Great video. Thanks, guys! I used to have a friend of mine who was academically trained(old school) and was so good at drawing, painting, composition,..etc. So this guy started learning Maya - I was helping him with the software, and he was teaching me drawing. Believe me or not he knew so little of the software but his renders were so good. He used to build stuff from simple primitives and his modeling skills were so basic - he would put a light here and another there and his renders used to come out really pleasant to look at. All this showed me how important the art fundamentals are...
I remembered a joke from a Disney Zbrush summit, but also a great advice: "Doctor, do I have to brush every tooth? No, just the ones that you want to keep". Same, "Do I have to reference everything? - No, just what you want to look good."
This is such a complex subject, but when you train your eye the whole world is different. After watching some Schoolism courses I learned a lot about techniques to measure with angles/lines/shapes, color relationships and my personal favorite: VALUES; I really feel like my drawing skills rocketed up a lot! Now I even go out and I'm able to perceive the colors and appreciate the volume and shape that I never noticed before.
Hands down the best channel, i'm studying in an art institute here in my country learning maya and zbrush ,your channel is a plus very helpful , thank you so much for sharing your professional knowledge :D!
I used to be one of those people: I used to think using references was cheating. My art didn't improve for a long time. After taking some art classes recently as part of my animation program, especially life drawing, my artwork seriously improved at the end because the classes were so focused on observing the subject. Super helpful and I'm glad I got out of that mindset!
One of the best videos you guys have done in my opinion, and I would love to see more of these fundamentals type videos. No matter how far you go in any art discipline, continuing the study of fundamentals is a lot more important to creating successful art than knowing the ins-and-outs of every software package.
Hi guys thank you for the great videos. I wanted to bring up a point that in the 30 years of working in the graphic arts and fine art field I hear a lot of these young artist always saying " oh but that's cheating" well if you are going into the commercial art field start getting used to it because it's a big fish eat little fish business and the big fish will use reference and other techniques to get the job done for his clients. In commercial art the clients don't care whether you cheated or not they just want you to get the job done right and to their specifications. Now in the other hand if you are entering a fine art competition then everything has to be your original including the reference photos. Just a little advice from an old timer :-)
Really enjoying the backlog of these podcast style videos. Much food for thought. Love it when UA-cam suggest a channel I might never have found otherwise.
U made me feelmuch much better and motivated in CG, Thank u soo soo much for Sharing tutorials for CG Students like me. The most important thing that u have is this: u r two persons and make it much much funnier and Friendly and Really interesting to listen to u ...
I think that weird lion like reference was actually a liliger, basically a second generation hybrid between a lion and a ligress (which is hybrid of a male lion with a female tiger)
I'm trying to make some realistic grapes right now and watching this video I feel so stup** about not having one single reference on screen, then I googled some grapes photos and realized how wrong I was. And belive me, here in Italy you can see shi* tons of grapes, memory is not enough.
There you go! This is one of the most common issues we've seen. "Hmm these apples arent looking so good.." - Have you tried, you know, looking at apples? And then the artists face palms harder than ever before. Glad it helped! /Henning
I think it's something that beginning artist all struggle with, I still have to remind myself at times. Personally, I always had this (really bad) idea, that if I was a "Really good" artist, I wouldn't need reference, I could just do it off memory. Which is just the silliest thing ever. All artist use reference in some sort of way, and really at the end of the day it's just more work to do it off memory.
worked for engineering firm for a few years. ended up looking at things while walking around in life thinking how to model things... now im trying to do organics, think i get better every time i take a break purely because of all art i look at.
The thing is ... sometimes you are observing something, and then when you try to visualize how it would look if you drew it and you're like "Nobody would believe this is how it actually looks like in real life and everyone would thought that I don't know how it actually looks like."
