The Art of Finger-Pointing
polycounter lvl 12
"Steal from everyone and copy no one." - Charles Movalli
Polycount, being a great forum and community to discuss, share and admire techniques, tools, and work has not only brought about a great deal of learning for myself and others, but has fostered an undeniably hostile defensive posture of work being repeated.
I really don't know how others feel about this, but more often than not i've begin to see a growing trend of blame and rising pitchforks being littered about work being posted. Work that contains developed techniques or styles, or even blatantly ripped content thrown together in a different manner. This just raises a level of elitism and in my opinion restricts growth of artists and their motivation to post, publicly.
Granted, this community has thousands of lurkers that don't dare post their work because of exactly that. Do we really need to make sure fellow polycounters are thinking thoughts such as "What if they think my work looks too much like his" or "Because i'm not original and because I have a painterly style of this guy here"?
"All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
One thing I do every single day, is find something I can duplicate. Great Artists from Epic, Dice, Blizzard? Direct competition and of course i'm going to repeat exactly what they do and try to develop my own technique. Every good artist should, and if a tutorial is posted, its intended for duplication and everyone should feel proud if they succeeded at duplicating. Video games do this on a regular basis. What game are we going to reference? Do we want it to play like Rainbow Six, or do we want it to play more like Call of Duty? What major gameplay elements do we want to keep, and what to we want to scrap. Such as games, game art has been a process of not only developing skills from fine art such as color, composition and balance but identifying tools and techniques that satisfy the technical requirements of this field.
It's easy to say, "Ive got this badass idea" but little do you know how to get there. You put it on pen and paper and realize how shitty it looks. So you start digging, and then you start to get this funny feeling what you "right click - download" on some fellows work to do a paintover or rip some parts of it to develop your own. Now, is this plagiarism? It can be, if you present that portion or quality at that original state. Of course there are many reasons, but could blame be put if you changed it, painted over it and developed your own from it? Absolutely not, as long as it is a step in your learning process, it's a fair assessment to say that it is your own work, inspired by these certain artists.
"They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind, so I left them sweating and stealing a year and a half behind." - Rudyard Kipling
While most issues are simply crediting inspiration, I don't think artists here on Polycount would fully bother posting if they had known they were fully ripping off another. Similar work gets posted and you end up doing one of two things. You either get defensive and upset or you think, "cool he totally got that from me". Then you realize "Oh yeah, I remember when I got that from this other guy". Simply put, if you seen it, it's been done before. Why worry so much, just do it.
Work that is blatantly ripped are obvious, should be exploited and banned from the presence of their original creators. Everyone knows this, but there's no point dancing in a grey line and having a hissy fit over it.
"Good artists borrow. Great artists steal." - Pablo Picasso
Are you a lurker? Student or professional that wants critique given? Polycount still is the place for that, and I encourage you to not hesitate for once. All elements of this industry are stolen from others, but not on a literal sense. Using common sense, anyone can avoid this and if the question still lingers, do yourself a favor and give credit where credits due, or just simply ask. After all, Blizzard's not the first studio to develop hand painting techniques.
When I began work, I was told to leave my ego at the door. It has kept a great circle of constructive criticism in my life and I think Polycount should remember that. It might just foster an even tighter circle of criticism.
Keep on modeling!
Polycount, being a great forum and community to discuss, share and admire techniques, tools, and work has not only brought about a great deal of learning for myself and others, but has fostered an undeniably hostile defensive posture of work being repeated.
I really don't know how others feel about this, but more often than not i've begin to see a growing trend of blame and rising pitchforks being littered about work being posted. Work that contains developed techniques or styles, or even blatantly ripped content thrown together in a different manner. This just raises a level of elitism and in my opinion restricts growth of artists and their motivation to post, publicly.
Granted, this community has thousands of lurkers that don't dare post their work because of exactly that. Do we really need to make sure fellow polycounters are thinking thoughts such as "What if they think my work looks too much like his" or "Because i'm not original and because I have a painterly style of this guy here"?
