Hi everybody...

I'm watching some of your 3d images and am very impressed about your work.

What I wonder is where did you learn all those things you use in your renders? forums, books, tutorials?

what do you recommend to a beginner? how did you start?

I don't know if you're talking about me , but I spent 9 years working for Disney Animation as a CG modeler.  Learned from the Maya manuals.  Very useful stuff.

The last time I tried 3D I have made a beautiful black house isolated on black. Seriously there's too many options in those softwares to learn this by myself. But one day I will get it

That is fascinating stuff SJ,

 May I ask why you chose to turn to photography when CGI is such an up and coming profession. I would love to have your 9 years experience under my hat. Do you have any of your CGI work we could see, I love that stuff. Thanks for the post.

Best,
AVAVA

I learned some of it at the college, we had computer graphics lectures that included some work in Maya and then programming in openGL. The rest I learned on my own but didn't have the time to continue learning since I had other things to do. I'm just starting to get back to it.

There are many tutorials and books on the web. Those should be enough for the basic stuff. Then the only limitation is the time invested and your imagination.

...May I ask why you chose to turn to photography when CGI is such an up and coming profession...

It's a very tough business. As Sean mentions, it's a lot of long hours, the work is tough, and it does have a tendency to leave you a bit unsatisfied, especially when you're in the middle of a project.

Studying 3D was enough for me, and I didn't take it much further than college except for a few short term gigs. My niche was more in graphic design, and I'm much happier with that sort of work. 

Looking through my portfolio you won't find a single 3D image, because I have to agree that it's just way too time consuming to be profitable. A few people have made it work with some popular character series, but generally speaking CG images require too much of a time investment.

I earned a degree in computer animation from the Art Institute of Seattle.. I loved the cool stuff you can do, but Like Sean and Helix said it is so labor intensive.. The industry is very tight and difficult to break into and once your in it is long hours and tight deadlines constantly.. I would say that 3d for microstock is limited, as it is so much work to make a good 3d model from scratch, that you have to really keep what you do simple and that keeps your options a little limited because the returns might not justify the time spent.. I guess if you plan it out and do stuff that doesn't involve a lot of 3d details and "fake it" with textures then it might work for you..

 I use 3d studio max mostly, and also mess with Maya from time to time.. Both very Great programs and the industries best.. 

Can you bring yourself to watch those films you worked on.

Oh sure, I love to see the stuff I worked on.  If you watch Lilo and Stitch, when Stitch goes into hyperspace in front of the huge police ship, you can see my initials on the front of the ship in the swirly texture pattern.  I tried to spell my son's name in Brother Bear, out of falling fish, but the efx department ended up covering them with water splashes.

oh thx for starting this thread, i am also curious about this technique.
i also remembered an old mention (snurder, some of you may remember )
sayig how it take take to process the work, sometimes overnight.
so i suppose it can be time-consuming, huh?

what is the minimum computer equipment you need, though? i guess a fast computer is critical for this , wouldn' it?

For basic modeling and scenes, the amount of memory depends on how bloated your program is. Something rudimentary like Blender will run on just about anything. Fluffier programs like True Space will run more efficiently on a machine with a bump up in memory. It all depends on the architecture of the program and how well the programmers did their job. A bump up in memory is recommended. But some programs will run on 2GB just fine for basic projects.

The memory needs really come into play on Renders, when you generate the final image from your models with textures and lighting applied. In one program that I use, a very basic render may take only a few minutes, but on the final "fine render", where there are many subdivisions to a fine tuned mesh, complex textures like glass or metal and reflections, lighting and shadows, along with rendering techniques like radiosity, inclusion of alpha channels, a final render of something like 8000x6000 pixels could indeed take several hours or overnight.

SJ,

 WOW! That is so cool. It must be really fun to see your stuff up on the big screen.

Bet,
AVAVA