So, you wanna be a 3D artist?

Introduction to 3D Art
3D art is created by manipulating polygon meshes and molding them into objects, characters, and scenes. 3D art is used in everything from print ads, to web sites, television, movies, video games, and beyond.

So, what does it take to be a 3D artist? Well, obviously, you must have an eye for art. Most people who begin learning how to do 3D have some kind of background in drawing and sketching. Indeed, it’s not unheard of for 3D studios to hire artists who have no experience in 3D art, based solely on the strength of a pencil drawing portfolio. Sculptors, who were previously limited to animatronics and claymation to enter the realm of live-action art, also tend to have an easy time making the transition to 3D.

Even if you don’t have formal art training that goes beyond the few classes you took in high school or college for the “easy A,” you can still do great work in 3D.

Useful Traits of a 3D Artist

1. Patience. 3D artists need to be patient. Many beginners unfairly compare themselves to established artists possessing years of experience. While it can be a great motivator, and valuable source of inspiration, to examine another’s work, don’t obsess; 3D art is a diverse subject, and requires a lot of dedication and practice to get acceptable results. Some say that 3D is like Go, the ancient game of strategy: it takes minutes to learn, but a lifetime to master.

2. Sharp. 3D attracts a different breed of artist. 3D artists tend to have a strong background in computers, compared to non-digital artists. Experience in computer programming is common in 3D circles, though certainly not required. 3D artists have an eye for detail, and are extremely resourceful and self-sufficient. Oftentimes, problems you encounter in 3D won’t have any analogy in traditional art, and may be no one around to help.

3. Hard work required. If you want something easy, pick up a pencil and paper and start doodling. 3D art is not nearly as immediate in regards to results. One can spend, hours, days, and even weeks perfecting a 3D model before ever moving onto texturing, animation, or final renders. 3D art is unique in that it can require a broad array of skills, from drawing to acting, to successfully bring together a finished piece. The payoff is that, entering the 21st century, 3D artist are perhaps the most sought-after creative workers.

4. Accepting of criticism. Eventually you’ll feel motivated to submit your art for review by other artists. 3D artists can nitpick like no one else in the world, so be prepared to have even the slightest errors pointed out to you in exacting detail – especially if you’re attempting to recreate anything remotely realistic. If you intend to work in a studio one day, your ability to accept criticism in stride will be crucial to the overall success of the team.

Types of 3D Art
As mentioned earlier, 3D is a broad subject, and a typical finished picture will be composed of several – perhaps dozens – of hours of work in an array of skills. What follows is an overview of the subjects you’ll need to learn to be a well-rounded 3D artist.

Modeling – No, you won’t be strutting your stuff on the catwalk anytime soon. At least, I hope you won’t. Modeling is the act of creating a 3D mesh, whether the end result is a bug-eyed alien or a teacup. How you get to that finished model depends largely on the methods that make the most sense to you.

Animation – Animation is the process of taking a 3D object and getting it to move. Animation comes in a few different flavors. There’s keyframe animation, where the animator manipulates the objects on a frame-by-frame basis, similar to old hand-drawn cartoons. Other methods of animation include placing objects on splines and setting them to follow the path of the curve, or importing motion capture data and applying it to a character rig. Yet another way to animate is to use your 3D application’s built-in physics engines, such as when your scene requires that objects fall.

Texturing – Texture artists make models look pretty. Without some kind of texture art, everything will be variations of solid colors. The most common and accurate way to create a texture for a model is to “unwrap” the mesh (flatten it out) and paint over it in an application such as Photoshop. The final texture is then “wrapped” over the original mesh again. Depending on how a model is created, each section may have its own texture, i.e., a separate texture for hands, one for arms, and one for the torso of a character, all made to blend together seamlessly.

Rendering – Rendering an image is typically the last step in any workflow pipeline, and is perhaps the most important part. It is a step often overlooked or glossed over by beginners, who are more focused on creating models and animating them. There are many aspects to creating a good final render of a scene, including attention to camera placement, lighting choices which may affect mood and shadows, reflections and transparency, and the handling of special effects, like fluids or gasses.

