The Secret Renaissance of the 21st Century
polycounter lvl 9
I'm not sure if this has every really been brought up much here, or on any other of the big places, like Zbrush Central etc. but has the community ever stopped and realized that all of us, the modelers, the animators, the concept artists, all of us, are a part of one of the greatest art movements in the last hundred years?
Take a look at any of these disciplines, and you will see that artists are producing things on levels at and beyond what the masters of the last renaissance achieved in their time.
Concept Artists are creating paintings that surpass those in museums on a technical level and in beauty.
Modelers are creating sculptures in Zbrush that rival anything made by the Greeks and the Romans, the greatest sculptors in human history.
Animators give life to digital works in ways people 60 years ago could never have imagined possible.
How is such a movement going unnoticed by the 'Art Scene' and Academics, and our culture as whole?
I'd be really interested to hear what y'all think
Take a look at any of these disciplines, and you will see that artists are producing things on levels at and beyond what the masters of the last renaissance achieved in their time.
Concept Artists are creating paintings that surpass those in museums on a technical level and in beauty.
Modelers are creating sculptures in Zbrush that rival anything made by the Greeks and the Romans, the greatest sculptors in human history.
Animators give life to digital works in ways people 60 years ago could never have imagined possible.
How is such a movement going unnoticed by the 'Art Scene' and Academics, and our culture as whole?
I'd be really interested to hear what y'all think
Replies
Think of all the time that traditional artists would have needed to put in to achieve things like correct colour, perspective, lighting and so on - we can easily go back to tweak our values. Can you imagine spending a lifetime perfecting that stuff by hand?
As for concept artists producing "paintings" that surpass those seen in museums? Take a closer look at them. I really love how a lot of them look, but many of them are quick slapdash composites that shove photographs in together with a bit of paintover (if any at all).
I don't feel like 3D art is overlooked at all, plenty of people talk about how great stuff looks in a movie or game. For me that's just fine.
no real skills involved, just some photoshop filters and magic buttons
I think the issue is that at the end of the day the work we produce as a part of a production while great from a technical level and aesthetic level exists as a part of a whole. Think of it like this, the individual brush strokes that make up a painting in and of themselves are not statements and they normally do not 'say' anything. They are used to build something that does make a statement something that does speak to the viewer.
In the same way, Uncharted 4 might make statements about 'letting go' and 'family bonds' but a sculpt/final game mesh of Nathan Drake while amazing in its aesthetics and technical achievement doesn't actually say anything by itself. However, the work we produce on our own time, our personal work CAN be statements if we want them to be. However, frequently... We don't say anything with out personal projects. I think its still art, in that it exists for itself.
And the funny thing games themselves are NOT being ignored by academics as something worthy of critical analysis, the statements games make are being seen and studied now more than ever, in many cases at the same level as traditional media.
Long story short, what we make for a game (or film for that matter) isn't what would define the 21st century renaissance, the games themselves do that, we are craftsmen contributing to that.
I'm pretty sure though that in a few decades historians will go over games like they did go over film. But it'll be mostly talk about famous designers or whenever a revolutionary event happened - e.g. emergence of online games, move from 2D to 3D, dominance of FTP games, MOBA era, emergence of VR and so on.
Beside that, yes, academics do take notice. But academic research isn't necessarily quick, and being a scholar of game art/design/whatever is probably still somewhat of a niche in the wider fields of art, technology and management.
The jist of it was:
For centuries prior to the renaissance, Artists would simply paint what they knew, and occasionally what they saw.
High Renaissance Artists like Leo, Michelangelo, would actually dig up dead bodies or visit the morgue, and study anatomy through autopsy n shit. They basically invented what we know as perspective. Atmospheric fog, and chiaroscuro.
Their study of anatomy furthered the fields of Science and Medicine.
What they did was change the entire worlds perspective on art. As great as we are, it's doubtful we are changing many perspectives.
But I disagree with saying modern artists aren't changing perspectives. I think one major advantage that past artists would kill for is the internet. That advancement has brought art to every corner of the world and it can all be done for free.
It's also a tool that created more artists. Before the internet, I mostly just treated art as a side hobby and just hoped it would be one of my careers. Now fast forward to when I discovered websites like Polycount, Deviantart etc. Seeing all the art made online skyrocketed my interest in being an artist myself.
I find these two statements odd. How is someone not expressing themselves in games? Isn't the way the characters modeled an expression? Nobody is just taking a box and rendering it. Same goes for concept art. Was it not created based off an amalgamation of research and imagination?
I know this is my own anecdote but in many threads I've made, I've been very open behind every part of the modeling process. An example is a a shotgun I made recently. I could have just rendered an exact replica but instead, I went for something that was low poly. You could say "you're just changing specs" but that's not true. I wanted a shotgun that specifically and intentionally looked more blockier and edgier than its real life counterpart. Especially the slugs. It was this choice that I believed made my gun more interesting and fit the rest of the scene I had in mind.
