09/28/2020: I’d always dreamed of seeing what happened when I could spend a year working on art seriously, 40+ hours a week, as opposed to in my free time. I’ve also always struggled with having become comfortable with a workflow that is clearly inefficient – how do I push past a skill plateau and get to be better? A friend of mine had been to Rochester Institute of Technology for 3d modeling and had been successful professionally as one, and so I went to him and asked him initially what was the best way to push past a skill plateau. Was it classes, as it had been for me in traditional drawing in my own undergrad? What he mentioned that surprised me was that getting a degree from RIT opened doors for him and gave him professional connections, the classwork and projects from his school had all been useful, but the biggest drivers of his own personal modeling skill had in fact been pursuing the Gnomon workshop.
That changed the nature of this year of art quite a bit. Instead of a year to work using the amateur skillsets I’d developed using freeware, it was looking like the best thing to do would be to aggressively pursue tutorials. Being me, I ran this plan past all of my closest friends to see what they thought, and after moving and spending a week+ banging my head against personal modding projects totally orthogonal to 3d art, it was time to begin.
So the first day starts with this, which a friend had linked me to.
Which is about $25 until two days from now. The whole point is to seriously work on modeling skills primarily for spaceships and other hard surfaces. So this looks good on paper, and is using Maya – the software of choice in the film/TV world. I understand there is a degree of tribalism around which specific program you use but for now that’s all irrelevant. I know how to use Wings3d to shuffle verts around, and that’s been not good enough.
Flipped Normals is an a la carte marketplace, though you get a meaty chunk of content for your money 12-13 hour tutorials can still run >$50. Gnomon Workshop by contrast is a subscription model, and it’s $50 a month. Mathematically, even if I’m consuming 1 tutorial a week and then attempting to apply it for the remainder of the week, it’s still in my best interests to do the Gnomon subscription model.
That said, Gnomon Workshop has a three day free trial and there’s nothing stopping me from shopping on Flipped Normals is there is a gap that the Gnomon Workshop can’t fill in. So without further ado, let’s get started with:
https://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/tutorials/introduction-to-maya-2019
The plan is to follow each tutorial twice (as appropriate), once doing what was depicted exactly, and then once putting a spin on it with my own projects as a form of homework.
WHILE I’M AT IT:
The truth is I want to level up my Homeworld ship art skills, but it’s not like there’s an extensive Gnomon workshop series on vehicle design in the vein of Chris Foss and the other big inspirations of Homeworld. Additionally, one of the most powerful learning techniques can be pushing outside of one’s comfort zone (spaaaace) and into other fields. Be that as it may, there’s lots of ‘character’ tutorials, some of which for robots. What are some characters and robots I could be planning to work on?
FANTASY CHARACTER:
Akshat of Bahlika would be a fun (if fuzzy and blood soaked) conventional fantasy character, so would Corey Willikins. You can’t go wrong with D&D characters.
SCI FI CHARACTER/VEHICLE:
Siorc / Siorc Rua battlesuit.
1) concept art phase: https://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/tutorials/robot-design-with-josh-nizzi and https://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/tutorials/mechanical-character-design
2) modeling the thing in zbrush: https://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/tutorials/mech-design-for-the-entertainment-industry
Program Notes:
Modo, like Maya, is expensive as hell except if you get it as a student in which case it is free. https://www.foundry.com/products/modo#editions