Everything else – There are many other aspects to creating a good final product. Scenes must be correctly staged, usually working from a pre-visualization rendering, or a quick pencil sketch. Character models must be properly rigged for animation, an art in and of itself. In many big 3D firms, there may be a handful of artists whose sole purpose is to rig up models created by modelers for the animators to work with. Finally, most major software packages allow extensions on the base program in the form of plugins. Programmers may build in features necessary to complete a particular scene or style of animation.

Your First Steps in 3D
The first step in becoming a great 3D artist is to understand the concepts of 3D modeling, and how to create a model that will eventually be useful for animation. Later, you will need to learn the principles of animation, and how to bring your skills together in a fully rendered scene.

3D art is a complex topic that can take months or years to learn. It is also an extremely rewarding venture, and one that is increasingly useful as art is increasingly created on computers. Digital art, and specifically 3D art, is still in its infancy when compared to traditional forms of art. The landscape is constantly changing, and, as a 3D artist, you will have to change with it. Perhaps, one day, your creations will mold the future of 3D art.

Let’s get started!

Below are a few schools that offer relevant 3D Art courses.

Digital Media Arts College

The BFA program in Animation focuses on the preparation of the artist to meet the challenges of tomorrow’s production workplace. Through a strong foundation in traditional visual and performance arts, students develop their digital content creation skills within a classical framework. During this program students study foundation art skills; including illustration, painting, photography, sculpture and film making, as the prerequisites to an equally diversified animation core curriculum.
Take classes in artist-designed labs and facilities. Learn from experts in digital artistry. Work with industry-standard animation tools, 3D software, and imaging technologies, and one of the only Motion Capture studios in the Southeast U.S. All at Digital Media Arts College

The Art Institute Online-this school offers courses that have been tailored to let the aspiring video game designer have loads of fun while making baby steps towards imaging and animation. With courses like Motion Capture, 3D Animation, Low-Polygon Modeling, Game Level Design and Character Development, among others, you are definitely on your way to completing a portfolio that will not just wow your would-be employers but your future market as well.

The Game Art & Design program concentrates on the artistic side of games – not computer programming. This unique program is your first step toward becoming an artist and designer in the multi-billion dollar game design industry.

Wanna be a 3D Animator?

Good 3D animators are the most highly sought-after artist in the world of 3D. There’s a reason for this: good animation is hard. Which is not to say that animation is hard to learn, but rather that making animation that is believable and entertaining requires a lot of skill and practice. Most people who become 3D artists rarely venture beyond modeling, and their forays into animation are inexpert at best, and cringe-worthy or unwatchable at worst.

This is because animation requires a completely different skillset than 3D modeling. In fact, these two aspects of 3D art are so different that 3D modelers are rarely animators, and animators can rarely model. Established studios usually hire dedicated animators to do the bulk of the animation. Modelers, if they have any input into the animation process at all, usually stick with rigging.

What you should take away is not that it’s impossible to be a good modeler and animator, but that these two subsets of 3D art require different ways of thinking and usually do not share techniques.

The Basics of 3D Animation
Animation in 3D applications usually happens in two primary ways. In major productions, both may be used.

1. Keyframe animation - Keyframe animation, or keyframing, is the most well-known and oldest style of animation. In fact, there are examples of frame-by-frame animation dating all the way back to 1600 B.C. Egypt! Modern keyframing techniques date back to the early cartoons created by animation pioneers like Winsor McCay and Walt Disney. What may surprise you is that keyframing techniques have not changed much since the early 1900′s – most of the basic principles still apply today. What has changed is that 3D software packages have made keyframing much easier to accomplish, meaning a broader scope of artists can learn how to animate.

Keyframing is essentially changing the shape, position, spacing, or timing of an object in successive frames, with major changes to the object being the key frames. In traditional 2D animation, each frame is usually drawn by hand. When frames are shown in succession, as in a movie, the slight differences in each frame of animation create the illusion of motion. 3D software packages make keyframe animation easier by interpolating, or “tweening,” the in-between frames. When animating a falling ball, for example, one key frame might be of the ball in mid-air, the next key frame may be the ball touching the ground, and the key frame after that would be the ball squishing down as the impact deforms its shape. All of the in-between frames are then calculated by the software automatically, including the squish at the bottom, making actual process of animation a matter of creating a few great key frames.

