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Same tech, more optimizations, more 'cool' stuff (SSS, hair, importance/radiosity lighting), GPU-accelerated engines slowly gaining traction in the field (after games, as usual)

most raytracers have gone from linear reasoning to physically based maths (correct lighting & exposure with quadratic energy falloff, BSDFs instead of run-of-the-mill Lamberts etc...) and there's a fight between non-biased renderers (physically "correct" but slow) and plausible/biased renders (incorrect but way faster as of 2012, for the needs of 2k vfx)

I'm not a rendering expert but that's how I feel about it. If you're not using mentalray, it's incredibly easy for a beginner to make realistic images. Taste is another matter.

As for open source, I know there's Cycles with blender, but by far my favorite toy is Mitsuba: http://www.mitsuba-renderer.org/ most of cool kids in the siggraph presentations that look good have used Mitsuba.

Wrong sub my friend! This is a place about CGI/VFX, not computer games specifically.

Although to reply to your question, you can use websites such as this one to check if your config can run certain games.

Terragen

• Screen Resolution size 1024x768

• Pre-prepared scene

• 1,343,597 polygons

In this one, it is not a generated scene but one premade. So it was a open and render. Terragen doesn't have the flexible feel to it that Vue does. Had I opened a pre-prepared scene, they would have been a much better match.

https://imgur.com/a/utzLM

The top image is Terragen, the bottom one Vue.

Vue

• Screen Resolution size 1024x768

• Created scene, not a pre-prepared one

• 23,796,822 polygons

This was done with stock, included items in Vue and literally slapped together on the spur of the moment with no planning. It was done strictly to show you the ground scenery. It takes into account no other capabilites beyond stock setup and render. It could have been far better planned or as a premade scene. No account was taken about what they do best at.

edit to set up post with data easier to evaluate

How old are you? I'm asking because it would be interesting to know if you're currently studying, or working, or neither. It would also be interesting to know your drive behind wanting a 3D job. Do you like gaming? Watching Pixar movies? Want to create models for IKEA catalogs? What made you think: "Oh, THIS is something I want to do"?

The videos you saw on Youtube were probably not part of a production chain, but rather something a person was doing for fun. When actually working with 3D, there's a lot of feedback and issues, which usually takes some time to handle. Also, what you think looked mighty fine after a day's work, will probably not look as fine when you are more experienced. There's a huge difference in perspective once you learn a few things. :)

Sculptris is a free sculpting program. I'd recommend downloading that and just play around, to see if you like it.

Blender is a pretty decent 3D software that is also free, if you want to dig into playing with lights and textures. A simple project would be to light and texture a cube, just to get started.

Polycount that was linked before is a great resource, and forum.

Otherwise I'd recommend picking up pen and paper, and working on 2D skills. It's a very useful skill to have in any area of 3D.

I've been doing the same thing really. Got into animation and then learned how to make Nuke gizmos, which are basically a collection of nodes with a designed functionality. I love Modo as well and Python is a great starting language to learn. I'm learning Python with this app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sololearn.python

"Technical artist" is the name of career path that you're thinking of. Programming is more of a skill to acquire through any means you think is best. There are certifications you can get; college is not required. As always, finished programming projects/experience speak more than formal credentials.

I wouldn't rule out being a programmer for something like databases or something. Database admins make quite a bit. :)

Joel

Sorry to pimp my own stuff but this is a tutorial I did on eyes in maya/vray.

https://gumroad.com/ysalex

A couple things -

• I wouldn't use phong shaders with Vray. Those are maya shaders, what you need in the vray shaders. Base all your materials off of the vraymtl shader, and if you need phong use it in the reflectivity model dropdown.

• To make the vraymtl 'clear' or transparent while maintaining reflectivity, just set the diffuse to black, and turn the 'refraction' all the way up. Set the IOR of refraction to something between 1.38 and 1.42.

• The eye is actually a pretty rough surface with blood vessels, surface noise, veins etc, so don't go for a glass look, consider using a subtle bump/disp/normal to get some noise in there and break up the reflections over the sclera. The surface over the cornea is much more smooth, so that part is actually a lot like glass.

• Dont overdo reflections, keep the specular power down a bit.

Seconded. Link.

Blender can be a bit overwhelming for beginners at first; but there are tons of tutorials, courses, articles and books out there; so if you're serious, skipping the kiddie pool of less capable software and just jumping in the deep end is ultimately worth it. Best 0 markkaa you'll ever spend on modelling/rendering software ;)

Pretty much and asset store with a good population is going to take a cut. I forget what Turbosquids's was, but the Unity Asset Store is very fair.

