Traditional sculpting viable alternative to zbrush?
Lately I have been getting alot of eye strain and visual snow from my screens.
Even if I take long breaks or sleep, after just 1 hour of use they are bloodshot again. And thats with using gunnar glasses / flux.
So I was thinking about getting into traditional sculpting away from the computer as a way to take breaks but still be productive,
and then I can 3d scan my work, retopologize, and add details later, right?
My question is how good is real world sculpting for complex characters?
I understand theres no undo, and no symmetry (but I can copy/mirror one side after I 3d scan it?)
I'm almost 30 and it seems like I should cut back on the computer use to save the health of my eyes so they dont get worse. I've already seen an opthomologist and his response was "tv screens, monitors, phones, fans, they all trash your eyes"
The redness and eyestrain is something I can deal with, but this "visual snow" thing, where you see your vision is made up of tiny pixels almost like static, its frightening. I dont want that to get worse..but theres also no real cure or known cause. The doc said my eyes looked fine but I can tell that staring into led tv screens for long periods messes with the chemicals in your eyes!
Even if I take long breaks or sleep, after just 1 hour of use they are bloodshot again. And thats with using gunnar glasses / flux.
So I was thinking about getting into traditional sculpting away from the computer as a way to take breaks but still be productive,
and then I can 3d scan my work, retopologize, and add details later, right?
My question is how good is real world sculpting for complex characters?
I understand theres no undo, and no symmetry (but I can copy/mirror one side after I 3d scan it?)
I'm almost 30 and it seems like I should cut back on the computer use to save the health of my eyes so they dont get worse. I've already seen an opthomologist and his response was "tv screens, monitors, phones, fans, they all trash your eyes"
The redness and eyestrain is something I can deal with, but this "visual snow" thing, where you see your vision is made up of tiny pixels almost like static, its frightening. I dont want that to get worse..but theres also no real cure or known cause. The doc said my eyes looked fine but I can tell that staring into led tv screens for long periods messes with the chemicals in your eyes!
Replies
But if you need to work in a studio, you might find your methods limited to studios who can afford your niche work. There is a calling for traditional sculpture work (to be scanned in and converted), but I just cannot imagine its common. However, if you just mean to cut out time you spend staring at screens during your personal work, it would be no less impressive for it.
It would be a fun/interesting exercise in any case, all concerns relate only to whether or not it actually cuts down the time you spend looking at screens, how efficient that workflow is going to be for models that need to be animated (eg, blendshapes), and how applicable it would be to future work.
But that said, not everything you work on needs to be polished into a game rez model and put onto your portfolio. Learning traditional sculpting is fun and informative, certainly not a waste of time, and would probably do less harm to your eyes than doing your practice/for fun sculpts digitally.
So it's kind of up to you, and where you're at in your career (you may already be in a stable job, or have a great portfolio, I don't know).
tl;dr It's certainly possible and it would work, but whether it would cut down time spent working digitally is questionable at best. Pick it up for fun, or work with it seriously @ your own risk (but your reward would be that your eyesight may not suffer as much).
I'd be interested to know if anyone else has hands on experience with this, though?
as a career this seems very much a tiny niche to me. hard to imagine a company willing to spend on somebody painstakingly creating sculpts and redoing parts based on feedback. and then scanning and cleaning it all when it could have been done on a computer in the first place, reusing bits and pieces from other assets.
and the lowest subdivision level could almost serve as your output mesh right away (assuming things are approached with a decent basemesh).
with 3d printing on the rise the whole physical object vs image on a computer screen is a moot point nowadays, too.
i think a physical sculptor would have to bring quite some advantage to the table here to compete with that. probably very serious skill and a name that carries some weight. clients who simply prefer that process. like you can occasionally read about film makers still using traditionally sculpted maquettes.
there are probably forums dedicated to this craft, you should inquire there, not the least about the future viability for this kind of job.
