I like voices rough XD Also rly nice video. Trying to do blender stuff myself tho Im into game assets and weapons and such so Im really trying to learn and adopt the "correct" workflow there. I would say tho. Better to learn the proper methods and get a good workflow with it first then you can cut corners as you become proficient at stuff that needs it and those that doesn't. but again a proper model can be reused in more than one scene, a quick model cannot.
@@DECODEDVFX great video as always 😁 Would you be interested in joining my discord server for 3D youtubers? So far Daniel Krafft, Corza and I are the only members, it could be awesome if you want to join😁
I was going to say just that. One big part of doing stuff professionally (and by that I mean on time and in budget) is to know what to do to minimize effort and save time. If you do this stuff as a hobby that doesn´t matter at all - as long as you´re happy with your result your workflow and over-designing is no ones business.
Probably one of the most important things they taught me in art school: Dont waste your time rendering fine detail with a three-bristle-brush, learn how to create the illusion of it with a single stroke.
in painting yea ... but use the same mentality in more "fiddly requirement environment" and that thing will cause a whole lot of problems. take ur time and do it properly. ul save time and money and stress long down the road. better spend 30 extra minutes on one thing than "patching it" to look good and then spend 10days or 20days figure out why ur game keeps crashing ...
@@GeorgeZaharia For code, this is a completely different story. Code can also be done sloppy, hacky and fast if it doesn't need to be the proper way for whatever you're working on. (quick script that you'll use once, tiny utility that doesn't do much or need much) But as soon as you get close to a larger codebase, that shit needs to be very well structured from the start. But art and assets aren't code. Sure, game assets often need to be nice from all angles and distances but in the end, players won't scrutinize the topology or techniques as long as it looks right and is ok performance-wise.
As a musician, it took me many years to learn the same thing. I used to create my sounds from scratch and tweak all my effects from scratch. Often the result was WORSE than just using presets. Often times, more work does not mean better. It just simply means time wasted. The end product is all that matters.
Your comment made me think of this video which I watched a couple days ago. I see the connection between what Jimmy Hendrix did with playing to his own rhythm, what recording to a metronome in beat is like, and what the DECODED video suggests. How Jimi Hendrix invented his own timing ruclips.net/video/Q-3oFreydHo/видео.html As a musician you'll also find the video informative.
Im not a musician but I wanted to make soundtrack for my planned bkender animation. I used to experiment with ny own drums, original sounds etc. but I created quite horrible soundtracks but then I started using some drum assets and I could pretty much improvize cool melodies on top, following the base beats, and it ruend out a lot better and people told me its pretty good. I also created my own assets for Blender but I realized its more important to focus on my characters than some bqckground deco objects etc. Although sadly since its a stylized animation I csnt use too many normal assets.
It seems Ian Hubert really hit the nail on the head huh. And as someone who came into 3D modelling from mathematics, this absoluteness hounds my every action
@@djC653 I'm gonna draw a cube and see if this helps me make it better. Edit: I opened blender and blender automatically made a cube for me! Mission success.
That's exactly what Ian hubert has been trying to tell us. I have the same super detailed approach and I am not even an advanced blender user so it's especially difficult for me but seeing a video like this once in a while helps. thank you
This is very inspirational. I find myself getting sucked into perfecting small, inconsequential details and then getting very frustrated when I can't get them just right. It usually affects my mind set for the rest of the project. I will keep your advice in my mind and soldier forward.
Yeah, this kind of thinking might actually help me to bloody well finish some things. I'm the worst for leaving an idea half done. Must have hundreds of unfinished blends!
There was a children's show (Sesame Street, Electric Company, or maybe even a sitcom, I forget) episode that commented on how unnecessary texture is when the object is being viewed from a distance and isn't the focal point. One of the kids in the scene was painting a brick wall as the backdrop for a theater play. The girl was paining each brick with fine detail, and it was taking a long time. One of the adults on the project came along and let her know she didn't need all that detail. As an example, he showed her that her classmate was painting another brick wall with very simple detail. Man, that's a deep-cut memory you've sparked.
The highest level of animation is about knowing how much you can cheat and get away with as long as the final product looks right, and doing so in the most workflow-efficient manner.
It can be a case of not having a clear vision for your project from the start, too. I've found myself stressing too much about the wrong things because I'm thinking, "But what if I want to frame a shot differently later, or fly a camera close to this thing?" which is a sign that I haven't solidly planned what I'm doing.
@@joechapman8208 There is one good thing about 3D. You can reuse everyday objects in future scenes or even put them up as assets for others to purchase. I think sometimes we should decide whether to round the quality up or down. If the model is almost good enough to sell then you might as well polish it. If you don't have any interest in selling or reusing the object then hack it together or even buy the assets where possible. Stop thinking like a worker and think like a boss. How much would it cost to make that dripping candle if you had to pay someone else a professional wage? If it is such a common item it will cost you $5-10 online. Actually I just found a candle pack on CGTrader for $5. Looks just as good. Realistic items are easy because you don't need to worry about your own art style. If you do stylized then it will be harder to purchase assets I will admit. But as artists we must value our time.
Perfectionism is perhaps a problematic term - i usually hear it invoked when someone's underdelivered/not finished something for themselves or someone else. It's ambiguous and positive, painting the failure with a sort of hazy virtue, when in truth they spent a lot of time on a rabbit hole that didn't contribute much to the planned outcome. I have those failures all the time, it's how we get better, but if we call it "perfectionism", it stops us looking at the real problem - the lack of focus, through issues as varied as anxiety (about the project anything else) executive function disorders, underestimating a challenge or a simple lack of the experience/perspective needed to determine what's really key to the project. 😀
I prefer learner or amateur. It takes humility to call yourself a learner or amateur rather than a perfectionist, but it comes with an attitude of improvement rather than being more discerning than others (implying the fault is external).
@@bakedbeings I agree. We can call it perfectionism, but we need to consider our goals and broad stroke the whole piece. Then do another pass with more detail if appropriate. I like to look at the imperfections in AAA games. Last of Us has low res shadows and almost no interactivity in the environment. BOTW has ugly environment textures often with too much detail. Weapons clip through clothing etc. These are some of the greatest games in history. Remember to think like an audience. Will they really notice or care? Make a table of primary, secondary and background items and give them the appropriate time allowance.
As someone who recently spent several hours modelling a lovely detailed shopfront awning, complete with brackets and screws into the walls, only to discover i can only see about 5% of a dark outline in the final scene anyway... I did a lot of nodding during this video...
On the contrary, consider making a separate artistic render simply to show off your awning, and post it somewhere! Then, your beautiful awning, screws and all, can be appreciated separately for it's own relevance!
Good comment. One thing to add: Mastering the "correct and clean" way first is still vital to comprehend what and why you can omit or brush over. Those broad Rembrandt strokes work so well because he knows exactly how to do it proper, but is masterful enough to abstract it to fit the overall "feel" he was trying to communicate. This abstraction is prolly the highest form of artistic achievement. To put it differently: Don't educate yourself to be sloppy. Do the hard work (i.e. learning it proper) and then use your experience to deviate and use time-savers to your advantage.
There's also a thing called "blocking" where you rough out your animation using only crude "stand-in" models and textures. Once you know where everything will be in the scene and what's lit, you'll polish the models as necessary.
@@JohnDBlue the best advise, and something you'll come to realise yourself eventually anyway, is to always start things simple and only make them as complex as they need to be, which is really the essence of this video too. Always start with blocking out, using simple shapes and making sure the 'form' and proportions are correct before moving forward. If you look at some good artists you'll realise that they can make even a few brush strokes look breath taking. I noticed this whilst playing Ghost of Tsushima where they use an ink bleeding effect and manage to paint entire scenes just from the way the black ink runs off and contrasts the white
I also find that keeping things simple makes learning the process much easier. Instead of thinking 'oh no how do I model this entire bedroom scene' you start thinking about it in terms of cubes and other primitive shapes, and then slowly build up the detail once you're ready
I liked when you point out Rembrandt quote at 5:48 “It’s actually distracting to the viewer if everything has the same amount of attention drawn to it”
haha yeah. All my scenes. if you just move the camera one bit, everything breaks u see holes. It's perfected for the frame and nothing else. u can actually dl scenes from Pixar, same thing there. looks like jank from any other angle other than the cameras
"Perfection is the enemy of Good Enough." as a solo Artist, Designer, and Coder, in that order, I learned long ago that sometimes sacrificing quality in order to ensure you actually finish is necessary. You can always go back later and fix things if you aren't working on a strict deadline. Having anything is better than having really beautiful nothing.
