Learning Advanced 3d Art Skills
dreamfarmer
Posts: 2,128
I'd been thinking about this thread for a while. I've picked up a couple of new 3d programs and I've decided to make a thread documenting what I learn with them. So far I have Vue 2016 and 3d-Coat. I've done small things with both of them, although I haven't really 'finished' anything with 3d-Coat. Hopefully that's going to change soon! I signed up for an online (non-live) class that uses 3d-coat to do concept art. Also, Keyshot, which is a $1000 piece of rendering software I /don't/ have. I'm gonna be using Daz for those parts of the class. It may not be as good as Keyshot, but I know how to use it and I have a lot of shaders for it.
I was a little worried about this class I signed up for because I was pretty sure it was aimed at pros and I assume at some point the instructor will say, "Now go off and do this task all pros can do in Photoshop," and I'll be lost. But so far, while he HAS been talking to pros, it's all been "forget everything you know about 3d modeling because 3d-coat is unique" so that's kind of been fun.
Anyhow, I'm going to go off and work through this first set of lectures. I've watched a few videos of people doing the homework from the class (when I was trying to decide if I wanted to splurge on it) and they're impressive; I'll leave you with one. It's long but fast-moving and the majority of the fascinating stuff is in the first ten minutes. After that it's lots of tweaking in Keyshot and Photoshop.
(I know most people don't have and probably don't want 3d-Coat or Vue. But perhaps there's some that do, or who want to watch learning in process, or see if they can apply techniques in Blender or something... thus, this focused thread instead of my general art thread.)
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Reserving this in case this thread needs a table of contents.
I may never use either of those but I'm still interested in learning about them.
I look forward to reading more on this topic.
Cool! The updates may be slow because I have a couple other things going on. But I can say that I did end up downloading the Keyshot trial because the first lesson in this class sidesteps everything related to UVs to use Keyshot for projection texturing. In the process of figuring this out I did learn some about 3D-coat UV unwrapping but mostly to realize that it would definitely take _time_.
Anyhow, i’m hoping to finish the homework today. It’s amazing how _easy_ some of these techniques look in videos and how clunky my results are.
LOL Well, you will improve with practice, just as I'm sure your current renders are leaps and bounds better than your first ones. I'm thinking of giving marvelous designer a try, but I'm not that great at Daz yet so I'm a bit torn on whether I should be practicing Daz for a while longer before chasing other shinies... even if they are related.
My Marvelous Designer trial just expired. It was really interesting and I don't think you need to be a Daz Master to learn to use it. It's got a really gentle learning curve, at least for making simple clothes.
Here is some of the stuff from the first homework for the 3d concept class. I started out by drawing silhouettes of tall buildings, and then making a height map (top down) view that I could extrude into smaller buildings. I then used the Photoshop brush dynamics to take the single heightmap and scatter and color shift and stretch and resize it into a sort of block, which I then extruded. Then using Keyshot (which seems to be a 14-days-of-use kind of trial) I did some pattern-based instancing of the block objects, and projected an actual cropped city photograph across the obj to quickly (and without UVs) texture it. I screwed that up somehow in the attached image because it syhould not be the exact same image in the same place on the image on every building.
The final stage of the homework is postwork in Photoshop, which I'm gonna do, but later because I want to get through as much of the Keyshot-requiring stuff as I can first.
The interesting thing about this that I feel I can use even without Keyshot is the whole heightmap/silhouette-based extrusion stuff, along with the brush dynamics.
My current lesson is leading up to Hard Surface concept modeling. Like the previous lesson it's tricky but mostly because I'm out of my depth so I'm being forced to learn all sorts of fundamentals just so I can follow along. Like, the teacher insists on using the 'sphere' tool to paint shapes rather than using primitives and I can only barely get it to work the way he does. I had to learn about the functional difference between orthoganal views vs perspective views. For the longest time every time I used a square brush with the sphere tool to draw a cube, it would, well, be slanted. This is because I was in perspective mode and it applied that automatically to the stuff I painted in 3d.
I'm STILL not sure how he's getting consistently cube-like cubes instead of just polygons of varying depth... but I think I've got enough of a work around there to progress with that lesson.
double post, will replace later with more updates.
I will be very interested in what you achieve with 3D-Coat.
I have bought it, but barely scratched any of its abilities.
I also have Vue and 3d Coat. I've played a bit with Vue, not as much lately--for a variety of reasons. I've not really done much with the other one yet. I'd be interested in reading more about your adventures in learning with both of them.Can you share more about the class?
Sure. It's from LearnSquared, the Intro to 3d Concept Art class. https://www.learnsquared.com/courses/intro-3dconcept ; It's been on my radar for a long time, but it's both expensive and intimidating so I experimented with a much cheaper Udemy course. That one is also good, but on the slow side and very introductory and I still have it lingering, unfinished.
I'm hoping to do more homework this weekend. I've been trying to juggle school science fair stuff and a graphic novel project I'm trying to get off the ground.
Have fun with the course, you're well on your way.
Thanks for answering. I'm very much interested in seeing what you do. Makes me think maybe I should consider doing something similar. Please keep us informed on your progress.
That city is really quite good. I mean I know there is a ways to go, but still! It could probably work well, as is, as a distant backdrop. Thanks for showing your progress.
I haven't abandoned this but I've been busy lately. However, I'm stopping by to mention that E-On software is 30% off over at Motion Media for a couple of days so I'm going to be taking the money I was saving for an Oculus Rift and dumping it into Plant Factory, which was the other (final) big piece of speciality modeling software I've wanted.