Working With Three Dimensions
When I was a teenager I became frustrated that I couldn’t learn to draw. Even the simplest stick figure would have me erupt in tears while my friends tried to explain that I just needed to practice more. While I won’t deny there are those that have fought tooth and nail for artistic prowess, I personally just needed to play to my strengths.
I have the hand-eye coordination of someone who grew up on their computer playing video games: fast, mechanical muscle-memory, lacking the gentle touch and flowing lines needed for traditional art. When I got my own laptop,and got really into Homestuck and Team Fortress 2, I found Digital Art, which I figured was just learning to press the right buttons, and I was really good at pressing buttons!
Turns out, it's not that easy. I never attended college, I spent those years binging Youtube videos to learn Blender’s complicated UI and basics in perspective and colors and such. You may be familiar with my art at the time: I mostly made objects for the game Garry’s Mod. My earliest 3D work was inspired by BabyFawnLegs, who made the Homestuck characters for it, and I spent most of the time working with the now very outdated Source Engine. These days I stick to Blender for 3D, Photoshop for editing, and Inkscape for vector art.
With introductions out of the way, let’s talk about art. I can’t possibly fit a tutorial for 3D Art here, any given topic by itself can have a preposterous amount of information: from Modeling to Texturing to Animating and everything in between. Instead, I’ll go over some specific methods and style choices I used for the image I created for this zine.
First of all, I think you’ll get the biggest WOAH moment if I just move the camera slightly:
The biggest advantage that 3D Art has: everything exists. If I don’t like the placement or angle of an object, I can just.. move it. In this image I was inspired by the scene in Alice in Wonderland where Alice is falling and furniture is floating around her. I first modeled the room as it would appear in reality, then used a grab tool to drag a corner down, dragging everything with it. Here’s a couple shots from when it was rather plain:
I can also note here a couple of techniques for the basic model. Most things in this image are super, super simple. Most objects, from the table to the computer to the bookshelf, are just cubes with some resized bits. Most of the materials are very basic, just a color or a pattern. A weird style choice came about naturally: giving the floor/walls the texture of repeating Homestuck panels, and the textures for the books being handy, led me to taking even the table and bookshelf and giving them weird skewed versions of the Homestuck book art plastered across them. The face and shirt-icon are “Images as Planes”, imported as a quad and placed over the simple geometry:
The only thing that required more finesse was their hoodie: I edited a cube the best I could for a crude hoodie-ish shape, then used Blender’s sculpting tools to smooth things out. In this case I only used my mouse. I own a small tablet, a Huion h420 (blaze it), that I use for texture painting or sculpting, but only rarely.
Another incredible feature of 3D art is being able to reuse things. For this image: MSPA Reader’s left hand and the Fenestrated Window in the background are both older models of mine. The details on his hand were a bit uhhhhhh uncanny when placed in this simple scene, so I’m very lucky that Homestuck has already set a precedent for glowing limbs. Also his arm sticks right out the back of his sleeve.
Once everything in my image is properly placed and skewed and haphazardly textured through image-textures and generated patterns (which Blender does via a Node system that is surprisingly intuitive), it’s time to render! Back in the years I was learning Blender this would take…. 45 minutes to an hour. But Blender has come a long way over the years and the EEVEE renderer can make it nigh instantaneous, taking advantage of your graphics card to render it like a video game can in under a second! And voila, we get art!
Hmmm. That’s…. Okay? It’s not GREAT. If we want it to be GREAT we gotta get ARTSY. This is where Photoshop comes in: my particular style of post-processing includes many many layers of adjustments and edits.Turns out if you right click a layer in Photoshop and press “Blending Options…”, you get a bunch of magic “MAKE ART BETTER” buttons, who knew???
As a last note, you can see some bits of wireframe in the final version (especially in the higher res at the top of this page). That wasn’t drawn, that was taking advantage of the fact that making the art in 3D allows us to easily tweak some properties for different renders: using different styles and materials and compositing them into the final version through Photoshop.
