What every 3D artist needs

3D artists generally create models from reference (whether that is created by a concept artist, yourself, or from photographs).

Every 3D artist needs to know certain things. There is some basic knowledge that a 3D artist should possess. This is what we call the artist’s pipeline. This pipeline includes the following:

• Modeling
• UV Mapping
• Rigging
• Texturing
• Sculpting
• Retopology
• Lighting

1. Modeling

The software that is used the most for modeling is 3DMax, so learning how to use this program gives you a good start. Other popular software programs that have been gaining ground over the past couple of years are Maya and SoftImage. The most important thing is that you learn the principles of modeling. These are universal so you can transfer from one tool to another rather quickly once you have these down.

2. UV Mapping

UV mapping is all about transforming a texture map onto the 3D object.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Cube_Representative_UV_Unwrapping.png (attribute to: Attribution: Zephyris at en.wikipedia). Maps can either be generated automatically, made manually, or a combination of both. Some UV mapping software programs are Ultimate Unwrap 3D and UVMapper Professional.

3. Rigging

Rigging is quite a wide area in 3D artistry, one that you should preferably do in steps. It’s all about attaching bones or biped to a modeled character / object in order to make them animate or performa actions. By rigging, the character can walk, talk and make movements. If you can learn to become really fast at rigging a character, for example, it can save you a lot of time. To get some practice click here to check out some tutorials by Dennis Jensen on rigging in Maya, starting out with setting up the skeleton.

4. Texturing

When it comes to texturing, Adobe Photoshop is the dominant package in the games industry. although the texture of something as simple as a wall might not seem so important, a game is nothing without great textures. It doesn’t matter if your game has great 3D graphics if it has horrible textures.

5.  Sculpting

The dominant program for this is Z-Brush. There’s also a free bit of software called Sculptris which is quite revolutionary (it subdivides the mesh where you paint). If you want some basic lessons in sculpting, check out the forums on CG Sculpt. They’ve got some good examples of some CG sculptures for you to draw your inspiration from, too.

6. Retopology

“There are lots of ways you might use the retopolgy tools, but the main way they are used today is to free you from thinking about polygons until you have to. It used to be that if you wanted to create a model, you would have to start in something like Maya, LightWave, etc, and build everything up polygon by polygon, until you had a workable mesh. Then you would paint it, so it looked “real” and render it in an animation app.

The problem was that to be a good polygon artist, you need to be part scientist — which ran counter to the way a lot of artists think. Applications such as zBrush and Mudbox allowed artists to get involved in the creation process, because it was more like working with clay and traditional artist mediums, but the problem was the result was millions of polygons that would choke any animation program.

Retopology tools came to the rescue. By laying down a low-polygon mesh over top of the high density model, artists now had the best of both worlds. They could model in a more natural and organic way, and then lay a mesh over top of it that had a MUCH lower polygon count.

There are three times I can see using retopology, even for a casual artist:

1. Create clothes for a model. You can lay a mesh out on your model, and have it “cling” to the form, and use this as a starting point for shirts, coats, and what have you

2. Create a better arranged mesh to sculpt on (“normal” sculpting, not voxel sculpting) One of the real probelms with sculpting on polygons is if they do not flow the right way, you have to add a lot of them to get the edge you want. The classic case of this is if you have ever watched a head sculpting tutorial that starts with a sphere. (zBrush has a ton of these on their site.) It works OK, until you get to the moth. And then the line of the lips goes counter to the edge of the polygons in the sphere — even when you subdivide many, many times. This is, honestly, why so many zBrush models have a gajillion ploygons. The casual zBrush user has never taken the time to learn polygon flow, so their solution is to crank up the sub-divisions until the polygons are small enough that it is possible to get the edge they want. Trouble is that subdividing a mesh increses the polygon count exponentially (by a factor of four, in fact). So this approach creates VERY dense meshes. A better approach would be to retopolize your mesh before scultping so the edge flow of your polygons worked with you instead of against you. Again, this does NOT apply to voxel sculpting which has a different underlying structure for the sculpt.

3. Lower the density of your mesh so you can animate it. If you plan on exporting your model into any animation application — even if you just want to pose it and render it there — the polygon count becomes an issue. XSI is very friendly to high density meshes, but other apps will absolutely choke if you try to import a couple of high res models. ”
Source

7. Lighting

Getting the lighting correct can make your artwork more realistic and more beautiful. Check out this tutorial explaining all the basics for CG lighting.

Once you’ve got confident with these areas, then there is the all important game engines you can learn how to make use of! Think of UDK and Unity. Try to be resourceful as an artist. Search the web for other artists, forums to share your work, and browse the web for free assets, tutorials and information on what it takes to be an artist.

Baseline of this article is thanks to Kris Doggett.