.com/artwork/1xwzkG

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To realism (the kind which excludes people):

The Flatiron - Edward Streichen (taken in 1904) || https://www.artstation.com/artwork/OG4e5e

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What is notably absent, on the other hand, are:

History art:

The Death of General Wolfe - James Wolfe (1770)

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Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch - David Wilkie (between 1818 & 1822)

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Washington Crossing the Delaware - Emanuel Leutze (1851)

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Genre art:

The Hunters at Rest - Vasily Perov (1871)

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Winter landscape with Skaters - Hendrick Avercamp (ca. 1608)

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Bull subdued by dogs - Paul de Vos (between 1638 & 1640)

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Cook at a kitchen table with dead game - Frans Snyders (between 1634 & 1637)

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Nighthawks - Edward Hopper (21 January 1942)

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Realism (the kind which includes people):

Dempsey and Firpo - George Bellows (June 1924)

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Mc Sorley’s Bar - John Sloan (1912)

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So, in other words, if it includes several characters interacting, some form of noteworthy action, is situational, so to speak, its either Photoshop or it doesn’t exist.

Yes, that was a little bit polemic and a little bit hyperbolic, and there are exceptions, but those seem remarkably rare:

.Wanting to Leave

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.Shark Ride

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.https://www.artstation.com/artwork/39NOKB

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.https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qezRya

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.https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qeGovD

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.https://www.artstation.com/artwork/elNR93

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Possible Explanations

So why is that?
Are characters just so exceptionally hard to do (well?) in 3D, it’s so much of an inordinate amount of extra effort, (virtually) nobody deems it worth it?

Is it a shortage of available (premade) character assets? Like whatever there is from renderpeople.com, bigmediumsmall.com and such is too pricey and/or doesn’t cover enough (ages, genders, ethnicities, clothing styles, hairstyles, beards, cultures, periods, poses etc.)?

Are artists too lazy for it if its personal projects?

Are things in professional, paid-work contexts too departmentalized for this to ever happen outside either the concept art phase or the finished team effort?
Like you’re e.g. either a character artist or an environment artist, thus nobody ever does both?

Do artists just not care to tell a story, but only for ticking boxes in terms of what rectuiters may look for in their portfolio?

Are artists just so overexposed to postmodernistic popcultural klischees, it wouldn’t occur to them to make an artwork about,- say the assasination of Julius Caesar - unless they’d seen that in a Netflix series the week before?

Something else?

Is it just a false impression I’m getting there?

So there you have it, now it’s not lateish afternoon anymore around here.

greetings, Kologe

[kkar]

Real art is harder than building 3D scenes and renders, however the technicalities around 3d scene/object constructions are making things extra hard for the practitioners. An excellent painter can express a lot with observation and execution, the 3D execution steps are not as straight forward as dealing with a 2d canvas even though 3D tools make a lot of things easier or seemingly easier.

Also painters spent a long time on their artworks back then, no one is going to spend 6 years building a 3d scene to render nowadays.

[Viktor_smg]

I think omitting animation then saying that there’s no story is kinda self-defeating. 3D lends itself to animation more than 2D. It’s faster, easier, cheaper to animate (some things?) in 3D, that’s why so many animes are trying to shove it in, sometimes successfully, other times hilariously.

Furthermore, I think you’re looking at artstation only. I’m not a professional, but I still consider some wacky SFM animations on youtube as art. Eltorro64Rus’s animations are OVERFLOWING with personality. There’s hyper, who does funny Blender reload animations, and now has worked on the reload animations for Titanfall 2 and I believe either some recent Call of Duty game/s, or Apex Legends, or both. Actually, scratch that, it’s both, I just looked at his channel description.

I’ve sometimes heard that some of the old artists people talk about were not recognized as great artists during their time. With that in mind… Why not look elsewhere? Set the bar lower? Does something have to be portfolio-quality to be art? I think no.