Now, there's the possibility for something genuinely inspiring in the field of games and CGI to be an honest to goodness Day One smash, hitting millions upon millions with its life-changing magnificence in the time it takes some people to get out of bed. Shout up when it happens.
@jordann ... man alive, get over yourself. What you're talking about is just the simple vanilla choices that game artists make every - single - day, while they filter whats in their brain through the software and onto the game player's screen. Its not some grand cultural signifier. It's just normal.
I don't believe PS1 spec art or any modern 3D art are just binary actions. Isn't a common motto here that "there is no make art button"?
It all takes effort and just like how Renaissance artists went around digging up bodies and studying them because anatomy wasn't as understood as today, there's the same case that until computers can do the same process automatically, modeling still requires human interactivity and thought.
Another great anecdote is that I remember posting on another forum and there was a talk about indies. People would always say "why do Indies rely so much on 2d pixel art and not early 3D games like the N64 or PS1?" Their response would be "because even despite the age of those systems, that type of art is still considered far too hard to make or would put them out of budget".
There is still something cultural in this where people aspire to see this stuff but how it's created comes down to people who can actually specialize in it.
@aaronindhouse
"How is such a movement going unnoticed by the 'Art Scene' and Academics..."
Who knows...?!
"...and our culture as whole?"
TBH, I'd say gamification whether your average joe is aware or not has well and truly embedded itself throughout today's global society, so don't worry too much about it.
Just calm down and make something
@aaronindhouse
"Take a look at any of these disciplines, and you will see that artists are producing things on levels at and beyond what the masters of the last renaissance achieved in their time."
...additionally, of course there are comparable accomplished CG artists indeed their work tends to benchmark the scope of dedication in terms of time and effort invested, typically over many years to achieve what most people interested in the digital medium as a whole I suspect would aspire too, myself included. However that quoted snippet frankly I find just a tad disingenuous, because not only are we separated historically by time and place but more importantly given this thread's premise, current solid-state tools/techniques as well. The old Masters for example during their respective trade apprenticeship after first having to pass an initial examination assessing potential innate creative attributes. Notably undertaken by Buonarroti Simoni, Leonardo di ser Piero, Raffaello Sanzio, Tiziano Vecelli, Tintoretto and Giotto were thus taught the rediscovered humanism (Western) foundational artistic knowledge of the ancients we take for granted today i.e: figurative drawing, observation, perspective, anatomy, lighting theory, colour theory, composition...etc. Thereby refining an existing prodigious talent starkly manifested via those acknowledged surviving masterpieces seen today. Now that all being said I believe realistically there's no comparison between the two mediums, here's why. A 3D artist can basically create something finished without being aware of those foundational elements listed above, particularly drawing and painting due to how 3D assets are generated. Whereas a 2D trained artist can relatively transition across to the digital space once a familiarity for a specific software suite is attained however the reverse can't be said when switching from a CG background to traditional.
heres the best one so far of this thread :
"I know this is my own anecdote but in many threads I've made, I've been very open behind every part of the modeling process. An example is a a shotgun I made recently. I could have just rendered an exact replica but instead, I went for something that was low poly. You could say "you're just changing specs" but that's not true. I wanted a shotgun that specifically and intentionally looked more blockier and edgier than its real life counterpart. Especially the slugs. It was this choice that I believed made my gun more interesting and fit the rest of the scene I had in mind." Jordan N
-no , you just couldnt model it correctly so you did those mental gymnastics to justify your lack of trying until you get it right.
and runner up :
"---anything by Tidal blast wich i have on my ignore list, but im sure its golden"
these threads creep up monthly or so...You arent special, there is no "grand artistic movement" that you are part of. You are artists, stop procrastinating with this silly threads and get to art .Its funny that the people that usually spend so much time on GD are the ones that rarely have any art to show.
/rage
Does that matter? No idea. I suspect we may be well known in the future, as a whole, for our work collectively being lost in some catastrophic tech way. Maybe we'd be the "lost generation of art".
That would be interesting. People with a propensity to exaggerate will talk of the good old days, "When I was a kid, the most amazing artists were posting work on the internet. Works more breathtaking than any physical painting. But alas, with the great crash of 2026, all, lost! Tech gods were angered by our creations, and thus, smote each pixel of them."
A great mystery, a mystique, will surround us all.
Ease of creating art and accessibility to art tools and learning resources has never been better. Does this mean that we're all producing works of art unsurpassed by those of bygone days? Absolutely not - it means we're pissing into a see of piss, and truly exceptional work is increasingly rare. When we talk about the achievements of the masters it's important to keep historical context in mind and recognize not only what they did but when they did it and what it meant to the world at the time. Sure, one can find any number of artists today that can paint a in a more photo realistic manner than da Vinci - but you're entirely missing the point.