Unity's Page :http://unity3d.com/asset-store/sell-assets

Interesting reddit post: http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1z2o7n/how_i_made_1000000_under_a_month_selling_assets/

I just did a Google search; Apparently it was Ray Bradbury. I heard it a long time ago, but swapped out my Sci Fi authors.

52

The way that you described browsing through a forest made me think of game dev programs like Unity or Unreal, where I fly around using the keyboard and mouse. From a UI perspective, that could work, but you would need really good filtering tools, so I can easily filter my forest down to just oak trees, or trees with a height of less than 20 feet, or christmas trees, or whatever. Maybe have a general search bar, from which I could type in "oak" or "height<20ft", but hide most of the more complex filtering options in Advanced Search?

I also think you should consider how you're going to differentiate yourself from existing programs. I'm not an expert in tree generation, but it looks like SnappyTree and SpeedTree do a lot of what you described, with SnappyTree being the free option and SpeedTree being the professional one. Is the big difference between your program and theirs the more intuitive Forest UI? If so, I suggest putting a lot of energy into making your UI really clean and user friendly, so users aren't put off by your UI just because its not what they are used to. I also suggest examining the UI of both the programs I mentioned to see what they do right, and more importantly where you could do better.

Oh, and one more thing: No matter how intuitive your program is, you still need good tutorials and documentation!

Edit: I forgot to mention price. If you can deliver something high quality without the expensive subscription of SpeedTree, I think that people will be interested, regardless of your UI.

Awesome project. I think OP should spend some more time on this and take all of adpsih's suggestions.

You could do a lot with this image just using different render passes even. Check this example out. And then take a look at the break down.

Have you thought using a model like khan academy?

If you're serious about this, watch it(it's simple and ingenious): http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html

Their homepage: http://www.khanacademy.org/

In terms of what? Code or what it actually involves?

If the former, I'd love to open source my stuff, but unfortunately I've got a non-compete with my former employer which runs for another six months - I plan to at some point though.

If the latter, then to be honest, all I've done is multithread my FFT code which is used to generate the ocean waves based on Jerry Tessendorf's "Simulating Open Water" paper. I've had this code for a while, but to generate big expanses of waves (4096 * 4096, generating a 33M tri mesh) it was taking around 45 seconds when Houdini could do it in seconds. With four threads, I've got it down to about 13 seconds now.

For the pure FFT side of things, there're extremely good open source FFT implementations already freely available which are much faster (FFTW) - I'm just re-inventing the wheel and coding everything myself so I understand how stuff works fully.

For the Ocean Wave side of things, Houdini's got this code built in (used to be Houdini Ocean Toolkit), Blender's got something similar, and there's stuff like aaOcean which has MentalRay and Arnold shaders to do the same thing.

> Links that use up more than 20 GB/day for Basic (free) accounts and 200 GB/day for Pro and Teams (paid) accounts are automatically suspended.

Here's the info for dropbox public file sharing: https://www.dropbox.com/help/45/en

Very cool. Another example someone made. Did you use Krakatoa to create new points from the fumefx cloud, then frost for just the custom shape of the points? And I gotta say, you gotta shorten your opening title. It's longer than the thing you wanted to show us.

This tutorial shows you the export process and addresses retopologizing: Export - MeshFusion for MODO Tutorial (3/3)

Check out my this comment for part 1 and 2.

45 seconds is what you should shoot for to blow someone's fucking socks off. THE ONLY reason to have a 2min reel if you're not a company with a few employees is if you're someone like this guy.

https://vimeo.com/47013636

The associated source code was adapted for LuxRender:

> Although very capable and well structured, PBRT focuses on academic use and is not easily usable by digital artists. As PBRT is licensed under the GPL, it was possible to start a new program based on PBRT's source code

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuxRender

The PBRT (not LuxRender) license apparently was shifted from GPL to BSD in 2012:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/pbrt/_uTeKpuADWM

Here is the turntable, let me know what you think.

EDIT: Here is the original concept by Stephen Oakley

Personally, I enjoy doing the re-topology in Zbrush using zspheres. This might be useful to you.

My workflow goes something like: Max (base mesh) -> Zbrush (sculpt) -> Zbrush (retopologize to low poly) -> Max (unwrap new low poly) -> Xnormal (mapping w/ high and low poly obj's).

