Is making Zbrush characters supposed to be fun?
polycounter lvl 3
I got into this thinking it would be so interesting making these 3d characters, but now that I have done a month long character to completion, most of the time it felt like mind-numbing hard work and required so much patience.
Replies
Actually welcome to making anything in general.
Best advice I could give you is to really optimize how you work to reduce the amount of time spent doing tedious bullshit so that you can focus more on the artistic aspects. Unless that raptor has a full set of animations, a month is a really long time to spend on that so there are probably a lot of areas you could save time on.
Really?
I don't know what other sort of reply you would expect but "I tried a thing, I didn't like it" is hardly headline news. I do that most days.
..but I don't do character art, so there's that.
Try making characters of the gender you're attracted to. It might give you a boost in effort.
...also not sure why this thread was moved out of the General Forum
Maybe a good way around the situation would be to produce characters up to a certain stage, like sculpts. Not all the time, just to alternate and keep your energy peaked.
After all the gameart is not a true art, it's a commercial art. Will never be a part of art history studying.
And as for game art not being a "true art", I wholly disagree. Certain games are already being touted as art, and it's only bound to grow as people become more aware of what the medium can be. And I can say that personally, I've looked at game art and been overcome with the same feeling I get from looking at more traditional forms of art. So whether or not it is ever considered true art by the mainstream, it certainly is true art.
And sometimes making a character in ZBrush is fun, sometimes it's mind-numbing. But it's like the Hero's Journey - eventually, it ceases to be mind numbing, and starts to be fun again.
They miss very necessary part, an artist personalization, not company , not franchise. And more developed and expensive they are getting , more they actually deviate from art. All those NDA and pipelines are from completely different vocabulary.
Some time ago I saw a huge 17 century Dutch gobelin. It amazed me. Such a weird and mysterious dark blue/indigo/grey thing. Like modern post color grading in movies. Was definitely a hard working business counting every bit to squeeze a few gold for lucky owner. Who knows, maybe not successful at all with poor guys sitting behind weaver machines all their days.
Now It stuck to my mind as an allegory of gamedev. We are those weavers behind our Windows weaving machines.
And yet people keep doing it. Whether they're complaining about the lack of innovation in games, lack of diversity, lack of artistic vision, its always the same tunnelvision on AAA titles designed to offer cinematic action experiences to the largest possible audience.
If you guys actually bothered to play smaller titles and indie games you'd realize how much more is out there.
there was a whole science and technology to mixing and preserving oil paints. they didn't have the easy tubes we have now.
TLDR; You need to be more in love with making characters than the idea of being a character artist. That doesn't sound like the case here.
For instance even though Zbrush is now industry standard it still has *huge* shortcomings that negatively affects everyone's workflow - and the fact that artists "power through" it doesn't change that. Similarly most if not all 3d apps are less than ideal when it comes to some specific tasks, and Autodesk apps being bug-ridden or more sluggish every year certainly doesn't help.
At the end of the day it's important to clearly identify if something is painful and tiresome because of a lack of planning and poor design, or, if it is painful and boring because the tool being used is not fit for the job.
There's also definitely something to be said about a current-day specced, realistically sculpted and shaded character taking around a month to complete as opposed to a Quake3-era lightweight model + texture that one can wrap up in a matter of days. If anything my advice to the OP would be to try this out.
" ...Quake3-era lightweight model + texture that one can wrap up in a matter of days. If anything my advice to the OP would be to try this out."
thanks man i will try that.
If you’re new to this game, I want to assure you that spending time learning tools is normal.
Everyone goes through it. Sometimes it is frustrating, and it’s easy to get impatient when
you have an awesome web app in your head and you just want to learn Rails already, but
have to spend a week learning some weird ancient Unix editor just to get started. But a
craftsman has to know his tools; in the end the reward is worth the effort