Additionally, modern digital art is created in and for a throw away culture. Artwork is quickly created, posted on the internet, and forgotten. It is highly unlikely that in 100 years someone will dig up a Van Gogh from this pile of garbage that we're creating.
Artwork produced for film and games is stripped of individual expression and creativity. It's a product to be consumed en masse and it's extremely difficult to pin point any aspect of it's creation to individual artists. And even when we can, that trash can or AR15 or space marine in itself isn't meaningful art in the traditional sense. It's not art that is significant to culture and society as a whole. One could argue that certain films or games as a whole transcend this boundary.
There is art or artistry in much of what we do, that is certainly true, but the end result is rarely of any significance whatsoever. A quick cheat sheet for those following along, if you have to try to convince your peers of how significant your art is on internet forums, it's not even remotely significant. If it is of any significance, society will let you know eventually, though you may be well and proper dead by that time.
I think there's too much emphasis on "making art that surpasses Davinci". There are arguments that go both ways but ultimately, I don't think that's the subject that needs to be focused on and teared apart. We live in a time with different tools, that it becomes an apples and oranges comparison.
Art can be treated like a product yes. There's no denying that it's heavily involved in selling games and movies etc. But that shouldn't be the end all conclusion that there is no more merit left.
Especially as, the way I see it, I don't always see "mainstream = perfect". A game sells a million copies, but what if it doesn't have the artstyle I'm after? Someone comes out with a game that does something different, takes a huge risk with its art by looking very stylish instead of being brown realistic with a first person shooter mechanic.
That to me is why I consider it art. Because the developer chose to be daring. Even if there is no profit to be made, I admire that time was still taken to craft a game or an artstyle that specifically comes from the artist's imagination and relatively nowhere else. And yes, that includes every asset that had to be modeled/textured/lit etc.
When a computer can create a watercolor landscape in the blink of an eye, or generate characters that look like old 90s cartoon movies then fine. I'll admit that there's nothing left anymore that makes art special.
But that thought terrifies me as well. Will the future of art be decided by what the masses want, as opposed to what the [individual] artist does? A future where everything is homogenized is my biggest nightmare.
oh wait.
It's the only way to browse the web!
cool story.
"I believe art is very important. We need to.... woah what just happened?"
I love this profession cos I get to dabble in everything from art to science, and whilst I love the technological, technique and aesthetic boundaries we've pushed, but to call it the greatest movement thus far is i think a bit premature.
we, as game artists, haven't actually developed anything new or done anything new with what we have that film or books or theatre before those hadn't done.
That said, give it another 30 years and we might be there.
Edit: as for da vinci, he was (broadly, in terms of character), no procrastinator - you can tell that just by the sheer volume of work, he was bloody prolific. Da Vinci's incomplete work does not point to procrastination, in his case for the most part it points to ITERATION. Each unfinished test is an iteration on the last unfinished test in preparation for a finished piece by design - he didnt just stop working on stuff because he wandered off to play guitar, he did tests of techniques and compositions and form etc. endless tests. That's not procrastination, that's dedication and tireless, toilsome endeavouring toward perfection. Procrastinators don't pump out thousands of pieces. And even if they did, Da Vinci's arent random pieces, they're largely preparatory, to prepare him to do a proper piece to the standard he wants.
Edit edit: that article, further down actually refutes the procrastination claim itself. Read to the bottom.
I have respect for artists which have a unique concept for a model and bring it to life. But when someone make a model from a concept of others he is for me more a craftsmen then a artist in this moment.
The king has been dethroned.
We're the first generation of digital artist.
A new breed that uses automation, programmed shortcuts, as well as computerized tools to aids,assist us in our work.
To be honest, I think we have it easy. Yeh, you might see lots of talented work on Artstation, DeviantArt and ZbrushCentral but there would be far less of it in this qaulty if itwasn't about the highly sophisticated softwres we have today.
Artist back then did not have acces to Ctrl-Z, you could not just unsculpt or unpaint a mistake you did, they had no layers to divide their work into multiples levels of complexity, it was all in one piece, htye didn't have acces to pre-made brushes or textures and all that. They most likely always had to start from scratch.
I've always had a huge respect for handmade traditionnal craft or discipline. I somewhat see more value and in bread made in traditionnal way in an oven instead of the processed factory one, sames goes for shoes, car, woodwork...wahtever you want.
When it comes to digital art, I kinda think sometimes that it's even worse since...we never actually get to ''touch'' our work..it's all behind a screen, it's just data translated into pixels...sure you can print but is it truly the same thing?
I dunno, this Da Vinci cat has a pretty good portfolio of finished work. I'd hire him
Unless you got a beast of a computer, undo functions stops remembering to a certain point. That's why I save out multiple versions of my work. Regardless, I don't think it's anyone's intention to continuously make errors. That's still inefficiency, digital or not.
This is why I'm hoping VR becomes big. The monitor will no longer serve as division from getting closer to the digital end result.
That was Italian Renaissance Marvelous Designer.