"Perfection is the enemy of Good Enough." Thats good for people early in their journey in order to get them being productive. Later, though, it can be an obstacle to greatness if they apply the philosophy too liberally.
"Having anything is better than having really beautiful nothing." Sometimes I'll bite my tongue critiquing something, because at least the creator DID something.
that is why people become specialist where their perfectionism work well. Because they can spend all of their time to just small aspect of huge picture.
Here's some actionable advice: if your end goal is a single frame or a simple animation, the camera should be one of the first things you set up. Check camera view periodically, and get used to thinking of that as the default view for the scene. Whenever you start to add detail or work on textures, go into camera first and think, "is this change going to be noticeable in the final result?" The desire for perfection isn't a flaw, it just needs to be tempered with the demands of time. This is why deadlines and time management are super important, even for a personal project. Assign a certain amount of time for each project, and figure out how much time that gives you to do each aspect of it. If you're not satisfied with one part of it at the end of the allotted time, you might be able to squeeze in extra time elsewhere, but it'll have to be at the expense of something else. Practice teaches, along with how to make things, how to make the right things at the right time for the use they're going to be put into.
I think this is an extremely useful piece of advice. As you say, the desire for perfection isn't a flaw, but instead something that can be directed into a perfect final product, rather than a perfect piece of irrelevant information.
Best comment I’ve read in a while! Great advice! I’m a professional photographer, so when I started learning blender, I immediately started doing what you’re saying. The first shortcut I learned was how to toggle in and out of camera view! Everybody always deletes the default cube, camera and light. Camera and lighting from the start is the way I work best..
So I'm a games programmer. This stuff happens at every level of the process. A UI designer, artist and programmer spent a combined 100 hours making a button animation that's visible to a player for 4 frames. It's always best to keep things in context, it's only cutting a corner if there's a corner there to cut! This took me so long to learn too, don't worry yourself, funnily enough, I'm pretty directly related to Rembrandt too.
as a fellow programmer I 100% can see people spending that amount of time making a button. when I first started I spent weeks making a damage effect that lasted 0.2 seconds
I don't think wrong is the word, as Bruce Lee said: "Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick." The overdetailed perfectionism path is the learning part, mastering techniques, improving quality, training perception, being capable of doing very quality things, the simplifying and optimization sounds look the final stage, where "a punch is just a punch". The video is amazing mostly because of the ,amazing work, but a beginner trying to apply your last approach can do very awful things, because of skipping his own development.
Very true, what he missed is saying that you have to learn the fundamentals to be able to act like you didn't, and still end up with a work of art. Blender is not as easy as so many make out. Just because it's free doesn't mean it's easy. They give you the tool at no cost, you MUST learn the fundamentals to create.
I like the analogy of texting. If you don't know English (or insert language here) but try learning it from text shorthand then you'll never learn it. But once you know English why waste time typing it all out perfectly?
It's a delicate balance, with destructive extremes on both ends, that's for sure. I'm a programmer primarily, been for a long time, I dabble in Blender here and there, but I recognize the same struggle in both fields. It's got a lot to do with your general attitude and motivation. You can slip into that mode where you're using "perfectionism" as an excuse to just show off, to do unnecessary things just to prove that you can do them, and so that nobody else might think there's even a single thing you haven't thought of, not a single outlandish future you haven't proofed against. And on the other end, you've got your Chads with "being thoughtful and thorough is for wusses" attitude, who use that overconfident machoism as an excuse to just be reckless and overall do sub-par work. Sweet-spot is somewhere between those two extremes, and its position will depend on what the job is, who you are, what your skill set is, what's expected for the future of the project, etc. There isn't a simple answer, but what can help you is to always look back on your process with brutal honesty, and admit to yourself when you see it actually made no sense to put so much time and effort into a thing, that it made no real impact; and also, when you see that cutting corners in some area really came back to bite you down the line. The more honest and realistic you can be in those assessments, the better you will calibrate your inner compass for such stuff, and you'll have less misfires in the future.
I have had this problem working on my graduation project at university, though sometimes I think I have had it "in reverse". I have created a few assets that I did not think were up to snuff, and wasted hours tinkering with improvements to make, only to realize that the model I was working on would be obscured by depth of field, motion blur and aerial perspective, sometimes the added details were much too small to be resolved at the final render's resolution, even absent those other effects. Focusing your time and effort on the focal point of your image is a much more efficient way to work, and it will ultimately lead to a better quality result.
I work by the philosophy that the time spent on a certain part of a scene should be proportional to the time the viewer will spend looking at that component relative to all others.
You actually don't need to worry about typology for any model unless it's either being exported to other software, you are getting surface artifacts or it's being animated with mesh deformations. Quads are only needed for those smooth mesh deformations and renderers triangulate meshes at render time anyway. One advantage of making more high quality assets though is that those assets are then a lot more usuable for other projects or even to sell when you're done with them. The one thing I learnt when I first started in 3D, and this only really applies if you are producing single renders or movies is that if you can't see it don't model it.
Recently I discovered that this quick and dirty way worked very well for me starting out at blender again. It’s a lot of fun to see quick and good results
A friend of mine used to say "Perfection is the enemy of 'Good enough'". When I was working previz, I found out how dodgy a scene can still look great. Anyone working in games knows too. If the object or scenery is far enough away in the shot, it can be shoddily modeled, rendered, touched up in Photoshop and put on a forest of image planes in the background to thicken up the scene. You can have billions of polygons worth of scenery in a shot that way. Anyway, love the cheap coverups. Great suggestions. Man, we put a lot of labor into making things *not* look perfect, clean and freshly made. It's a shame when we waste time on "B" scenery that could be better put to use spending more time on something that will be seen.
I picked up Blender at around the same time and have somewhat consistently been able to create animations for clients. Exactly as you pointed out, that precise way of working had to be thrown out the window. Compositing can also be extremely useful, especially working with any type of fluid sim.
Ah man, you hit the nail on the head. I'm making my first 3D film at the moment (been animating in 2D for years now). I have this long scene inside of the ruined train station. I started animating my character entirely, climbing up the stairs, walking into the room, starting up an old computer etc. I've spent hours making sure the entire character is animated properly, cleaning up every single step, gesture, face expression. But when I finally set up cameras I asked myself, "why do all this work?". Most of what I animated wouldn't even show on screen, the feet of the character would show in maybe two shots, in some he wouldn't even be seen at all. And as you said, I animated in 2D for years, I know how and when to cut corners to save myself needless work and time! So now I rember to animate and show only what I need. Good thing I strarted 3D scanning my assets before I began building them from scratch and hand-painting them all!
This is one of the things I wish I learned earlier on. It clicked for me when I spent an evening modelling one of those nitrous canisters that litter the streets in London. I modelled it, simulated squashing it and then textured it, it looked perfect. In the final scene it was no more than the glint of a couple of white pixels.
Yeah, I remember making loads of litter to cover the floor of a subway for a render. Cigarette butts, crisp packs, fake newspaper pages, McDonald's cups, etc. I ended up not even using most of it because it was distracting, and the few assets I did use could have been low poly models with a simple texture applied.
I haven't been using Blender for years, in fact, I just started this year. But I am SO glad I stumbled upon this before I got too accustomed to the way I was doing it. You are right. No one can see all those tiny details in the final render. Definitely appreciated this!
I had to learn this in my field too (compositing). I am far more technical than I am creative, so as a consequence I tend to enjoy the process more than even the final result. That meant that I ended up making what we dubbed "science experiments", which granted, did eventually work and often did solve complex issues, but most of the time could've been solved much faster with the simple, basic tools. How I think about it is this; you have a bag of tricks and techniques that you're constantly expanding (hopefully). The problem is knowing when to use which technique, because there is a lot of overlap with their utility. With experience, you kinda build this hierarchy, or continuum where you place all your techniques from "crap" to "awesome". With more experience you learn when you can use some of the crap techniques, because they're fast and the thing you'll be using it on is 50 pixels, defocused in the background. And in the same vein, you learn when the awesome technique is just not necessary, and may even give you a worse result because it'll take so long that you lose iteration time. So then you have this multidimensional hierarchy of techniques, with the dimensions being quality, setup speed, render speed, interactivity, realism, difficulty etc. This is why experience is so valuable, this is the sort of thing you only learn through practice, practice, practice (or work, work, work).
