Reward Post - How to make your own 3D art (Patreon)

This is a 'reward post' for hitting $100 per month.  Obviously I won't see any of that cash until you all get billed on Feb 1st, and so I hope you all do the decent thing and stay with me until then... and afterwards.

I didn't think I would reach this point so soon, within the first week, but I am writing this already.  So, here we go!  

Introduction

It's really not hard or expensive to get started in 3D art, which is maybe why it has such a poor reputation - there is a lot of shockingly bad stuff posted online, which really doesn't help us.  However, the fact that you subscribe to my page shows that you have good taste, and probably cool ideas of your own, so the chance of you producing some good 3D art is pretty high. Therefore I want to give you every chance to try it and get hooked.

This guide can only really be an overview of the process and the steps involved.  It's not going to explain in detail each step, because each one needs a guide of its own and your own experience to be done well.  But I would suggest that, for each step, there is a useful guide on YouTube somewhere. The key is just understanding how it all fits together, and how you go from the ideas you have in your head to an actual 3D picture in front of you.

The 3D art-making process in 10 steps

OK so here it is, literally step by step.  I will write an explanatory paragraph for each part below then, if you do try it, and YouTube really doesn't help, you can drop me a note and I can try to help.

To make your own 3D art...

1) Choose and install your 3D art software

2) Download (i.e. buy) 3D content and install to your library

3) Create a scene

4) Load 3D models into the scene

5) Pose and arrange the models

6) Position the camera

7) Add lights

8) Render!

9) Make adjustments then render again

10) Postwork

The 10 steps explained

Choose and install your 3D art software - there are many 3d packages you can use with various capabilities, strengths and weaknesses, including such things as 3DS Max and Carrara.  But if people are going to be the main subject of your pictures, and you lack training to create your own content, then it quickly comes down to a choice of Poser or Daz Studio. Here are the links, http://my.smithmicro.com/poser-pro-11.html  and http://daz3d.com/daz_studio  so you can compare them....  Oh wait, Poser 11 is $349.00 and Daz Studio 4,9 is free?  These deadly rivals have totally different business models. Poser provides you a lot of 3D models bundled with the software.  Daz3d let you have their program for nothing, but then you need to buy the models from the store on their website.  But let's worry about that later: just download Daz Studio now.  As a footnote, I still use Daz Studio 3, for my own reasons. I cannot therefore give technical support on DS4 even if I wanted to.  So please don't ask.

Download (i.e. buy) 3D content and install to your library - wait, you mean I need to spend actual money? Ultimately, yes, but don't worry about that NOW. Luckily for you, Daz3d know the reason that most people want Daz Studio and therefore provide you with a basic version of the Genesis 3 female bundled with DS4, that you can load in and play around with - and some clothes too.  This is enough for you to see whether the whole thing is your cup of tea. But if you want to make pictures of anything more you're going to need models, models, models. Basically, anything you want in your scene, from a tea cup to a tazer, someone has made already. This includes human figures, morphs (alterations to the figures that individualise them), hair, clothes, props, poses... you name it.  There are two main places to obtain content: http://www.daz3d.com/shop/ and https://www.renderosity.com/ - go take a look, and be amazed.  When you have put some things in your basket, paid and downloaded the stuff, you will need to install it into your Daz content library so you can use it.  This is normally straighforward but with older content made for Poser this can be occasionally difficult - YouTube tutorial videos exist for this.

Create a scene - everything in the world of 3D art takes place in a scene.  For this reason, when you open Daz Studio the first thing it does automatically is create a blank new scene for you.  Scenes can be saved and reloaded.  When you save a scene, it saves all the content, lights, cameras and settings so you can reload them another day exactly as before.  This is good but beware that these save files can be BIG and will fill up a normal size HDD quickly. This is why it's advisable to install your 3D software and content to a drive where you have a lot of space.  I recommend nothing less than 200GB free, or you're going to regret it further down the road.  One quick tip - if you spend a lot of time making a character out of a model, textures, morphs, hair, clothes etc, then save him on his own as a scene and keep that as a master copy. You can then load his scene any time into an existing scene using the Merge Scenes option... meaning that you don't have to make him/her again and again each time.

