How to Learn 3D Effectively - The Andrew Price Podcast

welcome to the andrew price podcast the podcast for artists wanting to learn techniques and how it's to improve their game that is the tagline i'm going to use for this i figured it needed a tagline um the topic for this podcast is going to be how to learn 3d effectively normally well i've done it for one episode but i want to kind of keep doing it normally i would take your questions that you send in to me and then i would answer them like we did on the last episode there weren't that many good questions that came in the last week um really only a few of them and none of them really that good so um apologies to anyone who did send in and now has realized i'm not a fan of it but um but yeah you can send in your question blendingguru.com forward slash podcast question and you'll get a dropbox folder and you just drop in your video question and then i will answer it um maybe in the next episode or after that um but anyways this episode is about how to learn 3d art effectively because i think um i think it's something that i is isn't discussed well enough right like the 3d field is art in general is expansive right meaning that the more you know about it the more you realize there is to know right like many things it just expands so you think like 3d is a thing with some meshes and some textures and then you get into it and you realize there's topology there's sculpting tools there's texture painting tools there's mountain generation there's rigging there's proceduralism there's it just expands right and i don't think that will slow down i think that i will probably die and you will probably die one day um not learning half the stuff there is to learn out there um i'll be lying in my death bed going i should have learned houdini why did i put it off right it'll be on version 100 and something um but uh that's okay right um because that i think is one of the biggest myths of 3d that you need to learn everything that like oh i'm i'm really good at sculpting and rigging and retopology and things but oh i i guess i should learn procedural i i should pick up substance designer because that's what you know people are using and i should learn how to make my own textures these these skill sets these other little things you can you can learn they will definitely help you and i can vouch for that as sort of being a jack-of-all-trades artist myself and because i have to teach it for blender guru it's like people send in a request why don't you do talk about textures in blender and i'm like damn it um it is helpful to ex you know broaden your horizons and like i'm learning 2d now as well because i want to sort of broaden it further it'll help you however it is not the results are not uniform so what i mean by that is um if you're familiar with the pareto principle which is uh by a guy who discovered that in his garden the peas that were growing the little little piece um 80 of the output of the piece that he got came from 20 of the stalks um which by the way confused me for a long time the 80 20 thing because i thought that the 80 and the 20 were in one graph but that's actually they're separate graphs it's like 80 percent of the results meaning there was another 20 results it didn't uh came from uh 20 percent of the stork so the stalks is a separate pie chart anyways point being is that results are not uniform um uh you could learn gaia which if that's how you even pronounce that why did they spell it g-a-e-a if they wanted people to say it out loud at some point which is mountain generation software you could learn that right if you're getting into 3d because you might need mountains at some point but it would not have the same impact to your artwork as if you use the same time just learning how to do lighting well right lighting is far more useful has a far bigger impact on a render than an obscure piece of software so there are many things that you can learn and they are not at all uniform in any way and i think that unfortunately that is the way that a lot of um a lot of let me check the recordings going a lot of teachers do it right if you go to school or even if you just follow tutors on youtube um they i and i think it's because they think i know a lot because i teach it right that they usually know a lot about the topic of all the the variety of areas and they think therefore my students should know it right um which is a complete it's a mistake there's a great quote by martin h fisher who said um a good teacher needs to know all the rules a good pupil the exceptions so uh in the book by tim ferriss the four-hour work week um he talks largely about i mean that's kind of the whole principle of the four-hour work week that sort of went viral and blew up a decade ago um was that yeah like the work hours that you're putting like most of the stuff you're doing is not generating an output right 80 of it's just kind of wasted output you should be focusing on the 20 it does count i mean he talked about an example where he um he entered a chinese kickboxing tournament and he had four weeks to learn it right and it was like a dare from a friend or something and so he focused on two um two rules in the in like the way that the kickboxing was done and just focused on those two things the first one was that weigh-ins were done the day prior to the the competition meaning that you could uh use methods to like dehydrate yourself to go at a lower weight range and then rehydrate yourself the next day to perform at a higher weight range which i think is pretty common now in mma i believe i don't i know nothing about mma but i'm pretty sure i've heard that but anyway so that was something he used to basically perform at a weight class like three classes above it and then the second one was that there was a rule in chinese kickboxing which was that if somebody falls off the platform three times in a round then they win uh sorry not they win the opponent wins so all he focused on was uh how can i get my my weight up to the like dehydrate and then and then rehydrate and then how can i get my opponent off the platform and that was all that mattered he just had to like stand near the edge i don't know what it was let people run at him and then sort of move out the way i don't know um which didn't make the judges very happy um that they had this foreigner coming in there exploiting things um but he won right he he won the competition which is a crazy story um and that's totally fine to do by the way that's that's kind of like sports is done it's always done that way um it also it gave the example of like the the for the frosby flop which was um if you ever watch high jumping the runner runs along and then they jump and then they loop over with their back and they sort of do this backflip kind of thing over and then they flop onto the map um it didn't used to be that way in high jump it used to be used to run up and then like jump with your leg or something or jump dive over i can't remember how they used to do it but then this guy came in like the 1960s or something and just did this crazy jump leaped off the other foot and did this spin around thing and cleared the bar like like exceeded the the record at the time and a few years later that like yeah it was like 13 of the 16 athletes just copied him and did the frosty flop now i think it's just like standard right so that the ways that we think are the correct way to do things are really just kind of like a mindset like we think that's what you need to do in order to to get the thing anyways point is um the 3d field is expansive there's so much to learn and if you asked a teacher what do i need to learn they'll write out like a 20-page sheet that'll take you 10 plus years to learn and it's not helpful because those results are not uniform the output is not uniform so there uh i think it's better to rephrase it as a question um which was actually um a question that was taught in the four-hour chef another one by tim ferriss i've talked about this many times but um he talked about breaking down a skill into something like learnable units and the way to figure out all these things is to talk to professionals and instructors but ask them just the right questions in order to figure out what is the distilled elements that i need to learn and so there's one question that is sort of the overarching framework that i think is is the best question and that is that if you had to train me for a competition and there was a million dollars on the line and i only had four weeks to train what would the training look like right and if you asked a teacher this like how can i learn 3d in four weeks they'll probably laugh you out of the room like oh it's impossible you can't learn that but if you put a gun to their head and say teach me damn it um they'd come up with a list very quickly a one-page this is what i think you should learn right because you can it it it forces you to think of like get rid of the nice to haves like yeah it would be nice if you learned some rigging it'd be nice if you learned some retopology and baking and blah to just what actually matters and um so i asked myself that question right i've been doing 3d for 15 years how would i train you if you had four weeks to train for a 3d competition you're gonna go against a bunch of artists i don't know you don't know them i don't know what their skill levels are at but you only have four weeks to train and you've never used 3d before as impossible as that sounds gun to my head how would i train you for those those four weeks so this is what it would be um yeah i'm going to outline it i would say first of all you need to focus on like what what is the outcome of the competition what is it based on and let's say it is based on sort of making wide art that is that gets likes on instagram or art station or things which i generally think you know following likes is not a good rule for your life um but i generally think it's not a bad rule for art because it gives you very real feedback that is otherwise subjective right you know you show an art piece to your mom and she's like oh it's amazing and then you show your friend and they're like not