#41: How to stay motivated in the age of AI art

g'day and welcome to the Andrew price podcast the podcast for serious artists normally I would be interviewing a serious artist but instead today is a special episode because I am going to be answering your questions so last night I tweeted send me your burning CG or blender related questions and I will answer them so here we are starting with the first question from Kevin just Kevin Kevin says how can I motivate myself to create when I know that AI can carry out my imaginations instructions I felt too unmotivated lately because of AI not seeing the point anymore it's interesting like seeing the different artists reaction to AI like some get like really thrilled and like jazzed up about they can create so much more and then others uh um I think rightfully like looking at like oh my God what skills am I like what my livelihood is depending on this and that seems like it's not going to be there anymore and it's relatable because I mean I myself have felt that before and I know many artists that have felt like how can you stay motivated now when it feels like everything you're learning is just going to be made redundant um and I've even heard artists quote The Incredibles you know when um what's the what's the guy's name you know the little boy who becomes like the villain in The Incredibles right and he says when everyone is special no one is right and they say that well the implication is that this will apply to Art when everyone can create art then no one is special anymore and they're really there is no art and there's no point to Art because everyone can create it right but there is a floor in that a big floor because in the movie superpowers are binary but it art of course is not binary because quality is not binary it is a moving scale and you can argue it is a moving Target right entertainment has not peaked art has not peaked there will always be new ideas and new improvements to be had and provided that room for improvement still exists then it will there will always be more to create more studios hiring more production starting more jobs for people who are creatively minded what you have to remember though is that the problem has changed okay problem that art solved yesterday is different to what it solves today and tomorrow a year ago the problem that artists were solving was to just create a pretty image right a lot of the work went you know both in 2D and 3D was in the rendering stage right the shading uh getting things you know to match a photo quality right the problem of Tomorrow is to create a better image okay so for example there is a tutorial that is on my YouTube channel and it showed you how to create a cabin in the woods using blender okay now uh it was a long tutorial it was like 20 minutes long and it was even like condensed because it was like months of my work right and so it was creating this long you know Cabin in the Woods tutorial but just for fun yesterday in fact I opened up mid journey and I typed in Cabin in the Woods and in four words I got arguably a better result in about 10 seconds right so how can you say like what does that mean that really sounds like we're all going to be replaced okay the problem has changed right the problem used to be create a pretty image now that problem has changed to create a better image the problem that you need to solve now is how to make a better Cabin in the Woods right so maybe the building has more interesting shapes the building that I had in that tutorial was horrible this is like simple looking thing was terrible maybe it tells about a story right so it has set dressing to tell the story about a character or a scene or a uh something interesting about the life of the person or in relation to something else or maybe it incorporates animation or it's how you've interpreted it or something new right so that Target has now moved to something else right well maybe it's just like not to create a cabin in the woods at all but something else you know entirely that would fit you know the solution of the problem that that Cabin in the Woods thing is you know for a client or something like that right so that's the bit that has has changed so remember artists aren't being replaced generally workflows are so whenever someone says like artists are being replaced just replace artists with workflows and generally it fits so another similarly related question from subham tripathy tripathy yeah okay is 3D going to be a reliable career option I'd love to know your opinion on this yeah so related to that um I think the issue with this and why so much of our thinking goes back to like am I going to lose my job right it's that humans are geared towards loss aversion right we're much more we've done so many experiments on this right like people are much more motivated when they are losing like 50 of their own money versus gaining the fifty dollars that they don't have yet right we're much more protective of that than the 50 that we could gain right and so similarly we're always going to visualize the things that are lost and also we know what those things are we know those jobs that exist but it's much harder to visualize the opportunities that will arise from the falling costs of something right and there are many of those but it's hard to think about and we're also just not primed to think about them because it's again not a loss so basically if you think CG is big now wait until CG is incorporated into every major sector on the entire planet right like I think 3D today is where photography was about 30 years ago right it was like an expensive Niche skill that a few knew about like very technical people and it was just kind of its own thing and only the very rich and wealthy could afford to do it very well well today thanks to cameras being cheap and way way way higher quality they're now used by everyone