[Musashidan (Danny McGrath)]

A large part of it is the fact that people are often practicing workflows or building characters for print or games/film/etc, whether for work or for pleasure. Honing their craft, as it were. It can take a huge amount of time to create storytelling images like your example ‘the assassination of Caesar’, and people at the level to create a piece like this are generally working and fit in personal projects when they have the time.

I had a whole series of fantasy storytelling dioramas I had planned out on paper 2 years ago, but I only got around to creating one of them, simply because I didn’t have the time to do any more.

Less skilled/experienced artists won’t have the confidence/ability to tackle a challenging piece like that so they work on T-pose characters or whatever to build up their portfolios.

For whatever reason, over the years, I have seen Chinese artists create an overwhelming amount of these sorts of studies over the years. They were definitely more popular in 3D circles 10 years ago.

[zeauro]

I think you are trying to compare hundreds of years of painting to decades of CGI arts.
We lost track of many paintings done during those centuries to only keep memory of the good stuff.

You also have to admit that consumption of art changed.
Those paintings were commanded, by wealthy people, not just to decorate their interior for themselves. It had to impress their guests, to demonstrate their wealth in an intimate circle.
Nowadays, still CGI images are not sell the same way. There are no more subject of an intimate discussion. They are displayed and discussed on the internet.

And artists who want to tell a story, have the opportunity to try other media.
Amount of newbies showing on this forum, wanting to create a game by themselves, is astronomic.
At the moment, people buy computers to do CGI ; they can try animation without further cost.

[Zyl]

More and more creative tasks in the field are gradually getting replaced by alternative technical approaches. The turning point for me was generative materials. For many it now feels wrong to spend time working on whatever tedium we have not yet compartmentalized into a set of generative technical systems. So much time lost that could have been spent on moving sliders in Substance Painter!

Despite this cynical impression, I hope to be wrong and what we’re seeing is mostly a case of form follows function. CGI at its core is applied mathematics, and everything that feels like established practice is really just a blip on what is so far a very short timeline.

So, I’d say you are absolutely right in suggesting that getting characters under control is simply too difficult right now. Unless you are making an entire motion picture, the work required to get it right is disproportionate, especially in light of the speed at which traditional art (and god forbid, AI) can do it.

[calpgrmr (Cal the Programmer)]

It’s just like drum machines and synthesizers.

Can they make music? Yes.

Is it any good? Some of it.

It depends a lot on the creator.

And the audience… and what they will put up with.

[Musashidan (Danny McGrath)]

Incidentally, this video just popped up…

Eternal Ascent - 3rd place Full Creation Breakdown

[jeffrey.thrash (Jeffrey Christian Thrash)]

Besides the already-excellent points above, I would say the pipeline of creating just a single character or prop is too complex for just a simple, static illustration, compared to just drawing it out. Even if we ignore AI, I’ve simply found it much faster to draw an entire scene out than to re-create it again entirely in 3D. Ideally, you need an entire team just to make a high-quality 3D model, let alone an entire scene and composition. Alternatively, 2D is slow for animation, unless you REALLY want to shoot for the hand-drawn Disney look, whereas 3D computer animation is a bit more feasible for those of us that don’t have the privilege of working on our animated passion project full-time.

Many of the best 3D character artists I follow have to make a proper rig with good weight painting, regardless of whether they plan to use the rig for just a still render or a full animation. If I have to spend all this trouble making a rig just to pose the character in the first place, then I might as well go further and make a full animation, not just a still image that may impress social media for about 2 hours and people will forget it even exists immediately after. Especially in the likely event you post your finished illustration on social media, drawing and painting an illustration is far faster and more algorithm-friendly than spending weeks or months on that same scene in Blender…until A.I. generated slop officially crowds out any human endeavor on social media and algorithms reward only that just because algorithms are generally set up to reward constant uploads over quality. At that point, even someone that manages to upload “content” multiple times a day would be seen as a casual uploader and would have their stuff buried by the algorithm that prefers to promote AI generated similar “content” 500 times per minute, or something.

