Okay I absolutely love Photoshop, I have been using it ever since I was in jr high. I use it for building materials and textures when I am doing 3D scenes and I use it just for pimping photographs. Its so much fun. Today I did a wallpaper and its of the Joker from Batman Dark Knight.
What do you think?
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Okay who do you think did the best job at playing the Joker... Jack Nicholson or Heath Ledger?
A.) HEATH
B.) JACK
Personally, I loved Heath Ledger over Jack Nicholson. Heath just did a way better job a playing the character then Nicholson. He was funny, but he was so evil. He did just a perfect job.
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I was going through all my 3D scenes and I found my first 3D scene I ever did. Wow :) So long ago. What do you think?
Its my snowman scene :P Wow I remember sitting in my office working 13 hours on that. Haha I can get that done its about 5 minutes now. I am going to put some more scenes that I did when I first started.
Here is just a scene I did with random objects.
Haha Here is my Post Apocalypse scene, i call it... "Dan's Dead Gas Station" I ran the render through photoshop to give it a cartoon-ish look.
OHHHHHHH HERE IS MY REDBULL ENERGY SPRAY
Well I've been doing 3D work for about 5 years now, I have been teaching myself and working hard at it. I want to work for Pixar so badly, It's not even funny how badly I want to work there. I would sell my own mother so I could.. JUST KIDDING MOM!!! Nahh I just have to keep working and learning as much as I can. Hopefully I can make a good impression on the Pixar people.
After a couple of years of working on my 3D modeling, I got enough courage to send a professional graphic designs guy some of my work and hoping that he could give me his critique. This is what he sent me.
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HOLY SH**, ETHAN! That is one f***ing beautiful render!
I don't think there's anything more I can tell you about the modeling part that you don't already know. Right now, you already seem to be an experienced modeler. I think you'll be able solve any problems you might have making any shape by using what you already know. You can tell if the mesh is bad because it is hard to uv map and when you render it, the textures will seem to stretch or slide. Your models look just fine.
Ethan, it seems you've already gone beyond modeling and are moving into the creative/artistic side of things. I can really say you're well on your way to becoming a well rounded 3d artist.
You want a critique? :) Ok, here it goes.
I don't remember what software you use but I love the way you did the texturing. Texturing is an art form by itself that is completely separate from modeling. UV mapping is the technical side of it and making the shaders and the textures is the creative side. In big production studios there is 1 whole department just for texturing.
I'm really impressed by the fine scratches and the reflectivity of the bottles.
The way you did the blood is really top notch. I want to say that it could use just a bit of transparency but I cannot really tell if it is a separate mesh from the sand or a part of the sand with a different shader and bump map. And that's 1 way you can tell if the artist is good. If you can't decide whether what you see is real or fake, then the artist really knows his stuff. Very nicely done!
The coins are just perfect. The bumps are just right and the sand on some of the coins is a master touch. That is the funny thing about details. Even if there is only 1 very small detail that is wrong, the eye of the viewer is pulled to it. He can tell there is something wrong with the picture even if he can't tell you exactly what it is. If all the details are correct, the viewer knows the picture is good even if he can't tell you why. It's all in the small details.
The cork is just fine. When I zoom in on the parchment labels I want to say that you should lessen the bumps. But when I zoom out and look at the whole thing, the labels looks just fine.
I like the way the smoothness of the skull is in contrast to all the grainy textures around it. There seem to be some black smudges on some parts facing the light so they should not be in shadow. Could be some problem with the uv mapping or maybe some normals in the mesh got reversed if you used booleans to make the skull.
Sand and snow are always hard to do and you made your sand very nicely. I can see that you're already using bumps to add to the effect - very good. You can make it more realistic by subdividing the mesh more and more to make small folds and details in the sand. But that will make your poly count really crazy and your render time really crazy, so that's not a practical way to do it. Try using displacements maps. If you want your displacements to go down as well as up, use a negative value in the displacement. If you see "banding" or lines when it should be a gradient, try making your displacement map really big. Or save to a format that doesn't have data loss like jpg. Try saving to tiff or bmp.