good you show it to another friend and they're like it's okay you know this subjective feedback is kind of hard to make a decision on but following likes for something like art stage and instagram match is kind of helpful because you can you know based on the stats that you've received numbers of likes whether a larger amount of people than normal liked it or not so let's say it is like based right you have to make something that the general population is going to be judging and they're going to click likes on the things that they like um so how would you how would you get to the top of the art station board i generally think the stuff that does really well is characters okay that's no surprise it's no secret to anyone if you go to art station you look on instagram you look at the top artists what are they doing characters problem is characters are extremely extremely punishing to do there are a few things as disheartening as trying to learn to sculpt a character for the very first time i as i said been doing 3d with for 15 years i just picked up sculpting six months ago did a character did two characters did three characters and it was so punishing um it's really really hard to do because your eye your your human brain is just biologically wired to detect problems in the face when things don't look right when an eye is a little bit droopier than it should be or the nose is a little bit shorter than it should be or the lip is so and then it's just like not even the position but the fault like how much volume is under the skin that pushes it out or in and out and there's so much and it just takes i think uh a lot longer to learn to do um 3d characters than other things like a heart like if you were to model um a phone or a computer mouse or just a an everyday object you could get things wildly wrong and your brain wouldn't be able to really tell it it's not going to be stand out as wildly wrong so that's why it is good to start with inanimate objects so i think that if you were to enter into a car competition you had four weeks the the topic that you'll be focusing on would be environments with a character with their back turned okay so very simple framework environment an interesting looking environment with a character with their back turned to the camera having a character in it present is just helpful so that i mean it just helps art pieces generally um connect with a viewer because they can sort of imagine themselves looking at the scene inside the scene something like that so that's that's the point of that okay so you want to just look at creating environments that can have a character in it okay now it sounds like a lot but we're going to break it down i'm going to show you how you can get there within four weeks so this is the way you do it you've never used 3d software before uh guess what you're going to be using blinder i'm biased because that is what my channel is based around but also because it is free and it is actually becoming almost an industry standard and in its own right which is amazing which is great anyways you're going to start with blender and what's the best blender beginner tutorial series out there apparently it is my donut tutorial series not to toot my own horn but millions of people have gone through it and they've gotten results from it so the reason i recommend starting with that is you have to start somewhere and i actually designed that course to be based around the pareto's principle of 80 20. the the areas of blender that you're like the 20 of blender that you're actually going to be using the most amount of time on um is modeling it's lighting it's texturing et cetera and it's based around that so it walks you through what the interface is and how to use this and that and it's all in one sort of tight little package and then by the end of it you should have a donut so you start with that obviously um now by the way for this four weeks this is a full-time job for you okay you can be working six days a week maybe eight to 12 hours a day just doing 3d for this challenge okay that should go without saying but let's just get that out there so this donut tutorial you're spending every day on it let's say you get it done in two or three days fantastic next when you finish that you need to create something similar to a donut by yourself now this is crucial for a few reasons um one it's to solidify what you've just learned and put it into practice and realize what you got wrong and make a mental note of what you need to learn in the future but it also is helpful for your brain to understand that you're not just watching something and doing the thing but you also need to be processing that information because you're going to need to apply it practically which i think is important because a lot of people fall into this trap of only being able to follow tutorials and that's a problem when they go to do their own thing eventually down the road and they fail because their brain hasn't gotten to a point of like truly understanding what's going on so they can do it later on so forcing yourself to do a practical test at the end of a tutorial um will will help solidify that okay so you've now made a donut the coffee cup whatever the sprinkle's on at the plate and you have also created something similar a cookie a cupcake doesn't have to be food but something small-ish that is based off those principles well done good job now the next thing i recommend starting with lighting so learning the theory of lighting um because lighting is one of those things that if you learn it and you know how to do it well and what goes into making it uh work and why it works you can vastly improve your render most renders that fail in my opinion like the ones that beginners create i think if you just gave me that file i could improve it immediately just touching lights only make it dark start with a dark scene and then add in lights to highlight the areas that look good and hide the areas that don't so knowing how to uh emphasize certain areas as well to alter the composition and uh and also hide the parts that don't look good right like that's just sort of like an easy hack that you can do if you know how to use lighting well and it's not just like uh what color is the light or how strong is it it's like how close is the light so all this stuff um i put together of course it's called the beginner's guide to lighting beginners how to light i'll put it by the way all the stuff i'm going to be talking for this little one-month curriculum i'll put a link to that in the description um it'll be like a one-page thing with links that'll walk you through all that i'm sorry that'll take you to the tutorial as well so anyways um you follow this course it's free it's on youtube it's five episodes and it's all theory based with examples that show um how and when to use light and what light does to the scene etc with examples so i would highly recommend that course then you need to put it into practice so go back to your donut or your cookie or your cupcake or whatever it is that you made and improve the lighting but don't just improve it once come up with one variation of it and then create variation two scrap the lighting put new lighting in and do something different variation three then variation four and do five i want you to do five variations of the lights for that scene now this is important for many reasons one just good for idea generation and just kind of discover and play with lights and and and ideas but it's also a very good creative habit to learn which is that your first idea ideas generally suck the first way that you lit the cookie the cupcake whatever it is it's probably not the best way it's just the idea that seemed easier to you at the time it's only through churning through and trying many many ideas usually by your fourth fifth or if you really want to take it to the extreme 10 10th 11th 12th example that you end up finding things that really work it's after exhausting all the ideas that you thought would be good and then start daring into these weird obscure stuff that you start to go like oh actually i mean it's not great but i like this part about it changing that light to be pink created this interesting look right so it's it's that is a is a habit that you can kind of learn adjacent to that whilst you're learning about lighting so well done you've now learned uh donut a cupcake lighting next materials so the next important thing is uh yeah the next theory component of making good looking images is how do materials actually work because you've got so many sliders to play with you've got color and that's all you know but then you've also got you've got spec you've got roughness you've got anisotropic you've got a mission you've got transmission you've got all the values in the world and if you don't know what you're doing you're just going to be pulling and pulling things and you're going to be breaking materials that are impossible it's impossible to have a material that has zero reflection but a lot of artists will do that if they don't understand the principles of materials so i have a video called the principled bsdf how to make photorealistic materials in blender again click the link in the description you'll see the full curriculum there it'll take you to that tutorial but that will explain yeah like how roughness works right and what roughness does to a reflection how it changes the fresnel um energy conservation you can't have more energy exuded from it than what it received um a bunch of little things it's basically it's all put into it it's one video it's it's framed around the new shader that came out at the time the principal bsdf because that's all you need to learn uh for materials basically is using that one shader so learning that will give you the fundamentals of how material good materials actually work and it is important to the next step which is the next tutorial you're going to be following which is my anvil tutorial so really the point of this tutorial i mean i'm recommending all my videos because i happen to know what's in them and i know which parts they teach and which parts they don't um but you could substitute with