Absolutely crucial bit of advice! Personally I try to establish a camera angle early on, make a small viewport that's always visible, and evaluate my scene through that during the creation process. That way I have an idea of what will be seen in the final frame at every stage of the process.
This video sums up what I ended up learning in roughly the same amount of time. So don't worry. You're not the only one. Thanks for informing people about it!
I'm primarily a software developer but premature optimisation and perfectionism can apply to us as well. Many years ago, after a successful handoff of my first program to a very happy client, the feedback from my boss was: "If you can deliver a program that is that good, you could have delivered a program that was good enough in half the time." *Breadth first, then depth only where it is needed.*
Also ruclips.net/video/CMm96KwOePI/видео.html that video from Corridor Digital from about 7:30 to 10:00 gives a good quick overview of things that you will simplify around when you master those concepts. He calls it visual beauty and basically says it's not really that important for that video he made and not to get hung up on it so you actually make stuff. The whole video is pretty great really and many of the concepts can be translated to 3d like the zones of grayscale concept. If you can tolerate the obnoxious in-video hijinks of them pointing out their website.
As others have pointed out. This is actually bad advice for beginners. I suggest reading through the comments especially the Bruce lee and picasso quotes, if I explained why it would end up quite a wall of text. Learn photorealism and full functional, high detail first, then learn how to simplify. Do use this as seeing the endpoint, think seeing a target across a bay and the only way to hit the target is trek up the mountain to get the height for your shot to actually make it to the target to hit it. This was my original first reply. I guess it somehow got deleted?? Maybe replying to myself with a link seemed spammy, idk? Good thing I keep copies of things I guess. The video recommendation doesn't make full sense without this original comment preceding it.
totally agreed on every point! In the video game business you sometimes need to be quick and dirty (to an extense) and nobody will see the difference. What is important is if the context is good enough the small details won't make it more awesome then it is already.
You nailed it man!! It took me like 10 years of practice to understand that. And I still sometimes do the mistake of spending too much time on invisible details.
Good to know. I'm not as advanced as you, but all of it sounds like good common sense that is not all that common. Will keep all this in mind once I start making animations.
Excellent observations. I am so guilty of this. It's funny, 15-18 years ago I worked a lot in Second Life. I used to iterate so fast, mainly because SL made it almost impossible to create the kinds of complex meshes we take for granted in Blender. Now that I’ve spent a year in Blender, I appear to have forgotten the value of keeping things simple. :)
i really appreciate artist who can take a step back from their work and go, hey maybe i dont need to put so much effort in that bit. really makes a difference in the work
I work as a designer and concept artist on animated shows. We use Blender to get our ideas out because it's very fast to work in and we don't concern ourselves with clean typology, Ngons, 3D modeling best practices otherwise we're not going to get anywhere. Once design gets approved then all that stuff matters as the Modelling department builds the asset.
Absolutely 100% true, if you know the things are never going to be seen close up, like the candle at the start there for instance. I'm also absolutely guilty of putting in to much work, as I think my work might be seen from any distance and angel.
I used to spend 6 months just to create textures for a simple airplane models, paying super in-depth attention to microscopic details. But after working on several such time consuming projects this idea automatically clicked in my head. Who’s actually going to even notice I did that much of detailed work? That’s it for me. Since then I began doing multiple projects a day, from scratch to picture perfect finished job. The fact is this is actually your learning curve. The amount of time you spent isn’t a waste actually. You just got yourself refined with your skills. You are more well aware of what you’re doing, what is needed, what can be skipped. You subconsciously can think all of that within a matter of seconds. And besides all it’s only the highly experienced ones can do such short methods, yet so proficient final product. Every creator has to walk this path at some point.
Thanks for reminding. It's all too easy to go back down the rabbit hole when you really want to model that screw perfectly because you really love that kind of screw and you don't want to disappoint it.
I've known this for a while but have soooo much trouble actually doing it. I can't stop myself making stuff look 'right'. I think it's because while we model each individual element they ARE the hero shot.
This approach is SO important for almost anything in life. It's always good to be able to do everything perfectly if need be, but knowing what's important and what's not and where time can be saved and put into what really matters is the most valuable skill.
Man i think you're 100% right. I recently learned that i care way too much and spend way too much time on my renders/modelling when the client would have been happy with it 2 hours/days ago. Really need to stop being such a perfectionist and just get it done quick - nobody really notices that much! great video
So much this. I feel that a lot of the Blender community is geared towards making models for selling on websites. Most of the stuff I do is for specific shots, animations and uses, and it's that that defines how much work I put in. I think getting the level of detail right usually involves going *slightly* beyond what can be clearly seen, but not by much.
6:40 in movies or games they also like to save render- and production time. so they use a similar approach. in big budged projects are often people just for cleaning up the models, so the 3d designers can focus on their actual jobs
BRILLIANT! I've been thinking that for years about the level of detail used in films. Each new movie creating a new hair system from scratch, etc.only to be 4 frames long and blurred. Know your composition and adjust the LOD accordingly.
It's definitely about what you want to do and how you manage yourself doing it. There's not point to make a complex mesh for 50 pixels on screen, but likewise half-assing a key object can kill a render. Know what you want to make, allow for some experimentation and balance your time doing it.
I desperately need to start doing exactly that. It took some time to realize this but you're totally right. It's nice to know there are more artists going through the same stuff and actually being able to simply solve this problem they simply didn't know it existed!
Good point at all. In this case, I strongly recommend to all be armed with Hardops, Mechmashine, Zenuv and other small tools like Miratools, Machinetools, Decalmachine, Kitops and so on. It will take some time to learn and even can break your view at vanilla Blender, but in the end, you will be amazed how fast you can approach the same results.
It's funny I think Meshmachine is bloody brilliant yet the 1 dollar MachineTools is what I use even more. But yeah, absolutely worth it for both. Couldn't get on with decalmachine as I don't understand how the mesh decals work exactly, which is a shame because it seems fantastic
@@jimmysgameclips A decal is just a plane with a texture on it. And a trimsheet is a collection of decals which can be easily and quickly applied to an object. I recommend watching Ryuurui, he has some videos on DecalMachine. The official MACHIN3 channel is also good.
@@jimmysgameclips As Paul already noticed - it's just a plane with normal map texture, allowing you to avoid the work with some small details. If you need a full model outside of the Blender - later you can bake it with your UV map and work with it in Substance Painter. For example, if you constantly do the same forms on your mesh - you can create your own Decals and just kitbashing with your personal style. The KitOps on the other hand do the same things but with mesh inserts via life-boolean (you do not apply it before the final result). Meaning that you can basically work in a non-destructive manner and prototyping things pretty quickly based on simple geometry form like a cube (at raw form). But on top of all these things Is Hardops. Since it's not just some live-boolean addon, but it provides tons of tools and scripts that drastically change your speed of modelling in Blender.
My 3d teacher had this simple exercise for us - create a scene of a basketball rolling over the floor from one side of the classroom to the other, and it had to be realistic - and whoever did it best based on the brief got an award. Turned out that following the brief showing anything else but the ball rolling and a bit of the floor was unnecessary and all else should just be skipped, or you would spend more way more time than you had and most of us failed the task. I think this holds true for most projects - block it out, build out what you need and decide as you go along what you will actually see - skip everything else or keep it as simple as possible.
You learn this quickly when you make 3D models for video games. How detailed/complex the object needs to be depends on how close the object is going to be to the camera, and how important the object is in the scene. A hero object, meant to stand out, requires more attention than a random, unimportant object. Plus you have to take performance into consideration, so "faking" detail in models is a common thing (as long as it looks good in the camera). You can even get away with building only the part of an object that will be visible (for example, if you know the camera will only ever see the front of the vending machine, then you don't really need the back side at all).
Knowing what and when to go quickly is a key to being a pro. After 20+ years of graphic design I realized that subtle details are usually pointless and make little difference in the final result! Unless they DO make a difference, and it's up to you to know which is which. ;)
Man I can relate to this so much. Not 3D, but the feeling is the same. You polish every small bit of a turd in the corner and you don't even feel accomplished when you look at the final result, where none of that hard work is there to be seen.