Experience with measuring what you draw-from life or a photo, teaches us that we are highly susceptible to accidentally enlarging out of proportion whatever we have as the object of our focus. This may partially derive from the difference between the details of what our eyes are able to see, and what we are able to draw with our materials. Measuring provides instant feedback and helps us learn to see the errors in observation. Blind contour drawing is also helpful because it teaches us to look at our subject more than our drawing, and is actual practice in bringing into alignment the hand and eyes. We can tell someone how to ride a bike, and offer them encouragement to learn. Or we can actually provide a bike for practice-what you actually came here for 😉
I think a good trick for getting more belivable stuff is to both make fake stuff, like get a toy pistol at a store, and do your best to make it look real, spray painting, dry brushing it, this way you have real lights and reflections and the only think keeping your toy gun from looking real is the its texture, and the stroy behind that, the other thing is to look at cosplayers, they are the KING of making something belivable, often with foam and EVA, that means that the texture/painting is responsible for like 90% of how something looks, do these both, or atleast the cosplay one and your stuff will look a lot better, doing it for real/ watching cosplay content cuts down the technical aspect of the computer it self, we all had that: oh damn i don't have this exact material i'll have to make it or fake it, thats a bit of time you toss out. So yeah, do ALL that these guys are saying they know what they are talking about, and maybe try to do what i said as well, remember, nothing looks as real as the real world.
I noticed that the structural element is observed better from the bigger picture and the story element from the details. Should we e observe both or there is always time to work later on the story?
I love everything you guys do and how you make training easy even for us who don't have time and are working most of the time. I would have a request can we have some animation Maya training, Chara ter animation, dialogue animation, prop interaction, camera animation and character to character interaction
After all these videos listening to you guys, the invention of the term Zbrush cowboy is priceless. For real, great term. Hardline reality check terminology. Made me realize that I am a Zbrush wannabe cowboy and the steps it will take to reach that goal. :D
Actually they would pretty much just throw in rocks and concrete in the middle, because that literally just servers as structural integrity and doesnt need to be aligned and look good like the outside.
people who boast about not using a reference or it took me like 30 minutes to do this complicated artwork, are the ones bullshitting the most by trying to put you down and pretending like they are this god tier person its pathetic.
Weirdly enough, I think that first reference of a lion is actually a liger! (A mix between a lion and a tiger) That’s probably why it looks kinda weird
My problem with their first example is that it only encompasses realistic renderings. Most of it isn't realistic, it's highly represential, so you don't need to have that level of detail. At that point you might as well just megascan the damn thing (if possible) and clean it up. At some point you can just get an ai to do this
I'm wanting to do this for a living, it's going to take years for me to get there, so wondering if there's basic drawing exercises so I can build strong basics in this industry
Regarding Mad Max, I bet its because George Miller had this universe and movie in mind for sooo long that he came up with all these little details. And also because of all the creative crew he probably surrounded himself with.
15:08 funny thing is, if I had seen this as a 3D render, I would judge it as terrible, like "why the hell the dude inflated all the rocks? That`s far from reallity" Crazy shit
I challange you to draw prespectice boxes 1 2 and 3 point Atleast 10 of each filling up the pag in 1 and a half hour with only 2-3 errors if you win buy yourself a chocolate fudge with vanilla icecream drink hot water after wards
Guys, can you give examples of sculpts that are industry level? I mean like worth making a portfolio of? I am still learning and I wonder when does it make sense to show the work.
For sure! Check out some of these guys: instagram.com/lukestarkie/?hl=en instagram.com/klausskovbo/?hl=en instagram.com/ranmanolov/?hl=en www.artstation.com/kubisi
My 1 comment about that Inca Wall that "must have been made by aliens cuz it was so perfect" is this. If stupid people today can make masterpieces sitting on their couch, on their phones, eating a ham sandwich, multi-tasking a notepad for poetry and porn on their browser, than the Incas are completely within the realm of possibilities.
13:40 "There's so much variation; you can't do it with automatisation" *cough*Substance Designer*cough* which is still down to observation skill of the artist.
Thats our point though, if you just slap a designer material on it, thats enough to get you up to a certain point, but you need to observe specific real world objects to get all the way there.
