6 Misconceptions in 3D

Cymae's been doing 3D for a long while, and she spends a lot of time critiquing people's work. It's easy to get caught up in misconceptions and ideas about 3D which might hinder your ability to make your art even better!

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1. Post-work is not a dirty word

A lot of people have this idea in their heads that editing an image in Photoshop after you render it, or combining different things you've rendered separately together is somehow deceitful and wrong, but it's not.

Post-work just makes your 3D even better! It's a lot faster to fix a small lighting bug in Photoshop than edit it painstakingly in your 3D program, and often the results are just as good!

2. Pre-made models are not cheating (and cheating is OK)

There seems to be this rift between people that create their own models, and people that use premade stock, such as Daz, Poser, etc, and this idea that because they are doing less work they are somehow cheating.

Many successful 3D artists create generic characters, and then edit them when they do an artwork. It's rare you will re-model a character from scratch every time you want to do a render.

If there's something you can do to make your life easier, any shortcut or cheat you can use, it's perfectly acceptable to do so. There's nothing wrong with cutting corners as long as your art doesn't suffer (and you're not breaking any laws).

3. You don't make better art when you 'wing it'

A lot of people just go for it with their artwork rather than take the time to plan and decide what they want to do. It's important to gather up lots of reference pictures and materials so you have a clear idea of what you need to achieve before you start and realise it's not working.

No professional 3D artist just pulls stuff from their head. They will have dozens of images or more which they can refer to for their work. It's part of why their work looks 'professional'!

4. Long render times are not a good thing

There's this odd sort of pride that is sometimes taken about long render times, like the longer it takes the more skilful the piece must be.

When you're setting up a render, try to think about exactly what you need to achieve, and use the minimum number of lights and lowest render settings possible to achieve this. Key areas you can usually speed things up with virtually no quality drop are:

• Decreasing GI photons
• Reducing reflections and refraction depth
• Decreasing shadow map size and resolution
• Removing light links where they're not needed
• Reducing your render size to only as large as you actually need
• Using Passes to render out faster pieces and then combine them in Photoshop (or something)

Feel free to ask if you don't understand some of these. Never be afraid to ask about or look up things you don't understand!

5. More polygons do not make you better at 3D

Things that will always be far away from the camera you are rendering from should always be much less detailed and lower poly than things very close to the camera. Use only as many polygons as you need to achieve your purpose. Use more, and your scene will slow down and be harder to UV and texture, Use less and it will look blocky and unfinished.

6. The program does not make the artist

in 3D, a mind-set exists where a lot of stock is placed on the software someone's using. You can make amazing pictures in the worst 3D program, and terrible pictures in the best. It's important to pick a program which you can get help, advice and support with while you're learning.

Once you understand WHAT something does, it's not too hard to swap to a different program and learn HOW to do it in that. If you spread yourself too thin, the concentration you should be spending learning about 3D, you will be spending learning about lots of interfaces and keyboard shortcuts.

I hope that was helpful to you all. Comments, suggestions and questions are highly encouraged in the comments section!

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