I'm not a Blender user but that was interesting with somes very good advises there, and yes I think some of the most important is to know wich details to focus on, it's like mastering where you want the viewer eyes to focus.
So much important stuff in one short video, nice! This is good advice for beginners and advanced users. All of those things are so simple and yet so difficult and advanced.
That makes a lot of sense, considering that's how it goes painting. It's all very gestural outside of the focal points. The little bit of 3d I've done for work was all LOD models for games, so I've seen first hand that you don't really need highly detailed models or textures as long as you can fool the eye.
It's pretty nice that you share these lessons. Many people charge a hefty sum for this, as it's considered a "secret" in the industry. Heavily invested companies and agencies, film studios all over the world - Hollywood, Bollywood, any other jolly wood lmao - save thousands, if not millions, simply by implementing this psychology, "If it ain't visible up close in your face, it doesn't need details." While learning graphics design and animation, I was taught this in the first semester and we were practically forced to practice this philosophy. In many professional works I've done over the past several years, be it interior walk through, or a motion graphics CGI, my practice has always been to keep only those items at great details which are - 2 meters in front of the camera, and inside the focal length cone - everything else beyond this range gets lower and lower details. The same principle is applied in games, also known as Level Of Detail, or L.O.D. . I'm pretty sure you must've heard about this. L.O.D zero is when the object is nearest to the camera, that's when it has massive details, while L.O.D xyz is for far away objects. Even in real life you cannot see detail in objects at a certain distance away from the eyes, nor can you see details in objects closer to the eyes beyond a certain distance. While you're focused on something, only a tiny portion of that object is in complete focus and everything else is out of focus, you can experiment if curious. Check through your peripheral vision and try to find details in objects out of your immediate focused item. Anyway, I know I've typed an essay for you and many others to read (if interested), but I just wanted to sincerely thank you for sharing your experiences with us. It's really hard to find good people sharing good stuff for free.
As someone said "Perfection is an enemy of Good" and btw which resources you came across to learn to make clean UVs, topologies all this standard "correct" methods, because from start I followed Ian, peter france all this guys who make stuff faster and I love this way but I'll also want to get decent knowledge of standard way.
That's a major lesson for modelling and for life in general. You're at your best when your focusing on what really matters instead of worrying about invisible details. Especially if it's a hobby.
hah I love this because I'm a previz artist these days, and this is my life! first day of the previz job, coming from a game company where each model had to be as good as it could from every angle, and we spent a few weeks or months making every asset.... I sit down and I"m told to make an entire environment, 3 characters and some effects.... by the end of the day! I picked up a lot of the tricks you mentioned really quick (been doing previz for more than 10 years now, I love the speed of the work)
It's not wasted time, imagine starting out like this and then after a while you want to be part of the industry but have nearly no idea on optimized and clean typology, unwraps and workflow. You will spend so much more time fixing bad habits that you picked up learning this way rather than having learned the industry standard for high quality renders, videogames and more. Once familiar with the standard and you wanna work for yourself or just care about a good render you can break these rules but they still offer important knowledge especially when working on group projects or game assets. Still awesome video, enjoyed it a lot.
Fantastic video mate. When you're working in an environment where anything and everything can be made super high res, it often takes away from the final product like you say. Human brains are great at interpreting very basic shapes and the best artists know that and use it really well.
I find this video very informative, not just in terms of practicality, but in the approach to Art itself. I'm a painter and Sketch artist and this approach is something I discovered a long time ago. I only recently started learning how to create 3D art in blender and Unreal Engine. I completely forgot about this very basic artistic principle of minimalism versus detail when creating the 3D art. Thank you for the reminder.
This is encouraging to users like me who see all the elaborate work others do sometimes which is beyond me... but for simple still renders and even simple video animations that are not needing that kind of detail and perfection... even I can pull that off!
Seems like a scenario of "learn the rules before you break them." Learning to do 3d modelling right is super important, and should probably be prioritized in most cases over time. When you've figured shit out is when you can get lazy about it.
"if people are noticing all these small inconsequential parts of the mesh, your animation probably sucks." I really needed to hear this bc im always stressing about details.
Very correct thoughts in my understanding. Human brain are trained to compensate for nonexistent unnecessary details on the background. I think realistically combined composition and realistic lighting is more important then supper detailed background objects.
Implementation time is an ever-present and very important factor but there's something to be said for learning the rules first before breaking them. I think you doing this in this order was the best approach. I hope most people *do* take the time to learn the ideal rules for "perfect" modelling before throwing them out the window as needed.
Really happy I stumbled upon your video in my recommended feed. As I’ve been learning more in depth with animation and modeling, I’ve been losing the forest for the trees. This really helped me mentally visualize my work flow.
Real nice, especially the anecdotes about Rembrandt and your own painting - stuff like that really helps to understand your basic thrust but more importantly shows that you know what you are actually talking about - not just another screen recording of someone awesome at Blender.
Didn't know where you were going with this, but totally agree. If something is going to be 30 pixels wide on the final screen, you don't need that much detail in it for the time it takes to make it.
Truth. Most production artists live by this if a producer is in the mix and the pressure is on. At one point we were cutting 6 shots a day 2K on a team of three and dof and motion blur cut the workload down by about 60% after tests.
Thank you! I've been working on a couple of short animations, and I've been getting so caught up in modelling background stuff in great detail that I've become frustrated and shelved them. This video has given me the freedom to pick them up again.
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No idea why my voice sounds so rough here. You'd think I've been smoking unfiltered Woodbines since I was five. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's your quick&dirty voice.
@@keithkool lol. It's my "sixth attempt at recording at 2am voice".
lol sounds actually great.
I like voices rough XD
Also rly nice video. Trying to do blender stuff myself tho Im into game assets and weapons and such so Im really trying to learn and adopt the "correct" workflow there. I would say tho. Better to learn the proper methods and get a good workflow with it first then you can cut corners as you become proficient at stuff that needs it and those that doesn't. but again a proper model can be reused in more than one scene, a quick model cannot.
@@DECODEDVFX great video as always 😁 Would you be interested in joining my discord server for 3D youtubers? So far Daniel Krafft, Corza and I are the only members, it could be awesome if you want to join😁
The years learning the proper way to do things is not wasted.
“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
― Pablo Picasso
I was going to say just that. One big part of doing stuff professionally (and by that I mean on time and in budget) is to know what to do to minimize effort and save time. If you do this stuff as a hobby that doesn´t matter at all - as long as you´re happy with your result your workflow and over-designing is no ones business.
That sums up my rather long comment in a nutshell :D So true!
to know the techniques is GOLD! to break them is FUN! - you always know how to do it correctly if needed RIGHT ?!?
Excellent.
I wanted to write something similar.
AKA the method Ian Hubert made famous haha! Great video as always mate
Yes, Ian does a lot of this type of work.
Lazy
Don't overthink it. The ducks sure don't.
@@AaronRotenberg this...this is beautiful
I am of fan of a great CG artist, director Sir Ian Hubbert!
Probably one of the most important things they taught me in art school: Dont waste your time rendering fine detail with a three-bristle-brush, learn how to create the illusion of it with a single stroke.
I agree. The target should be analogous to being Bob Ross of Blender.
in painting yea ... but use the same mentality in more "fiddly requirement environment" and that thing will cause a whole lot of problems. take ur time and do it properly. ul save time and money and stress long down the road. better spend 30 extra minutes on one thing than "patching it" to look good and then spend 10days or 20days figure out why ur game keeps crashing ...
@@GeorgeZaharia For code, this is a completely different story. Code can also be done sloppy, hacky and fast if it doesn't need to be the proper way for whatever you're working on. (quick script that you'll use once, tiny utility that doesn't do much or need much) But as soon as you get close to a larger codebase, that shit needs to be very well structured from the start.
But art and assets aren't code. Sure, game assets often need to be nice from all angles and distances but in the end, players won't scrutinize the topology or techniques as long as it looks right and is ok performance-wise.
As a musician, it took me many years to learn the same thing. I used to create my sounds from scratch and tweak all my effects from scratch. Often the result was WORSE than just using presets. Often times, more work does not mean better. It just simply means time wasted. The end product is all that matters.
