3D Modeling "Course"

3D Modeling "Course"

rbwhitaker 12 Mar 2017 22:34

I'm moving forward with making good on my promise to add in an art facet to the website. I do not have the art skills to create tutorials on any form of art, unfortunately.

But I feel that the bulk of getting good at art is practice, practice, practice, along with constructive feedback. Given that framework, I think there's plenty we can do.

To this end, I'm announcing that I'm planning on putting together a super lightweight 8-week 3D modeling "course" that will run in April and May. The expected workload for the course is about 1 hour per week, so it's not a huge investment.

I'm flexible in terms of what happens during this course, so if you have ideas, please post below. But my current plan is to give out an "assignment" to make a 3D model of something specific (e.g., "a sword", "a gun", "a cottage house", etc.) determined weekly, possibly collectively by the members of the course with a time constraint of 1 hour. The time limit prevents people from spending forever on it, and having it consume their entire week.

In the future, I'd love to expand the 3D Modeling Course to include things like drills (practicing hard aspects of the art), technical reading (getting better at the theory), and spending more time on bigger portfolio pieces. But I think for the first run, we keep it simple. (I'm also leaning towards a focus on just modeling, and not texturing, rigging, or animation for now.) At any rate, lots of room for future expansion, but I'd lean towards keeping it simple for the time being, and see where that leads us.

Any thoughts or suggestions? Any takers?

I'll probably do this, even if nobody else joins me. The timing is such that this will be ending right when the next competition is starting up, which works well for me.

Re: 3D Modeling "Course"

PiscesMike 13 Mar 2017 00:39

Sounds like fun, I'm in.

My only comment is that I think modelling and texturing go hand in hand. There is, of course, a huge difference in practice, and both are tremendous fields of their own. It's just been my experience that once I was familiar with the tools of whatever modeler I happen to be using, that things flow fairly quickly on the modelling side.

In other words, getting to the point where you know what everything is and what you need at a given point may take a little bit, but after that, things kind of fly. Where I hit a bump was adding those textures in in the correct positions. And that means pre-made textures unwrapped into a square, and a UV map added to the model. That's a little more complex than adding say, a generated material from the material editor. But those have always looked better to me.

Not to say, focusing on just modelling would be a bad idea, or that there isn't room just for that. Just thinking, a bland, grey model is kind of boring and having the motivation to at least attempt some UV mapping can't hurt.

-PiscesMike

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"May the mercy of His Divine Shadow fall upon you." - Stanley H. Tweedle, Security Guard class IV, The League of 20,000 planets

Re: 3D Modeling "Course"

TristanSt 15 Mar 2017 16:49

Hi,
I join you, too. I played only a bit with 3D modelers and I really need practice here. :D

Re: 3D Modeling "Course"

rbwhitaker 15 Mar 2017 17:49

Excellent! It's nice to see people signing up for this! Should be fun.

Nolin Kumar (guest) 16 Mar 2017 03:37

I AM DEFINITELY INTERESTED!!!!

one question, what software is going to be use in this course?

Re: 3D Modeling "Course"

rbwhitaker 16 Mar 2017 03:39

Oh, @PiscesMike, I wanted to respond to your comments here. I know we talked about this in the chat room, but for those of you that weren't there, I wanted to share my response here.

I totally agree that texturing (and rigging and animation) is indispensable to making good 3D models. I'm definitely not opposed to people adding textures to their models. I was just trying to keep the burden of doing this somewhat light, especially for our first pass at it. I'm not sure 1 hour is enough time to model and texture something.

But! If people want to include texturing right away, then I'm not opposed to that. Maybe we'd want to expand the time to 2 hours instead, or something.

What I had kind of thought is that for this first round, we'd just focus on modeling. The next time we do this, in a few months, we might have two courses: a modeling one and a texturing one. Perhaps even the texturing one can be offset from the modeling one, and we can pick a "winner" each week from the modeling class to have everybody texture the next week or something. So my thought process was maybe to start as simple as is absolutely possible and see where it goes and decide what to do next afterwards.

But again, I want to make this useful for everybody, and if everybody wants to include texturing right from the beginning, I don't have any problems with that.

Re: 3D Modeling "Course"

rbwhitaker 16 Mar 2017 03:42

@NolinKumar, the description as it currently stands is basically just that each week, you have the assignment to make a 3D model. It doesn't prescribe any particular piece of software, so you can pick and choose what you want to use, but it would also be your own responsibility to learn how to use the software you choose (and pay for it, if you choose something that costs money). The "course" doesn't include how to use the software, or even how to make your models better. Though the hope would be that by getting practice and showing people what you've done, you'll start to learn how to make 3D models better.

Nolin Kumar (guest) 16 Mar 2017 03:44

oh, i see, if I do this…I need to learn how too use Blender really quickly…that learning curve…

Re: 3D Modeling "Course"

rbwhitaker 25 Mar 2017 15:51

OK guys, we're getting close to the start of April, and we need to get into the details of what we're doing for this 3D modeling course. So how do we want to do this, exactly?

I had initially proposed an 8-week plan, where every week we'd do a different 3D model, with an upper limit on the time allowed. Something like 1 hour. The purpose of that would be to keep this little course to a reasonable level of commitment. One hour per week should be more than doable by anybody who is interested.

I had proposed that we stick with just modeling for now, and sort of skip the texturing, rigging, and animation type stuff. That's not to say that those don't have value, just that I don't think you can model, texture, and rig a model in 60 minutes. In future rounds, we can run a modeling and a separate texturing course side-by-side.

I suppose I'm imagining a format along these lines:

1. Every week, we somehow pick a theme or a specific object to model. I'm currently not sure how we'll pick the topic, nor how specific we want to be. (For example, is it, "Something on your desk", "a mythical creature", "an Xbox One controller", etc.) Obviously, the real purpose is to just get some time practicing 3D modeling, so people should definitely feel free to be creative and do whatever they think is best for them in any given week. We're all at different skill levels. One size probably won't fit everybody.
2. The specific topic is announced on… let's say Sunday… and you have from Monday through Sunday to do the work, spending no more than the allotted time for it. (We don't necessarily need to always stick to 1 hour. But we'll assume that for now.)
3. When you complete the task, you have to post either the model itself or pictures of the model, or both. I think it might be nice to see a picture of the wireframe (which shows better how exactly you modeled it) as well as a rendering. I would say sharing the actual model so we can download and open it on our own is preferable, but if you don't want to share the model, that's acceptable too. Just share pictures instead.
4. I've had some thoughts about allowing everybody to vote for a winner or a favorite. I'm not sure how we'd do that, and perhaps that's a can we kick down the road a little further and ignore this time around.

It might also be interesting to require that Week #1 and Week #8 be the same object, so we can see improvement over time.

Based on this schedule, our first project would be given out on 2 April 2017, due for completion on 9 April 2017. The last week would wrap up on 28 May 2017.

Perhaps I should make a thread for modeling suggestions?