Interesting question, it might sound silly but the best thing I can advice you to do is to practice! Sense of scale is one of those things that might seem simple and straightforward but actually takes a while to master, for all of us! The only way to get there is to fail at it, and move on. It's such a hard topic to put into words or to even teach someone I guess.
Watching tutorials only wont cut it, the artists you say usually nail their proportions at first, it's only cos they perfected their craft.
Still, to get you started, try and ALWAYS have a human in your scene, even if you're building a little prop, always have a human visible in your scene at all times, it helps you to never loose the sense of scale.
With time, you'll learn that actually trying to mimic reality's proportions doesn't work, due to a lot of factors -- FoV and just the nature of 3D being one of them, so you teach your brain to fake and hack a lot of things, exaggerating some proportions and trimming down others.
very good topic for sure, I've had the same problem since i first started in any kind of art, both 2d and 3d.
i'l re-iterate what HP said in terms of practice. I've been at this for about 10 years and i'm just now starting to get to a point where i feel like i have a grasp on this sort of thing
My best tips would be:
-Analyze everything around you, even if it doesn't seem significant at the time, it may help you down the road. Door frames, windows, whole buildings; it all adds up to a good sense of scale
-Bring your work into an engine. maya, 3dsmax, blender etc wont give you a proper sense of scale because you're not dealing with engine dependent fov or unit scale , so jump rite into the engine even if its just a few boxes and barrels
-look at bad examples and figure out why the scene isnt working. My favorite example to bring up here is Deus Ex: Invisible War, play through it yourself or look at videos/pictures. everything is just kind of off, wide doors, long stretched out windows...
One tip I can give is for a FPS to create a camera at the height of an average human (1.80 m). This way you can get a preview of how you would percieve before loading the asset into an engine.
Another thing you can do is export assets from the engine into your 3D app to compare size.
Always good to model things a little bit exaggerated compared to real-life units to avoid claustrophobic environments unless your going for that theme.
A doorway/door is a good start to establishing scale...an average door is about 3x7 so one would be able to compare it to something in real life. If a door is not in your scene put something in there that is comparable. Chair, soda can, guns etc...but a human is probably the best...
I always drop in a udk base male mesh into my scene then build off of that scale. I can scale everything down or up at once if need to compared to trying to do it to separate models within the scene.
i always drop in a player mesh while building my props and the scene in udk, and if working from concpets, i try and work of of items in the concept with knowen heights, such as a door or table.
for games i tend to always go a bit bigger than real-life, than i put things 2 a nice power of 2 number if it is modular.
also a few more application spefic tips.
in udk in the 2nd views you can drag middle mouse to drag out a ruler and measure things, and in maya control+T, will give you the bounding box dimensions of everythign selected.
I always made everything too big at first too. What I started doing was making a bounding box for the pieces I was modeling.
It's funny because I actually just had this problem too for the first time in a long time. I spent a couple of weeks on a terrain based scene w/o ever once doing a PIE run. I jumped in and I couldn't believe how badly I exaggerated everything. The really funny part is, I modeled everything to the proper scale but kept scaling the pieces up in the editor because it looked wrong lol...
Turns out my terrain was way bigger than I perceived it. So it's possible that just one thing can put your whole perception off-kilter.
How big is a rock? Well what's the rock for? Is it supposed to be small and decorative? Is it supposed to block a passage? It is meant to be a big chunk sticking out of a hillside?
Scale comes from purpose; a chair should be the right scale so you could comfortably sit at the table it's next to. The window next to the table should be at the right height so you can look at it by sitting at the table.
What I did recently was put in a bunch of dummy objects into max. A table with the correct height, a chair, stairs, human 6ft man, child etc. I always have these dummy objects handy with any scene I'm working in now. It will help to just bring one of the objects over and use it for reference.
Also, Crydev.net has a handy scale reference page: http://freesdk.crydev.net/display/SDKDOC3/Measurement+Reference
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Watching tutorials only wont cut it, the artists you say usually nail their proportions at first, it's only cos they perfected their craft.
Still, to get you started, try and ALWAYS have a human in your scene, even if you're building a little prop, always have a human visible in your scene at all times, it helps you to never loose the sense of scale.
With time, you'll learn that actually trying to mimic reality's proportions doesn't work, due to a lot of factors -- FoV and just the nature of 3D being one of them, so you teach your brain to fake and hack a lot of things, exaggerating some proportions and trimming down others.
I wish I could be of better help, but, yeah.
i'l re-iterate what HP said in terms of practice. I've been at this for about 10 years and i'm just now starting to get to a point where i feel like i have a grasp on this sort of thing
My best tips would be:
-Analyze everything around you, even if it doesn't seem significant at the time, it may help you down the road. Door frames, windows, whole buildings; it all adds up to a good sense of scale
-Bring your work into an engine. maya, 3dsmax, blender etc wont give you a proper sense of scale because you're not dealing with engine dependent fov or unit scale , so jump rite into the engine even if its just a few boxes and barrels
-look at bad examples and figure out why the scene isnt working. My favorite example to bring up here is Deus Ex: Invisible War, play through it yourself or look at videos/pictures. everything is just kind of off, wide doors, long stretched out windows...
hope that helps in some way!
Another thing you can do is export assets from the engine into your 3D app to compare size.
I always drop in a udk base male mesh into my scene then build off of that scale. I can scale everything down or up at once if need to compared to trying to do it to separate models within the scene.
for games i tend to always go a bit bigger than real-life, than i put things 2 a nice power of 2 number if it is modular.
also a few more application spefic tips.
in udk in the 2nd views you can drag middle mouse to drag out a ruler and measure things, and in maya control+T, will give you the bounding box dimensions of everythign selected.
It's funny because I actually just had this problem too for the first time in a long time. I spent a couple of weeks on a terrain based scene w/o ever once doing a PIE run. I jumped in and I couldn't believe how badly I exaggerated everything. The really funny part is, I modeled everything to the proper scale but kept scaling the pieces up in the editor because it looked wrong lol...
Turns out my terrain was way bigger than I perceived it. So it's possible that just one thing can put your whole perception off-kilter.
Scale comes from purpose; a chair should be the right scale so you could comfortably sit at the table it's next to. The window next to the table should be at the right height so you can look at it by sitting at the table.
Also, Crydev.net has a handy scale reference page:
http://freesdk.crydev.net/display/SDKDOC3/Measurement+Reference