Your comment made me think of this video which I watched a couple days ago. I see the connection between what Jimmy Hendrix did with playing to his own rhythm, what recording to a metronome in beat is like, and what the DECODED video suggests. How Jimi Hendrix invented his own timing ruclips.net/video/Q-3oFreydHo/видео.html As a musician you'll also find the video informative.
and you mostly tweak the presets a little anyway, so nobody cares at the end. same with 3d assets. for this reason turbo squid exists 😁
Plus, you paid for those presets, so they're yours now.
If you see the piano as a preset, a lot of people have had luck with that one sound.
Im not a musician but I wanted to make soundtrack for my planned bkender animation. I used to experiment with ny own drums, original sounds etc. but I created quite horrible soundtracks but then I started using some drum assets and I could pretty much improvize cool melodies on top, following the base beats, and it ruend out a lot better and people told me its pretty good. I also created my own assets for Blender but I realized its more important to focus on my characters than some bqckground deco objects etc. Although sadly since its a stylized animation I csnt use too many normal assets.
It seems Ian Hubert really hit the nail on the head huh.
And as someone who came into 3D modelling from mathematics, this absoluteness hounds my every action
exactly my reaction to this lol
also math/engineering background here, and switching to 'design' mindset has been interesting
If efficiency had a name.
Yep pretty much Ian Hubert's workflow
Moths!
I know nothing about 3d modelling and came here by chance drinking evening beer, but yes I am fully convinced now this is the way to go!
😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣😭😭😹😹
Lolllll
One of the funniest comments I've ever read.
It actually applies to a lot of thing and not just 3d modelling/animation. Unless you are an engineer that build people house that is.
This is why you gotta ask the question before you start: “What are you trying to do”
Sketch out the compo and then highlight your focal points. Choose detail accordingly.
@@robrobusa was going to mention 'draw it out first'. Hence the reason I'm trying to do Draw-A-Box, to improve my drawing.
@@djC653 I'm gonna draw a cube and see if this helps me make it better.
Edit: I opened blender and blender automatically made a cube for me! Mission success.
Agree! best thing you can do before any project is ask yourself this question.
Better, what are you communicating.
That's exactly what Ian hubert has been trying to tell us. I have the same super detailed approach and I am not even an advanced blender user so it's especially difficult for me but seeing a video like this once in a while helps. thank you
This is very inspirational. I find myself getting sucked into perfecting small, inconsequential details and then getting very frustrated when I can't get them just right. It usually affects my mind set for the rest of the project. I will keep your advice in my mind and soldier forward.
yes, exactly!
Yeah, this kind of thinking might actually help me to bloody well finish some things. I'm the worst for leaving an idea half done. Must have hundreds of unfinished blends!
There was a children's show (Sesame Street, Electric Company, or maybe even a sitcom, I forget) episode that commented on how unnecessary texture is when the object is being viewed from a distance and isn't the focal point. One of the kids in the scene was painting a brick wall as the backdrop for a theater play. The girl was paining each brick with fine detail, and it was taking a long time. One of the adults on the project came along and let her know she didn't need all that detail. As an example, he showed her that her classmate was painting another brick wall with very simple detail. Man, that's a deep-cut memory you've sparked.
The highest level of animation is about knowing how much you can cheat and get away with as long as the final product looks right, and doing so in the most workflow-efficient manner.
This is perfectionism. It is a "disease" I struggle with as well
It can be a case of not having a clear vision for your project from the start, too. I've found myself stressing too much about the wrong things because I'm thinking, "But what if I want to frame a shot differently later, or fly a camera close to this thing?" which is a sign that I haven't solidly planned what I'm doing.
@@joechapman8208 There is one good thing about 3D. You can reuse everyday objects in future scenes or even put them up as assets for others to purchase. I think sometimes we should decide whether to round the quality up or down. If the model is almost good enough to sell then you might as well polish it. If you don't have any interest in selling or reusing the object then hack it together or even buy the assets where possible. Stop thinking like a worker and think like a boss. How much would it cost to make that dripping candle if you had to pay someone else a professional wage? If it is such a common item it will cost you $5-10 online. Actually I just found a candle pack on CGTrader for $5. Looks just as good. Realistic items are easy because you don't need to worry about your own art style. If you do stylized then it will be harder to purchase assets I will admit. But as artists we must value our time.
Perfectionism is perhaps a problematic term - i usually hear it invoked when someone's underdelivered/not finished something for themselves or someone else. It's ambiguous and positive, painting the failure with a sort of hazy virtue, when in truth they spent a lot of time on a rabbit hole that didn't contribute much to the planned outcome. I have those failures all the time, it's how we get better, but if we call it "perfectionism", it stops us looking at the real problem - the lack of focus, through issues as varied as anxiety (about the project anything else) executive function disorders, underestimating a challenge or a simple lack of the experience/perspective needed to determine what's really key to the project. 😀
I prefer learner or amateur. It takes humility to call yourself a learner or amateur rather than a perfectionist, but it comes with an attitude of improvement rather than being more discerning than others (implying the fault is external).
@@bakedbeings I agree. We can call it perfectionism, but we need to consider our goals and broad stroke the whole piece. Then do another pass with more detail if appropriate. I like to look at the imperfections in AAA games. Last of Us has low res shadows and almost no interactivity in the environment. BOTW has ugly environment textures often with too much detail. Weapons clip through clothing etc. These are some of the greatest games in history. Remember to think like an audience. Will they really notice or care? Make a table of primary, secondary and background items and give them the appropriate time allowance.
As someone who recently spent several hours modelling a lovely detailed shopfront awning, complete with brackets and screws into the walls, only to discover i can only see about 5% of a dark outline in the final scene anyway... I did a lot of nodding during this video...
Don't worry. We get 16k monitors at some point... They are going to notice the tiny pixel eventually... :D
On the contrary, consider making a separate artistic render simply to show off your awning, and post it somewhere! Then, your beautiful awning, screws and all, can be appreciated separately for it's own relevance!
Good comment. One thing to add: Mastering the "correct and clean" way first is still vital to comprehend what and why you can omit or brush over. Those broad Rembrandt strokes work so well because he knows exactly how to do it proper, but is masterful enough to abstract it to fit the overall "feel" he was trying to communicate. This abstraction is prolly the highest form of artistic achievement. To put it differently: Don't educate yourself to be sloppy. Do the hard work (i.e. learning it proper) and then use your experience to deviate and use time-savers to your advantage.
There's also a thing called "blocking" where you rough out your animation using only crude "stand-in" models and textures.
Once you know where everything will be in the scene and what's lit, you'll polish the models as necessary.
I'm just starting to learn 3d modeling and animation, this sounds like something I'll wanna keep in mind 👌
@@JohnDBlue the best advise, and something you'll come to realise yourself eventually anyway, is to always start things simple and only make them as complex as they need to be, which is really the essence of this video too.
Always start with blocking out, using simple shapes and making sure the 'form' and proportions are correct before moving forward.
If you look at some good artists you'll realise that they can make even a few brush strokes look breath taking. I noticed this whilst playing Ghost of Tsushima where they use an ink bleeding effect and manage to paint entire scenes just from the way the black ink runs off and contrasts the white
I also find that keeping things simple makes learning the process much easier. Instead of thinking 'oh no how do I model this entire bedroom scene' you start thinking about it in terms of cubes and other primitive shapes, and then slowly build up the detail once you're ready
I liked when you point out Rembrandt quote at 5:48 “It’s actually distracting to the viewer if everything has the same amount of attention drawn to it”
The best analogy I have come up with is "you don't need to build a world behind you camera"
But reflections :P
haha yeah. All my scenes. if you just move the camera one bit, everything breaks u see holes. It's perfected for the frame and nothing else. u can actually dl scenes from Pixar, same thing there. looks like jank from any other angle other than the cameras
*your
@@daniel4647 if you want reflections then you already know what to do
Moar HDRIs
Great tips - I have to keep relearning this lesson all the time.😬
Big fan sir
You aren't alone.
Why Nbdy replying?
Ok Nbdy replying I’ll just sub.
I hear ya.
"Perfection is the enemy of Good Enough."
as a solo Artist, Designer, and Coder, in that order, I learned long ago that sometimes sacrificing quality in order to ensure you actually finish is necessary.