anything which is uh creating a game ready asset so when i say game ready it just has to be like textured something small that you've got a finished asset then you could bring into somewhere else because that's going to be important to your your environment that you create so the anvil it teaches you how to model something it's more complex than the donut by a long ways you've got like subtracting elements you've got curved shapes you've got things and it was deliberately designed to be an interesting shape that gives you some modeling challenges and then importantly it covers texturing so how do you actually texture paint in blender how do you also sculpt so there's a little bit of sculpting in there and then there's baking it into a texture if you wanted to go down that route as well but really the whole point of it is to just give you more modeling challenge introduce you to textures and yeah because you've learned the principal bstf stuff you'll know you won't just be farting around pulling and pulling sliders around etc now when you finish that one guess what just like what you did with the donut you're going to be making your own thing that is similar to that so you learned an anvil so now maybe making axe or a hammer just trying to think it doesn't have to be related to an anvil but something small that is textured and you could achieve within two to three days and that's kind of important because a big problem i see a lot of people have is they they go they watch the anvil tutorial and they go great i'm gonna make a spaceship uh you're not you are going to blunder around in the dark for a few days get frustrated and then end up on reddit like you do all the time so you have to pick something that is achievable that you've just learned that is something new related to that so really think about it don't just go like ah and like go to google images and click the first thing that you found like really think about it because if it's too hard you could fail and not only does that waste time but it also kind of screws up your motivation to continue because you have to keep coming back right so yeah that's the uh that's the okay so you've done the hammer next up after that is oh what is it okay i was trying to memorize everything and i i've exhausted the limits of my okay so it is composition all right next up aesthetics composition um composition is another area just like lighting just like materials that is going to have a large impact on your final render and um a lot of people do it very poorly i mean most beginner images just have a lot of empty space they have conflicting elements they have like like a bright window and a bright other thing and everything's bright and your eyes don't know what to look at because it's sort of fighting composition my video on understanding composition again links to all this in the description in one page um it's yeah it explains how to make a pleasing looking image that is readable so guiding lines um sort of design principles using shapes um it's it's some short things that you can do and just even if you don't understand everything at the stage because of course you won't it'll help you understand sort of how to yeah how to make why certain images are more pleasing to the eye than you might not have other underst otherwise understood and then guess what practical of course you're going to be using what you've just learned to improve either your donut your anvil your hammer or your axe or whatever it is that you modeled to try and improve it using composition and lighting and again come up with five variations for it so change the camera angle change the position change the aspect ratio of the image so it doesn't have to be just widescreen a lot of beginners just stick to the wide screen it can be tall it can be whatever aspect ratio you want so um yeah play around with it create five variations bam well done um next is a solo project so you've learned really sort of the basics of making any asset um yeah pretty much yeah like any sort of small-ish asset it's modeled it's textured et cetera solar project so um pick something that you think is achievable based on what you know and at this point you should know that there are things that are hard to do and there are things that you could possibly achieve so pick something small to do that that you could achieve and i want you to replicate a photo one to one so this i've talked about in previous episodes is uh it's an important skill to learn uh replicating a photo one-to-one will not only help you in like what you need to do next and what needs to be improved um but it develops the it develops uh attention to detail which has to be developed um it's not most beginners um beginning artists do not have that off the bat um you develop it over time and it's this exercise of taking a photo of something replicating it and then putting it directly over the top of the other one literally in photoshop or wherever and just turning the layer on and off flicking between them it reveals so much because you're so wildly off and you had no idea that that was happening it's almost embarrassing when you see it but it is important because it'll help your mind go from seeing things as just kind of big shapes to things that there's actually detail and there's reasons why it doesn't work so you go from thinking like all the axe like it's a rust there's some rust and there's wood on the the handle of the axe you go to thinking like oh no like like it's not just rust but there's a little bit of metal in there and the scale that i chose for my rust texture is totally wrong it's way too big um same with the wood and when you go back and forth you have to uh reconcile right internally why does that not look as good as the photo and so it's very very revealing so um i've talked about why i think like most artists should just focus on one-to-one replication that's what you're going to be doing in this solid project okay so um why is that keyboard popped up oh there we go okay um okay the next one this is sort of just like a side theory thing to learn optimizing renders so this is a necessary thing of 3d unlike 2d when you paint you're finished ta-da it's done 3d you have to render and depending on your machine depending what pretty much any machine there's time involved in rendering and if you don't know what is making your render take 20 30 minutes to render you're going to be eating up valuable time and motivation because what can you do while you're sitting there you can't use blender you can't really even use your computer it's wasted time and there are things that you can do to have just as good a result that takes a fraction of the time so um i have a video on 18 ways to improve your render render speeds um i'd probably revisit it and change things today there's a few other things de-noising and other areas that i'd sort of get into but as an overarching idea that's a great one to yeah just learn some ways to improve it because [Music] yeah otherwise you're just going to be wasting time while you're learning and that is going to be important for the next part so i'm i'm assuming you've probably spent about two weeks so far or a week week and a half two weeks if you were full time just learning all this um but the next part is going to be the environment so you've now learned small assets let's get larger so um the most challenging part of an environment and outdoor environment is the ground itself there's a lot going on on the ground uh the assets that make up the uh the surface the ground that stuff that you can download now this might sound like cheating like oh you wouldn't recommend really you're just gonna recommend like downloading some photo scanned assets yes um now and then this is the thing photo scanning as a workflow unless you want to do that as a skill if you want to get a job as a photo scanning artist and work for a company and go out and scan shoes or whatever it needs for for a game or something be my guest um but it is separate to art it is so dry and technical really that it is separate to art um and you don't need to learn it you really don't um most studios are going to be using an asset library like mega scans um they're just pulling from stuff that is out there so there's really i mean it's like text like would you go out and photograph your own textures no so use use photo scan assets when you can so anyways the most challenging part is the ground itself and there's really two components that make up the like make a ground challenging one is the displacement so learning how to displace a ground so that you don't destroy your renders so you need to learn about adaptive displacement so i've got a video on that called micro displacements again links to all this in the description and then the second component of that is tiling which is an underrated under talked about really area of making a realistic image because yeah if you have an environment you have to have a material which is going to be tiling at least 100 meters which a one by one meter texture is going to be 100 meter 100 times tiled in just one direction on the other so you're going to be noticing a tiled pattern so that's going to be conflicting to an end result um a pleasing end result so i talk about that in my video um how to make tiling work so um yeah so those two things learning about micro displacement and then tiling and then the second thing to that is learning how to use photo scanned assets so we actually have some amazing assets at photo at polygon.com a bunch of rocks of like the highest resolution really sharp d-lit ready to use so you can bring them in we've also got some plants and of course there's also mega scans as well which has an even larger selection slightly less quality if i'm being a little honest but um good enough great so just learning how to bring those in and just sort of drop them on the ground there the point of this i mean really is to just make something right um i'd actually recommend starting with a desert environment because deserts don't have grass and they tend to not really have trees which is handy so sticking to deserts will also limit you put some blinders on on things