Load 3D models into the scene - once you have your idea for the scene you will need to load in the necessary content from your library.  This is going to be a mixture of characters, props and locations.  Making your characters is a sub process in itself.  As above, make each one in their own scene first then you can merge them into your main scene as required. When making a character you will need to use a base figure. You have a choice between using the modern Daz-specific ones (the Genesis models) and the older Poser/Daz generic ones (Michael 4 and Victoria 4). The Genesis models are technically superior and, debateably, more realistic.  However the library of content for them (clothes, hair) is smaller than the older Generation 4 models, who have been out for roughly ten years and have tens of thousands of compatible clothing and hair models.  Additonally, both Victoria 4 and Michael 4 have been modded quite heavily and had a lot of their weaknesses fixed.  Just for info, all the men and women appearing in my artwork are made with Michael 4 and Victoria 4 - including Amanda old and new. 

Pose and arrange the models - this is what Poser and Daz Studio do best in theory: help you to pose figures.  You will need to move stuff around in your scene using the Translate tool - each thing has X,Y and Z co-ordinates in 3D space.  This is where you realise this stuff isn't intelligent or self-aware. People won't stand on floors unless you put their feet there. There isn't any gravity. Two things can occupy the same space. Basically the laws of physics don't apply, and this bit can initially feel overwhelming. Just moving the view so you can see what you're doing can be fiddly. Stay calm. The key to this part is using the view correctly. Learn the difference between moving the Perspective View and the Camera itself. Use the Top, Bottom, Front, Back, Left and Right views to help you line things up. This is like learning to drive a car... stick with it. Watch YouTube videos. Soon you will be doing it without thinking.

Position the camera - 3D art and photography have a lot in common. And one thing that surprises people is that the camera is itself a 'thing' in the scene... an actual object.  Indeed you can add several cameras in. That's one of the joys of working in 3D - the same scene can be viewed from multiple angles. The main thing that you do with your camera is look through it and take your picture (render). The reason for adding a camera to the scene is that you can leave it in position and then go use the Perspective View (which is like a camera, but not a thing) to move around the scene making changes - then at any moment return to looking through your camera where it was before. This sounds weird, but it does make sense and it does work. And the camera in your scene can do the things a real camera can do - zoom in and out (wide), focus near and far (if you turn on depth of field).  A lot of these functions come into play when you get more advanced.  Early on, you'll just want to position your camera so that you can see the objects you posed earlier. Different types of shot - establishing shot, top-shot, close-up, extreme close-up - well these are the 'art' bit.  All I will say is that you can spot noob 3D art simply because new artists just plonk a camera in the scene giving a pulled out shot showing full bodies of all their stiffly-posed characters, which is probably a good thing as their faces are expressionless anyway.... all I am saying is, try to be better than that please. Use the camera like a real photographer would.

Add lights - what do you mean add lights? I can see things in my scene just fine! Oh dear. I need to explain. What you're looking at is called preview lighting. This is some pretend light to help you see what you're doing in the scene while you load and pose models.  It isn't real light, it isn't a 'thing' in the scene. When you render, that light won't be there. Sure, if you render now, your scene won't be pitch black. That's because Daz Studio will automatically add something called a headlamp to any scene you render without an actual light in it. About a third to half of the more dreadful 3D pics I see posted online are rendered with that headlamp only. Please, don't do this and upload it - it looks awful.  Add a light or two to your scene. Lights come in three types: Distant Lights (like the sun, they light up the whole scene from one direction), Spot Lights (like a flashlight, they illuminate a cone) and Point Lights (like a bulb or candle, light goes outward 360 degrees from a single point). You can make these lights in all sorts of brightness and colours but the key thing is that you turn shadows on for each of your lights.  By default, shadows are off, and if you don't turn them on, your pictures will look unrealistic and bad - sure, it renders fast without shadows and slow with shadows. But don't even think about not using shadows please. There are two main methods for generating shadows (a setting you select in each light) - these are Deep Shadow Map and Raytraced.  Both create slightly different looking shadows that will suit different situations and tastes.

