Hiperia3D News: July 2011

Fresh Faced Beauty
(Read more...)

Book: Blender 2.5 HOTSHOT
(Read more...)

John E. Herreño is an Electronics Engineer from the National University of Colombia. He got interest in open source software and how much it can help in the development of countries. He works doing Drupal web development and Blender training, and develops custom software. You can visit his site at http://jeh3.net

He is the author of the book, "Blender 2.5 HOTSHOT", which consists in 10 chapters that contain 10 projects. These projects are very similar to the situations you meet in real life projects, and are the kind of things that someone who employs or commissions you may ask you.

In real life projects, people ask you to make a final image, model something specific, and things like that. This book covers different projects from beginning to end.

The first project consists in making a render of a sci-fi space scene. This is what a pure 3D artist does at his work, creating a model from scratch, a background, adding effects, and rendering the piece, obtaining a final image that accomplishes the idea in his mind.

The second project, "Fly a Fighter Aircraft Through a Storm", is for creating a war aircraft that flies through some clouds. In this lesson you learn modeling tips, the use of shaders to increase realism of 3D models, with textures and material settings combined, cloud effects with particles, and of course, you learn to animate the flying machine.

This project illustrates the workflow of a 3D animator, whose task is to produce animated films by making 3D models, creating a world around them, and taking them to life by adding movement through time.

The use of blueprints is common in technical 3D modeling of vehicles and industry pieces, for example. In project 3, you learn how to put these skills in practice. A blueprint is a image in a sheet that contains views of an object from the most common angles (top, side, back, bottom, front...). From this blueprint you can model adding increasing complexity and using techniques toold in this project. Finally, you will create a car paint shader.

Notice how in all these projects, the final product of your work is obtained. The author doesn't stops until the final result is obtained, so you can see how real proffessionals work.

In "Create a Professional Looking Demo Reel" you produce something that is often required for most 3D portfolio, and it's a demo reel that showcases your skills as 3D modeler, made using the video sequencer of Blender.

Now that you have become familiar with the video sequencer, it comes the time to learn some of the game engine. As you know, Blender includes a 3D game engine which is very powerful and has been used in multiple commercial and indy games.

In project 5 you learn the basics of this engine using the Python programming language, to build an interactive walkthrough around a building in a 3D environment that uses a skybox, a semisphere with a sky painted on it. This gives you the opportunity to learn how to bake textures in Blender, and also learn simple UV mapping.

Interactive walkthrough are a classic in animation, showcases of virtual reality, and even on intro sequences of games.

On the following chapter, "Detailed Render of the Earth from Space", you'll focus on pre-processing of textures and post-processing of a render. These are all techniques aimed to get the maximum quality for your renders using Blender 3D.

Project 7 is about animating an humanoid character. The book explains later, on chapter 10, how was this humanoid modeled, but the author prefers to explain how to animate it now, because as you have already read the chapters about animation, it's easy for you to understand all this now, without losing the perspective of an animator.

To animate this humanoid figure, you'll be told how to create a skeleton, an armature for the body, with its joints and limits, that can be later animated and deform the humanoid as it walks in an animation.

Humanoid animations have particularities and are the base of many projects in the films and animation industry.

"Create a Snail" is the eighth chapter. It's a journey through the process of creating an organic creature by using both parametric and box modeling techniques. The shape of the snail is also refined using the sculpt tools of Blender, wich are very powerful for artistic modeling and digital sculpture. It also introduces you to the creation of organic shaders and the use of subsurface scattering to simulate beings that have flesh (human or not).

One of the fields in which 3D modeling was widely used from the beginning is architectural modeling and visualization. Chapter 9 is about architectural rendering, in the example of a kitchen. It is also an introduction to lighting, as it's the 50% or more of a good render.

Last but not least, project 10 is about modeling humanoids, by combining the speed of box modeling techniques with the power of Blender's sculpt tools.

To summarize, as you can notice, this is a book that really gives examples of tasks that a pro 3D modeler has to do when he/she is hired by someone. A book from a get-things-done perspective. It is a very good learning material for someone who uses Blender and needs to have a perspective on how the different pieces fit.

When we learn to use a program, we usually learn how to model something, then we see another example on the internet on how to map your UVs, later another piece of the puzzle, another different example on how to make a shader, and so on and on. This book is different because it tells you how to build the whole puzzle. It tells you how to achieve projects from beginning to end, explaining it all with the same project, in a logical ad real-life way: you model something, then texture this same thing, then animate it, and so on, and get a real animation video. Or model something, apply shaders, light it, and render and get a real render.

And the author makes this with 10 example projects carefully chosen to showcase the typical situation for someone who wants to learn to achive the most common uses of 3D.

Get it at Packt Publishing, you won't repent:

Blender 2.5 HOTSHOT, by John E. Herreño

Morphing Ice Pop For Poser And DAZ Studio
(Read more...)

Packt Open Source announce exclusive discount offers on best-selling books
(Read more...)

A 3D Artist Workflow Video
(Read more...)

What Is Render Art?
(Read more...)