that are too challenging for this for four week progress process so um yeah focus on that next research so now that you've got an environment done i want you to sort of understand what it is that is actually going to be making a pleasing image because the next part we're going to be adding characters and making kind of a nice looking image so just spending a few hours on art station or instagram and just sort of looking at what concept artists are doing in their environments that make them look good and just writing notes like it can't hurt to just go there and go like okay interesting shapes um backlit lighting um reflections or puddles i don't know just writing that kind of thing even if you don't understand why it'll help you sort of maybe you can incorporate it into an image and then discover why but yeah generally as i've said it is something with a character in it which is helps the viewer put themselves in that place exploring an interesting environment usually alien not necessarily sci-fi alien that's really complex but just kind of an interesting environment with really interesting lighting and composition because this is uh that's kind of the aim of 3d like if you ever like you know you've been walking along the beach or the street or something like that and the light will just you know it'll go down the horizon and you'll get this golden light and like half of it is in shadow because it's just below the horizon it's got this interesting look and then you'll see like a girl like standing on the intersection and the light is hitting the back and it's like lighting up because it's got this awesome rim lighting around the hair and you think like oh man if i got a photo of that that would make an awesome photo and if you're real creepy you just run up and photograph it but you know photographers work around those constraints they have to time things just right they have to get all that equipment ready hike to a place get everything right get the framing right and then wait for just the right lighting because they know when it's going to look interesting um in 3d you want to really be manufacturing that you want to know what's going to make that interesting light and you're going to want to try to add it in there so like i mean i saw one the other day it was like this interesting house with this really unique like uh it was like at night time with this bright light that was sort of hitting the side of the house it's kind of like moonlight but kind of like a street light as well it looked kind of otherworldly it was sort of unusual and it created something that you don't usually see in a photograph and therefore it has interest so that's generally what you probably discover if you went on our station you see these sort of manufactured moments of like incredible lighting or an incredible moment in time at just the right time that got it but of course in 3d you can do it whenever so um yeah just exploring that um and just spending a few hours writing notes and things but i think that's that will help you for the next part so the next part is characters so we're not going to be making a character just like a lot of movies vfx um even games they buy character models there's a bunch of websites render people all those sites that offer photo scanned people you could use those however i actually think miximo might be better for you so miximo is adobe's product of um they give you i think like 60 different characters that you can choose from but then a whole bunch of poses and actually full animations that is then applied to the character so you go like pick a guy in a t-shirt and shorts and do the rolling one or the i don't know some stupid tick-tock dance or whatever you can pick all this and then it will um then yeah you just then hit export as an fbx you download the fbx and then you import that into blender and you have a finished character with amazing poses because it was based off of i think motion captured data so it's actually pretty accurate and yeah i mean the hands can be a little janky it doesn't really get the finger movements or anything like that doesn't need to be perfect again going back to the 80 20 rule you're going to be hiding things in a way you're going to be positioning the camera with just the back to the camera until it works the most important thing of this step is just figuring out what miximo is taking a character picking a pose hitting export bring it into blender and then changing the materials because fbx for whatever reason when you import them into blender they always come in a little bit wrong the normals are flipped or the specularity is turned off for some reason or things are just in the wrong channel so just learning how to do that i mean you could just google like look on youtube mixamo blender and you'll see like a bunch of tutorials i'm sure so just learning how to correct it and get the material looking right and then you've got to make you've got a character then guess what you can add that character to your desert environment and um use some composition and uh what you've learned from lighting to make an interesting environment um then we're sort of getting to the end here was sort of leading up to the point of like making the final image but there's two more things that i would uh recommend learning uh the first is color so color is it's overrated and underrated a lot of people think that's all you need to know with art like if you just learn how to make colors pop it's like what does that even mean but a lot of renders fail because the colors are too noisy they're too intense they're too saturated the values are wrong um or there's just too many colors so i have a video talking about understanding color i should really revisit some of these old theory videos um some of them are like yeah i think this one's six years old this color one it's still one of my most popular videos believe it or not i think the donut tutorial just dwarfed it now finally for the first time ever but anyways so i would watch that which just talks about yeah color theory it talks about color schemes why they work uh split complementary color schemes etc and that'll just help you it's not gonna be this wonderful magical thing but it'll help you stop making huge errors that could otherwise ruin a scene so um so watch that and then apply it to your desert environment basically remove colors that are too oversaturated under saturated and um any yeah if you've got more than three hues in there just just try and keep it to under three and um and you should be okay um next uh post-processing so this is sort of the final thing that can sort of help an image go from looking like a render to looking like a photo and that is replicating imperfections and things that happen in camera so for example glare glow when uh if you're watching the video when the light hits this microphone stand thing and the highlight peaks and makes this highlight for the camera the light is creating a slight bloom around it because of what is it your eyes also do it but only because of like eyelashes but it's like it's not bouncing around the lens is it i mean you don't really even need to understand it to be honest it's just the understanding of how to replicate that in blender and when it happens it happens to areas of high contrast in otherwise low contrast areas other things to emulate barrel distortion cameras always have barrel distortion that just adds a tiny little thing that can help it noise every shot will have noise so you want to learn how to de-noise a shot and then add in fake noise on top of it which sounds crazy i know but cameras have noise and it's important to have it and then sharpening so um you probably want to do it in photoshop but yeah the unsharpened filter i have no idea why they called it unsharpened when it is technically sharpening of course um but it is and so you want to learn how to do that because it just makes it's a really cheap and easy thing you can do that'll just it makes renders pop really it adds detail and you'll be amazed with the result so learning that and then color grading so i mean a really simple one in blender is make sure that you're not using the default no look just change it to either high contrast or medium high contrast something like that it's just going to add a sort of simple s curve across it it's just going to like crush the shadows a little bit and raise the highlights and let's kind of improve it and then if you want to get into you know changing the r g and b and making the shadows do things that could be a separate thing as well which might improve it but most people sort of overdo it so take it easy but those things to do with post-processing i don't have a video that talks about each one but i'll put the links to some that i found that could be interesting in the description for that but again specular highlights barrel distortion noise sharpening and color grading then apply that to your desert shot okay and now at this point it is time to put it all together in a new scene i don't know how many you'll get done assuming you're working full-time maybe you plowed through this and you really stayed dedicated maybe you've got time to do two or three full scenes i have no idea but um with everything in there you should be able to create an environment that has realistic nice looking ground that renders well that has a character looking at something and then photo scanned assets which is what the industry uses nothing wrong with that to create an interesting environment and then with your lighting you should be able to make an interesting um an interesting environment so will you win the competition with four weeks experience having never used 3d before i highly doubt it but that's not the point of this right um the point of this is is to get results fast and then expand from there okay um people will critique this of course and go oh you've left out this uh you can't rush through this you've only taught people how to follow this narrow pathway uh to do this one thing yes that's the point um if you wanted to do a expand and learn how to sculpt characters down the road well that's an entirely different workflow