and pretty much every business so have for example here's some like like top of the head like business opportunities right like fashion right fashion has wanted to use CG for a long time but it is so expensive and there's too much to figure out right like you've got the threads and the the folds and the cuts and just fabric is very expensive so they're still doing things practically right the design of it the trade shows the models are flown in to do these like single poses you know uh the uh what else would it be like yeah uh trying on clothing right you have to physically drive to a store try it on look in the mirror right they want to be able to let clients try it on virtually either with an AR headset or like your phone or something like that and it's just too costly to do so fashion has not really been able to adopt 3D when it does that is like trillions and trillions of dollars right there's so many jobs in just fashion alone you've also got like events trade shows conferences live performances all of which stands to scale massively and gain a lot by switching to CG but there is still so many challenges to overcome there's latency see this that like the realism of 3D all of this stuff that has just done better practically so practice practically is still what we do but they would love to switch to CG which it could get there once costs fall another one is education right which everyone hates everyone knows that school is terrible we're still doing the same old classrooms coming there read like a a very complex problem or a concept right from a science textbook which would be much easier to explain if it was visualized in 3D or something that you could interact with right think of the people if they could like kids could understand like molecular biology if they could see the cells move around or they could interact or they could do experiments virtually right using AI or something to kind of like augment that I don't know or to augment the child's learning by giving them like one-on-one feedback like all this stuff like education stands to gain a huge amount by CG um and it just largely has not really been touched at all um you've also got like digital twins right this concept of digital twins we've tried to get into it with polygon and sort of realize that like it's just too early right like it's still way too expensive for most companies to create digital twins of their items so billions is spent every year on producing like prototypes constructing buildings interior design just like Furniture alone all of which could be done way more efficiently and environmentally friendly if it was done in CG because you could like just mock up something mock up a building mock-up a design try out different digital twins of the real world before you actually go and buy the thing and then realize it sucks then you just have to throw it out and get a new one or something else right like so this is another space right like it it's basically everything in the Practical world and then you've got the current ways that CG are being used currently right but just like costs falling and so therefore number of Productions going up right like the number of AAA games released every year like you could probably count them on one hand right but the number of Indie Games produced per year is like thousands like probably I don't know tens of thousands I think it is right if you look on Steam like the titles released per day um it's a lot and yet the difference between Triple A quality and Indie quality is drastic and it's the reason it's drastic is because of costs um I think they estimate like you know Red Dead Redemption they asked me like 200 million dollars spent producing that like it's astronaut you'd be mind blown at how costly it is to build like a simple level of AAA quality or what if every indie game had the graphics of a triple a title today right like what would that do like what could you do with that what type of stories could you create what type of experiences could you create like and that's that's gaming then you've got like VFX and animation like what if there were hundreds or thousands of movies made like Avatar right with Not actors but like virtual actors or like just like single person Productions making an entire movie right when costs fall you could feasibly create something like that that just seems impossible today because it really is impossible today without investing Decades of your own time or something to do it so really to say we're all losing our jobs is to ignore the growth of industries that faced Automation in the past so long as you're not a chimp pulling a lever right that is the caviar that is the toughest pill to swallow um there are people like that who prefer to they don't want to learn anything new they're happy with the skill sets that they've got and those are the people who are at risk of losing their job but provided you are still hungry to learn and still prepared to prepared to pick up a new tool when one is available to you then there will always be more opportunities too I truly do believe that but again the tough pill as well is that you will need to learn new skills okay uh next one this question by the way I'm reading like I've got this little teleprompter set up and I've got like the Twitter questions there that's why it looks like I'm looking at the camera but I'm actually reading the questions on the screen which types of skills will become obsolete in the near future and which skills should people new to the industry focus on we can fight AI as much as we want but it is not going anywhere and I think the conversation should focus more on how we prepare ourselves for it and I think that is the right mindset by the way um I think that so much of the discussion for the Arts community at the moment is around like the ethics and like how can we stop this um because of you