Hey guys. I have a question, do you or anyone know weather it's possible to get the free student licenses from substance, Maya or other programs if you're still at school. Or do you actually have to be at a proper university? I'm only 17 and I'll be in school for another 2 years and I don't have the money to buy all these programs. I've been using blender for 4 years at least but I'm at a point where I can't learn proper texturing and industry standard workflows with blender.
2:34 fuck, man, I went to some random website to check my credit score, and when they asked what MY OWN eye color was according to my driver's license I had to check!
Sure. But I reckon you'd still be looking at parts of real guns for reference, like the grip, trigger, bolt, magazine, hammers, slide, etc. Unless you're designing a completely alien type of gun with none of those features.
I find myself trying to figure out topology on random objects in real life all the time. I have a Vive sitting on my desk atm and all the circular insets on it's rounded front makes me cringe. :>
So i just saw the Fish coment and depends on the fish, just take alook at Guppys, the female are fat, and more gray'ish, and the males are more colourfull, smaller and longer tails. Yes, i am eating up your videos hahahhaaha
You guys not knowing a lot about guns is understandable since you're from Europe. But people from America are probably cringing on your misidentification of gun parts XD. What you call "scopes" are not really scopes, they're just gun sights. And the part of the revolver which holds the bullets is called the "cylinder".
Great video. But sorry, Mad Max is a terrible movie. Yes, it has great details and a lot of thought was put into the micro scale, but fails terribly from a macro story-telling POV.
Great video. Thanks, guys!
I used to have a friend of mine who was academically trained(old school) and was so good at drawing, painting, composition,..etc. So this guy started learning Maya - I was helping him with the software, and he was teaching me drawing. Believe me or not he knew so little of the software but his renders were so good. He used to build stuff from simple primitives and his modeling skills were so basic - he would put a light here and another there and his renders used to come out really pleasant to look at. All this showed me how important the art fundamentals are...
I love to see the work of your friend
Any link to your friend's renders?
I remembered a joke from a Disney Zbrush summit, but also a great advice: "Doctor, do I have to brush every tooth? No, just the ones that you want to keep". Same, "Do I have to reference everything? - No, just what you want to look good."
fricking genius metaphor
Lol this is priceless
Haha nice!
This is such a complex subject, but when you train your eye the whole world is different. After watching some Schoolism courses I learned a lot about techniques to measure with angles/lines/shapes, color relationships and my personal favorite: VALUES; I really feel like my drawing skills rocketed up a lot!
Now I even go out and I'm able to perceive the colors and appreciate the volume and shape that I never noticed before.
Schoolism uh? I'll have to look it up! thank you!
Which courses in Schoolism?
this channel is better than netflix and chilling, always sad when I hear "thank you guys for watching" wish i could just binge watch.
haha, I should just cancel my netflix, hulu, amazon prime, and hbonow. just listen to these guys on repeat and absorb everything via osmosis xD
Completely agree
@@alexandruachim743 L
you know netflix and chilling is sex right?
Most of their advices are for established artists, not for beginners though.
Hands down the best channel, i'm studying in an art institute here in my country learning maya and zbrush ,your channel is a plus very helpful , thank you so much for sharing your professional knowledge :D!
Amazing :D Thank you so much! We really appreciate hearing that.
I used to be one of those people: I used to think using references was cheating. My art didn't improve for a long time. After taking some art classes recently as part of my animation program, especially life drawing, my artwork seriously improved at the end because the classes were so focused on observing the subject. Super helpful and I'm glad I got out of that mindset!
One of the best videos you guys have done in my opinion, and I would love to see more of these fundamentals type videos. No matter how far you go in any art discipline, continuing the study of fundamentals is a lot more important to creating successful art than knowing the ins-and-outs of every software package.
Thanks a lot! Really appreciate it. I'd love to do more videos like this :) You can always improve the fundamentals.
