Observe your interests everywhere

in #life5 years ago

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Since I started working in Blender, several months ago, I tried my best to get better and better at 3D Modelling, and one way I've been trying to do that was by watching tutorials and timelapse videos to see how other people are creating their models.

That helped me quite a lot, and it gave me new ideas about how to better do things in Blender. However, another trick I've been using, to try and raise my standards and to understand how something should look like, is to look at 3D models everywhere.

This applies especially to games. Since I started working in Blender I also started looking at games in a different way. Instead of just going through one focusing on the story, gameplay and all kind of similar elements, I also started paying a lot more attention to how things are made.

Doing that helped me understand a few things about games and how 3D models are made in order to look good without sacrificing a lot of performance.

For example, I never created nature in Blender, and for a long time, I thought that in order to create something like a tree, you need to create several 3D models for each leaf you want to add in the tree. Then, you had to use the particle system to just spread those leafs around and that was it.

However, one day I got into Witcher 3 for a few minutes, to look at a few models, and I realized that most nature elements aren't exactly 3D models. Leafs are just 2D elements, combined with the 3D models of the trunk and the branches of the tree.

Same thing with grass. They didn't really have to use 3D models to create the grass, at least not complicated models. Instead, they created the shape of several patches of grass using probably simple planes, and then they used a 2D image (or at least I think that's what happened) attached to the plane that looked like grass in order to make it seem real.

And it's a smart thing to do. You don't actually need to add a bunch of textures to make grass look amazing, mainly because most people won't really pay attention to it. Sure, there are exceptions, but if you know anything about 3D and how textures work, just ask yourself - is it worth adding a bunch of normal maps to grass just to fake some details that players will probably not even notice?

Not really, especially since you need to keep performance in mind.

Another thing you can easily observe if you look at how models look in games is how important Normal Maps are. You get into a game, you look at a castle, and it just looks awesome, full of details, and full of rocks, and you ask yourself how the hell did they manage to do that.

But if you go near a wall and you look at it from an angle, you'll realize that those 3D stones you were seeing at first, aren't really there. It's just a normal map added to make it seem like the stones are there, but in reality, all that wall is just a square (or a similar shape) with multiple textures on it.

This applies to writing as well. Once you start writing a lot, you'll stop looking at other articles the same way as before. You'll pay a lot more attention to how the article was written, to how the author used certain words to make the reader curious about what's gonna happen next and so on.

While all that will become a reflex, it's worth acknowledging it and trying to actively observing the things you're interested in, in other places. If you're a writer, look at how others write and try to learn from them. If you like 3D, pay attention to how other people make things and try to figure out a way to do the same things yourself. If you're a graphic designer, look at how other people create designs and try to figure out how they did it.

That's gonna help you improve the way you work by a lot, without actually doing anything.

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If you're interested in looking at the design process in games, did you know this new trend called #blocktober? It's like inktober, but for gamedevs. The things they're showing is the "blockout" stage of their games. It was created back in 2017 by Naughty Dog's designer.

Go to this post that I wrote a year ago, if you're interested to know more.

I need to learn to work with normal map too. Normal map is... black magic, that's what it is XD I know I haven't started in game development yet and I think I'm still far away from that, but learning it sooner would be good. You good luck with your learning as well! I'm looking forward to see more of your 3d creation.

I didn't know about this trend, thank you for telling me about it, it's gonna be useful to look at all those levels and figure out how others are working and how they are optimizing everything to work better.

And agreed, normal maps are great, and I wish there would a software that could generate them a lot better than what's already available out there. But, because that's not the case, we just need to learn how to create good normal maps by hand if we want our models to look good.

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