know the data sets that we used and it's using everyone's work or something like that and I think you know there's a there is I I mean I do get it there is like an argument to be made for that I just don't think it matters in the long run um because we're already seeing ethical AI models being created like adobe's created one Firefly that didn't use that copyrighted pool and they're still able to get really good results I've heard that adobe is also creating AI for um maybe I'm not allowed to say it well anyways um but they're they're working with artists internally to create different styles right so rather than having to pull from art station and go this style or this style this style they're hiring artists to create certain Styles and then feed that into the data so basically these ethical models will come that's why I kind of think it's just like not the best use of our time it's kind of it's just buying time really to like the ethical thing and like trying to do lawsuits and stuff I'm not saying that there's not a place for that I just don't think like if you're an individual an individual artist and you're looking for like what can I do the best use of your time is to like yeah just kind of yeah level up right like accept that AI is here now what do I do about that so as I mentioned before jobs don't disappear skill sets do workflows do so provided you're prefer prepared to keep learning you're going to be fine the only people that risk losing their jobs to automation are those that do not want to learn anything new so remember that the skill sets that are likely to disappear if you ask me anything that is overly manual mathematical or heavily repeatable right so obvious ones UVs right that's something that a computer is way better suited for than an artist trying to like find the optimal use for where those UVS fit in the Square read toppo that's another one it's like a mathematical puzzle for people who happen to like mathematical puzzles right no one really enjoys doing it that's why the kind of the meme is like let's automate it um mesh cleanup right similar thing all that kind of stuff like that's a skill that you can just like reliably depend upon it being automatable in the future so if your skill set is that at the moment I would be looking to upskill right um and along with that there are also like large parts of pipelines um like asset creation that are extremely repetitive and I think that although it's probably not like likely that you'll be able to create like AAA quality assets for a while I would say maybe five to well that's the other thing like yeah you could probably get one that could make like one chair right but then what about a car what about not a car but a tank or not a tank but something that doesn't exist yet like like to create something that actually works reliably for 99 of the subjects you feed it that's really the challenge and that's the reason I don't think it'll be more than like closer than like five years I have seen I I don't I don't send me the links I have seen them like oh Adobe in the video we keep an eye on this at polygon right our business is based on assets we're keeping an eye on we've seen all of them and like they're all like very like mushy um you know and they fall over in some things and they're better at other things and like it's not even close to AAA quality right so that's why I kind of put it at like five years right so I don't think it'll get there but I will think that asset generation uh will be augmented um pretty soon right so for example like the workflow for like just creating a chair right you go online you got the photo reference then you have to hand model it in blender then you download textures from polygon uh then you open it in like substance painter then you paint onto it you do the details then you have to bake it from high to low then you export it right this is very repetitive a lot of it is mathematical and a lot of it is very manual labor intensive right so these skills will continue to be valuable in the future but large parts of them will be augmented so for example you could get a pretty good result of that chair via a prompt right but you'd have to know like how to improve it right so you might have to know like technically like the fabric of that that chair that it came with it's kind of low res or maybe it needs more detail maybe I could art direct that chair to be like kind of slanted or have like a different design that better suits this purpose over here right so that's where your skills will be used and yeah fixing a lot of the issues that come with that I mean in much the same way that like animators today they start with mocap as a reference and then they manipulate that and they art direct that and they really like fine it down to basically using more of their time where it should be spent which is like creatively not this like manual get the base result stuff that's really time consuming um that's I think gonna apply to 3D so yeah really like animation you look at like mocap and what's happening there I think that's exactly what's going to happen to 3D in a lot of like 3D Pipelines so yeah anyways if you're a student today and you're wondering like what skills should I focus on what do you think is valuable um I would just keep creating right I know that sounds like like generic and like just keep doing it but there's a reason for this like if you focus on producing and creating new projects like I don't know doing a render a week or starting a short film Project or a video game or a VFX project or something like that even though you will learn skills today that will be made redundant within five years and by the way that's like nothing new with AI there like that's just been how 3D has always been there's always been stuff like the old photo show workflow Photoshop workflow of texturing no longer applies