You do see CG film studios using clay maquettes - Pixar and Dreamworks both do the clay then scan thing. Again, this might be because they have a lot of traditional artists on the teams.
For games? You're mostly dealing with guys who've been working on computers since they started, so the appreciation for a clay maquette isn't going to be the same. Like others have said, it's a great skill to have, and will likely help your cg sculpting a great deal, but it's unlikely to be a skill you use much unless you go and work on the next Neverhood game.
Are over head fans an issue also? any fans that sucks cause its about to get S* hot for me here.
I looked a few things up in the past and many have already mentioned what I learned to do, much of what Kevin mentions.
What is not mentioned is dimming down the contrast and lighting on the screen to match your surrounding light in whatever room your working in.
I think even the paint color that surrounds your work space (monitor) causes situations. I did not know about the fans issue, that is the only issue for me as one fan is overhead and always on a.t.m.
It would be great to hear more about how to prevent this from happening, what are these glasses people use? I don't wear glasses in general and always used at least 1 monitor. I recently have had issues with my 2nd and been using 1 for a year (cutting back) and hopefully helping myself with any extra strain this might add.
Don't have any valid input for the i.r.l. sculpture redirection, but a few peeps here work in the movie industry at least from a few of the older PCers no longer posting afaik.
Best of luck.
I recommend flux, it dims your monitor, adjusting to your region's day/night cycle. Obviously turn it off when doing color-sensitive stuff.
Another important consideration is the overall lighting of the room you're in, especially the backlighting behind the monitor. A lot of eyestrain is caused by your monitors being very bright while your room is very dark, or vice versa. In a lot of cases, it's a good idea to have the wall or environment behind your monitor be brightly lit so your eyes aren't working to focus on one thing or another in your field of vision. I've had a lot of success with pointing a small lamp at the area behind my monitors so there's less sharp contrast.
Something else that will help with eyestrain is to make sure that you're working about an arm's length from your monitor (or maybe even more). If you're working much closer, you're probably going to develop eyestrain because our eyes are not built to handle focusing on things that close for extended periods.
Additionally, there's that "20 20 20" rest rule from eye doctors. Every 20 minutes you look at things at least 20 feet away from you, for at least 20 seconds.
http://www.gunnars.com/rx/
I thought the yellow would be annoying, but after a week i couldn't even see the difference anymore, except with grey color, they appears more warm than they are, the rest of the color are all the same, after all they are made for that.
anyway to cut short, I used to lost -0.5 every years, i had terrible migraine after spending too much time in front a screen, especially at school with the shitty neon light. My eyes would be strain and burn and red.
Guess what ? After 3 years wearing gunnars, My sight HASN'T drop a bit. My eyes are nearly never tired except if my health is bad (like not enough sleep, etc) my daily terrible migraine aren't happening anymore, i have 1 max by month and they are really small. They literally CHANGED my life and i would never go back to normal glasses, I don't care if as a woman it's hard to make up or match cloths with yellow glasses, they are amazing ! (I'm waiting for big discount to try if the crystalline are as effective as the yellow lenses)
Also they cost nothing. My glasses used to cost around 400-500$ in quebec shop (canada), my gunnars cost 150$ ( I bought them when they were a 100$ off) and on that 150$ assurence paid 100$. If got an amazing pair of glasses that i still wear for the last 3 years and i don't even feel like i would need new glasses anytime soon.
However: If you plan on being one of those player who wear them 30min at the time, then take them off, and put them againt for an hours. It's bad, so bad and it will only make it worse. Either make them your everyday glasses or wear them your entire work day. Don't freaking take them of to go take a coffee or take piss. (true story, my boyfriend did that since he has perfect vision he just wanted to keep the headache and strain away but couldn't "tame" himself to freaking wear them correctly he would take them off and back at least 50 time day, he didn't last a week.)
Was having some issues with my eyes as well and I found that practicing this has given them a bit of an aid.