2. Motion capture – Motion capture, or mocap, was first used sparingly due to the limitations of the technology, but is seeing increased acceptance in everything from video game animation to CG effects in movies as the technique matures. Whereas keyframing is a precise, but slow animation method, motion capture offers an immediacy not found in traditional animation techniques. Mocap subjects, usually actors, are placed in a special suit containing sensors that record the motion of their limbs as they move. The data is then linked to the rig of a 3D character and translated into animation by the 3D software.

There are a couple downsides to motion capture which make it difficult for beginning 3D animators to learn. Firstly is the cost of mocap technology, which can run several thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. This means that most new 3D artists must learn to incorporate this animation style by importing mocap data into a project from a commercially available mocap library.

The other downside to mocap is that the end-result is often far from perfect; mocap animation usually requires clean-up from keyframe artists to make it look more realistic, especially if the character being animated does not have an anatomy or proportions similar to those of a human.

Learning 3D Animation
Animators must have a keen understanding of motion, movement, and acting. It may surprise you that the best animators take acting lessons – this helps them understand how their own body moves, and makes it easier to transfer that understanding into believable animation.

Keen observation may be the most important skill to develop as an animator. Observe life around you, and how things move. Make sketches, take notes, and try to give meaning to what you observe. Don’t study just animation. Learn from film, theatre, and even comic books to understand how poses and movement create moods and nonverbally communicate messages. New animators would do well to learn from the old masters of 20th century animation – Walt Disney, Art Babbitt, Grim Natwick, and Ken Anderson. The principles used to bring characters like Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny to life are still as relevant today as they were back then. Indeed, the first place a new 3D animator should look is to the old animation manuals of 2D artists. Consider picking up “The Animator’s Survival Kit” by Richard Williams from your local book dealer. While written as a book about hand-drawn animation, it contains everything you’ll need to know about good animation techniques in the 3D world.

The beginning 3D animator will want to focus on basic objects first: how to make a ball move from one place to another, and how to make it bounce. Later, as you explore character animation, you’ll need to understand what makes a good walk cycle, and how to cut down on “float,” a common problem for new animators where the character moves as if underwater. The software used is not important, at least in the beginning, as animation packages all have the same basic features.

3D animators must also have a good grasp of how models are rigged for animation, especially character animators. The “bones” used in a rig must be placed in a way similar to that of a living creature. Animators must also learn how to use inverse kinematic (IK) setups for their character rigs to reduce the amount of time spent keyframing.

Above all else, animators must practice their craft. Like modeling, animation requires time to learn, and even more time to master. Even experienced animators may create dozens, or even hundreds of test movies before getting a good final result. A good animator can make an average model come to life, while even the best model can be made to look amateurish by a poor animator. Persistence will pay off, as a skilled animator can very well be the most important team member to a production.

Below are a few schools that offer relevant 3D Animation courses.

Digital Media Arts College

The BFA program in Animation focuses on the preparation of the artist to meet the challenges of tomorrow’s production workplace. Through a strong foundation in traditional visual and performance arts, students develop their digital content creation skills within a classical framework. During this program students study foundation art skills; including illustration, painting, photography, sculpture and film making, as the prerequisites to an equally diversified animation core curriculum.
Take classes in artist-designed labs and facilities. Learn from experts in digital artistry. Work with industry-standard animation tools, 3D software, and imaging technologies, and one of the only Motion Capture studios in the Southeast U.S. All at Digital Media Arts College

The Art Institute Online-this school offers courses that have been tailored to let the aspiring video game designer have loads of fun while making baby steps towards imaging and animation. With courses like Motion Capture, 3D Animation, Low-Polygon Modeling, Game Level Design and Character Development, among others, you are definitely on your way to completing a portfolio that will not just wow your would-be employers but your future market as well.

The Game Art & Design program concentrates on the artistic side of games – not computer programming. This unique program is your first step toward becoming an artist and designer in the multi-billion dollar game design industry.