Hi guys thank you for the great videos. I wanted to bring up a point that in the 30 years of working in the graphic arts and fine art field I hear a lot of these young artist always saying " oh but that's cheating" well if you are going into the commercial art field start getting used to it because it's a big fish eat little fish business and the big fish will use reference and other techniques to get the job done for his clients. In commercial art the clients don't care whether you cheated or not they just want you to get the job done right and to their specifications. Now in the other hand if you are entering a fine art competition then everything has to be your original including the reference photos. Just a little advice from an old timer :-)
Really enjoying the backlog of these podcast style videos. Much food for thought. Love it when UA-cam suggest a channel I might never have found otherwise.
Thank you! :D So you found us just through the YT suggestions?
Yes, YT suggested a video on my home page. Until then I hadn't seen anything from your channel come up before.
this podcast episode is super underrated, every artist needs to watch this
Thanks! We really hope it was useful :)
Thank you for this video, it is very good to remind ourselves about the importance of observing the world around us!
Haha the wireframe game in real life is a classic. Nice chat and nice vibe guys, keep it up!
Guys! Thank you very-very much! It's like insight for me! You just opened a new kind of vision for me. I'm so appreciate!
I like how the video is just 2 dudes talking about their passion, rly nice.
10/10, best lion tutorial I've seen yet
U made me feelmuch much better and motivated in CG, Thank u soo soo much for Sharing tutorials for CG Students like me. The most important thing that u have is this: u r two persons and make it much much funnier and Friendly and Really interesting to listen to u ...
I really like this content. People just talking about stuff. Keep 'em coming.
I think that weird lion like reference was actually a liliger, basically a second generation hybrid between a lion and a ligress (which is hybrid of a male lion with a female tiger)
You guys are heroes! Another excellent video and thank you for taking the time to put this together for us :)
Good eye for details is a must!
Thanks, always nice to get a refresher to pound it into you brain.
I'm trying to make some realistic grapes right now and watching this video I feel so stup** about not having one single reference on screen, then I googled some grapes photos and realized how wrong I was.
And belive me, here in Italy you can see shi* tons of grapes, memory is not enough.
There you go! This is one of the most common issues we've seen. "Hmm these apples arent looking so good.."
- Have you tried, you know, looking at apples?
And then the artists face palms harder than ever before.
Glad it helped!
/Henning
I think it's something that beginning artist all struggle with, I still have to remind myself at times. Personally, I always had this (really bad) idea, that if I was a "Really good" artist, I wouldn't need reference, I could just do it off memory. Which is just the silliest thing ever. All artist use reference in some sort of way, and really at the end of the day it's just more work to do it off memory.
I know this is supposed to be a tip but I imagined a british guy saying "Sir, have you looked at them apples??"
Thank you very much, guys! You opened my eyes on this world!
Excellent stuff guys! Many thanks.
the weird lion is probably a hybrid -- the markings closely match tiger patterns.
loving the recent uploads!
worked for engineering firm for a few years. ended up looking at things while walking around in life thinking how to model things... now im trying to do organics, think i get better every time i take a break purely because of all art i look at.
im going to need to learn this observation haki
It's a LIGER!
The Pattern on it's ears are tiger spots!
I was just going to post a comment about this "Lions" Tiger genes, but someone already figured out it's ears lol. Good observation :) 18:54
Keep them coming guys!
that first "lion" was either a liger or a tigon. It has the traditional markings of a tiger on the ears along with the colour pattern of a lion.
The thing is ... sometimes you are observing something, and then when you try to visualize how it would look if you drew it and you're like "Nobody would believe this is how it actually looks like in real life and everyone would thought that I don't know how it actually looks like."
Experience with measuring what you draw-from life or a photo, teaches us that we are highly susceptible to accidentally enlarging out of proportion whatever we have as the object of our focus. This may partially derive from the difference between the details of what our eyes are able to see, and what we are able to draw with our materials. Measuring provides instant feedback and helps us learn to see the errors in observation. Blind contour drawing is also helpful because it teaches us to look at our subject more than our drawing, and is actual practice in bringing into alignment the hand and eyes. We can tell someone how to ride a bike, and offer them encouragement to learn. Or we can actually provide a bike for practice-what you actually came here for 😉
PureRef is helping me a lot, thank you for your reccomedation in you previous video
Alex C same here!