and and skill set but that's important to know about 3d is like a lot of schools that are sort of advertising you know 3d design or whatever they call it um what 3d what there is so much 3d is used for today it is crazy you should i mean 3d is reaching a point where it's almost breaking off into its own industry with sub industries within it i mean it kind of already is right there's archevis there's there's gaming there's vfx those are the big ones there's uh scientific visualization there's ar vr there's uh there's this whole subset of of like uh what was it i was talking about it the other day on the newsletter but people talked about non-fungible tokens making high-priced art that is digital um that people are now trading um he sold one for 66 thousand 000 um two of them apparently for that price for something that doesn't exist it's a token it's a digital token anyways the 3d art field is blowing up it's exploding and there's so many industries and then within each of those industries subject specific things it's not just gaming but it's there's characters there's vehicles there's props there's uh design there is layout there is landscapes there's environments there's procedural there's so much going on there that of course any field like any course that you followed at a school or anything like that is only going to teach you one narrow thing and any course that attempts to try to teach everything is probably going to be wasting your time because there's no way you can teach everything in a four-year course um to any good extent and if you look at the results of students that come out of these places results speak for themselves you can't right you can't do everything you have to pick something so that's my advice just for purely focusing on something that's going to get results and keep you interested i think that's important as well episode 2 of this podcast was just talking about how to stay motivated while you fail and just like if you picked up a game and you hit the go button and you failed and you failed and you failed and you failed and it gave you nothing in return you quit and that i wanna i wanna i'd love to change the art industry in some way um to be more rewarding like a game i think there's an opportunity there to make like a gamification of 3d or 2d um to sort of reward people in the same way that games do when you do the right thing and you know the the sound effects and the light and the colors and the random uh reward systems and like all that kind of thing it could be gamified to make it interesting but it's not there yet not even on the pathway to get there but you can do it yourself by building um building a system that will give you some sort of result in some sort of time frame so that is my advice now there's a few other questions that um in the four-hour chef that tim ferriss recommended you ask instructors if you wanted to to drill deeper i only covered one of them then which is what is the four-week curriculum to to train and get good at something but there's a bunch of other questions so we're gonna um we're gonna get to them but first there was one question which i want to answer and that is this question by abdul rahm i shouldn't have tried to pronounce your name i'm sorry i'll just call you abdul hey andrew we were just thinking about this now do you know of any website that would allow me to make better renders faster oh you sly dog thank you for leading me perfectly into this advert polygon make better renders faster um that is the mission that is the statement of my company polygon it is uh it is a site which offers you textures and models that you can easily and quickly download and import into blender or whatever 3d software they're compatible with 3ds max maya zbrush to make better renders faster because i know as an artist myself that a lot of time is spent correcting the assets that you download you download a rock wow that's my baby screaming you download a rock and it's the texture's blurry things are stretched and you then have to fix it right or you end up don't fixing it and you just have a blurry texture across your ground plane right and the render suffers because of that and when you find an asset that just works out of the box it's immediate it's noticeable how much better your image becomes because of it because you can focus on the things that actually matter so that's the idea of polygon um we have a team of you know 14 ish people that are highly trained we have an art director we have high quality standards and we go out and we do this stuff that you don't have to do like photo scanning so we recently released a whole bunch of rocks which were um actually there's another one coming out the end of this month couple of weeks i guess um of like a bunch of beach rocks um that are like the highest res uh really really sharp detail perfectly de-lit and they are awesome and we've got a tool that can bring them into blender really quick as well oh wait no that toolbox is not out yet but soon anyways um so there's that and then we've also got a whole bunch of photoscan grounds that we recently released as well which are three by three meter texas which means you don't have to tile them as much as uh as i mentioned before tiling is a big problem you don't have to tell them very much um and they're super super sharp and again apologies for the baby i'll have to uh go and correct that um but anyways so to subscribe go to polygon p o l i i g o n dot com so that you can start making better renders faster and yeah that's it um that's that's the only ad as always really maybe i'll get squarespace involved um because they'll sponsor anything right if i find like one of those tiny little channels and it's just like a guy talking into his webcam and he's like but first this video is sponsored by squarespace and i always think why though does that not damage their brand do they not care maybe it's just literally just if you hear it enough that you just i don't know it's just like a word thing you just get into everyone's subconscious brain you know coke coke coke cook what are you thirsty for hmm i don't know anyways bit of a tangent there now i will pause this recording for a brief second because i gotta fix the baby noise the joys of working from home huh it's uh it was funny at first right you know when like covert 19 happened and there was like all those videos of you know kids running in the background and doing things and and then it was almost manufactured you know like news stations seem to be planning it like oh look at this cute moment when the kid ran into the background isn't that totally random and natural and look we're just playing along with it isn't that fun and now it's just annoying now it's just like yeah i i just want to see uh um do i do i care i don't know just just i i it feels like this this year is just a dream you know of just weirdness it just keeps getting weirder and at some point i'll wake up we all will i don't know i'm rambling let's get on to the remainder of this podcast just talking about those remaining questions to ask uh the experts so um yeah i mean again context this is recommended questions to ask uh any sort of like if you look like wanting to get into basketball these are what tim ferriss recommended in the four-hour chef um about how to break down that skill and understand what gets to its core essence we covered the first question what's the four-week curriculum then these are some follow-up interesting questions so i will answer them what are the biggest mistakes and myths in 3d what are the biggest wastes of time so i covered this at the start but essentially the myth that you need to learn everything um you don't um you're just never going to cover everything in your lifetime and every area of the 3d software you're also not going to touch um that's why i think it's a mistake that a lot of tutors a lot of youtube videos sometimes sort of almost go in chronological order like let's go through every feature of blender one by one as if there was like an order like an actual uh reason for them being in that order other than just a developer put it there or something like it has to yeah anyway you have to sort of curate your approach to what it is you are pursuing and be okay with accepting that other parts of it you're never going to touch like there's there's parts of blender that i have never ever used before um i mean i've never really touched the python console i don't think i've ever touched the logic thing although that's gone i think that was the old game engine um oh what i mean video sequence editor i've really only used it to just drop in a set of frames and then make that a movie file never done editing and that's okay right so don't um don't ever get like people like i read comments and people like they see something on reddit and they're like oh my god that thing is so cool what did you make that with and like oh i used this thing of blender and they're like oh i didn't even know that existed i've got so much to learn i'll never learn it all and it's like that's all right that's that's kind of life um just be okay with that so i'd say that's um oh what are the biggest wastes of time um yeah what are the biggest waste of time yeah i mean i guess that could cover it that could kind of be included in that question that's kind of two questions in one but anyways all right next question what are your favorite instructional books or resources on the subject if people had to teach themselves what would you suggest they use um i would forget books in regards to 3d um 3d just moves way too fast um even for for videos right like i would like the fast like i've uploaded videos tutorials and then the next release of blender they've moved a button they've renamed it all the hotkeys changed and now the tutorial is outdated well imagine if you had a book right and you got a book that was written even a year ago half of the stuff in it might be changed in the newest version um actually the fastest that i had a tutorial become outdated was two hours after i released a video i saw in the uh the latest version the builder whatever it was um they changed it and so that tutorial uh that