Best Software to create sketches to be used in Maya?
Hello, I heard somebody say about a software that was great to create reference images and sketches to be used in maya, unfortunately couldnt catch the name. Any recommendations?
Thanks.
Thanks.
Replies
Sketchbook pro is cool, and had a very clean, non-overloaded interface last time i used it.
Also look at Krita, which is an amazing full featured painting tool and free. Its open source and developing very quickly
I primarily use clipstudio for now.
the symmetry tools are awesome
you can put your symmetry line where you want and it will draw the symmetry in realtime
you also have radial symmetry which is alot of fun playing with
also the brush system rocks
I'm familiar with Sketchbook Pro, it's a fine drawing program. As is I'm sure everything else listed in this thread. OP asked for the "best" software and my point is pretty much that there isn't one, preference is really the deciding factor here. Even for symmetrical painting, you can symmetrize a picture via hotkey by setting up an action in Photoshop.
I hope I am not going to sound like a naysayer, but I personally strongly disagree with this. Even simply sketching a profile curve straight on the screen with a dry-erase marker or with a screen annotation software can save a ton of time. Nothing beats the fluidity of the human hand, and on top of that, having an established goal to work towards is always a huge time saver compared to improvising in 3D, with all the limitations that comes with it (impractical curve handles to tweak, faces to extrude, move brushes causing surfaces to get lumpy, and so on).
I understand that "jamming straight in 3D" seems to be popular these days as shown by the many timelapse videos floating around, but good design rarely comes from improvisation (even though happy accidents can always happen of course).
My issue is that it's easy to mistake a bad painting for a bad design. Does this suck because the design sucks? Or is it because my painting sucks? With that in mind when people try to tackle a scene there's strong bias to make design choices based on whether or not they can draw it easily and effectively, not on what will give them the best design.
So they'll do things like simplify the perspective by making it a long distance shot, or obscure the floor with foreground objects so that the intersections don't look wonky, or they stack the scene with foliage/rocks or other organic objects that can be fudged better in perspective, or they simplify their shapes and choose angular objects that are easy to lay into a perspective drawing (or crazy shapes that can be fudged like organics) and people rarely ever offset the flat edges of their objects from the VPs in their painting because it just means more perspective bullshit to solve. Tools like Sketchbook Pro's makes it cleaner to draw a line to a VP than setting up massive pinwheel spokes but it doesn't do much to alleviate the most tedious tasks of perspective setup.
What should have been an attempt to find the best design quickly becomes an exercise in trying to work around their own drafting inadequacy.
Working in 3D frees you up from all this baggage because no matter how complex your scene becomes it will effortlessly render it in perfect perspective. (with correct cast shadows too, which almost no artist bothers to solve for and just eyeballs in concept sketches) And you can still go back and do crude greasepen sketches over it if you have an idea, but in instances like that accuracy is not a concern.
Anyway, I am actually agreeing with BOTH pior and Atticusmars, which might be odd, but it honestly depends on your perception of concept art, and what you are actually conceptualising.
Like, the OP asked about what I assume is a program to quickly doodle some orthographics in. Maybe some emblem designs that he can trace over. In that case, Pior's position is indeed correct, doing these kind of little designs in any program with symmetry is indeed the easiest way to go about it.
But if you start doing a full scale concept art, that needs to be perspectively correct, like AtticusMars is thinking, then doing the basis in 3d is the easiest.
In the end, the most efficient way is combining the two in some kind of unholy matte painting monsterousity. In the above picture, doing the top two designs was easy, but the lower design took me just as much time as the top two due to fiddliness of perspective. If I had just made the base block in Blender or whatever, I could've made a quick render, brought it in as a file layer/smart layer, and continued on doodling architectural details on there.
Just don't forget that at the end of the day, concept art is about conceptualising, so even if it's incorrect, the point is that you experiment with ideas and that you jot them down in a shorthand that is useful to you as an artist. (And arguably, it is part of the job of a 3d artist to succesfully translate a concept artist's shorthand into something nice)
That said *puts Krita-dev hat on*, there's some neat features in Krita that can help iterating on concepts. I uploaded a *.kra file of the above here: https://share.kde.org/index.php/s/IZHd9Lnjcfq2vyk
Draw on the layer "sunpattern (doodle here)" to see what clone layers and transform masks can do, or tick 'assistant' in the tool options of the freehand brush to see the perspective tools in action.