today everyone's having to use switch and learn substance designer and substance painter so everybody's always had to learn stuff it is happening at a more compressed rate but yeah anyways so a lot of that stuff will be made redundant but in the the meantime you will also be learning what quality is right if you've never touched 3D before and then in the future you pick up like a 3D prompt and then you just like type in like three thing and you get a model you won't know which parts of it suck right so a client who is hiring a prompt artist right they're not going to be happy with the work when the other client their competitor is working with an actual artist who knows what the technical issues were with that model or that image or what whatever it is and they were able to make it better so that's why knowing all this stuff today is going to help you down the line so learning what quality is and then also the most valuable thing is Art Direction when you're creating these projects by yourself these individual little tasks and short films and whatever it is you're learning art directing which is arguably the skill of the future learning how to solve that problem whatever that problem might be learning yeah the art direction of that how to create something that's aesthetically consistent good design right as I mentioned for the design of the house like big medium small shapes shape language interpretation all this stuff that like mid Journey does not understand right it's very good at just like copying right copying like just the exact thing that everybody happens to want it's like it's like a popular image generator is what I kind of Envision it but again when when everyone's special no one is right there's a moving Target there's a moving quality right so all the clients if they're now able to create the exact same images they're suddenly like looking at each other like we've all got the same images here this kind of like I need something to level up so they're going to hire an actual artist who can create something that is better designed right with an actual artist who knows good design for the The Cabin in the Woods thing that's going to sketch it out first to have good design and then they're going to feed it through of these things and they're going to make something better so that is the skill of the future is Art Direction and yeah I think you can learn a lot by doing that next question I've noticed that as I'm getting better at blender it takes longer to make better renders is this important yeah um sorry is this important is this normal um yes it is uh it's it's something you can kind of depend on like beginners always like they're producing a lot of work really quickly and it's very sloppy and the reason that you get slower the more yeah the Yeah the more skill you have is that for one you know what good is so your taste goes up and then because you know what good is you know the correct workflow you know what good topology actually is and generally what is good generally takes longer so therefore the more you know tends to be the longer things take but if you're a good artist you also have to be good at understanding what are the costs and compromises of these qualities and like when you're shooting for that like Optimal everything has to be perfect Triple A's quality standard asset that is one part of an entire scene it's like maybe that doesn't matter maybe I can get away with the sloppy workflow for just that one thing so a good professional artist should also like kind of max out like cap out their time spent on a thing so they're not just exponentially like as you go up taking longer and longer and longer to produce things but actually that is quite normal for professionals they've become more and more of a perfectionist and which I've talked about in like my old um habits of effective artists at the London conference all right next question this one comes from Luke 23 swoosh all right as a new starter in 2023 what do you think will be different in our journey compared to someone who started 15 years ago will it will it be easier and would you specialize or stay generalist um generalist as I mentioned um and yeah it will probably enable you to do things in fact you can actually see it like on Tick Tock right and like Reddit and like where a lot of these like younger artists are kind of hanging out they're not really on Art station nowadays like they're young the young guys um they're creating things that um kind of like everybody wanted to do when they started 3D like 15 years ago they're creating like a single one-person project of like them self as Spider-Man jumping and like jumping through a city right um something like what Peter Francis okay what's his last name Peter France I think is um from like Corridor he made like stuff like that like I would have loved to have done that when I started CD right like most of us we got into CG because we watched Jurassic Park right and we saw them like the dino like knock over the camera like I want to make that and then we started ourselves and we go I can't make that like making that one single car will take me months of work and I don't even know where to start with a dinosaur so we scale back and scale back but now you've got like model libraries you've got photogrammetry tools you've got so much educational stuff on YouTube and people revealing their workflows and you've also got like tools are now real time so you can make that entire thing on one little laptop so yeah I mean I think it is easier right from from the old guy sitting up on the hill talking about the young kids today they do have it so easy um but what will be different yeah is like tools will change much faster workflows will change much faster um um and another thing that really matters if you're a young person today you're just hungry to learn everything new anyway um or at