tutorial was already outdated so that's how fast things move in 3d that said there are theory books that uh anything related to design and sort of art theory composition framing um uh storytelling narrative driven art uh i mean i don't know i was the reason i'm looking around my room right now is there is a book that i own which is an example of that oh there it is okay framed inc this is one of those cases marcos metoo no idea how to say that but anyways uh this one that's pretty good that's a good example um i've got a bunch of little books like this universal principles of design it's not that relevant to 3d um anything related to i mean really anything related to drawing um the 2d form because i find that 2d um 2d artists have less technical skills to fall on they don't have you know uh different light lamp examples or or they don't know what global illumination is all that stuff re topology all that kind of high frequency acidic stuff that is like this barrier that stops you from getting to the art stuff 3d artists have to deal with that so we have to deal with this immense uh technological challenge 2d artists don't and it's very honest when they make a mistake which is why i kind of like 2d because it's very revealing when you get something right when you get something wrong because it's just kind of the essence of what it is um but anyways because of that they they make some um some pretty timeless books that um that still work so i'm just looking on my library here expressive anatomy for comics and narrative uh there's something there uh drawn to life volume one and two disney books figure drawing design and invention that's actually a really good one this one i'm holding it up to the camera by michael hampton that's good if you wanted to learn about anatomy and how the form is um i mean it's mostly about how to draw it but that's that's pretty good but generally 3d i would um instead of books going back to the question what would i recommend forget the books but just stick to youtube um you know people often ask like what is what are you what are the resources that you would recommend to to learn blender and i'm like i just go to youtube if i have a question if i have something i don't know um like i don't know i'm working on a task like i was looking at like retopology i'm like how do i read to apologize and blend i just go into youtube and i type in retopology blender and then i learn and then i'm like how do i bake something bake blender and it's like it doesn't even need to be from a specific channel if it's a technical thing you're learning provided it gets the desired result i mean pretty much anyone can teach it so i mean just use the tools that the great gods of google have given us and take advantage of the world of knowledge at your fingertips for free um and just and just switch it up just switch to switch to anything that uh any other tutorial that you need at that present time um yeah that's my recommendation there so okay uh what makes you different who trained or influenced you okay so this was questions to give to like an expert like a athlete or something and you want to find out what what made you different um i guess answering for that myself i mean what made me different i mean to i'm self-taught that's kind of different to some people although less so nowadays i think a lot of people are being self-taught more um something that has helped me immensely that i don't really talk about but running my youtube channel running creating tutorials for a living has forced me to understand things to a level that i wouldn't previously like say for example right you uh i said can you can you fix the sink right can you fix the the washer tap on the on the the kitchen sink tap or whatever right you might go like um okay and you'll look up how to do it and you'll figure out how to how to do the sync thing or whatever um and and how to you know move the ratchet or whatever to i don't know what i'm talking about but you know get the thing off get a plunger out jiggy with it i don't know what you do but anyways if then i said uh can you teach me how to do that if even if you had just done it you might have to think back in your head and go um what was the first steps what was step number two there was something with the washer you know you wouldn't know right you it wouldn't be crystal clear in your head and the problem with that is that you feel like you've learned it but then the next time you need to recall that information on another project you haven't actually put it into the storage part of your brain if we call it that to be recalled later on so you haven't learned it and i i realized this actually when i was doing that color space video the secrets the secret to photo realistic rendering i think it was called the one about the filmic look up table new color space for blender um i was asking questions on twitter and people uh people helped out they came in like oh it's this and when i asked a follow-up question when something wasn't clear uh i was surprised to learn that a lot of people couldn't really explain why something was the way it was or or delve deeper into an area which kind of said to me that yeah it might be wrong their understanding of it could be totally wrong because they are record basically just regurgitating some information that somebody else had told them like what does what is gamma right i think i've said this before what's gamma does anyone really know turns out that's actually a really complicated term that is overly confused shouldn't really be used for almost anything nowadays but if you ask someone what is gamma most people would regurgitate like oh it's like the to put the thing on the the screen the s curve or the 2.2 log thing whatever they might kind of regurgitate what they've learned but what is it how would you define it a lot of people don't have a true understanding of what it is in order to get there and and so when you're making a tutorial whenever i'm approaching a new topic for a video i have to really go deep on it um we're making a video at the moment bill barber and i bill works for me um and he's my sort of guinea pig who's going out there and doing all these tests for me but we've been making for over a year now a video on render engine comparisons in a speed comparison for render engines so putting cycles against redshift octane arnold uh corona v-ray i think those are the six so putting them against all of those and we're seeing which one is the fastest and the deeper you go the deeper the rabbit hole expands and it just keeps getting deeper and deeper and we feel like we've got it and then we do all the tests and then we go hmm we've this isn't working something's not right i don't know if this result matches this thing and then we go back and we realize gosh damn it it's all wrong do it all over again and there's so many ideas we had about what why you could fairly test render engines and anyone who said you couldn't was just wrong to now realizing that every engine handles things so differently they all have different terms whatever's under the hood is buried and it's all mishmash of wise you're not supposed to know how it's working but that could be hacking it to be slightly less realistic but have a speed increase so do you get points for realism less points for realism but points for for speed but then it's it's subjective you know it gets so deep but anyways it before that if you'd asked me like oh um which which render engine is the fastest i might just rattle off a response right but it's only through having to teach it that has um helped me understand it anyways my point is if you were interested at all in starting a youtube channel to make tutorials it will be helpful not only for your career because people will watch those videos and they want to hire you but also it'll help you to really understand things in fact i'm actually at the moment considering making some not videos but even just like articles um put them up on medium or art station even if no one reads them but about 2d like how to shade in 2d because i know from from doing my youtube stuff that it will help me understand it in a way that mindlessly drawing drawing after drawing after drawing will not so that's my advice i mean if you really want to take your learning and start to crystallize some of this knowledge just try to explain it to someone else if you think you know something and you've just learned something put it down on paper in a like an easy explanation that you could tell someone else and they could understand it and that exercise alone will really um it'll it'll lift your uh your education trust me okay so that was a question that i rattled on for a long time have you trained others to do what you do have they replicated your results that's an odd question for me obviously trained a few people to do what i do um donut tutorial series just became my number one video on the channel just surpassed the color video finally um the best the best people that follow the follow my tutorials and get a lot of results from it um i mean the easy answer is to say that they're driven right um and the the reason i know that is because they're always uploading work there's there's a just like a plethora like a catalog of things that they have done and and post and it is very clear that they have resumed work daily and gotten back into it or if it's not daily which it definitely best case should be watch episode one of this podcast to talk about that um even if it's not that it is it is a regular cadence and they are hungry and they are coming back and they are doing it again and again and again and here's the thing they probably failed a lot and it was probably painful for them in certain areas but their desire their their um craving to reach a point of uh sufficiency in this skill was i i think a lot higher than a lot of people's so those are the people that i think i i think excel it's the ones that um that just they get a momentum going and it just kind of snowballs and it rolls and it's it's it's really it's really good to see like i saw one gosh it was on that uh blended donut subreddit um i think i posted it on um