How do you control your artstyle?
interpolator
A quick look in the 3D Pimping and Previews and you'll see not one artist is the same.
Whether it's people who make their textures "hand painted", some who strive for stylized fantasy or those going for realism.
But I want to know what "standards" do you strive for when making art. What is it about your art pieces that only you do that you like?
Me: I want to create art that is highly photorealistic. So I want to put great attention in using advance graphical techniques like ambient occlusion or global illumination to make my art comparable to a photograph. I pay great attention to saturation and hue in my image. I want to avoid my images looking very muddy or dark compared to a lot of video games out there. My images have to look like they're full of color and brightness. I avoid using post processing filters like chromatic aberration or color grading that I feel would destroy the color balance I worked hard for.
Despite my love of photorealism, I also really care about stylization. I want to combine the two and end up with something close to Looney Tunes or Crash Bandicoot rather than say, Pixar.
Whether it's people who make their textures "hand painted", some who strive for stylized fantasy or those going for realism.
But I want to know what "standards" do you strive for when making art. What is it about your art pieces that only you do that you like?
Me: I want to create art that is highly photorealistic. So I want to put great attention in using advance graphical techniques like ambient occlusion or global illumination to make my art comparable to a photograph. I pay great attention to saturation and hue in my image. I want to avoid my images looking very muddy or dark compared to a lot of video games out there. My images have to look like they're full of color and brightness. I avoid using post processing filters like chromatic aberration or color grading that I feel would destroy the color balance I worked hard for.
Despite my love of photorealism, I also really care about stylization. I want to combine the two and end up with something close to Looney Tunes or Crash Bandicoot rather than say, Pixar.
Replies
Ain't nobody.
Everyone does have their own unique way of doing things, it often becomes recognizable, or a 'style'. That just happens and is not something I ever 'try to control'.
I don't have one way of doing things. Realistic, stylized, hand painted? I'll adapt based on the project. I may be more proficient in one thing over another, but I try not to constrain myself to any one thing. I create something in the style of whatever project I'm working on at the time, and if some of my underlying artistic touches or style comes through in the result, so be it.
You may be thinking a bit too hard about this, and worrying too much about style. Try a broad range of things, and never put artificial restrictions on yourself (except: never steal someone else's work). You never know when a particular technique will come in handy.
As a side note: I can't tell if you're stating what you are ideally trying to achieve, or what you think you currently are achieving, but you may want to watch your wording. Be careful of overconfidence / inflated ego. We've all got a lot left to learn.
Your brain naturally adopts tidbits of everything you've done and your style starts to form on its own.
as everyone mentioned, just go with it and dont think that much about it.
For example, originally I wanted to make a thread discussing the rise of chromatic aberration in people's art. But I figured if someone wants to use chromatic aberration, that's their vision even though I disagree with it for my own art.
I also do agree with trying out different styles. I've been looking into pencil crayons or paint brushes and thinking what kind of cool things I can make with them that I'll still enjoy doing.
I realized the type of textures and proportions that I enjoyed making and embraced it. My 'style' is still in flux as I learn new techniques.
http://media.steampowered.com/apps/dota2/workshop/Dota2CharacterArtGuide.pdf
While the DOTA style guide is very thorough it doesn't really cover the actual style of the characters. This is assumed to be understood purely from looking at the existing examples. An experienced artist would be expected to be adept at identifying the style by eye and is something you're expected to learn by practice.
A common technique for learning style is to draw the same subject many times but to change the signs used for representing the subject each time. For example you might draw something using only dots, and only lines, and only gradients. Each time you would learn the value of these elements for representing a message and can develop more complex ways of creating images.
Values play a more important role in making an image muddy/dark. It's more important to play with what is dark and what is bright. What brings contrast and what doesn't. What color you choose is secondary to that.
From my understanding adding in chromatic aberration is used to simulate a photograph because the lens of a camera distorts the wavelengths of light. Just like when you shine light at a glass prism and it splits your light into different colors. Someone please correct me if i'm wrong.
Why would you avoid color grading? It feels like you are scared to change your work just because you may have spent a long time on it. Why not try to see if the post filter effects actually add to your work. if it doesn't, then don't use it for that piece of work. Just don't actively avoid something just because you think it can ruin your image, try it first.
CA is apart of photography, I wont attempt to deny that. However, I don't see CA being "desirable" in photorealism. It's actually something photographers attempt to remove from their photos as opposed to keeping it. You can also tell the difference between a photo shot with a top of the line DSLR vs a very cheap $100 camera. The DSLR will feature next to no CA and will have a much cleaner and crisp image as a result of it.
That doesn't mean CA is completely useless or evil. It can have its place. For example, CA is heavily tied to old cameras. If you want to recreate an old scene from the 1800's, you might want to include it to sell the idea "this is an old photograph".