And lastly the sky. This is the only thing that I can say takes a little bit away from the realism of the picture. If you look at the sky you will notice that none of the clouds have any sharp edges. That is a very small detail but my eye was pulled to the lower right corner where the edges of the clouds are sharper. That's easy to fix. Just add a little gaussian blur to your sky texture map. Then you can add bright stars on another layer if you want. :)
If you want to make realistic textures the best thing to do is to go out and see what they look like in the real world. When I was learning how to do grunge maps I wanted to know where grunge grows and how it starts. So wherever I went I was always looking behind doors to look for grunge and bending down to see the corner between the floor and wall. Everybody thought I had finally gone crazy. LOL Well, maybe they're right but I try to act normal so nobody will notice. LOL
And that is my critique. Whew. But you know, I'm so proud of what you've made that I'm going to show it to my friends. It's really nice.
This next part is for your future study.
I already know you have a good grasp of modeling, uv mapping, shaders, texturing and rendering. I would say you're already moving from the intermediate level to the expert level in all of these.
Like I said, I think you're starting to move beyond the technical side of 3d into the purely artistic side. I think it's time that you should start to learn art theory. That is the difference between a 3d technician and a real artist. It's like the difference between a draftsman and a painter.
Here are some things you should study. Composition, perspective, balance, color theory and lighting. Just google any of these topics and you will get lots of reading material. You can just get an overview of these or you can go as deep as you want in your study. All of these topics are very broad and have many, many sub-topics inside them. Anything you can learn about these will help you greatly in whatever you do from now on.
Some people have natural artistic talent and I think you are one of them. Just imagine what you can do with your talent if you know what all the great masters have learned over so many hundreds of years.
To get you started here is a small tutorial on the rule of thirds. It falls under the topic of composition and there are many other rules of composition. If you read it you will find that your placement of the bottles is almost on the exact third. That is why your render is so pleasing to the eye. If you composed your render that way unconsciously without knowing about this rule, you definitely have talent.
It's really strange but you can try it for yourself. Relax your mind and your eyes and look at your render. Your eyes will stop on the third where the bottles are. But they will try to move to the right where the exact third is. Now try doing the same thing to another picture. If the point of focus of the picture is not on a third your eyes will never stop but will keep jumping all around the picture trying to find a place to rest.
It seems the old masters found out something about our human subconscious. Now go find out about the other rules of composition. They're just as much fun to play around with. You can play tricks on your friends by making them feel tense or worried just by looking at your renders. LOL
Now this part is if you want to specialize in realism. Realism is all about lighting, lighting, lighting. You can use light to make the viewer focus on one part, you can use it to hide mesh that is not so nice, you can use light or dark to add drama, you can use the contrast of light and dark to show action or conflict.
There is classical lighting - 1 point, 2 point, 3 point, ambient lighting, rim lighting, etc. That is 1 topic I mentioned above in art theory so it's good if you have an overview of all of these.
Then there is realistic lighting. The best place to study this is in photography. Photography is the study of light and shadow. No picture is all black or all white. There must be light and shadow so there will be a picture. Again google tutorials on photography. There are millions of them.
And finally, if you want to see some practical applications of art theory and lighting, here is a link to my gallery.
If you read the comments, you will notice that in my first and second post I asked that everyone critique my work. So many gave insights and very useful information on what I should learn. So you can see, Ethan, that I am also still learning. I don't think we will ever stop learning as long as we are alive.
And that is the end of this long,long email. LOL
Sorry for that but I'm so happy about your progress and so proud of what you have made. I want to teach you everything I know but I can't put it all into 1 email.
Keep going. You're doing fantastic.
Best regards,
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After getting this email, I became close to (I won't say his name because I don't know if he would want me to, so I will call him... Uhhh James) James and he became my teacher and mentor. He has helped me develop my 3D skills. I am still learning, heck I will be learning for a long long long time, But I have come a long long way from doing those two 3D snowmen. I can't wait to see where I go in the future.
Pixar is my goal. Someday you guys will see my name in the end credits. :) I can't wait.
Sorry for putting the long email on my post.
CHEERS!
