What is Reddit's opinion of
PureRef?
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10 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
I think at one point Zach and Niall both mentioned pixelovely, which is now known as line-of-action. It's used for gesture drawing, and you can choose different courses for your drawing, like male/female, nude or clothed, time limit, etc. https://line-of-action.com/
Another helpful tool that i don't think they mentioned, but is really useful, is called pureref. It's a desktop application that allows you to easily sort reference pics, as well as rotate and flip them for easy viewing. http://www.pureref.com/index.php
Common way of keep consistent with other ideas is collecting images to look at while you make concepts. Someone once called it a "mood board".
And easy way to do this is with pureref. Collect images that give the impression or design and put them all in pureref. Then just keep it up for reference while you sketch.
I don't know b much about full world building but b this has done wonders for my work.
I'll try to create atlas sheets for some of the stuff I'm doing where I tie a bunch of reference images into one giant one. Pureref makes it pretty easy.
When it comes to creating reference libraries I find they're too much work and I have a bunch of old ones I just never ended up using. Google image search and pinterest are just too easy to find what you want to make upkeeping your own worth it.
Are you working from a photo?
If so, it's just a matter of how well you can copy and how much time you invest. Keep your photo either on a separate layer, or in a program like PureRef (which I highly recommend) and match everything as best you can with round brushes of varying hardness and size.
If not values are probably your top priority.
If you are working from life (like a still life) be sure pay attention to more subtle variations in light and dark, as it's pretty common for your vision to trick you into seeing more contrast where there isn't (some super quick life-drawings I did about a year ago as an example.)
If you are working completely from imagination, be sure to include wider range of values. It's kind of funny, but people tend to do the opposite of above, and not push values enough (for the same reason, actually) making images grayed out and flat (some recent fom-imagination sketches.)
In either case, work on larger canvases. My go-to for general work is 8.5x11 inches, at 300 ppi, but that is personal preference (and because they print easily if I need to do that.) I find that there is a pretty direct correlation between image size and final quality, unfortunately, so if your computer chugs along as is I would temper your expectations with smaller images.
Actually, like any form of painting, digital is something that takes a lot of practice and acclimation, so tempering your expectations is a good idea in general.
Hope this helps!
The SP3 should still be fine. If you need more space you can look into an extra monitor, although I found myself living without.
Personally I stick with my CSP, and PureRef when I'm drawing, so I can have lots of references alongside CSP.
Not sure if this qualifies, but instead of using image planes or spotlight for ref pics you can use this 'always on' image viewer while you're sculpting in Zbrush. I couldn't live without this thing, highly recommended:
I'd say use PureRef, keep it always on top and lock the workspace. It's an image viewer specifically made for artists that use reference material that you can use to resize, rotate, change the opacity of the image(s) and a lot more.
It's a pay what you want program, and you can if you really wish pay nothing at all.
Instead of telling you about all the software you are already aware of (like Unity or Blender) let me tell you about a couple of tools we (@MoonberryTeam) use that can easily be overlooked:
PNGGauntlet - make your textures smaller
PureRef - view/organize reference images
Cheers!
So first off, me and my friend started this collab thing where she writes a little prompt and I draw it as a warmup (sometimes longer). This one was particularly interesting to do. I'd recently watched the free cgma workshop on environments for animation and I've been engrossed in drawing/painting this stuff. I absolutely love this guy's work! So I'd been emulating it before as well but I was more jokingly doing it. I really enjoyed doing this!
The two aspects I focused here was a) colour and b) texture! I never knew how much I ignored texture in my paintings. I'm floored by the difference. I'm going to now try to add texture where possible. Use references! I'll be the first to admit that I've never been really good at using references because most of the time they're a pain to find and an even bigger pain to actually use because you can't look at them all at the same time. Thankfully with a little bit of searching I found a WONDERFUL program that allows me to do just that! I'm still weak using references, but when I do- the difference is clear.
I'd love any critique/ comments you guys have!
The workshop if anyone wants to see it,
http://www.cgmwonline.com/nicolas-weiss-free-workshop.html
and the software for references viewing,