Becoming a better artist, part 3.

3D is not the real world. 

Too often I see people getting totally cought up on real world physical properties in surfaces and materials, referring to scientific texts, diagrams, numbers, curves and what not, believing that if you can learn this by heart, you’ll become a better 3D artist.

You probably won’t, because 3D is not the real world. Yes most renderers have PBR materials and more and more models are being made with scanned properties, but 3D is digital, it’s a replication, approximations, and most importantly, it’s art. You’ll always end up eyeballing everything anyway because it didn’t turn out like you wanted it to, so why be so picky in the first place? And in the end it’s up to you to be an artist, not a scientist.

You’re making beautiful, meaningful images, not scientifically correct images.

I have never cared very much about how things really work in a scientific level, correctness of values and so on, and I strongly believe that this is one of the reasons that I’ve come as far as I have. I just don’t let those things occupy my mind and hinder my way forward. Stopping to be so obsessed about real physical values and instead starting being an artist. If you rely 100% on that your values are correct, you’ll never really know how to control your image.

Ask the right questions

As mentioned in the beginning, we’re getting lots of questions about our work, how we do this and how we do that. What strikes me most though, is that the two absolutely, doubtlessly most frequently asked questions I get are:

1. What render settings did you use?
2. What camera settings did you use?

Let me explain why these questions bothers me. Hopefully you already know exactly why and it may seem very obvious. If not, this text is especially important for you. 

1. Render settings

Actually, we can use the camera & lens-story I wrote earlier here too.
You can replace “camera” with “render settings”, and “lens” with “scene contents”  (models, shaders, light, textures etc). No matter what render settings you use, if your scene contents are bad, your image will be bad.

The same goes the other way around, if you have really high quality models, shaders and light, the image will probably look pretty good no matter what render settings you have.

Render settings are not important enough that this would be the first thing coming to your mind when asking a question. The settings are certainly not what makes your image. It may affect image quality like noise, GI quality etc, and it may affect your render time. But it doesn’t make your image and you really should focus on the things that does, the scene contents. 

If the image look bad, no tweaking of render settings in the world will ever save it.

2. Camera settings

As architectural visualizers, we are basically virtual, digital photographers. That means that we must know how a camera works to be able to know how to use our render engine properly.

If you have the slightest idea of how a camera works, you also know that no camera settings (or tone mapping for that matter) works the same in two scenarios, meaning that asking someone about their camera settings is just… meaningless. Just as in real life, all scenes are unique and with different light temperature, intensity, etc, they need different settings. If you don’t know this, you better get yourself a camera and start shooting.

An archviz artist that doesn't understand photography simply is no archviz artist.

One of all times I got this question, I replied something absurd like “ fstop 100, shutter speed 0,01, ISO 9000 and pink color in white-balance”. The guy in question responded with his eternal gratefullness for my help. I never heard from him again, but I don’t think he ever understood my point.

If you are asking these questions, stop! :-)

The IKEA way

I thought I could add a little side note here as we're talking about cameras. One thing I took with me from IKEA is the way they approached 3D and personal development. 

If you have read wall street journals article (or any other who made their own articles of it) about the work we did at IKEA, you might already have read the story. To increase the overall experience of the workers, they started a program where 3D artists would change places with photographers. Basically, the 3D Artist would get to spend time in the studio following and being part of a photographer's work. In return, the photographers were sent to Chaos Group in Bulgaria to learn 3Ds Max and rendering and were then sitting in the artist's studio, doing 3D. Not permanently, but once every now and then to keep it fresh in their mind.

Wether this worked as effectively as it was meant to, there are different opinions about. But it was without a doubt a great idea to increase the overall experience and understanding of our industry. I as a 3D artist got lots of insights of how a photographer work and how they put their feeling into the images.

My conclusion? If you are a 3D Artist and doesn't do photography in your spare time, you really should start. It'll help you a LOT!

Don't underestimate our subconscious mind

Our brains has this extraordinary ability of noticing details. We may not see them, but we perceive them. It can be the dust on the light bulb, the crumbs on the worktop, or the clamped cable on the wall down behind the door. It’s definitely the scratches on the metal, the fingerprints on the glass and the splotchy reflections in the floor.

Don’t neglect the smallest details just because you don’t think anyone will notice them. Maybe they won’t, but it will still contribute a lot more than you think to the overall realism of the image.

Stop walking in your heroes’ footsteps

Coming back to the story about the corona dude asking about how to make Bertrand’s images, this is really where I want to get my point across. 

As everyone else, I’ve always had Bertrand Benoit as a personal role model. I’ve studied his work, read all blog posts, scavanging every source I could find in my search for his “magic trick”. I tried to replicate his work, I bought his scenes in the belief that I would be able to reverse engineer them. Of course, time after time I failed. I never reached his quality and I never stopped being impressed by the“magictrick” he was using.

So one day I got tired of it. I was too exausted to keep trying to beat him and I simply realized that whatever I was doing wasn’t workingand I’ll never get better. So I decided not to chase it anymore, to just unwillingly settle where I was and keep producing crappy 3D. Simply, I gave up on myself and my development.

And, my friends, that was where it all changed. I suddenly noticed that my personal development sky-rocketed. Instead of doing what somebody else was doing, I started doing things based on my own curiosity and needs. I tried new renderers and techniques, not because my heroes used them, but because I just felt like it. I was forced to analyse my own problems and eventually found my own solutions. And the workflow I found to be working for me, turned out to be very different from what my heroes use. 

That made me realize that we are all unique people with our own way of thinking and working, and we all need our own workflows, tools and ideas. This is the reason to why I left my emplyment at IKEA, and it’s why I’ve turned down job offers from high profile companies with salaries I could only dream of a few years earlier. It’s why the only reasonable thing for me was to work for myself, to be self employed. Because when working for others,  I would be forced to work with their tools, in their workflow, with their management and routines, and that simply doesn’t fit me. Being forced to work according to someone else's rules, just kills your artistry. It's like working with your hands tied behind your back.

I wish I could tell you exactly what I did differently but I can’t because I simply don’t know. As the old saying goes, “thereare as many painting techniques as there are painters”, and this applies very well to our industry as well.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t follow your role models and that shouldn’t read blogs etc, you definitely should. But you should follow them for inspiration, and not for trying to do what they do.

Simply stop trying so hard to become someone else, and instead start becoming a better version of yourself and your own artist.