Someone also mentioned that the great Renaissance painters were artists in a time when it was more acceptable to spend 6+ years on a single project. So the upside to this could potentially be that people will no longer see chasing social media art trends and speeding up/simplifying their workflows as worth it in an age where AI-generated “content” will always beat their own quick, low-effort content in the popularity contest. This may drive more artists to be more patient with the process and start making stuff closer to the old masters and further from the low-effort sketches we regularly see on Twitter or Instagram feeds, if the former becomes more rewarding than the social media numbers game again. Even then, though, 2D illustration has the advantage in that the technology seems to progress slower, so 2D artists aren’t as pressured to keep up with the latest technological developments and finish their work before it starts to look “obsolete” like their 3D artist counterparts, especially those that work in traditional mediums. One can hope…

[NeilJamesFrarey]

Storytelling requires a narration. Narration requires the ability to understand what is a story.

And that requires a visual language … a language with some sort of a compositional coherency.

And that takes storytelling talent … aptitude.

Such as this …

Untitled (Boxer), Jean-Michel Basquiat

[Ace_Dragon]

I believe the complete lack of undo has something to do with the sterility of CG as well. You can’t ctrl-z or do a complete remake of a face for instance if you mess up (which is why you have people referring to the ‘happy accident’ in the world of painting).

Then there’s the inherent imperfection in things like the line work and the coloring (ie. variation, which is very difficult to remove completely), and when you look closer you notice you create a very small 3D relief effect with the brushwork. 3D meanwhile has a lot of perfection inherent to it and while a nice clean photographic image might be the dream of some, it is possible to forget that you can do creative things with 3D as well (as opposed to making face with 3-point lighting number 129,102).

[Kologe]

@kkar

An excellent painter can express a lot with observation and execution, the 3D execution steps are not as straight forward as dealing with a 2d canvas even though 3D tools make a lot of things easier or seemingly easier.

I’ve always been under the (possibly naive) impression the Z-brush revolution would have kind of leveled this out for the most part.

Not surprisingly, by the way, zbrushcentral.com got me covered :

The Last Day od Pompeii - Karl Brullov (between 1830 &- 1833) || https://www.zbrushcentral.com/t/the-end-of-pompeii/458389

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Untitled - Solomon Joseph Solomon (1800s) || https://www.zbrushcentral.com/t/sanctus-georgius/212146

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Martyrdom of St. James the Less - Pedro de Orente () || https://www.zbrushcentral.com/t/martyrdom-of-saint-james-the-less/400837

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Fallen Angel - Alexandre Cabanel (1847) || https://www.zbrushcentral.com/t/lucifer-morningstar/451272

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The Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt - Peter Paul Rubens (1615) || https://www.zbrushcentral.com/t/the-hunt-of-the-hippopotamus/449928

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The Feast of the Bean King - Jacob Joerens (between 1640 & 1645) || https://www.zbrushcentral.com/t/the-feast-of-the-bean-king/449650

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Wotan takes leave of Brunhild - Konrad Dielitz (1892) || https://www.zbrushcentral.com/t/odin/450319

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So I suppose the digital artist community’s face is officially restored in front of my snobbery.
That said, even on zbc, there is one such work among a hundred really silly popcultural klischees (where virtually all of said klischees are equally well done in terms of mere craftmanship) (I’m not surprised).