These days there is some controversy about Poser, Daz Studio and other software used to make render art. I think that as I am a 3D modeler that makes content for those packages, I can appreciate every side of this issue.

Some people change their point of view and sometimes defend a position and other times the opposite. I think that is because of the confusion of concept in their own minds.

That is what makes me see that most 3D modelers, and most "3D artists" don't have a clue on what is render art. So they maintain a stupid, irrational, and useless debate of "modelers VS Poser users".

Render art deserves to be recognized in its dignity.

So let's explain, for the glory of render artists, and to open the obtuse minds of ignorants, what is render art.

What Is Render Art?

In digital art there are different artistic disciplines. Oh, yes: the one you practice is not the only one.

One of them is render art. A render artist is someone who takes a series of 3D models and poses them into a 3D scene, and uses the computer to generate a representation of this scene and its actors, with an artistic or illustrative purpose.

But beyond that, a render artist must know many other aspects, like computer skills and knowledge, 3D notions, a deep knowledge of how images are composed in a computer, the different parameters that rule the program that performs the generation of the 2D image (the render engine), anatomy of a natural pose in humans and animals, the creation of coherent sources of light, framing, image file formats...

He/she has to have a mix of skills of a photographer, or a painter, and needs to understand computer graphics to some degree.

To make his art, this render artist needs 3D models. This 3D models can be build by them, if they are 3d modelers in addition to render artists, or they can use the models that a modeler has made.

3D modelers and render artists

As a 3D modeler that makes models for render artists, I see pure render artists like the final artists who take my creations to life. I am the creator of something that will become alive. They are the creators of something that IS alive, they make the miracle.

A plant, a human being, a building... I create static shapes, try to consciously make them as much versatile as possible, sometimes making them able to be animated, to trigger the imagination of others.

We are a chain. I enjoy creating the shape, the geometry, like a sculptor, architect, or a genetics scientist of the imaginary world.

Then comes the render artist, who like a magician, a story writer, a cinema director, a photographer, a painter, or all of this at the same time, creates a universe of endless stories and images.

It's like a sculptor that makes a statue, and then comes the painter or the photographer and captures, creates, or renders a beautiful piece.

And I feel so happy to see the many different works of art and imagination that render artists create, because for me it's like watching them go alive.

They give them life, sometimes discovering possibilities that I could never imagine.

Criticism against render art

Every new art has criticism. Some blatantly ignorant people are very critic towards render art. Even in digital art communities, they use to find some members that offend them, and try to go against a trend of the future.

Let's review these groups of people and see why they are wrong about render art.

On one side we have traditional artists who permanently try to make a simil between painting and render art. They are simply comparing things that have nothing to do.

From their ignorance, they use to think in render art as something that the computer makes automatically, and takes little time and poor skills. But we all know that a render artist has to deal with the many factors that the computer uses, and is far away from being automatic, unless you want to get real crap. The time it takes to master render art can be equal or more than mastering painting, and it takes lots of skills to learn to be a master in render art, much beyond the basics of painting.

Render art can't be simply mastered by practice, it is an intellectual exercise that requires acquiring knowledge to increase the quality of each one of the projects.

As a last word, traditional painters keep on comparing things like antagonic. Render art is not going to take the place of painting. It's really a nonsense to compare them. People don't compare ceramics, photography or sculpture with painting, and comparing render art and painting is the same absurd thing, because it is simply a different kind of art, not a modern version of an old art.

On the other side we have 3D modelers that argue against render art. I must be clear at this: these are not pro modelers. Most of them are crappy modelers with poor skills that are very proud just because they modeled something in high-poly techniques and never dealt with the many limitations and problems of having to model for games, virtual worlds or render applications, that is where most geometric problems easily arise.

They say that render artists are not artists because many of them didn't create the models they use. Well, this is plain stupid. Photographers or painters, for example, are not meant to be the fathers and mothers of the models they use. Nor anyone pretends that a photographer or a painter must be the creator of the world that they depict.

I think I can't say anything more. This criticism just shows zero brain activity.

Other criticism they have is that many render art pieces are crap. Well, I must say that most of the 3d modeling stuff is in fact crap, with few exceptions from excellent modelers. The amount of crap in 3d models and 3d renders is equal.

Conclusion

Render art is a relatively new kind of art but not new at all in the scope of digital art. It goes beyond the use of a computer to make similar things to what we can do in a traditional painting technique. It brings new skills into action.

The first render artists were modelers who produced the entire process: they modeled something, and then made the render.

Now, there are lots of other newer artists that use models made by a modeler and make a render using them. These are pure render artists.

As every new revolution in arts, this has a small number of people that criticize this technique, and a legion of people who just admire and appreciate what they do.

Render art is just that: art. A technique to create beauty. And the search for beauty is the only reason that is worth the effort in this nasty world.

Art is everything that creates beauty. And beauty is that which makes us feel in harmony, calm, complete, and in presence of something more perfect than ourselves, so we can only feel fascination.

Who can say render art is not art if it makes us feel this way?