You can always go back later and fix things if you aren't working on a strict deadline. Having anything is better than having really beautiful nothing.
"Perfection is the enemy of Good Enough." Thats good for people early in their journey in order to get them being productive. Later, though, it can be an obstacle to greatness if they apply the philosophy too liberally.
"Having anything is better than having really beautiful nothing." Sometimes I'll bite my tongue critiquing something, because at least the creator DID something.
that is why people become specialist where their perfectionism work well. Because they can spend all of their time to just small aspect of huge picture.
That's so true. You can always add detail later, especially if it's art created on a computer.
Here's some actionable advice: if your end goal is a single frame or a simple animation, the camera should be one of the first things you set up. Check camera view periodically, and get used to thinking of that as the default view for the scene. Whenever you start to add detail or work on textures, go into camera first and think, "is this change going to be noticeable in the final result?"
The desire for perfection isn't a flaw, it just needs to be tempered with the demands of time. This is why deadlines and time management are super important, even for a personal project. Assign a certain amount of time for each project, and figure out how much time that gives you to do each aspect of it. If you're not satisfied with one part of it at the end of the allotted time, you might be able to squeeze in extra time elsewhere, but it'll have to be at the expense of something else. Practice teaches, along with how to make things, how to make the right things at the right time for the use they're going to be put into.
I think this is an extremely useful piece of advice. As you say, the desire for perfection isn't a flaw, but instead something that can be directed into a perfect final product, rather than a perfect piece of irrelevant information.
Best comment I’ve read in a while! Great advice! I’m a professional photographer, so when I started learning blender, I immediately started doing what you’re saying. The first shortcut I learned was how to toggle in and out of camera view! Everybody always deletes the default cube, camera and light. Camera and lighting from the start is the way I work best..
So I'm a games programmer. This stuff happens at every level of the process. A UI designer, artist and programmer spent a combined 100 hours making a button animation that's visible to a player for 4 frames. It's always best to keep things in context, it's only cutting a corner if there's a corner there to cut! This took me so long to learn too, don't worry yourself, funnily enough, I'm pretty directly related to Rembrandt too.
i hope 100 hours is an exaggeration 😅
Rembrandt? Fun story there I think!
@@willtn divided by 3, that's four days of a work week. Sounds like something that could easily happen in game production!
That isn't funny enough, I'm sorry.
as a fellow programmer I 100% can see people spending that amount of time making a button. when I first started I spent weeks making a damage effect that lasted 0.2 seconds
I don't think wrong is the word, as Bruce Lee said: "Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick." The overdetailed perfectionism path is the learning part, mastering techniques, improving quality, training perception, being capable of doing very quality things, the simplifying and optimization sounds look the final stage, where "a punch is just a punch". The video is amazing mostly because of the ,amazing work, but a beginner trying to apply your last approach can do very awful things, because of skipping his own development.
Very true, what he missed is saying that you have to learn the fundamentals to be able to act like you didn't, and still end up with a work of art. Blender is not as easy as so many make out. Just because it's free doesn't mean it's easy. They give you the tool at no cost, you MUST learn the fundamentals to create.
I like the analogy of texting. If you don't know English (or insert language here) but try learning it from text shorthand then you'll never learn it. But once you know English why waste time typing it all out perfectly?
It's a delicate balance, with destructive extremes on both ends, that's for sure.
I'm a programmer primarily, been for a long time, I dabble in Blender here and there, but I recognize the same struggle in both fields. It's got a lot to do with your general attitude and motivation. You can slip into that mode where you're using "perfectionism" as an excuse to just show off, to do unnecessary things just to prove that you can do them, and so that nobody else might think there's even a single thing you haven't thought of, not a single outlandish future you haven't proofed against. And on the other end, you've got your Chads with "being thoughtful and thorough is for wusses" attitude, who use that overconfident machoism as an excuse to just be reckless and overall do sub-par work.
Sweet-spot is somewhere between those two extremes, and its position will depend on what the job is, who you are, what your skill set is, what's expected for the future of the project, etc. There isn't a simple answer, but what can help you is to always look back on your process with brutal honesty, and admit to yourself when you see it actually made no sense to put so much time and effort into a thing, that it made no real impact; and also, when you see that cutting corners in some area really came back to bite you down the line. The more honest and realistic you can be in those assessments, the better you will calibrate your inner compass for such stuff, and you'll have less misfires in the future.
Nice insight :)
Makes perfect sense. Hollywood has been doing that for years using facades as their sets and matte paintings and so forth. Thanks for the video.
I have had this problem working on my graduation project at university, though sometimes I think I have had it "in reverse". I have created a few assets that I did not think were up to snuff, and wasted hours tinkering with improvements to make, only to realize that the model I was working on would be obscured by depth of field, motion blur and aerial perspective, sometimes the added details were much too small to be resolved at the final render's resolution, even absent those other effects. Focusing your time and effort on the focal point of your image is a much more efficient way to work, and it will ultimately lead to a better quality result.
I work by the philosophy that the time spent on a certain part of a scene should be proportional to the time the viewer will spend looking at that component relative to all others.
You actually don't need to worry about typology for any model unless it's either being exported to other software, you are getting surface artifacts or it's being animated with mesh deformations. Quads are only needed for those smooth mesh deformations and renderers triangulate meshes at render time anyway. One advantage of making more high quality assets though is that those assets are then a lot more usuable for other projects or even to sell when you're done with them.
The one thing I learnt when I first started in 3D, and this only really applies if you are producing single renders or movies is that if you can't see it don't model it.
3:32 Harrison Ford: “Kid, it ain’t that kind of movie “ boy was he wrong.
Recently I discovered that this quick and dirty way worked very well for me starting out at blender again. It’s a lot of fun to see quick and good results
A friend of mine used to say "Perfection is the enemy of 'Good enough'". When I was working previz, I found out how dodgy a scene can still look great. Anyone working in games knows too. If the object or scenery is far enough away in the shot, it can be shoddily modeled, rendered, touched up in Photoshop and put on a forest of image planes in the background to thicken up the scene. You can have billions of polygons worth of scenery in a shot that way.
Anyway, love the cheap coverups. Great suggestions.
Man, we put a lot of labor into making things *not* look perfect, clean and freshly made. It's a shame when we waste time on "B" scenery that could be better put to use spending more time on something that will be seen.
I picked up Blender at around the same time and have somewhat consistently been able to create animations for clients.
Exactly as you pointed out, that precise way of working had to be thrown out the window. Compositing can also be extremely useful, especially working with any type of fluid sim.
Ah man, you hit the nail on the head. I'm making my first 3D film at the moment (been animating in 2D for years now). I have this long scene inside of the ruined train station. I started animating my character entirely, climbing up the stairs, walking into the room, starting up an old computer etc. I've spent hours making sure the entire character is animated properly, cleaning up every single step, gesture, face expression. But when I finally set up cameras I asked myself, "why do all this work?". Most of what I animated wouldn't even show on screen, the feet of the character would show in maybe two shots, in some he wouldn't even be seen at all. And as you said, I animated in 2D for years, I know how and when to cut corners to save myself needless work and time! So now I rember to animate and show only what I need. Good thing I strarted 3D scanning my assets before I began building them from scratch and hand-painting them all!
This is one of the things I wish I learned earlier on. It clicked for me when I spent an evening modelling one of those nitrous canisters that litter the streets in London. I modelled it, simulated squashing it and then textured it, it looked perfect. In the final scene it was no more than the glint of a couple of white pixels.
Yeah, I remember making loads of litter to cover the floor of a subway for a render. Cigarette butts, crisp packs, fake newspaper pages, McDonald's cups, etc. I ended up not even using most of it because it was distracting, and the few assets I did use could have been low poly models with a simple texture applied.
I haven't been using Blender for years, in fact, I just started this year. But I am SO glad I stumbled upon this before I got too accustomed to the way I was doing it. You are right. No one can see all those tiny details in the final render. Definitely appreciated this!
I had to learn this in my field too (compositing). I am far more technical than I am creative, so as a consequence I tend to enjoy the process more than even the final result. That meant that I ended up making what we dubbed "science experiments", which granted, did eventually work and often did solve complex issues, but most of the time could've been solved much faster with the simple, basic tools.