least you should be um but uh I think I think that's definitely you know you can guarantee like things are improving faster right like like 3D like look at the old like from where Pixar was with Toy Story one to like Toy Story two didn't really improve that much like the tools they're using right but like the same period today like could you imagine like a five-year gap between softwares today and like five years in the future it's going to be so different so things are definitely changing faster um but again it's meaning costs are falling so just like Industries are like exponentially adopting CG so um there's so much opportunity out there all right next question comes from Joe Haley who says do you think that we are close to seeing some sort of AI Wizardry that could perfectly automate the process of re-topology in blender um I've kept an eye on it like I'm actually surprised that there isn't because I looked at it recently and I think it was just like quad Reflow I think is the one that was the best one that I found I put it on my YouTube shorts and Tick Tock like the best blender add-ons that I recommend it was quad Reflow um there's not really like it is actually quite a hard problem to solve like how to do re-toppo well because you have to know like how to like keep a silhouette consistent how to simplify some things but not simplify all the details you have to know like okay like all the little bumps across the surface of that photo scan statue right with every little look and thing like not all of that matters I can kind of smooth that out um but like the the silhouette is important but this edge here this specific one shouldn't be smoothed out so that it looks like blend it should be kept sharp so knowing where to keep sharpness and where to smooth something out it's very challenging um so I do think it is something that AI is poised to be very very good at um so I'm eagerly awaiting it like other people all right uh this one is from raw shash raw shash is photogrammetry considered art no um no if you ask me it's not I mean I know like what is that like philosophical question of like what is art everything is Art it anything it's up to the individual or what can be considered art and like the raindrop on a window could be considered art and it's like yeah but then like nothing is odd right it's like if it's all up to the eye that we're holding then yeah but then the question is really like what do we do we call that uh do we call a raindrop on a window art when most people are talking about art are they talking about raindrops right no we're talking about something that is Art in the traditional sense I don't think photogrammetry is Art um uh I'm sorry if that offends any photogrammetry artists but I think any good photogrammetry artists would agree with that it's largely technical skill it's like it's more mathematical or or I don't know listen to the one that we just did with uh Mason actually talking about photogram tree it's so Technical and it's understanding like physics of light and like Reflections and neutralizing and color balance and really like it's like yeah like you get better and better and better at it the more you like the more nerdy you get the more technical you get photogrammetry gets better so by itself if you photo scan a chair I would not really call that art um the art I would call is like something stylized or something that you've somehow interpreted into something else not just like a physical capturing of the thing as it exists anyways next question Dem Nico art says top three best and worst things about blender what are the top three okay um I mean blenders definitely accessibility right like the education the compatibility with like uh operating systems the lightweight nature of it uh the user interface which some people might cringe at but like used to be horrible uh the community overall just people sharing things that's definitely something you don't find with old software packages in fact most um it's also very good at look Dev right like visualizing things quickly and just seeing them in real time thanks to EV um and then also rendering um so that'd be my top three accessibility look div and rendering so Cycles rendering is actually it's almost like world-class like best in its class like I think like v-ray in our render engine comparison video we did I think v-ray did beat it out on like the uh when it was using like that secondary solver method but like Cycles X is like really damn close to it and it's using the brute force method so it's pretty impressive what Cycles is doing so it's yeah it's almost the best like the best renderer in my opinion it is um anyways um the worst so what is the worst best and worst um I would say simulations every time I want to use blender for simulation like I want to do like a fire simulation or like an explosion tutorial or something like that blender just sucks at simulations it's just kind of like from talking to developers at the blender conference I've learned that it's just like we need to have a developer who's interested in and wants to solve it um and wants to work on it really is the answer like why why does some things just not get done in blender like no one's interested in it so sometimes people are and then it just it picks up and it's great but in this case simulations not really uh texture painting number two texture painting definitely sucks and the whole like texture workflow like substance designer that kind of workflow should be in blender and it's not I think it's waiting for money or a developer that's interested in it and then having talked to artists that are in animation and people that I know in the industry um animation just the whole animation pipeline rigging and animation um is a weak area of blunder from what I have heard yeah I don't know what specifics I think that interview that I did with sir