Hey everybody,
I’m a pretty experienced C++ programmer who feels pretty comfortable coding in UE4, but I wanted to know how to learn the art part of ue4 and how you artist folks started? Any resources would be appreciated, or just the general path you took.
cheers!
I can give you some advice as someone who has been (or is, depending on how you want to look at it) in the same boat. What I found is that 3d photorealism is the easiest to pick up for non-artists for a variety of reasons. You might think that 2d is easier than 3d, but with 2d you need to take care of perspective and shading yourself. Those aren’t at all easy to get right. If you work with 3d models, you just place them in the level and the engine takes care of those aspects. The reason why photorealism is easy, is that you don’t have to make as many stylistic decisions and the amount of reference material is, for all intents and purposes, infinite. By photorealism I don’t mean that it has to have AAA levels of detail, but the style itself. You can just model objects as they are in real life and the results will look coherent.
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For me sculpting is the most difficult part of 3d modeling and I’m almost completely useless at it. Hard surface modeling (e.g. architecture) is far easier to pick up, because it has a very technical approach to it. You construct the surfaces you want to model by adding, removing, cutting, extruding, etc. simple shapes like rings, rectangles and cylinders. It’s easy to pick up. The complexity stems from the complexity of the tools you use. 3d modeling applications are complex and need some time getting used to.
You need to “unwrap” your model for texturing, which isn’t difficult. Even on complex models it’s just busywork. It’s something you eventually get the hang of, when you did it with enough models. As far as the actual texturing goes, I have two words to say: Get Substance. If it weren’t for Substance (Painter in particular) I couldn’t make my game, period. SP has a very technical approach to texturing your models. Rather than painting your textures in Photoshop or GIMP, you can specify the surface characteristics of your models as they are in real life. You tell SP that this part is made from brushed aluminum, this part is made of wood, that part is made of plastic and this one of painted steel. And then SP spits out your textures. You need little artistic talent for that. SP is another reason why photorealism is easy.
Skinning, rigging and finally animating are the second most difficult part IMO. The reason for that is that there are a lot of subtleties to animation and it doesn’t take much for animations to look stiff and not natural. Still, when making a game, most models won’t be animated. The majority of the models that make up your game’s world are static.
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The biggest hurdle is that you’ll have to pick up A LOT of skills. Seriously, it can not be overstated how much you’ll have to learn. What you have to understand is what class of applications we’re talking about here. You’ll have to learn how to use a wide variety of applications, each of which is a full-time job for professional artists. You have to get this through your skull and adjust your expectations accordingly. From my experience, after you learned how to produce your 3d models (including textures), you’ll be super inefficient. It’ll take you two or three days to create a model that should be done in under an hour. But there’s no way around this, because there isn’t a shortcut to getting experienced.