How I think about it is this; you have a bag of tricks and techniques that you're constantly expanding (hopefully). The problem is knowing when to use which technique, because there is a lot of overlap with their utility. With experience, you kinda build this hierarchy, or continuum where you place all your techniques from "crap" to "awesome". With more experience you learn when you can use some of the crap techniques, because they're fast and the thing you'll be using it on is 50 pixels, defocused in the background. And in the same vein, you learn when the awesome technique is just not necessary, and may even give you a worse result because it'll take so long that you lose iteration time. So then you have this multidimensional hierarchy of techniques, with the dimensions being quality, setup speed, render speed, interactivity, realism, difficulty etc.
This is why experience is so valuable, this is the sort of thing you only learn through practice, practice, practice (or work, work, work).
Absolutely crucial bit of advice! Personally I try to establish a camera angle early on, make a small viewport that's always visible, and evaluate my scene through that during the creation process. That way I have an idea of what will be seen in the final frame at every stage of the process.
This video sums up what I ended up learning in roughly the same amount of time. So don't worry. You're not the only one. Thanks for informing people about it!
Glad to hear it!
I'm primarily a software developer but premature optimisation and perfectionism can apply to us as well. Many years ago, after a successful handoff of my first program to a very happy client, the feedback from my boss was: "If you can deliver a program that is that good, you could have delivered a program that was good enough in half the time."
*Breadth first, then depth only where it is needed.*
I'm just about to start down the path of learning 3d modeling / rendering and this feels like really important knowledge. Thanks mate.
Also ruclips.net/video/CMm96KwOePI/видео.html that video from Corridor Digital from about 7:30 to 10:00 gives a good quick overview of things that you will simplify around when you master those concepts. He calls it visual beauty and basically says it's not really that important for that video he made and not to get hung up on it so you actually make stuff. The whole video is pretty great really and many of the concepts can be translated to 3d like the zones of grayscale concept. If you can tolerate the obnoxious in-video hijinks of them pointing out their website.
As others have pointed out. This is actually bad advice for beginners. I suggest reading through the comments especially the Bruce lee and picasso quotes, if I explained why it would end up quite a wall of text. Learn photorealism and full functional, high detail first, then learn how to simplify. Do use this as seeing the endpoint, think seeing a target across a bay and the only way to hit the target is trek up the mountain to get the height for your shot to actually make it to the target to hit it.
This was my original first reply. I guess it somehow got deleted?? Maybe replying to myself with a link seemed spammy, idk? Good thing I keep copies of things I guess. The video recommendation doesn't make full sense without this original comment preceding it.
Yeah, Ian Hubert's videos really get me inspired with 3d. Makes you realise that you can make good looking results without an insane amount of work.
totally agreed on every point! In the video game business you sometimes need to be quick and dirty (to an extense) and nobody will see the difference. What is important is if the context is good enough the small details won't make it more awesome then it is already.
You nailed it man!! It took me like 10 years of practice to understand that. And I still sometimes do the mistake of spending too much time on invisible details.
Good to know. I'm not as advanced as you, but all of it sounds like good common sense that is not all that common. Will keep all this in mind once I start making animations.
Excellent observations. I am so guilty of this. It's funny, 15-18 years ago I worked a lot in Second Life. I used to iterate so fast, mainly because SL made it almost impossible to create the kinds of complex meshes we take for granted in Blender. Now that I’ve spent a year in Blender, I appear to have forgotten the value of keeping things simple. :)
i really appreciate artist who can take a step back from their work and go, hey maybe i dont need to put so much effort in that bit. really makes a difference in the work
I work as a designer and concept artist on animated shows. We use Blender to get our ideas out because it's very fast to work in and we don't concern ourselves with clean typology, Ngons, 3D modeling best practices otherwise we're not going to get anywhere. Once design gets approved then all that stuff matters as the Modelling department builds the asset.
Absolutely 100% true, if you know the things are never going to be seen close up, like the candle at the start there for instance.
I'm also absolutely guilty of putting in to much work, as I think my work might be seen from any distance and angel.
my mind is blown, now it's time to jump into blender and see what magic we can do with that starting cube
I used to spend 6 months just to create textures for a simple airplane models, paying super in-depth attention to microscopic details. But after working on several such time consuming projects this idea automatically clicked in my head. Who’s actually going to even notice I did that much of detailed work? That’s it for me. Since then I began doing multiple projects a day, from scratch to picture perfect finished job.
The fact is this is actually your learning curve. The amount of time you spent isn’t a waste actually. You just got yourself refined with your skills. You are more well aware of what you’re doing, what is needed, what can be skipped. You subconsciously can think all of that within a matter of seconds.
And besides all it’s only the highly experienced ones can do such short methods, yet so proficient final product.
Every creator has to walk this path at some point.
I think the vending machine is the donut of messy blender usage. Everyone seems to be making them to figure out this quick and dirty style of working.
Thanks for reminding. It's all too easy to go back down the rabbit hole when you really want to model that screw perfectly because you really love that kind of screw and you don't want to disappoint it.
I've known this for a while but have soooo much trouble actually doing it. I can't stop myself making stuff look 'right'. I think it's because while we model each individual element they ARE the hero shot.
This approach is SO important for almost anything in life. It's always good to be able to do everything perfectly if need be, but knowing what's important and what's not and where time can be saved and put into what really matters is the most valuable skill.
fuck yeah
Man i think you're 100% right. I recently learned that i care way too much and spend way too much time on my renders/modelling when the client would have been happy with it 2 hours/days ago. Really need to stop being such a perfectionist and just get it done quick - nobody really notices that much! great video
So much this. I feel that a lot of the Blender community is geared towards making models for selling on websites. Most of the stuff I do is for specific shots, animations and uses, and it's that that defines how much work I put in. I think getting the level of detail right usually involves going *slightly* beyond what can be clearly seen, but not by much.
6:40 in movies or games they also like to save render- and production time. so they use a similar approach.
in big budged projects are often people just for cleaning up the models, so the 3d designers can focus on their actual jobs
I have spent three days trying to get an animal toe just right. This video is in the nick of time! Thanks.
BRILLIANT! I've been thinking that for years about the level of detail used in films. Each new movie creating a new hair system from scratch, etc.only to be 4 frames long and blurred. Know your composition and adjust the LOD accordingly.
It's definitely about what you want to do and how you manage yourself doing it. There's not point to make a complex mesh for 50 pixels on screen, but likewise half-assing a key object can kill a render. Know what you want to make, allow for some experimentation and balance your time doing it.
I desperately need to start doing exactly that. It took some time to realize this but you're totally right. It's nice to know there are more artists going through the same stuff and actually being able to simply solve this problem they simply didn't know it existed!
Good point at all. In this case, I strongly recommend to all be armed with Hardops, Mechmashine, Zenuv and other small tools like Miratools, Machinetools, Decalmachine, Kitops and so on. It will take some time to learn and even can break your view at vanilla Blender, but in the end, you will be amazed how fast you can approach the same results.
It's funny I think Meshmachine is bloody brilliant yet the 1 dollar MachineTools is what I use even more. But yeah, absolutely worth it for both. Couldn't get on with decalmachine as I don't understand how the mesh decals work exactly, which is a shame because it seems fantastic
@@jimmysgameclips A decal is just a plane with a texture on it. And a trimsheet is a collection of decals which can be easily and quickly applied to an object. I recommend watching Ryuurui, he has some videos on DecalMachine. The official MACHIN3 channel is also good.
@@jimmysgameclips As Paul already noticed - it's just a plane with normal map texture, allowing you to avoid the work with some small details. If you need a full model outside of the Blender - later you can bake it with your UV map and work with it in Substance Painter. For example, if you constantly do the same forms on your mesh - you can create your own Decals and just kitbashing with your personal style. The KitOps on the other hand do the same things but with mesh inserts via life-boolean (you do not apply it before the final result). Meaning that you can basically work in a non-destructive manner and prototyping things pretty quickly based on simple geometry form like a cube (at raw form). But on top of all these things Is Hardops. Since it's not just some live-boolean addon, but it provides tons of tools and scripts that drastically change your speed of modelling in Blender.
Don't forget the up and coming HyperCursor. I've got my eye on that for buying upon launch.
My 3d teacher had this simple exercise for us - create a scene of a basketball rolling over the floor from one side of the classroom to the other, and it had to be realistic - and whoever did it best based on the brief got an award.