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Of course there are also other noteworthy works to be found on zbc, w.r.t. what I’ve talked in the opening post (other in the sense of besides recreations of famous old paintings):

.https://www.zbrushcentral.com/t/saxa/444805

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.https://www.zbrushcentral.com/t/poker-poker/300486

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.https://www.zbrushcentral.com/t/deacon-vs-freakers/216285

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.https://www.zbrushcentral.com/t/topic/446442

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.https://www.zbrushcentral.com/t/love-death-peace/453161

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.https://www.zbrushcentral.com/t/euterpe/455634

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.https://www.zbrushcentral.com/t/topic/456828

greetings, Kologe

[kkar]

I am not disrespecting those artists but most of those 3d examples lack artistic rigor and finesse. All these ambitious 3D projects generally end up with over worked assets, lumpy details, inconsistent forms and sloppy background characters. Pulling off such work in 3D requires not just 3d skills but also requires real 2D skills. This is a classic issue in the 3D art world, people get way too ambitious with their goals. It is hard, actually very hard to make an artsy render piece that is crafty, majestic, artistic, ambitious and storytelling with 3D tool sets especially when you build all these assets from scratch.

[Musashidan (Danny McGrath)]

@kkar

most of those 3d examples lack artistic rigor and finesse

I would disagree with you. This is a wonderful piece and has both attributes.

This is also a great piece. Great gestures and lighting. The artist clearly doesn’t lack artistic rigour and finesse.

I won’t comment on all the 3D recreations of the 2D paintings, as they are more technical achievements than personal artistic pieces.

[joseph (J)]

There’s also something to be said for what people want to make. I don’t want to make art that looks like the initial examples- I like looking at that kind of art, but I have absolutely no desire to make it. Could I, if I put the time (lots of time, decades) and effort in? Absolutely. Am I going to? No, because I don’t want to

[Musashidan (Danny McGrath)]

I think this is an important distinction you make, because there are many kinds of 3D artists. Not everyone wants to create art in the traditional sense of a piece with a story/meaning/parable/tragedy behind it. Some people love the technical side of 3D. The challenge of using new tools or workflows. Etc.

Even the classically trained fine artists who moved into 3D don’t spend all their time trying to create epic ‘art art’ pieces. They’re just as happy to do standalone character art or renders of hard-surface pieces.

That’s the beauty of 3D art for me, there are so many options and avenues we can take when engaging in it. There are always new challenges to overcome and tools to learn.

[kkar]

Yeah, I said that “most” of those had those issues. The 3D sculpture by Ara is definitely the exceptional example.

[kkar]

Studying the old masters is a great way to speed up art education. They have done the leg work, and it is all there to study and inherit the knowledge, however copying a masterpiece in 3D is not art.

[Kologe]

@Musashidan

That’s the beauty of 3D art for me, there are so many options and avenues we can take when engaging in it. There are always new challenges to overcome and tools to learn.

…and I would have thought that was the case for any artform (if,- how should I best put this - faced with a certain amount of sincerity, maybe not just as a mere passtime alone).

@Musashidan

[…]
trying to create epic ‘art art’ pieces. […]

In case the term ‘epic’ herein refers to that kind of bombastic/pathos-laden works of the ‘The Assassination of Julius Cesar’-kind (to reiterate on that example for it matches well here), I don’t really mean to focus the discussion on such a genre primarily.

In fact I would consider something more subtle, of smaller scale and more mundane in terms of tone and subject, to be a lot more interesting. It is very well possible to tell a story in one image via like two characters.
To give an example, picture two guys on a fishing trip, one steadily rows the boat, the other is supposed to stear it, but de facto already fell asleep in the sunshine.

Btw. I fully agree to everything said in post #14.

greetings, Kologe

[Musashidan (Danny McGrath)]

@Kologe

…and I would have thought that was the case for any artform (if,- how should I best put this - faced with a certain amount of sincerity, maybe not just as a mere passtime alone).

Yes, of course, but my point was more that when a painter masters his craft he doesn’t have many options. Yes, he can still continue to improve with every piece, continue studying anatomy, form, lighting, drapery, etc, but he will always return to his paintbrush and canvas. He’s not going to face any technical challenges.

A 3D artist, on the other hand - as well as having to continue to learn and improve his anatomy/lighting/form/etc - has many disciplines and fields and options, from sculpting to hard-surface modeling to texture painting, shader creation, animation, VFX, etc. He can create an illustration or a game or a full film. The options are many.