Froggerdog it's amazing what reference can do, also checkout floating for youtube. You can follow tutorials while you work, I find it very useful
Such a great video, you guys rock!
I really liked the subject great video. I would like to know more about this so is it possible to recommend some books ?
I use to feel looking at references and using them was cheating. Now I realize that, that thinking hindered my growth. Know, I use references! 💪🏾
I think a good trick for getting more belivable stuff is to both make fake stuff, like get a toy pistol at a store, and do your best to make it look real, spray painting, dry brushing it, this way you have real lights and reflections and the only think keeping your toy gun from looking real is the its texture, and the stroy behind that, the other thing is to look at cosplayers, they are the KING of making something belivable, often with foam and EVA, that means that the texture/painting is responsible for like 90% of how something looks, do these both, or atleast the cosplay one and your stuff will look a lot better, doing it for real/ watching cosplay content cuts down the technical aspect of the computer it self, we all had that: oh damn i don't have this exact material i'll have to make it or fake it, thats a bit of time you toss out. So yeah, do ALL that these guys are saying they know what they are talking about, and maybe try to do what i said as well, remember, nothing looks as real as the real world.
I noticed that the structural element is observed better from the bigger picture and the story element from the details. Should we e observe both or there is always time to work later on the story?
I love everything you guys do and how you make training easy even for us who don't have time and are working most of the time. I would have a request can we have some animation Maya training, Chara ter animation, dialogue animation, prop interaction, camera animation and character to character interaction
38:56 you two just blew my mind
I not only look for basic shapes but what Letter does this form take.
After all these videos listening to you guys, the invention of the term Zbrush cowboy is priceless. For real, great term. Hardline reality check terminology. Made me realize that I am a Zbrush wannabe cowboy and the steps it will take to reach that goal. :D
Haha, that's great :D
Awesome content as always gentlemen.
Actually they would pretty much just throw in rocks and concrete in the middle, because that literally just servers as structural integrity and doesnt need to be aligned and look good like the outside.
Thanks guys!
people who boast about not using a reference or it took me like 30 minutes to do this complicated artwork, are the ones bullshitting the most by trying to put you down and pretending like they are this god tier person its pathetic.
Weirdly enough, I think that first reference of a lion is actually a liger! (A mix between a lion and a tiger) That’s probably why it looks kinda weird
This was a good 44 mins!
finally i need this idk if u read my comment in previous videos but i request this topic thanks a lot guys thanks thanks
We did indeed! :) Glad it was helpful.
"Glad it was helpful." ur every single video was helpful to me keep it up guys and best thing it's 44 min :D
Reference is always king..
Its nice, but feels more like a podcast. Do you have any podcast?
My problem with their first example is that it only encompasses realistic renderings. Most of it isn't realistic, it's highly represential, so you don't need to have that level of detail. At that point you might as well just megascan the damn thing (if possible) and clean it up. At some point you can just get an ai to do this
the first "weird lion" is a Liger = crossbreed between tiger and lion - captive stuff.
19:00 wrong. u dont need variations etc. in the hair to make it look good. u only need a good renderer. u dont need details.
All of a sudden I feel like I know nothing XD
Good stuff guys
Flipped Normal :D I want to request Vray video tips and trick lighting in Vray :D Love your content!!
I'm wanting to do this for a living, it's going to take years for me to get there, so wondering if there's basic drawing exercises so I can build strong basics in this industry
Regarding Mad Max, I bet its because George Miller had this universe and movie in mind for sooo long that he came up with all these little details. And also because of all the creative crew he probably surrounded himself with.
Probably! You can really feel he's thought the world through.
