04-02-2016, 04:16 PM
3d is an important tool to have in your repetoire if you want to do concept design. Yeah you don't "need" it to do anything, but as Alex said on our stream, those people using all the tools at their disposal including 3D, who don't care about fundamentals from a purist sense (meaning all lines have to be drawn by their hand or it doesn't count) will totally waste the competition, because they can be faster and more productive. It doesn't make you a better artist because design choices still have to be made and ideas have to be conceived, that comes down to your knowledge which only comes with time and learning and experience. What it does is free you from the more technical fundamental aspects of drawing...perspective, form, lighting and gives you much more freedom and potential to explore ideas. You will still need 2d skills to be able to finish and tweak, and do it well.
The thing to realise is that any additional skills you can bring to your work will benefit you. It's not an either-or scenario, but for concept art roles, especially environments, definitely basic 3d blockouts are very useful. You don't need a powerful machine to do basic blockout modeling and basic lighting. Tell us your machine specs.
"Hard" is a very relative term. I think 3d programs themselves can be daunting because of how complex they appear. There are quite a few basic terminologies to learn which again can seem daunting. In general though the principles aren't that difficult. It's not rocket science, unless you get into simulations and the technicalities of rendering engines!
Blender is a terrific, free and incredibly powerful 3d software. There are many tutorial channels for blender on youtube. BlenderGuru is one of them I like a lot for workflow tricks. But you have to get down with the basics of the interface and modelling in general, probably through following a step by step tutorial as well. Depends how you prefer to learn. I don't really learn through following tutorials so I can't link you any. Mostly I prefer to explore myself and apply various tricks I've seen in videos, or hunt out solutions to problems as and when needed.
For movies (and games) ZBrush is I would say a huge asset to you especially for character work. Everything in movies are designed 100s of iterations deep and photoreal. It's so much easier to do this with 3d. You just tweak the model and render out again with the click of a button. Also these 3d concept assets can slot nicely into the pipeline, and be handed off to vfx or props departments. Someone doesn't have to do all the work in translating your 2d design into 3d. This is why it is seen as an asset. It saves them time in the pipeline.
Gnomon dvd on zbrush 4r7 by Madeleine scott Spencer is a fantastic in depth coverage of zbrush. Really good. Sculptris is I believe the free version of ZBrush, so worth a go, to see how it works.
I did 3d as well (yeah the first I ever used was also bryce at least 18 years ago now?) and was working in arch viz for a year using Maya, but then also had to drop it due to life situation changing. I recently picked Blender up and all the stuff I learned came flooding back, and it took me maybe 2 weeks to get comfy with 3d again, but i did actually have a lot of the knowledge from before still in there. Starting from scratch will take longer. 3d programs haven't really changed all that much, just become more powerful because of our computers getting cheaper and more powerful.
The thing to realise is that any additional skills you can bring to your work will benefit you. It's not an either-or scenario, but for concept art roles, especially environments, definitely basic 3d blockouts are very useful. You don't need a powerful machine to do basic blockout modeling and basic lighting. Tell us your machine specs.
"Hard" is a very relative term. I think 3d programs themselves can be daunting because of how complex they appear. There are quite a few basic terminologies to learn which again can seem daunting. In general though the principles aren't that difficult. It's not rocket science, unless you get into simulations and the technicalities of rendering engines!
Blender is a terrific, free and incredibly powerful 3d software. There are many tutorial channels for blender on youtube. BlenderGuru is one of them I like a lot for workflow tricks. But you have to get down with the basics of the interface and modelling in general, probably through following a step by step tutorial as well. Depends how you prefer to learn. I don't really learn through following tutorials so I can't link you any. Mostly I prefer to explore myself and apply various tricks I've seen in videos, or hunt out solutions to problems as and when needed.
For movies (and games) ZBrush is I would say a huge asset to you especially for character work. Everything in movies are designed 100s of iterations deep and photoreal. It's so much easier to do this with 3d. You just tweak the model and render out again with the click of a button. Also these 3d concept assets can slot nicely into the pipeline, and be handed off to vfx or props departments. Someone doesn't have to do all the work in translating your 2d design into 3d. This is why it is seen as an asset. It saves them time in the pipeline.
Gnomon dvd on zbrush 4r7 by Madeleine scott Spencer is a fantastic in depth coverage of zbrush. Really good. Sculptris is I believe the free version of ZBrush, so worth a go, to see how it works.
I did 3d as well (yeah the first I ever used was also bryce at least 18 years ago now?) and was working in arch viz for a year using Maya, but then also had to drop it due to life situation changing. I recently picked Blender up and all the stuff I learned came flooding back, and it took me maybe 2 weeks to get comfy with 3d again, but i did actually have a lot of the knowledge from before still in there. Starting from scratch will take longer. 3d programs haven't really changed all that much, just become more powerful because of our computers getting cheaper and more powerful.