I've Been Using Blender Wrong for YEARS! - Maybe You Have Too...

i started using blender at the end of 2017 and i've recently realized that i've been doing it all wrong i'm not talking about one specific technique that i've been using but my whole approach to making renders you see the long term plan for this channel has always been to make short animated movies along with breakdown videos about how they were put together and as i've started working on those animations recently i've noticed that my old methods really aren't fit for purpose a lot of the time let me explain so my old workflow would look something like this i would make a mesh following all the rules that have been taught about how you should make 3d models nice clean quad topology good edge floor no end guns avoid using booleans etc then i would unwrap the mesh and get a nice flat uv map with no stretching finally i would export that to some sort of pbr texturing tool like substance painter and that would add all these nice high red textures with loads of detail like cracks and smudges and all the rest of it or i would make a really complex procedural material that would do that automatically using nodes i was trading 3d modeling as if each render was the sum of its parts i had to do everything 100 to the best of my ability in order to get the finest quality renders i could make these assets are from the harry potter video that i made about a year ago and they're a good example of what i'm talking about i probably spent a few hours each on these the topology is nice so is the uvs they've got all these nice fine details like this wax drips on the candle holder and there's fingerprints on the inkpot and this is what it looks like in the final render none of that stuff is visible in the slightest i could have knocked up some really simple models with basic textures and the final render would have looked almost exactly the same total waste of my time so as i've been making animations recently i've started to realize that a render can actually be more than the sum of its parts as long as you know how to put everything together all that really matters is the final frames and there's ways of getting the same sort of quality with much less work so i started watching videos of how other people work and i noticed they take the same approach too so one of the shots i'm working on right now is for a cyberpunk animation i made this vending machine just by throwing all of my old rolls out of the window and the whole thing came together in a fraction of the time it would normally take and i think i probably got a better result because of it i didn't bother measuring out the scale of individual parts i just eyeballed them i didn't create a nice uv map or procedural texture i just threw a few photo textures in there q projected the uvs and move things around until it looked good not only is this a faster way for me to work but it also leads to a lot of happy accidents i didn't plan to add this access panel on the side of the model but the texture had this nice feature on it so i incorporated it into the design did i bother to nicely cut out the panel and create all the handles and stuff from scratch no i just grabbed the knife tool and i quickly cut those suckers out of the mesh and extruded them out i did this quick test render just to see how it looked and i think the results are pretty good mark hamill likes to tell this story about shooting the first star wars movie he was worried about continuity problems at one point because in the scene with the trash compactor he's got wet hair but the next scene was shot days later and his hair was dry and harrison ford turned around and said kid it in that kind of movie if people are looking at your hair we're all in big trouble and it's the same when you're making 3d models for animations if people are noticing all these small inconsequential parts of the mesh your animation probably sucks here's another asset from the same cyberpunk animation there's going to be like a landing pad for a spacecraft and this field tank thing is going to be just on top of a building in the background so i made this the quick and messy way there's stretching on top of this fuel tank here i added this metal rim just to hide the same that was in the texture and i did the same thing around the big tank i added the same all the way around it i didn't even do a good job with this part there's actually some overlapping geometry but nobody's going to notice that there was this weird pixelation stretching thing going on with these faces on these tanks so i just extruded all the individual faces out and i made a part of the design of the tanks and it looks good the terminal is just a screenshot of some code and i threw that on what is essentially a cube with an emission shader and the final render the assets are going to be on top of building in the background you're not going to see any of those issues even with a couple of bright spotlights literally pointed at all the dodgy areas it looks fine the annoying thing is that i've used this approach in my 2d yard for years i used to be an illustrator and a concept artist before i made the switch to 3d here's a little sketch that i painted one morning randomly years and years ago and the final effect is quite nice even though the details are non-existent if you zoom into this bad boy it looks like junk but you're not supposed to view it zoomed in so who cares i mean the painting is supposed to be viewed just like this because the lighting and the forms and the composition are all correct it doesn't matter if it doesn't hold up the scrutiny because that's not how it's supposed to be viewed the painting is more than the sum of its parts here's a painting by rembrandt who knew a thing or two about art you'll notice that the faces here are super detailed but if you look at the claw next to his arm it's comprised of a few really loose brush strokes with no detail whatsoever because rembrandt understood that not only is it important to not detail the non-focal points it's actually distracting to the viewer if everything has the same amount of attention drawn to it that's why photographers are so keen on tricks like vignettes and shallow depth that failed because it takes attention away from the non-focal points there's other benefits to creating art like this too other than just the speed that you can work i mean i've found that the meshes that i'm creating are actually usually less dense lower poly and because i'm not important three to five high res textures for each material the render times a lot faster too now before you start typing loads of angry comments yes there are some caveats to what i've just said this sort of modeling won't work for everything if you're working on a character for instance or a hero asset i.e something that's going to be viewed really close up to the camera where the details are kind of a point then yeah you're going to have to do things properly similarly if you're working on some sort of group project where other people are going to be using your files like on a movie or a game you're going to want to do everything by the book but if you're just producing work for yourself or you're working for a client who only cares about the final render not the project files just get the frames done don't confine yourself to a bunch of arbitrary rules because at the end of the day the final result is the only thing that matters nobody's gonna see your claim topology or your fantastic uv maps okay they only say the final frames so i would have probably spent 30 or 40 minutes on this aircon unit in the past but doing it the quick and dirty way it took me i think about 10 minutes the final result in an animation would be no different if you'd like to see some more videos of me making this animation tutorials behind the scene workflow videos things like that you might want to check out my patreon because i'm posting that stuff on there there'll be a link in the description i hope you found this helpful guys this was definitely a bit of a eureka moment for me and it's completely changed how i look at 3d modelling i'll catch you soon with another video

Channel: DECODED

Views: 315,507

Rating: 4.9439511 out of 5

Keywords: tutorial, DECODED, Blender, blender 3d, software, computing, classes, blender for beginners, blender online, free 3d modeling software, open source software, 3d software, vfx, vfx artist, modeling the right way, blender had habits, blender mistake

Id: Fva4_a5ChFA

Length: 7min 55sec (475 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Catnip4Pedos]

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