Turned out that following the brief showing anything else but the ball rolling and a bit of the floor was unnecessary and all else should just be skipped, or you would spend more way more time than you had and most of us failed the task.
I think this holds true for most projects - block it out, build out what you need and decide as you go along what you will actually see - skip everything else or keep it as simple as possible.
My biggest problem is remembering that not even little detail matters, not that I don't know. I have the same issue drawing too ;-;
If you do it for yourself and like to to look at all the details, then it's allright. But if you do something as a job, don't do more than necessary.
You learn this quickly when you make 3D models for video games. How detailed/complex the object needs to be depends on how close the object is going to be to the camera, and how important the object is in the scene. A hero object, meant to stand out, requires more attention than a random, unimportant object. Plus you have to take performance into consideration, so "faking" detail in models is a common thing (as long as it looks good in the camera). You can even get away with building only the part of an object that will be visible (for example, if you know the camera will only ever see the front of the vending machine, then you don't really need the back side at all).
Knowing what and when to go quickly is a key to being a pro. After 20+ years of graphic design I realized that subtle details are usually pointless and make little difference in the final result! Unless they DO make a difference, and it's up to you to know which is which. ;)
When you work in production and have deadlines (in advertising they are very very tight) this is something that you learn fast.
Man I can relate to this so much. Not 3D, but the feeling is the same. You polish every small bit of a turd in the corner and you don't even feel accomplished when you look at the final result, where none of that hard work is there to be seen.
Exactly. It's actually really disheartening when you spend loads of time on something only for it to have a tiny effect on the final result.
Thanks for this good reminder. Same thing I learned in graphic design; focus on the focus.
I can't say you have doing it wrong. Basically it's and workflow depends on your goals and porpoises.
....and if the porpoises are under water, who’s gonna see them anyway?!
@Michael Sankale NO! IT"S A FISH
@@johndeggendorf7826 You can't do it wrong if no one have it seen
purposes, е*учий т9, кек
I'm not a Blender user but that was interesting with somes very good advises there, and yes I think some of the most important is to know wich details to focus on, it's like mastering where you want the viewer eyes to focus.
I remember that story by Mark Hamill. He does a great impression of Harrison Ford while he tells it lol!
So much important stuff in one short video, nice! This is good advice for beginners and advanced users. All of those things are so simple and yet so difficult and advanced.
1:25 made me literally laugh out loud 😂😂😂
That makes a lot of sense, considering that's how it goes painting. It's all very gestural outside of the focal points.
The little bit of 3d I've done for work was all LOD models for games, so I've seen first hand that you don't really need highly detailed models or textures as long as you can fool the eye.
Brilliant!
It's pretty nice that you share these lessons. Many people charge a hefty sum for this, as it's considered a "secret" in the industry.
Heavily invested companies and agencies, film studios all over the world - Hollywood, Bollywood, any other jolly wood lmao - save thousands, if not millions, simply by implementing this psychology, "If it ain't visible up close in your face, it doesn't need details."
While learning graphics design and animation, I was taught this in the first semester and we were practically forced to practice this philosophy.
In many professional works I've done over the past several years, be it interior walk through, or a motion graphics CGI, my practice has always been to keep only those items at great details which are - 2 meters in front of the camera, and inside the focal length cone - everything else beyond this range gets lower and lower details.
The same principle is applied in games, also known as Level Of Detail, or L.O.D. . I'm pretty sure you must've heard about this. L.O.D zero is when the object is nearest to the camera, that's when it has massive details, while L.O.D xyz is for far away objects.
Even in real life you cannot see detail in objects at a certain distance away from the eyes, nor can you see details in objects closer to the eyes beyond a certain distance. While you're focused on something, only a tiny portion of that object is in complete focus and everything else is out of focus, you can experiment if curious. Check through your peripheral vision and try to find details in objects out of your immediate focused item.
Anyway, I know I've typed an essay for you and many others to read (if interested), but I just wanted to sincerely thank you for sharing your experiences with us. It's really hard to find good people sharing good stuff for free.
As someone said "Perfection is an enemy of Good"
and btw which resources you came across to learn to make clean UVs, topologies all this standard "correct" methods, because from start I followed Ian, peter france all this guys who make stuff faster and I love this way but I'll also want to get decent knowledge of standard way.
Blender guru
You could try his workflow. He has a lot of proper workflow doing his projects.
That's a major lesson for modelling and for life in general. You're at your best when your focusing on what really matters instead of worrying about invisible details. Especially if it's a hobby.
Thanks for sharing, I was feeling that I’d become a slave to perfect topology and UV mapping and finding it hard to stop at ‘good enough’.
06:58 Don't confine yourself to a bunch of arbitrary rules because at the end of the day the final result is the only thing that matters 👍🏻
hah I love this because I'm a previz artist these days, and this is my life!
first day of the previz job, coming from a game company where each model had to be as good as it could from every angle, and we spent a few weeks or months making every asset.... I sit down and I"m told to make an entire environment, 3 characters and some effects.... by the end of the day! I picked up a lot of the tricks you mentioned really quick (been doing previz for more than 10 years now, I love the speed of the work)
It's not wasted time, imagine starting out like this and then after a while you want to be part of the industry but have nearly no idea on optimized and clean typology, unwraps and workflow. You will spend so much more time fixing bad habits that you picked up learning this way rather than having learned the industry standard for high quality renders, videogames and more. Once familiar with the standard and you wanna work for yourself or just care about a good render you can break these rules but they still offer important knowledge especially when working on group projects or game assets.
Still awesome video, enjoyed it a lot.
Fantastic video mate. When you're working in an environment where anything and everything can be made super high res, it often takes away from the final product like you say. Human brains are great at interpreting very basic shapes and the best artists know that and use it really well.
I find this video very informative, not just in terms of practicality, but in the approach to Art itself. I'm a painter and Sketch artist and this approach is something I discovered a long time ago. I only recently started learning how to create 3D art in blender and Unreal Engine. I completely forgot about this very basic artistic principle of minimalism versus detail when creating the 3D art. Thank you for the reminder.
This is encouraging to users like me who see all the elaborate work others do sometimes which is beyond me... but for simple still renders and even simple video animations that are not needing that kind of detail and perfection... even I can pull that off!
Very well said. This has actually changed my outlook on my work in a positive way. This is something every 3D artist needs to watch.
Seems like a scenario of "learn the rules before you break them." Learning to do 3d modelling right is super important, and should probably be prioritized in most cases over time. When you've figured shit out is when you can get lazy about it.
"if people are noticing all these small inconsequential parts of the mesh, your animation probably sucks."
I really needed to hear this bc im always stressing about details.
Awesome video!
This was some extremely useful insight I probably needed, thanks very much.
Good luck with your animation!
Very correct thoughts in my understanding. Human brain are trained to compensate for nonexistent unnecessary details on the background. I think realistically combined composition and realistic lighting is more important then supper detailed background objects.
Implementation time is an ever-present and very important factor but there's something to be said for learning the rules first before breaking them. I think you doing this in this order was the best approach. I hope most people *do* take the time to learn the ideal rules for "perfect" modelling before throwing them out the window as needed.
Really happy I stumbled upon your video in my recommended feed. As I’ve been learning more in depth with animation and modeling, I’ve been losing the forest for the trees. This really helped me mentally visualize my work flow.
Real nice, especially the anecdotes about Rembrandt and your own painting - stuff like that really helps to understand your basic thrust but more importantly shows that you know what you are actually talking about - not just another screen recording of someone awesome at Blender.
Didn't know where you were going with this, but totally agree. If something is going to be 30 pixels wide on the final screen, you don't need that much detail in it for the time it takes to make it.
Truth. Most production artists live by this if a producer is in the mix and the pressure is on. At one point we were cutting 6 shots a day 2K on a team of three and dof and motion blur cut the workload down by about 60% after tests.
Thank you! I've been working on a couple of short animations, and I've been getting so caught up in modelling background stuff in great detail that I've become frustrated and shelved them. This video has given me the freedom to pick them up again.
Realy helpful tip. defintly changes my approach at my illustrations and now, to my learning process for blender.
You're so right. I found the best artists know a lot less than how to use 'all' of the program. Ian Hubert is a perfect example.