blender (re)boot camp

So I spent the last 3 days trying to re-learn my entire pipeline in Blender… as some of you may know, I understand basic things like importing models off the internet, texturing, lighting, and animating them for the job I did in late November that recklessly tipped me off the psychological edge of “mental stability”. Well! I’m back in 3D after a traumatizing experience and took the time to really take a step back and evaluate who I am as a 3D artist. 

Now why would I need to do that when I clearly have an identity on the internet well... they don't tell you this but when you do 218098 corporate jobs, you basically become the lapdog of the art/cd director. They essentially tell you what they want and you're really being hired to execute their selected style. Dom and I do really great lowpoly stylized renders for Happy99 but none of these truly flex the technical skills I've amassed over the 2-3 years I've spent doing 3D professionally. When I look at my paintings/illustrations I see a style that I've sharpened like a blade over the past 20 years. However, when I look at my 3D work, I don't see that. It's kinda all over the place. So let me give you some perspective (enter opinions:)

I think in terms of identity, a lot of 3D artists are so focused on technical skill (I mean the ENTIRE CRAFT requires technical knowledge so I can’t blame them) but the whole idea that 3D inherently means sci-fi hurts my brain. Dom and I worked with a friend @s_a_mayer (who is, in my mind, a hyper intelligent and skilled 3D artist) who would discuss this subject with us in early 2019. The social media 3D scene (look up #c4d or any relevant hashtag) just kinda dumps science fiction DAZ default humanoids with shiny plastic neon colors on you as a form of art. While fun, I think it’s kinda limiting to assume all 3D must take the shape of futurism.

Here’s a list of free non-shiny non-futuristic ideas I thought of recently to help illustrate how more 3D artists can push their craft further with other mediums already well-loved with amazing communities:

3D composited with 2D illustrations

3D knitting and crocheted crafts

3D plush characters

3D pottery and ceramics

3D fairy core sounds kinda cute to me idk like big vegetation, whimsical forests

3D cottage core??? Am I getting too crazy here or is this genius

3D painterly aesthetic ok stay with me here… but what if the textures literally looked like thick brush strokes like gouache or oil?

3D rollerskating? Wow I actually should make a character on wheels that would be nuts &&& Ok i know i did that one air gear fang regalia flip ages ago but now that I know how to ANIMATE??? It would slay.

Like everyone’s done the virtual idol, the hyper sexualized non-binary orgys, the 80s neon pastel colorways, etc! Don’t be shy of trying new aesthetics or sampling from a few different ones you like!

I think being an artist is 2 parts: execution and swag. You can draw like hyper realistic photograph pencil drawings with perfect technical ability but that’s kinda swag-less if you think about it. Just take a photograph. Then there’s people who draw the most insane psychedelic mix of genres and styles and you really wish you could get in their head or have their experiences to understand the moodboard but it’s kinda just slapped together. Maybe you’re not feeling the line quality or the color scheme and it feels clearly guesswork. There’s no technical ability to admire so the execution is not really there. Again, this is my PERSONAL OPINION but my favorite artists are people who have both and these folks tend to be much older. They’ve practiced and studied so they exhibit skills of a desirable technical ability, aka their execution of the idea is impeccable. They did not miss. In addition, the swag is eternal. They also did not miss, bc it is a culmination of life experiences, TASTE, and years of trying different shit to hone in on a style.

SO. where does that leave me you ask?

I did what every artist should be doing, I took some time to research. I cross referenced between some books I’ve collected and really dug into old games. I know I like anime and video games so I just started there and looked into artists I like. I focused a lot on Range Murata, a phenomenal artist who I’ve worshiped for years. This guy doesn’t do any 3D but the way he treats his characters as part of this weird steam-punk art deco ALMOST futuristic world but not quite sorayama-level-shiny is genius. It puts his work miles apart from other 2D illustrators in Japan.

I put together a really bad mood board of what I was going for that I’m sharing knowing that if I was any younger and any more insecure I would not do this but I get it I don’t own any ideas… and that’s what I’m here to do anyway, to share ideas!!!

There’s honestly too many artists on here to fully cover but there’s a lot of love for Polygons, a somewhat ambiguous group in the Y2K 2000s era that made this virtual idol (top right). I covered them as an artist in a previous reference dump. There’s resin figures on here that are made from kits in the late 90s-early 2000s that are nearly impossible to find for purchase. The artists made them and basically it was never put into production and most are original characters. Iconic girls from Dead or Alive… Space Channel 5, Tatsuya Kerada in the top left, and other random mumbojumbo that I’ll cover in more depth another time.

A ton of ppl asked me when I posted a pic of my desk what book I have open & were upset I didn’t answer?? As usual, YALL already know the answer bc I gave a book review of it months ago. It’s Digital Beauties by Julius Weidemann. Thankful again for patreon for giving me a place to share my research and thoughts. Love y’all.

I’m going for the PS2 mid-poly semi-glossy 3D baddie of my dreams. I kinda struggled bc maybe I started off on the wrong foot. I shall explain:

I used a DAZ basic figure (bc I didn’t want to rig my own character in blender, its scary lol) and morphed it in z-Brush (made the eyes and head huge, snatched the waist, made the nose more anime?), then imported it back into DAZ to apply the morph. Then I used the DAZ to Blender Bridge and imported the morphed girl rig and all into Blender and started editing textures. I also switched from Cycles to Eevee at this point when I realized that it looked too photoreal and I was going for PS2 fun. I put some stars in her eyes to try and make her more cartoon-y and airbrushed all the textures with a brush in Photoshop to flatten out all the pores and details. Then I decided damn she needs hair, exported a basic store-bought hair from DAZ as an OBJ and dropped it in there, scaled it up to fit Ms. BigHead, and painfully took 2 hours editing textures so it would do what hair does. I then proceeded to spend the next 24 hours learning how to use the sculpt tools and make her a hat. I also went into Marvelous Designer and opened a random old clothing file I made (that’s absolutely awful in terms of how bad the pattern is) and applied it to the model. Exported it as OBJ and dropped it back into blender. Learned how to parent the clothes to the rig using automatic weights but when I tried to weight map the mesh to fix a few weird deformations, the process was so confusing and scary I quit right away. Not proud of that but HEY I didn’t say I was good at Blender yet.

Posed her in a silly pose and hit render.

Okay so the REASON why I think I did this all wrong is because perhaps I should have started from scratch instead of using DAZ. I did it this way because I was just really overwhelmed with the idea of rigging it myself and not getting good facial movements (the rest of the body is easy to rig using Rigify). Especially bc I was using a foreign program too. My results are like… close. I think I’ve gotten far enough from the default DAZ look but it’s far from what I want. I’m mid-level happy.

I’m going to drop a video hopefully tomorrow where I speed run through the process above. I was an idiot and did not record but lucky for you I love repeating processes to further burn them into my memory and I think it’s worth doing again for practice’s sake. For the record I've already repeated the process once with a second character (last slide) but am still not happy so you shall see a 3rd soon. 

I have so much to say and will break it up into 2-3 more posts this week!