"All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
One thing I do every single day, is find something I can duplicate. Great Artists from Epic, Dice, Blizzard? Direct competition and of course i'm going to repeat exactly what they do and try to develop my own technique. Every good artist should, and if a tutorial is posted, its intended for duplication and everyone should feel proud if they succeeded at duplicating. Video games do this on a regular basis. What game are we going to reference? Do we want it to play like Rainbow Six, or do we want it to play more like Call of Duty? What major gameplay elements do we want to keep, and what to we want to scrap. Such as games, game art has been a process of not only developing skills from fine art such as color, composition and balance but identifying tools and techniques that satisfy the technical requirements of this field.
It's easy to say, "Ive got this badass idea" but little do you know how to get there. You put it on pen and paper and realize how shitty it looks. So you start digging, and then you start to get this funny feeling what you "right click - download" on some fellows work to do a paintover or rip some parts of it to develop your own. Now, is this plagiarism? It can be, if you present that portion or quality at that original state. Of course there are many reasons, but could blame be put if you changed it, painted over it and developed your own from it? Absolutely not, as long as it is a step in your learning process, it's a fair assessment to say that it is your own work, inspired by these certain artists.
"They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind, so I left them sweating and stealing a year and a half behind." - Rudyard Kipling
While most issues are simply crediting inspiration, I don't think artists here on Polycount would fully bother posting if they had known they were fully ripping off another. Similar work gets posted and you end up doing one of two things. You either get defensive and upset or you think, "cool he totally got that from me". Then you realize "Oh yeah, I remember when I got that from this other guy". Simply put, if you seen it, it's been done before. Why worry so much, just do it.
Work that is blatantly ripped are obvious, should be exploited and banned from the presence of their original creators. Everyone knows this, but there's no point dancing in a grey line and having a hissy fit over it.
"Good artists borrow. Great artists steal." - Pablo Picasso
Are you a lurker? Student or professional that wants critique given? Polycount still is the place for that, and I encourage you to not hesitate for once. All elements of this industry are stolen from others, but not on a literal sense. Using common sense, anyone can avoid this and if the question still lingers, do yourself a favor and give credit where credits due, or just simply ask. After all, Blizzard's not the first studio to develop hand painting techniques.
When I began work, I was told to leave my ego at the door. It has kept a great circle of constructive criticism in my life and I think Polycount should remember that. It might just foster an even tighter circle of criticism.
Keep on modeling!
Replies
It might just be me, but tbh I haven't seen that much criticism on the subject. Open the p&p section, browse a few pages and I bet you'll find at least 5 sci-fi corridors. I mean people here do stuff from photo references and stuff like that and no one says they are riping off stuff. Some develop skills, some develop ideas. And ideas are never fully original, heck they aren't even 50% original and I haven't seen much people disagree on that.
Nevertheless I greatly appreciate your encouragement for people to post more and not be shy about nothing and I advise them to do just that. It's nice to see someone care enough, so thank you.
[size=-2]on a side note, I've begun a little paper too, that touches the subject and will hopefully make things a bit better in the unoriginal department, so it's nice to see someone being concerned with the issue.[/size]
If someone literally posts another persons work and claims it as their own, that is theft, easy. If someone models a building or a desk in the same style as another poster it's nothing. They are still doing the work, showing their skills and trying to better their craft. If the 'original' artist drops by upset, then good manners dictate you respect their wishes, but otherwise an artists inspired by someone else's art doesn't have to stop making shit.
I just want to say I'm talking about a very specific problem here. There's been alot of talk recently about a need for game art to be more original in general, I think that's very important.
This is exactly what I mean. New posters need not be afraid to repeat techniques and styles others are doing. Just go for it, and credit the inspiration or style.
Totally agree, Will, though i'm not sure i've seen much of this finger pointing, but i also haven't been in P&P lately. Like any craft, game art just takes dedication and "inspiration" from the right sources. If you look at the greatest eras of art everyone built off each other, that's how the medium moved forward.