Render! - I remember when I started off with Daz Studio six years ago, it took me about three days to notice the Render button and work out what it was for.  I thought that by loading and posing models I was kind of making 3D art somehow.... no.  What the Render button does is it turns your scene into a picture. This is the magic bit: you'll need to be looking through one of your cameras in the scene, with everything arranged and posed how you want, with all your lights in place (with shadows turned on) then BANG! hit Render and it starts making a picture. This process starts in another window and can take anything from a few seconds to hours. Things that make it take longer are generally raytraced lights with complex objects like hair: doing realistic shadows for that makes your processor work hard.  Rendering will make the actual 3D bit come to life and create a picture of your scene, seen through the camera, lit by the lights that you added.  You will be surprised how different things look rendered compared to how they did in the preview lighting before.  You also won't be able to do anything else while it's rendering so this may be time to leave your computer.... no, I don't mean now! You can save the final output render as a .png or .jpg - note that saving the render is not the same as saving the scene.  You can render a scene as many times as you like, which takes me to....

Make adjustments then render again - in other words, go back to (4). That's right: after rendering you will, I hope, think 'that doesn't look how I wanted, maybe if I just move that hand/light/teacup....' and then you will go back, make adjustments and re-render.... as many times as you like.  Don't think, 'I have rendered it now, not really happy but I guess that's my picture'. I often see pictures rendered on super fancy settings in iRay, that look shiny and 'wow' but have really bad things wrong with them: poor composition or an unnatural pose.  But you can see the poor artist didn't want to sit through the three hour render again... he wanted his computer back, so he just uploaded the flawed image.  Well, I say keep going until you're happy, because this is one difference between a 3D artist and someone who just likes messing around with 3D software. It's an iterative process. And the key issue here is how different things look rendered compared to under the preview lighting: often with shadows falling where they weren't expected. Now, if your render took 3 hours, you may not be up for tweaking, but you can reduce your render times drastically by temporarily making invisible certain complex items, like hair, while you do preview renders, then adding these items back in when everything else is satisfactory.  

Postwork - you thought you were finished? Not yet: post work is a process all in itself.  You'll need something like Photoshop or Gimp for this. Post work can be anything from changing brightness/contrast or colour balance of an image, to 'fixing' things that came out of Daz looking weird, to adding effects and/or really going to town on post-processing.  When I started in Daz it was several months before I started Photoshopping my images.  Dunno why, but initially I was so amazed by what was coming out of Daz I didn't think it could get any better.  Now I look back at the first 20-30 things I uploaded and wince. These days it's not uncommon for me to spend more time on the Photoshop bit than I do in Daz Studio - but that's just cause I like it.  I keep going at an image until I can't see anything more to fix or improve.  That's what I would urge you to aim for.  Don't settle for second best.  However, when you're starting out, don't get too worried about this bit. When I look at 3D art uploaded on dA, I can see that about 80% of it hasn't been postworked at all.  I have just added this section at the end so you know now, it's there and it's important eventually. IF this tutorial goes down well and I get enough requests, I may do a guide to postwork as a follow up based on hitting a target number of patrons or monthly income.

And finally

I really hope that this guide for my Patrons (I love you guys! xxxx) will be useful, treasured even by some... I would never post anything like this on deviantART as it would probably upset some people and also get me 50 notes asking for help.  But you Patrons are different.  You must like me a bit at least, if you are paying.  So I would like you to join in and have even just a fraction of the fun I have had.  In the last year I've managed to get a couple of long time fans started from scratch in 3D art, and I would encourage you to visit their pages: http://perilsofdawn.deviantart.com/ and http://ultimate-clash.deviantart.com/ 

Last of all, I am going to give you a trade secret.  The right hand is for the mouse.  The left hand is for....what?  Well, there's only two keys that matter on your keyboard: CTRL and Z. This is the best and most powerful thing about digital art - the Undo button.  Anything you don't like, just undo it and try again.  Keep going until you get it right!  

Comments and questions are welcome.  Good luck and thanks for reading!