Wade he sort of mentioned some of those like layers I know that much um but that's why if you talk to like people in the industry like everyone is like oh man blender is so great I really want to use it at my studio but like ah the animation like because of that we just have to keep using Maya but if you could fix the animation we could switch from Maya to blender so I'm like all right well the animation 2025 project is um underway so hopefully fingers crossed they'll fix the animation and then we'll start using it to see it used elsewhere um oh look it's related when do you think blender will be an industry standard there are so many tiny indie game studios these days that are using blender for making games but still big studios rely on their old pipelines like Maya what is your prediction for the future um yeah like it's it seems to be the animation once they solve that I think a lot of Industries are going to start switching to blender the one thing that could kind of hold it back also is just the fact that like if you develop a custom version of blender or you make a like an internal for your studio right like a pipeline Improvement that like a unique tool inside of blender that like checks files like we've got one for like uh polygon right we make these like internal plugins for like rendering out our previews for polygon and we use blender for it right all the code that we write for that is technically open source not really a problem for us right because it's not that much work but other Studios they are investing millions and millions of dollars into making it so that their movies are cheaper to produce than other studios around them right they're in this competitive bid sort of environment it's why like big studios um uh you know like dnag and all these others like they're worth millions of dollars sometimes billions like wetter um and it's because of their uh yeah their their internal tool sets that they've built um so the problem with like blender being a widely adopted is that Studios might not want to do that it they don't have to like release the code right to make it public you could just hide it on the internal servers of their company and that's fine and that's probably what all of them are doing currently the problem is though is that if one artist was to stick a USB in and steal that code and then release it onto the internet right they probably haven't done anything wrong because I think the open source code might Trump what any code they've got what any uh um contract they've signed internally about ndas I could be totally wrong there that's not legal advice adult do not follow my instruction there but what I'm saying is it's like the open source bit of the code is very challenging and it's also like hotly contested even developers say that the open you can't force a plugin to be open source just because you wrote code to be compatible with this other software that is open source so it's a it's a tough question but I think that that has like made a lot of Studios kind of pump the brakes a little bit or at least be reluctant to move over everything but I also understand why ton does not want to change that at all it's it's almost like it's a clash of like open source versus like the old capitalism and like do you want freedom for everyone and like to just be able to create more and more and more that's the free for everything but then if you also want like Innovative tools and Innovative Concepts and innovative ideas and Innovative things then people want to return on those Innovative things and so therefore that's where the capitalism model works so they're kind of bashing into each other but anyways I think the Catalyst might have to like into submission like okay all right blender you win we'll we'll adopt you Pro tip for artists learn how to use your time efficiently if you are spending time making a Shader that you've already built a hundred times before that is time not spent somewhere else more important polygon solves this by giving you access to over 5 000 assets which are Plug and Play shaders models and hdris that are created to a liable consistent standard so you don't have to waste any time fixing them and with our new blender add-on you can search download and import assets directly into your scene from your sidebar meaning you can keep your focus where it needs to be which is making good art you can try 100 assets for free by clicking the link in the description or by going to polygon p-o-l-i-i-g-o-n.com and signing up for a free account Jonathan Simba says what do you create when you have a computer that can barely render a slightly dense room um yeah that is something that a lot of beginners say is like I've got a really crappy computer like how can I learn blender how can I be good at it you have to remember that like anyone who's good at blender today is using computers that are exponentially worse than what you have today and using software that is exponentially worse right so I started using blender when it was like 2.2 something way back in the day 20 years ago and I was using like a Pentium three I was not even like rendering a field of grass took like hours and it was like not 1080p it was like 600 by like it was just horrible and there was no like particle tools it was all just like Jagged shapes you do what you can with the tools that you have available to you so it does mean that if you're using a crappy computer today you can't expect to be rendering the very best like Tech demo that just came out from someone right you look like a Houdini thing and you're like oh look at the simulation I'll never be able to write that like yeah it's like that's the Cutting Edge but you can render what everybody else was rendering five years ago right and also this doesn't get any like I've got a computer that's worth like 20 grand right and it's a Camino uh what's it called