Then you look at the more modern art movements and dudes were just dipping their c*cks in paint and rubbing it off on a canvas.
Say what you want about beefy space marines with bald heads and crew cuts, they work.
I think there is still a clear line between being inspired and blatantly copypasting, or in the more often scenarios, people stealing artwork and just getting inspired.
The other one is the lack of credit, where perhaps a witchhunt is too much, but a pointing out that the guy should credit the artist behind the concept art he is making a model from, and this is important, because generally the attitude can end up with a "I don't even bother to care about where this thing came from" which is not something I'd like to see in an art community.
But I will have to agree with d1ver on this one where I actually dont see this too much on Polycount beyond the incidents of blaitened theft where art was just taken off someones website and cropped and being used as there own. If that is the case pitchforks should then ensue.
I see people all the time using concepts from others, or strait up duplicating work of others to better there skills and I think that is totally cool and should actually be encouraged. Sure we are artists and all have our own creativity but fact of the mater is that were not all concept artists. Some people just are not skilled at design or creating extremely interesting concepts. Some people are better at taking a great concept and turning that into 3d. Which, hey guess what, thats what our industry is. Turning awesome concepts into 3d. The one thing you can do to make it your own is add those little hints of your own creativity in there to really make it your own.
I would say though that the only point the finger situations I see are when people post concepts they plan to use and dont credit the artist who actually did the concept. I for one totally support the whole giving credit where credit is due but someone people do see to get up in arms sometimes when credit is not given. Which I think people need to lay off. If you want them to credit the artist who did the concept art/work first just ask once if you could credit the artist and leave it at that. If they dont, then leave it there and move on.
And I think this is a good way to really break the mold and getting practice in for noobs. Theyre given the tools but don't know where to start.
Ideally, I think every artist should be able to develop their own concepts and push entire projects to the end from their own, but building work from others concepts are perfectly acceptable and a great way to get skilled.
However, it's just like working out while on a diet, you need to supplement the other. Noobs should supplement their practice in 3d with traditional art skills, especially concepting as it will push even their 3d work.
I'm still practicing it now and by no means an expert, I highly respect and regard our senior artists here and encourage growth through guidance and proper critiques.
Help the artist, don't bash the artist.
Ideally, I think every artist should be able to develop their own concepts and push entire projects to the end from their own, but building work from others concepts are perfectly acceptable and a great way to get skilled.
Wow, I can remember when I first took an interest in art, drawing Ninja Turtles everyday, which eventually lead to X-Men, Spider-Man, etc etc., then eventually creating my own characters in Jim Lee's style, or Brandon Choi. Even in early art classes in junior high school, copying some of the greats like Van Gogh (is that correct spelling? lol)
What better way to practice art than to copy the greats? Like you said, help the artist, don't bash the artist.
There's a breed of artist that takes great pride in seemingly unimportant details. They're easy to spot- usually their artwork is followed by phrases like "No reference used", "completely from my mind", "This is from life, not from a photo", etc.
I guess quite a few people find those things important, and in a public forum they'll always speak out when someone challenges their way of doing things.
Or an easier thing to do is to copy say a movie character and turn it in to 3d, not just copying an existing translation of a 3d character
For me its easier to take real world stuff as inpsiration as I am not really a cartoonist/charicaturist
With that said, I'll jump your ass and ride you 6 ways to Sunday if you think you can right-click > Save as > Upload > apply for job > I iz artizt!
I think there is a difference between being inspired by and outright stealing.
Personally I really like seeing the reference or the concept the person is working from. When its oddball stuff that is 100% unique it doesn't really give me an idea of what it should look like and lets them get away with saying "oh yea that stuff is style, I totally meant to make the legs way too short" "or "why, yes that is a door for midgets".
And kaburan, thank you for posting this. The quotes were an especially nice touch.
Personally, I don't think I would mind it if people started arguing over my work. What makes me sad is that no one cares at all.