My career as a 3D artist finally begins!!!

Bletzkarn

I'm really excited. To give some quick background, I started uni at 17 studying civil engineer - hated it and dropped out after 2 years. Got kicked out of the house and roamed aimlessly for a while. Did a 4 year design degree and got a job in visualisation.

Before this job I had never used vray and was pretty bad at 3DSMAX (still am). However in this small industry I've been able to create "industry leading" renders.

Throughout uni I used my crappy laptop that could barely support 5k polys on a 15 inch 1920x1080 the pain! photoshop and 3DSMAX open at the same time? impossible.

Well I'm sitting here with my $3000 computer, wacom tablet, dual 27" monitor with money I earned through rendering, it feels amazing. I have my leget copies of 3DSMAX, Vray, and substance ready to go. Where to begin!

As much as I love modelling for games I believe I have a better chance in architectural visualisation. My first goal is to build a portfolio that establishes my value as a designer and a visualisation artist. My first challenge to myself (after several hours of udemy tutorials) is to create some high quality foliage that is native to my country - and impossible to find on the web. Then I would like to model my apartment as a portfolio piece. 

Any tips and advice is greatly appreciated, or if anyone has advice for organising myself better it would be greatly appreciated.

sacboi

Sounds like a plan goodluck with it all and CGArchitect.com, is another resource with a ton of relevant content as well.

Brian "Panda" Choi

Make food for your team.  Their hearts can be in their stomachs.

jaker3278

Have you got any of your work online, would like to see what "Industry leading" renders are like. 

Bletzkarn

jaker3278 said:

Have you got any of your work online, would like to see what "Industry leading" renders are like. 

It's hilarious because they're actually really bad! I can't show any online for confidentiality reasons however they look similar to this: 



I work as a playground designer. Before I started the renders looked more like this:



They where literally just taking a screenshot of the 3dsmax viewport.

Ultimately I would like my renders to get to this level:

jaker3278

Thanks for the reply, Looks like the bottom image is using a lot of photo merging, especially the people. It would be impossible to get a render looking this good with out photographic assets as well. 

Bletzkarn

jaker3278 said:

Thanks for the reply, Looks like the bottom image is using a lot of photo merging, especially the people. It would be impossible to get a render looking this good with out photographic assets as well. 

I know it looks that way but the people are actually are 3D Models sold by axyz-design. They're 3D scanned and they look amazing, I will be purchasing some hopefully in the next few weeks. Otherwise the things I notice are great variation in the flora and the scene is just well composited. Much larger resolution as well.

jaker3278

O yeah if you look closely you can see they have reused some of them. Wow they are quite costly. 

Bletzkarn

jaker3278 said:

O yeah if you look closely you can see they have reused some of them. Wow they are quite costly. 

They are, lucky for me I have a really cool boss who is happy to drop $500-$600 on assets.