I'm supposed to like shout it out put it in the description I think but it's a it's a 20 grand computer it's very expensive but I still I face the exact same problems when it comes to rendering I have to make compromises I have to know which parts of the scene I can downgrade because I think there's even a word for it but like a law that like it doesn't matter how efficient you make something people will always they'll just find more ways to fill it up so that like basically a render will always take about a few hours per frame right and even if you crushed it down to like a fraction of that right people would then add like more particles and more data and more objects and make it even more realistic and add more Ray trace and Light Pass and and it would just fill up to that hour limit again right so the developers are like constantly crushing it down and developers are like great sorry artists are like great let's fill it up is that it's as he sends sounds similar to like traffic like I learned in La that like they spent years developing um this highway right and it took them like 10 years to build like one extra Lane both ways on this highway and then when they finally launched it the day that the lane opened um like uh I think it was like a week later they they checked like how much better traffic was and for one to particular route that would have taken 45 minutes it was now thanks to the extra Lane 44 minutes one minute saving and the reason for that is that when things take a really long like a slow time to to go somewhere then a lot of people just won't go they won't leave the house they won't start their Journey because they know it's going to take too long I won't bother visiting my friend for drinks it's going to take too long I don't want to sit in the car right but then when the time takes less right more people start traveling and then it eventually like caps out at where people go like this is too far I don't want to drive anymore so everyone kind of like maxes out so it's kind of an interesting thing and I think rendering is um is about the same um and that's about it like I mean there were more questions but I wanted to answer the the top ones um actually I might all right I might do a couple more since I've got time here but I've got them on my computer now I only put a few on the uh the old teleprompter there [Music] um oh a lot of AI questions which I've already answered I think I kind of like beat the drum on that and beat the dead horse I don't know um what will replace polygons and when what oh there's a number of questions there but what will replace polygons it's SDF signed distance fields or sfd Seinfield distance uh but it's voxels basically if you look at um substance modeler actually is like the most Innovative there I think it's getting away from polys and like topology and all that kind of stuff let's just do it all with like blobs right and like you can bully in a blob you can twist it you can make it sharp you can do it basically treat it like actual clay not like this pretend clay that we've got for sculpting right now where it's like it's at it looks like clay but it's actually lots of polygons in the background that are fighting with each other actually make it real clay and then you do the topology after that right so like once I finished modeling my exact thing then I choose how do I want it to actually be re-topologized or exported and I think that's that'll be very exciting um next is a trend among blender users that go on to study CG and animation in educational environment blender is very looked down upon why is there less respect for blender um I don't know uh I don't think it really matters though um I mean because like I I when I used blender 20 years ago like blunder like a lot of people didn't even know what blender was and then when they did they hated it and they said it was a joke and no one would ever take it seriously and now look where it is so it doesn't really matter um it I guess it doesn't matter if you're in a school that's like ah it's not serious software you know um but yeah it is annoying right because um I think it actually comes like the less experienced you are um well like if you think your experience but you're actually not you might think like oh actually like Maya has to be the one because that's the one that the industry uses and like they wouldn't use it if it wasn't great it's like well no they could just be like it's an old industry and they've invested so much into the pipeline and there's a cost of switching and yada yada but blunder is actually the best solution if you were to start again today it could be that um but anyway yeah why is there less respect I mean it'll change when tools improve and like if blender can fix the animation and the get texture painting and uh simulation like all that stuff like slowly just chip away at what it's bad at um it'll be taken more and more seriously uh what file format should I be exporting my models to fbxdae it's all USD dot USD that's what you should be using um but really it depends on what you're going to be using it for but USD is the universal one that is going to be adopted everywhere and it does everything so you should use that definitely the most powerful um oh how did you learn blender when there was no donut tutorial everyone knows you start with the donut I learned by following blog articles back in the day um HTML pages that people wrote there was a gingerbread tutorial Gingerbread Man tutorial back in the day and that was the old Donut the OG donut was the gingerbread man so I followed that I think that was the first thing I ever did and then from there I just tried to make things and I failed at them and then I learned some more by reading more HTML pages on how to do things and forums I followed instructions and it was just trial and error trial and error no schooling involved