twitter but it was like some crazy thing like a donut with arms and it was like a bunch of them and there was a grass scene and trees and a bunch of donuts behind it was a lot going on and he said he just started using blender three months ago or something and i was like oh my goodness i don't know how you got there man that's really impressive so but uh i don't know that was yeah have i trained others to achieve success yeah i have um that was a short answer to that question but i decided to riffle it who are the most impressive lesser known teachers now this is an interesting question because um i mean if you were to the point of this you know approaching athletes or chefs or top professionals in their field um is that uh everyone can sort of rattle off you know the top you know if if it's cooking it would be you know gordon ramsay or that other guy the naked chef something oliver jamie oliver that guy you know but if it's a lesser known teacher it can kind of highlight some people who are teaching things in an interesting way that are getting different results from students and therefore it can reveal yeah can sort of highlight somebody you might want to pursue in order to to learn different workflows so for me i mean most these people aren't that unknown but i'll still mention them um jama jurabayev he was at uh he did a presentation at the blender conference 2018 i believe it was which is great he talks about his work in the industry so he's been working at ilm for many years he's a concept artist by trade and um yeah he's got a whole grease pencil workflow and a bunch of tutorials that teach people his workflow and creating concept art using 3d software and uh yeah i mean i think a great test of a teacher is when they have students who have achieved their results and there's been a bunch of artists i've seen on artstation that reference his course i think it's on loan squared or he's got someone gumroad but i would definitely check his stuff out if you're into environments you want to create awesome looking environments i mean just just follow concept artists that would be someone to follow another one very similar to him is jan juresh jurashel i should have learned to say it john ursul john urschel i think it's europe he's european so i don't know how to say it but he is very similar to drama he's a concept artist who has moved to blender like a lot of concept artists have because they realize like hey you can do a lot with 3d you don't have to be locked into a 2d canvas when you finish something you can move their camera around and change the lighting and isn't that great so and it's actually really interesting watching a concept artist pick up a tool um after they've mastered another skill they just excel at it straight away like their work is immediately better like because they've already they know the lighting they know the color they know design uh they know like shape language and how to make interesting like an interesting layout and so they don't have to go through the pains that a lot of 3d artists do so their technical skills might be a little rough around the edges like i don't know the bump mappings or inverted or or i don't know there's not enough detail on this texture or something like that but design wise it's it's amazing anyways um another one you probably already know not really that lesser known but ian hubert um his vfx tutorials on his channel they're very fast paced but they they show i think that you don't need to do a bunch of stuff to get um you don't have to be perfect often to get a uh possible result right so he actually i mean he doesn't really talk about it but i mean he worked he was the director of tears of steel the blender movie and he was also um oh what's that movie prospect i think it is prospect i'm gonna make sure i get this right but it's like an indie sci-fi movie prospect sci-fi yeah it's called prospect so it came out in 2018 88 on rod tomatoes um and it's set on a planet whatever um it's fairly low budget he was the pretty much the only vfx artist on that entire movie and he he did the entire the all the vfx for it the spaceships the everything that was on the planet the little uh aura things the everything he did the entire vfx himself as a single like one man band which is insane and he should definitely talk about more in his videos um i only learned it because i messaged him on twitter and we were talking um but here's to do that you can't be a perfectionist you can't like all right i gotta spend like four months rigging and making sure that this spaceship looks good from every angle it's like bam i've got like two days to do this how could i pull this off in two days well i gotta like make a bunch of big shapes big design decisions i gotta add what looks like detail but it's a bunch of grieble but it's hidden because it's in the background so it kind of works so his approach in his tutorials i think is kind of interesting because it's a it's a good reminder that sometimes 3d artists over analyze what they're trying to do and and over overthink things so and then sculpting flip normals um you probably already know about them already they're sort of i guess the top zbrush channel um two guys met them uh henning henning and morton uh scandinavian fellas denmark and sweden i think they're from but living in japan although i think they move forward anyways point is is they're um they're from the industry so they they worked at npc in london as creature artists um actually visited them um in london uh yeah the the their approach you know that they are teaching the right thing right because they're professionals so um yeah i i would check that out and then as for other lesser known teachers i mean anyone if you look at a lot of pro artists on art station you often find they have a gum road where they are teaching tutorials and they're selling things for like an abysmally small price i mean guys you can raise the prices now you don't have to keep selling things for two dollars um i know people will be mad at me for saying that but like it cheapens it it's like i look at it and i'm like you're gonna teach the entire zbrush workflow for two dollars is it worth it yeah um and then you watch it and it's amazing um but like guys can we you don't artists are so afraid of like putting a price on something that's it's actually worth like it's not worth two dollars it's worth like at least 50 come on um but anyways uh so like i found one raf grazetti he's like one of the top character artists in the world he's got like an entire gumroad course on sculpting a character that i've been following it's really good 20 bucks um i think it includes the entire body as well it's like the whole the whole character from the face the nose the lips everything walks through his workflow which is incredible so uh gumroad gumroad as a teacher is a good one all right only two questions left because this episode's going on a bit hope it's useful who do you know that's good at 3d but shouldn't be inexperienced or unorthodox style um yeah i think i kind of mentioned it but anyone who's already good at another medium um so concept artists obviously uh but photographers as well um they just basically outperform 3d artists in in a lot of ways when they start um because they already have have that prior knowledge that kind of that years of build up of expertise that means that when they jump into 3d they already know how to frame they know they know what what good lighting is um yeah i've just seen some people that have um yeah like like photographers or something on instagram and they're like oh you know i'm uh my photographer and i've just been learning 3d i'm just sort of dabbling in it and i look at their work and it's you know mostly photography and they've just started getting into 3d and doing some some things and the lighting is amazing the rendering is amazing the color grading is amazing because they've already got that side of it so it's really interesting um those people yeah basically if you've mastered another skill um it usually transfers over i mean parts of it obviously not the technical stuff but the design and everything else all right and then the final question who are the most unorthodox artists why what do you think of them so similar i guess to the impressive lesser known teachers some of them are repeating the first one is ian hubert um so why is he an unorthodox artist so he has a kind of controlled speed and it's it's a methodical use of time to do the minimum required to get a effective result right he doesn't seem to put even a second more into a task if it doesn't require it um i mean obviously that's a i'm sure there are assets that are in the background that didn't need to be that detailed but his his use of his time seems very very effective so if you watched his workflow you might think like oh my gosh he just kind of like goes in there and just throws stuff around and like yes but it's it's it's much like when you see one of those painters on tick-tock or instagram or something and they're like standing on the street and they got this one brush and they go and then like one stroke they make this masterpiece kind of thing it looks simple but that's kind of the point it's it's it's 20 years or whatever that went into it to know how to do it to make it look as simple as it was so in ian's approach you could actually kind of um if you were a beginner develop a lazy bad habit by thinking that you can just be lazy and just kind of throw stuff around and cheat and do things in a rough manner for everything and if it to come out well but yeah so that's kind of the bad extreme of it but his his workflow i find to be yeah just a good reminder um that yeah you you can and should use your time effectively because i ever have it myself of of um making every asset look perfect from every angle and then it's just gonna sit in the background like what's the point of that um because then the project took three months to create instead of two weeks right and you could have gotten the same result so um yeah it's i i i i've kind of rift on that a lot uh next beeple so why why is he unorthodox um so he is i guess similar in in many