Which software to learn first?
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So about half a year ago my friend tried out blender and got me very interested in 3D modeling (although he himself gave up after a few weeks due to his lack of english which made searching for tutorials very hard) and i started to do a bit of modeling myself and watched some tutorials and so on. Now ive been thinking about getting into 3D environment art but im not quite sure which software i should start with. Obviously i will still use blender since i cant afford maya/3ds max but ive been looking into programs like Terragen 3 and 3DCoat. Keep in mind that im still pretty much a beginner since i only started to model actively about a month ago. Also any advice in general for a beginner like me is appreciated.
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I suggest to study zbrush and maya too.
zbrush because is the most powerful sculpting software out there, and maya because studios ask for maya knoweldge.
in my case, I barely know Maya, just the interface and the material editor, but is more that enough to let me work in production combined with blender.
If you are doing environment art though it might be more worthwhile to look into something like Substance Designer or Quixel. Modeling is after all, only half the battle.
blender is cool and covers a lot of bases - i'd stick with it!
It's good to pick up a 2d program like Krita or Photoshop as well to do textures and sketches. If you're serious about developing your skills you should buy a sketchbook and do at least one focused study of a particular subject a day. You can learn how to work all sorts of 3d programs as much as you want, but that will have limited use if you don't understand how things are put together. Also, do gesture drawings where you try to capture the big forms of things in a short time. Try to capture the way that an entire body, animal, plant, car, or landscape should flow on the page within a short time (30 seconds to two minutes.) This will be difficult at first, but keep trying and you'll get better. Doing these gesture drawings will help your refined drawings feel less stiff.
Learn to put lines exactly where you want them. It can be a good idea to make the line one or two times off the paper to have some practice before you lay it down. Lay down the line fast enough that it's not jittery, but not so fast that you can't control where it goes. Don't forget to breathe while you're drawing.
Krita, Photoshop, and the sculpting, painting, and vertex painting functions in Blender are well-complemented by a graphics tablet. I recommend getting one at about the time you've gone through your first sketchbook. Don't get a tablet that's also a monitor, just get a regular tablet. I personally recommend the Huion H610 Pro for an off-brand option: http://www.amazon.com/Huion-H610PRO-Painting-Drawing-Graphics/dp/B00GIGGS6A or the Wacom Intuos Pro Medium for an on-brand option: http://www.wacom.com/en-es/products/pen-tablets/intuos-pro-medium I don't have either, but from what I've heard around the internet the Huion has a better pressure curve and drawing surface quality and the Wacom is a little more durable and has more features like tilt sensitivity (which is mostly superfluous unless you're painting normal maps in Krita), as well as better tracking on the pen. Either one will take some time to get used to, but if you're serious about developing your skills you'll need one sooner or later.
There are a lot of ways to put an asset together. You can use dynamic topology sculpting and booleans to quickly build up forms then use the shrinkwrap modifier to get better topology. You can draw a study and three orthographic references (top, side, front) to make sure you understand the logic of why something looks the way it does and scan it all in to use as background images in the viewport to help you do traditional polygon modeling. You can just sculpt the shit out of something, retopologize it, and bake out a normal map to capture the sculpted details. For a hard surface model like an engine or a gun you can make the highpoly model with a subdivision surface modifier and traditional polygon modeling, and simply remove the modifier and the support loops to get a lowpoly model. You can paint the texture first in a 2d program then lay out the UVs over the texture after you've made the model. There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach. Post a thread in the critiques forum once you've made some progress and we'll probably help you improve.
A lot of software can be used on subscription:
-Maya LT = $30/month
-Modo Indie = $15/month
-Photoshop = $20/month
-Substance Designer+Painter Indie = $20/month
Zbrush is worth having, but it's not that cheap ( about $800 ).
Good advice on the modeling though. Start simple. Create a few basic models. Get comfortable with the UI. Then unwrap the models. Then texture. Then set up some lighting and set up a render. Baby steps. Incremental. Best way to learn at the start is to actually complete small projects and feel a sense of achievement, rather than expecting to create a a 2 min short film with fully rigged characters and cloth/hair/explosion simulations, only to wonder why the buttons you're clicking are just not making the shit happen like ito happened in your head......
Maya LT looks like a good option but i dont really understand half of the stuff mentioned on the maya vs maya LT comparison. Maya LT is more for indie devs so will it have some critical limitations or does it matter at all which one i buy? Also isnt there a student version for zbrush that is half the price?
Any opinions on sculptris? I know i have to get Zbrush sooner or later but ive heard sculptris is decent too.
Sculptris is a useful intro to digital sculpting and nice for sketching but it is too limited in my opinion to make anything particularly complicated.
the complexity of the process was nowhere near what we have nowadays so not that much to learn either. back then you could have quite happily stuck with 3ds max - or lightwave for the suckers
Incidentally, I made a 2 min short film back in the day.(light tracer had just been added to Max) I built the entire film from scratch: I even had a fully custom-rigged character with a morph-based wired facial UI, and I completed the whole project in 2 weeks flat with a single 14" monitor and 1.5gigs of ram....fully rendered with the new light tracer.
Sculptris is a great tool, very quick and easy to use, not to mention free (always a plus). That said, I can only recommend it as an introduction to sculpting, as its toolset is rather basic and it tends to choke on meshs over about 2 million triangles. Because it's free, there's really no reason not to try it, but if you want to pursue digital sculpting seriously, you'll eventually need to get ZBrush.