15:08 funny thing is, if I had seen this as a 3D render, I would judge it as terrible, like "why the hell the dude inflated all the rocks? That`s far from reallity"
Crazy shit
It really is crazy when you start observing reality!
yes because your renderer is bad or u dont know how to make it look real
nice video , you guys deserv more views
Best Channel Guys... it would be very nice if you guys conduct any challenges
Thank you! We'll definitely have some challenges in the future. Really excited about that
I'm really looking forward for that guys!....Do it soon :)
I challange you to draw prespectice boxes 1 2 and 3 point
Atleast 10 of each
filling up the pag in 1 and a half hour with only 2-3 errors if you win buy yourself a chocolate fudge with vanilla icecream drink hot water after wards
The text on image on your website is (was) missing the word "best" :D
Guys, can you give examples of sculpts that are industry level? I mean like worth making a portfolio of? I am still learning and I wonder when does it make sense to show the work.
For sure! Check out some of these guys:
instagram.com/lukestarkie/?hl=en
instagram.com/klausskovbo/?hl=en
instagram.com/ranmanolov/?hl=en
www.artstation.com/kubisi
Thanks a lot ^^
thanks!
My 1 comment about that Inca Wall that "must have been made by aliens cuz it was so perfect" is this. If stupid people today can make masterpieces sitting on their couch, on their phones, eating a ham sandwich, multi-tasking a notepad for poetry and porn on their browser, than the Incas are completely within the realm of possibilities.
Is there any book you reccomend about observation?
13:40 "There's so much variation; you can't do it with automatisation"
*cough*Substance Designer*cough* which is still down to observation skill of the artist.
Thats our point though, if you just slap a designer material on it, thats enough to get you up to a certain point, but you need to observe specific real world objects to get all the way there.
I do the same with my water bottles.... thought I was alone
You have to show them who's the boss!
/H
can anyone advise me a video for UV mapping for a videogame? specially using Blender, thanks :)
Hey guys. I have a question, do you or anyone know weather it's possible to get the free student licenses from substance, Maya or other programs if you're still at school. Or do you actually have to be at a proper university? I'm only 17 and I'll be in school for another 2 years and I don't have the money to buy all these programs. I've been using blender for 4 years at least but I'm at a point where I can't learn proper texturing and industry standard workflows with blender.
you can get a Maya student liscense without being in college.
9 months ago, hope you got an answer sooner
2:34 fuck, man, I went to some random website to check my credit score, and when they asked what MY OWN eye color was according to my driver's license I had to check!
Using presets without observation It's like using a calculator without knowing maths.
as a gun designer, I'd definitely draw a gun from imagination xD
Sure. But I reckon you'd still be looking at parts of real guns for reference, like the grip, trigger, bolt, magazine, hammers, slide, etc. Unless you're designing a completely alien type of gun with none of those features.
That's a Liger if im not wrong (Half lion hlaf tiger) or a Puma
I find myself trying to figure out topology on random objects in real life all the time. I have a Vive sitting on my desk atm and all the circular insets on it's rounded front makes me cringe. :>
We do this all the time too. Once your brain is in 3D model, it's really hard to switch off. Oh yes, circular insets on curved surfaces is the worst..
VERY hard to turn off, indeed!
Speaking of observation, I just noticed it is a website in this video after minutes into the video😂
Watched Tiger King. That first lion is a Liger. Half lion half tiger.
My eye 👁 is color pink
I skipped it because the beginning had no change in picture.
So i just saw the Fish coment and depends on the fish, just take alook at Guppys, the female are fat, and more gray'ish, and the males are more colourfull, smaller and longer tails. Yes, i am eating up your videos hahahhaaha
8:47 SPOILERS ALERT!!! :D
Scandinavia? This whole time I thought you were both Irish..
You guys not knowing a lot about guns is understandable since you're from Europe. But people from America are probably cringing on your misidentification of gun parts XD. What you call "scopes" are not really scopes, they're just gun sights. And the part of the revolver which holds the bullets is called the "cylinder".
22:00 wrong. u dont need variations etc. in the hair to make it look good. u only need good renderer then even a simple white lion will look real
I thought I had observational skills...I tried to fly...it didn't work...
Great video. But sorry, Mad Max is a terrible movie. Yes, it has great details and a lot of thought was put into the micro scale, but fails terribly from a macro story-telling POV.
How do you see a building with a lot of different shapes and put it on the software?