However, here is where my opinion comes in why I try to avoid it. Real life is devoid of CA. Stick out your hand and you wont see any green or red wavelengths lining next to it. Same goes for everything else in a room.
I hold this same opinion for film grain. It does show up in photos but it reflects very old quality. Real life as well, is not made up of "noise" that we can stick out our hand and see up close.
My reason for not using color grading is because I want to keep things "vanilla". That is, I wouldn't want to tamper with an image if it already looks real.
You know how in some movies or games, there's usually that extra "yellow filter" thrown in? To me, that isn't photorealistic because real life isn't viewed through a yellow lens (unless you actually wear something like yellow goggles or you're looking through yellow binoculars).
Of course, I can understand the purpose behind it. Certain colors can dictate mood in a scene or have your eyes behave a certain way while watching. But that's another topic.
I also agree with you on trying out these effects. In fact, some of my opinions stems from trying them out in the past. I use to really look up to seeing Chromatic Aberration in images. After a while though, I started getting annoyed by the "blurriness" CA left behind. Eventually, I dropped it all together when I saw the high quality images taken by cutting-edge cameras did away with them and it just looked better to me.
~~~~~~~~~~
Once again, I'm not trying to dictate to others what the standards of art should be. The beauty of polycount and art in general, is that everyone does their own thing. Everyone's approach to art is different which leads to variety as opposed to every art piece looking the same.
It´s a quick an easy way to create imperfections in the image which in turn fool the eye/perception into thinking the image is more realistic than it is straight out of the renderer.
Straight lines, perfect colors, too high contrast and too high saturation in my view plagues the "realistic" 3D space in general, and is usually what can seperate great- from mediocre artwork.
Going for photorealism should in my personal view not be a primary goal of anyone doing 3D if its not going to be matched into a photo or film.
Going for a look that instantly grabs your eye, and makes you want to look closer at an image is.
Too clean and clinical is just boring.
Cool factor >>> realism I should say, but thats just my personal view/taste.
The real world in most cases is drab, de-saturated, and flat in contrast unless the sun is shining or you have a studio light setup :P
However, I don't think you'll always have to rely on those two to break the spell.
Compare the first Toy Story movie with the sequels. The later films look more real but because the increase in horsepower has lead to bigger texture maps which have more detail (i.e, scratches, dirt, oils), more advance lighting and shadowing and higher polygon counts for detailed environments.
CG will have to continue putting in research and compute power into finding out how lighting behaves in real life so we end up with something that is less artificial looking.
Most styles are exploits of the optical illusions that the brain uses to make sense of the world. This works because vision is a representative system with flaws (dynamic range, colour perception), and can be tricked. Animation is an optical illusion that exploits persistence of vision for example.
Under this understanding the effect of a 2d animator stretching a limb to show fast movement is no less valid than a 3d artist emulating motion blur. Both exploit the same optical illusion.
On the colour grading thing. A photo is a flawed representation no matter how you look at it. An image with bad white balance is no less valid an interpretation than a well white balanced image, and is just a different interpretation of the same scene. However in creation of an image, i recommend making the clearest interpretation with as much colour and light information as possible as any other representation is a destructive reduction of information and reduces options down the track.
An example of this done badly is in bioshock infinity, many enemies had exposure painted into their diffuse textures.
Also RE film grain. Film grain is far more prevalent in film cameras, and is considered by many to be beautiful. It's a stylistic choice, but if you are going with it, i recommend choosing a particular lens to emulate and doing it consistently instead of picking and choosing camera effects.
I must have angered the art gods and now they post processed my city! :poly122:
It can be little things or big things. "I draw hands and eyes like this" or "I smudge transitions into shadows like this".
edit for Justin (via a friend of mine):
Do i have a personal style? maybe but its not something that i intend to force onto my work unless its deliberate (like my disney sculptstuff).
Just study everything and try to be the best you can be , whatever style comes along on that journey will only evolve together with you
Artists who find their strong style too early often spend their entire careers trying to escape it.
+1 to this! I've developed some hard habits in my penwork over the years that I find hard to get out of.
I do however try to be more flexible, trying out other art-styles and become efficient enough in them to be able to work professionally with them.
Right now , being very efficient in Realistic will land you jobs for sure and it's a good way to start :P
For example, for one project I might do realism and another I might do cartoony - these are both STYLES, and both /in/ my STYLE. So we have two things that use the same word here.
So for me, I prefer to think of my 'artist's style' like HANDWRITING - I don't think about it, its just how I do my stuff. And I use the word 'style' to talk about what kind of aesthetic I am going for with this particular project.
So with regard to how I control my 'style' as you would put it, I don't. It's my handwriting, its how I do things and its not a concious choice. It's evolved over the years, just like how my handwriting was terrible as a child and is now better.
So whether I am tackling cartoons or hyper real or somewhere between, I don't particularly think about what its doing, I just put down my pixels or triangles in line with my vision for the project.