just trial and error just trying a new project trying to figure out how to do it not doing very well at it learning more tutorials adopting that basically the exact same way that people learn today it's just that there is a lot more to learn from which is great for you uh what minimum PC specs would you recommend for using blender I don't know the minimum specs and I don't really know if they're there actually might be some published on the blender.org website but honestly if you want to know the best specs because that is a common question people have is like what uh like Hardware would you recommend for uh rendering or like using blender like what's the best graphics card just type in blender Benchmark and there is open data.blender.org you'll see the results it's basically like an open test that you can run on your machine and then they like upload it to the site and everyone can see what is the best graphics card and what you can expect from that so the top graphics card is not surprisingly uh GeForce RTX 4090 um the top core CPU is an AMD Epic it's nine six five four Ninety Six core process 96 cores oh and dual two of them fun um but yeah so I would go there if you're looking to buy anything and just see like what can you expect for that thing so yep um who would you say blender's closest competitor would be blender is very versatile but for individual parts for instance I think Moto is the best modeler Houdini is the best for simulations well that's it like I don't think there's a closest competitor because yeah like blender sucks at simulations but then it's very good at modeling it's very good at rendering um look Dev lighting um you know I don't know like it's just compared with all the other all-rounders right like 3ds Max Maya Cinema 4D I think is really the closest competitor but I don't know what it is closest to probably max if I had to guess but then I've heard Cinema 40 is also great but they're not great at other things so it's very very hard to to say if there is to be a metaverse will AI be the doorway into the metaverse for all will one platform platform dominate like Unreal Engine 5 or will it be open source like open SIM what tools will content creators need like blender how will we collect author protect and sell 3D content um yeah I mean I no one knows the future so we don't know if there will be one metaphors some people are like rolling their eyes at the metaverse question I I that's the other thing like it's such a hard extrapolation into the future because it's it's so lofty it's like ah in the future they'll be the internet there'll be this internet informational Super Highway and everyone's like what and they were like the metaverse it'll be in the future way way in the future and everyone will be on it and everyone's like what we don't know what it's going to look like what problems there are or if there'll be one or many um I think it is definitely looking like the biggest players are epic of course with Unreal Engine and the fortnite editor and all that kind of stuff Roblox which is already arguably like a metaverse in and of itself like kids are hanging out there that's kind of the funny like people say like oh the metaverse will never happen it's never real it's like talk to anyone under 18. they're probably already in the metaverse it's Roblox it's like there are 20 million monthly active users in Roblox it is insane how popular that thing is and most people over 30 haven't really heard of it or used it it's insane um so Roblox is like building they're in like epic and that's kind of like fortnite is trying to replicate what Roblox is doing by building this kind of open world where anyone can create their own content inside it um you've got meta right Facebook they've got the hardware component they've definitely got the best you know Oculus Quest or whatever um or meta Quest I think they call it now they're moving getting rid of the Oculus but I don't know what else um Nvidia with their Omniverse I think that is actually a very underrated tool that a lot of people are going to be using more and more in the future it's kind of like just a platform you can plug anything else into like a digital like we're talking about like digital Twins and right moving into the metaverse OR moving into 3D like Omniverse I think will be that platform a lot of people like plug their stuff into it's free works very well and it's being very cleverly built and I think nvidia's done a lot of very smart moves maybe Apple if they can ever release their VR AR headset I mean they just tend to be very good at things so if they can Ace the hardware thing they might be a strong Contender I think that's probably no yeah it's probably why Facebook is so into the hardware because they saw that they were really late to the mobile game and then they tried to release a phone when it was too late and then they failed at it and it was just a big flop now they're like let's own the hardware because if we own the hardware then we can't have Apple or Google blocking our app and our tracking and advertising and all that kind of stuff if we don't own the hardware we don't own anything so they're kind of really leaning into the hardware um but yeah so like Nvidia Apple meta Roblox epic seem to be the five biggest contenders if I had to guess for the metaverse but who knows it's the future of the future future that's gonna do us though guys so thank you for watching listening to this podcast I know it was a bit of a short one but I hope it was um interesting and I'll see in the next episode bye foreign

Channel: The Andrew Price Podcast

Views: 9,353

Keywords: podcast, andrew price, blender guru podcast, andrew price podcast, advice, help, artist, art, career, learning, hacks, technique, habits, art habits

Id: IlxSW1VTz8k

Length: 47min 7sec (2827 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 15 2023