ways to ian um he doesn't over analyze things so um yeah it was like a video he went to corridor digital's studio and was talking about what he was doing he's saying like it doesn't have to be perfect what you're doing it doesn't have to be some special thing you can just make something stupid right and you can see that in his work he has just this stupid approach to art that you look at and you go like come on what is the point of that why would you make uh i don't know shrek morphed into donald trump uh or something or whatever weird like drinking from the teat of sci-fi borg uh hillary clinton he's got a bunch of political stuff on there um but what i mean what he's just having fun he doesn't care he's just throwing stuff out there and his volume of work the amount of work he creates um it stands to reason that some of those pieces are gonna stand out and uh yeah i mean some of the ideas just just hit really well and and they come out and a lot of them don't but that's understandable doing one render every single day um yeah i've come to respect it i i used to kind of think his artwork looked a little lazy um and it is in some ways it it it's rushed and it could be better um technically but uh the proof is in the pudding he's creating actual artwork he's not a technical artist he's creating ideas and narratives and pushing i yeah like political ideas i mean that's the other really cool thing about his art is he deliberately offends people he does not care if you don't like the themes of his artwork he doesn't entertain anyone in the comments who gets mad at him for his i mean he did one recently which was um the one that he sold for 66 000 or something and it was like um a piece of artwork that will change depending on who wins the us election and it was like uh if donald trump wins it was like donald trump like walking as like a a minotaur like this sort of demon like walking around and then um oh is this is the focal of this camera off no anyway um and then uh yeah like fire and hell all around him and then you swipe and then it was like if joe biden wins and it was like a peaceful utopia with donald trump dead in the background and spray painted on him like fat loser and stuff like that incredibly offensive work right um that's the point of it i mean you don't have to question and ask who you gonna vote for you know what his beliefs are and what he thinks of a certain person and i wouldn't do that artwork myself right but i respect i respect the artistic integrity to stick to what you want to do and not be like shy right and think oh i don't know if i want to put this out there what do people think like i've got some ideas in my head that i want to put into an art piece but i i know people will really hate it and i'm kind of like i'm like standing on the ledge i'm like should i jump what should i do he doesn't care he just goes for it and it's it's funny to watch um even though i would disagree with you know half the things he makes that's kind of that that's how you get great art is going through just ideas and um and letting people express themselves as i've talked about as nausea all right uh three other artists that are unorthodox that i like uh julian casper so he is a blender artist he worked on spring he's i actually like his his work his personal work on uh on art station he's got a really um yeah his sculpts have like really nice simplified exaggerated forms and really interesting lighting very simple just kind of the bear elements and um yeah he did like a bunch for sculpt january or something um i feel like there's a an art theme for every month now november sculpt to january uh inktober what else is there it's probably something for february march yeah i don't know we'll make one for polygon we'll call it polygon april you just have to buy our and put it in your renters uh that's the worst when like a corporate company comes out and tries to join in a trend and goes like we'll make our own little hashtag and go viral and it doesn't work and it's very sad uh anyways uh yeah so i like his stuff um uh yeah you can check him out julian casper two other artists vitali bulgarov so he is uh like the top hard surface modeler person in the world and um what makes him different is i think his mastery of both the design and the technical so he's doing something which is exceedingly technical which is like a lot of boolean operations hard surface sculpting hard surface and zbrush sometimes blending it with organic forms occasionally um but kind of this yeah it does like quadrupeds robots just the most insane technical thing that's a really technical thing to do is um yeah all that bully and stuff with like rounded forms and everything really really hard to do um so he's got a handle on that but he also has a really good handle on on design um shape language what's it called big medium small details um [Music] what else how many other buzzwords can i throw at you he's got a really great handle on that so the fusing of those two things i think um has uh has made him one of the top artists in the world because most people are one or the other you'll find a lot of 2d artists that can do this technical blocky hard surface stuff but it's 2d because they can't understand 3d they tried it once it's too hard and it's confusing and they don't want to he's figured that out he's got this insane 3d knowledge and then he's also got this uh incredible design knowledge as well and then the final one jama durabe as i mentioned as a teacher he's also just as an artist um i think he's on what makes him unorthodox and great is uh he's kind of an early adopter of technology a lot of concept artists are very shy to 3d in fact you know five ten years ago a lot of concept artists for one almost none of them use 3d software um and they they hated it they said that like the software got in the way of the work that they did because you can't work fast you have to keep dealing with menus and pushing buttons and oh it's too confusing and so they're just kind of like no i'm going to stick to photoshop and you guys do what you want to do but i'm going to do this um jama was one of the first artists i know concept artists that said like no no blunder's really cool and you should use it because it has all these extra advantages you don't have to you know if the director then asks you to change the camera angle you don't have to redraw it you can change the camera angle because it's a 3d scene if you need to be relit if it needs to have any other changes you have so much more flexible workflow when you deal with 3d so he he was like an early adopter in the concept art to sort of jump into blender and use grease pencil to sketch it out and because he wasn't happy with a lot of the tools um that he wanted in blender um he's also like hired a developer i think to build um i just saw like a few add-ons that he's got uh to do sort of like quick curves and i think quick box modeling and things to sort of rapidly throw ideas into a frame doesn't have to be perfect doesn't have to be whatever but just kind of rapidly build things um so he's he's harnessing the technology to get to the desired creative result i think he's doing that quite well he's also just got a company called big medium small and i think he's hiring artists to make 3d assets that are at the level of detail that he wants for his concept pieces so i think he's got two packs so far one on like medieval nights and then like really high detailed medieval knights with like starves and things and then he's also got one recently on like apocalypse soldiers and like hazmat gear and tanks and things like that for like apocalypse scenes um so yeah he's he's really another one of those artists who's got a handle on both the design and the technical and isn't afraid to dabble and get uncomfortable because he knows that the the the rainbow at the what's it called the bag of gold at the end of the rainbow is worth dealing with the the technical challenges so that's what kind of makes him unorthodox and stands out there but those are kind of just the people i know i mean a lot of those are kind of top artists in the world and that's kind of why they stand out but there's you know i'm sure hundreds of little known artists that we don't even know about yet but will one day be amazing and be well known because they're doing things in a different way that i don't know right now and maybe that's you watching this right now so don't lose hope um anyways that was it for this episode next episode i thought i would do the same set of questions but around 2d because yeah i've spent two ish years learning 2d and because of that i have a fresh knowledge of how to learn 2d today because there's a bunch of ideas and techniques which are taught in 2d which i think are kind of a waste of time and things that aren't emphasized enough that i think are important and i do get asked a lot actually through twitter and instagram how did you learn 2d what could you what would you recommend today so i thought i'd do a video a podcast episode on that so um subscribe if you want to listen to that one again and for the next next episode um i hope to answer your questions so if you have questions send it to blenderguru.com forward slash podcast question type that into your browser you'll get a dropbox folder there and i want you to upload a video question it says video question on the page people open up a notepad text file and they type in a text and they send me a text file i'm not going to read it it has to be a video because it's going to be on a podcast and i want to be able to see it and i want to be able to hear it so all you need to do is take out your phone you don't need a webcam and has professional gear or anything you take out your phone selfie mode record it upload it from your phone it takes five seconds um or maybe a minute or two but do that and i hope to answer some interesting questions on the the next podcast episode thanks guys bye

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 335,555

Keywords: 3d, computer graphics, beginner, blender

Id: nqW01JzVQFQ

Length: 84min 34sec (5074 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 24 2020