EDIT: The process of creating the new topology in zbrush can seem tricky at first, but there are a few tricks that, once you get the hang of it, really make it a smooth process.

For creating a window, try the GLFW docs directly: http://www.glfw.org/docs/latest/intro.html . For the rest, there is probably no tutorial that will cover ALL those concepts, but if you Google Vertex Buffer Objects (for mesh rendering) and normal, diffuse, displacement maps separately, you will surely find plenty of tutorials on how to program those shaders.

TheKeg's critique was spot on, so I have nothing to add to that. But that said, great work on the character. Puts my first fully modeled, textured, and rigged character right to shame.

As for the website design, may I suggest implementing jQuery to display your images? My favorite is Shadowbox. Doing this would allow you to put the thumbnails on the main page and enlarge them to a reasonable size.

There is a super cheap way of doing this with a pico projector and some open source software. Hackaday showed it a little while ago.

The quality of the scan is not as detailed but it is still neat.

“Generalized Perspective Projection” by Robert Kooima is a solid place to start: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Generalized-Perspective-Projection-Kooima/14d1b312aba825bcce17edd67e3fdc139f1a76a2

The linked PDF no longer works, but you can find it if you google for it.

I can't tell you for your particular computer. Several makers have various key combos to access it. Usually at POST (when it starts up) it will tell you the key combo. If you don't see it, then use a search engine to find it. I've had some like a cheap Emachine that used ctrl+C, while others use F1 or F8. You have a short time during startup to do the access. If you've reached windows start up, you waited too long. Normally you'll hear a beep then do the access key combo. If you've done it right the bios screen will pop up. Be careful where you go and what you do in BIOS. You can make mistakes very easily. Each makers' bios is different than everyone elses. You'll have to recognize your sound setup. It shouldn't be too hard to find. You'll see a startup screen entering bios that is normally something like the time, the date, and similar. Scroll through the pages till you find what you are looking for making sure to make no changes along the way going to the sound section. One page will have hard drives, which you don't fool with. Another may have it listed on the front page section. This is why I can't give you blow by blow to arrive at the sound section where you inert your motherboard sound and allow the new hardware access. But it's usually pretty obvious. Make the change, save bios, your done with that part. If you make a mistake along the way, back out of BIOS and don't save.

edit This should help you out while at the same time showing you why I can't tell you the bios access keys for your setup.

Thanks !!! So to improve in modeling you need to practice a lot in that go with basics whatever you see in everyday life...

And for mood of lighting and rendering please refer a lot of references and concept arts ... from that you really can learn a good color scheme.

To ease your work particularly in Color scheme - you can use this website - https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel

Udacity has a great introductory course (free): https://www.udacity.com/course/interactive-3d-graphics--cs291

It's WebGL/Three.js based, but covers lots of concepts that apply anywhere.

I got a lot out of the OpenGL cookbook too. It's a good overview of many techniques commonly used to render modern graphics. It's not as math heavy as some other books, which was a good thing for me to get started. Definitely work on math in parallel though if that's a weak area (was/is for me). It's great when a previously impenetrable book becomes even vaguely understandable!

UnityPRO costs money but the free license is free-ninety-nine, and they encourage you to use it and develop games with it. The main differences between free and pro are:

• All webgames display a Unity logo for about three secounds on startup. (Only goes for webgames, standalone do not have the logo)

• Unity Pro packs a few more features than regular Unity.

• You need to make less than $100K per year at the time of your purchase.

Here's the full list of comparisons between free and PRO. And again, even if you only pay the initial $20 for UE4, you still have to pay them 5% royalty on any game that you publish.

Since your post is geared toward 3D for GAMES, I think you left out one really incredible tool: UNITY!

Unity is a Game development engine that is free to use (until you make more than $100k/yr with your game) and is becoming more prevalent in the game dev realm, especially in the mobile games arena. It's object-based programming and has navigation controls that are the same as Maya, so it's an easy transition if you are already familiar with Maya. I've used Unity to learn how to build my own video game and the ability to test your code immediately after writing it is hugely important to the power of this tool!

Depending on your needs in the OpenGL application you could possibly just fake the whole thing using a shader and some perlin noise. It would of course not match the quality of a offline rendered hand modeled disco ball but might be enough for what you require.

A MonoPrice tablet is a great starting point for someone looking into using a graphics tablet.

Here's a thorough review from a few years ago that you may find useful:

http://frenden.com/post/31659364200/the-little-monoprice-graphics-tablet-that-could

I have the unit described in the review - about $60 on Amazon currently - and was very satisfied with the feel of the pen and the pressure sensitivity.

As for a program, I recommend ArtRage ($50) - https://www.artrage.com/

This looks very cool. One thing someone mentioned on another forum, was the fear of getting that "Quixel look". it seems like there are enough options for customization, that it really wouldn't happen.
I also came across allegorithmic and 3d-coat. Any thoughts on those?

Final images and turnaround shots at my ArtSation profile.

Zbrush crashed on my twice while recording. All that is missed is the beginning of creating the tub out of a cube and fixing overlapping topology in the hips.

I have a weekly thread on Polycount that I update with WIPs and stuff like that. Also if anyone is interested I post final images on my Artsation profile.

http://www.pixologic.com/sculptris/

don't know if you saw them or not but there are some intro videos at the bottom there. i'm sure there are some good tutorials on youtube, or check zbrushcentral.com or if you have some extra cash buy the gnomon dvd on zbrush character sculpting. good luck!

Yeah i don't think this is the right sub but i think this is the kind of thing you want:

https://www.flaticon.com/packs/search?word=fruit&amp;license=selection

Be careful to make sure you have permission for commercial use (that is if that's your plan)

Here is the website with info about Vulkan https://www.khronos.org/vulkan

As thunabrain said there is nothing yet released for the general public so there's nothing you can really do now, but when it is released you can be sure details will be on the linked page.

Unity uses C#, JavaScript, and Boo. If you're working on Windows and want an environment for just C#, download Visual Studio Express

Here's another link for learning Unity.

Not sure there is anything with all your requirements, certainly not for $200. There aren't really a lot of stand-alone graphics tablets, usually you need to connect to a computer. You can also consider an iPad with the Apple Pencil, but those are way more than $200. If you want to go cheap (and I would recommend not spending a ton of money), get a graphics tablet without a screen and use it on your computer. This is the one I'm using and I've been happy with it.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B071JN86L3/

No, it requires 300w, but if you do wind up upgrading your PSU and have space in your PC, you should consider a GTX 1050 instead. It's only ~ $30 more and it's about twice as powerful.

If I may suggest something, read this book Figure Drawing for All It's Worth - Andrew Loomis. It will help tremendously to model any character or anatomical~ system. It even gives good thinking process to gradually build complex things starting with simple reference geometry (yes, pencil or mouse, same ideas apply).

As the others said, stick to Maya or 3ds max. Learning C4D once you know other packages is pretty easy, but for employment you really want one of the Autodesk packages.

Also, I've found the best way to learn to do 3D modeling is to do it as often as possible. No substitute for hours spent trying and failing. Almost everything you model has unique needs and requirements, so watching tutorials can only help so much. You need to just get in there and start creating, hit a wall on how some part of it should be made, then go research the best technique. A good example is how best to drill holes in surfaces, many people trip up on this.

I would recommend you start by choosing simple real-world objects and model them, whether they are things in your room or products, etc. Go on Amazon and buy a pair of calipers (such as these) and use them to take measurements of real world objects as you model them. This will help you get everything proportionally correct, AND make the job easier. Guessing proportions is a good way to make everything look off.

It's pretty much blasphemy. Don't use it. Well this is coming from a long time comic collector. I know my comics, I know the market, and I also know a thing or three about CGI. I've worked on some big films as well as some good games.

Comics have their own little art movements. The indie comic The Bunker has received incredible reviews for it's art and the artist Joe Infurnari used a pastel charcoal medium. Fiona Staples continues to win every award there is every year for her work on Saga. She is entirely digital.

Most comic art is done by 3-4 people as you probably already know. A letterer, a pencil artist, an inker and a colorist or a team of colorists. DC comics uses entire sweat shops that are solely dedicated to color. Where a multitude of underpaid asian artists color Batman and Superman every month for pennies.

A classical computer graphics book is:

Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice

Already in the third version.

This is one of the more advanced books, but even it misses the most foundational notion in all of realtime 3-D graphics--the perspective divide.

http://www.amazon.com/Real-Time-Rendering-Third-Tomas-Akenine-Moller/dp/1568814240/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1423281255&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=Realtime+rendering

I have the Huion H610 Pro, and I've compared it side by side with the WACOM equivelant and it is nearly identical hardware wise. I believe the specs aren't quite as good, but as a student that is just learning it's great for the price. Amazon link