Hey everybody!

I’m here to talk about how to get started with 3D.

I see lots of designers (and non-designers) around me interested in 3D, but they are often nervous to get started. Because 3D is such a big concept, it’s not always evident how to begin.

In this article, I will try to simplify and explain what 3D means and answer some common questions, giving you some helpful tips to start!

Why should you start 3D?

Just in case you’re not already convinced… ;) If you are, you can skip this section!

Because with 3D you can do whatever you want.
When I started with 3D, I wanted to create beautiful images to use in my design. But 3D is way more than that. Today, if you want to design your own product and print it in 3D, you can! If you want to use your little creation as a Snapchat filter in AR, you can! If you want to build your indie game, it’s at your fingertips. You will be surprised how 3D can broaden your mind.

Because it’s becoming more accessible.
Today, 3D is becoming more accessible and less time-consuming. It still requires you to invest some time at first, but it’s getting easier. At one time, we had to wait hours to see the result of a scene, but today — thanks to GPU rendering — it happens live! It’s much easier and makes a big difference when you’re just starting out.

Because it’s the right time to start.
Think about it… 3D is everywhere today and will be even more so in the near future. To take a striking example, more than 70% of the IKEA catalogue is now made with 3D visuals! I’m sure you don’t want to spend your next years doing renderings of the ‘Klippan’ sofa, but 3D can open up new perspectives, and the more you become familiar with it, the more the possibilities will open. Augmented and Virtual Reality, Illustrations, Product Design, Movie/VFX industry, Games or even just Art are areas where 3D play a major role.

Where to start?

That’s a great question, and I think to answer that one correctly, you need to ask yourself: why am I interested in 3D?

Because 3D is a very broad field and you have to start somewhere, focus on what you’re interested in to progress faster.

You can take a more academic approach and learn things in a logical order: first the modeling, then materials, lighting, etc. But it’s up to you. I preferred not to follow a specific process, and this helped me achieve what I really wanted to do.

I was obsessed with a rendering that I had seen, where the material and light was so gorgeous that I decided to start by learning this particular aspect.

In the beginning, I was not focused so much on modeling. I found existing objects or 3D scanned objects and played with lighting and materials, without spending a day modeling my own thing. (You can easily find great model to start, I’ll give you some links at the end of this article).

Sometimes I created an organic scene without trying to represent something specific — my process was more to open Cinema 4D without any idea of what I wanted. I started playing with the tools there, and I would see where it would take me!

There are many different 3D aspects, so let me explain them to you.

Modeling

Modeling is basically creating the model you want — it’s about learning how to use the tools. Start with a cube or another primitive shape to model the thing you want to create. It’s all about polygons and arranging them in a 3D space.

Usually, you should limit the amount of polygons, but it depends on the final use case for your model. For a Web/Game, it’s better for performance to use only a few polygons. But sometimes, if you want to do sculpting, for example, you will need more polygons to achieve beautiful surface detail.

My advice on modeling is very simple: Don’t try to create something too complex, at least at first. Start by becoming familiar with the tools. Even simple things can be very satisfying to model, and you can get a pretty nice result.

You may also decide to explore something completely abstract. In my opinion, this is the easiest thing to do at first. Then once you’re comfortable with the tools and the process, you can start creating something more realistic.

Texturing

Depending on what you want to achieve, textures can be difficult or easy. If you’re going for a cartoony style, that’s pretty easy — simple colors or gradients with a cool but not too pronounced glossy aspect will do the job. This may be where you should start, by creating a nice basic material, and then add complexity into it.

Things get harder when you’re trying to be realistic, and this is where texturing becomes really interesting.

Creating realistic materials takes time, and you will need to be a good observer to improve their quality. Textures are about really small details that make the difference between poor and great materials.

You can create textures directly in your favorite 3D software, but if you want to go further, you should look into dedicated software like Substance Painter.

You can also use your favorite camera to photograph texture that you can use in your design.

At the end of this article, you’ll find some good places to find materials. It’s really useful to download materials to see how they are made — it will help you understand how to create yours.

Lighting

Lighting is a key component for good results. It will (with a nice combination of material) help you find the aesthetic you want.

It takes practice to make you see the world differently — over time, you will sharpen your eyes and you will see the importance of lighting by getting familiar with it. For me, learning 3D helps me to understand some photography principles, and I guess a photographer with good knowledge about light will get better at it faster.

Every detail is important when you’re creating the lighting of a scene. The size and shape of your light, the position, the intensity, the color — all of these will affect the contrast and the detail of your scene.

Light is also about shadow, and different type of light will produce different type of shadows — do you want a hard or a soft shadow?

These choices will affect the aesthetic of your work, and the more you become familiar with it, the more you can play and use all this variation to your advantage.

Here is an excellent article from Helloluxx to help you understand lighting and how to apply this knowledge in C4D.

Animation

Another great thing about 3D is animation! Welcome to a 3D environment where you can recreate the physical rules that apply in the real world, like gravity, collision, pressure, etc. All this is pretty helpful when it comes to creating realistic animations.

Rigging (or creating a skeleton to your model, enabling it to move) is also really fun to do.With a little practice, you can fairly easily animate basic characters, and the result is always really cool. :) In case you’re too lazy to animate your Skeleton, Maximo allows you to download some motion capture on their website and apply it to your model in just a few clicks!

Rendering

One last step is the rendering of your scene. You can create multi-pass to extract alpha channel or lights, shadows, etc. on different layers, allowing you to do compositing in Photoshop or After Effects for example.

Rendering is also the art of optimizing your scene parameters to get a faster render. Don’t forget that rendering can easily take a long time, especially when you’re rendering an animation. For a 10 second animation at 30 fps, if each frame takes 1 minute to render, it will take 5 hours to get your animation!

Each 3D software has its own rendering engine, but today there are plenty of additional plugins that can save time. Some of them, Octane render for example — are super fast and allow you to live-render, but require an Nvidia GPU.

I recently started using Corona render for C4D and I really like it — and it’s still in development for Cinema 4D, so you can get a free version!

There are many rendering engines on the market today, such as Redshift, Arnold, V-ray, etc. The one you’ll use depends on the complexity and the workflows of your project. I recommend Octane if you have a powerful Nvidia GPU or Corona render.

That’s pretty broad, no?
The visual effects world is very compartmented, with each discipline owned by someone different. Different people specialize in lighting, materials, modeling, rendering or even on really precise task like creating particles or fluid.

Because 3D is a broad field, try to focus on one thing at the time, get better at it, and then jump into something else!

One last thing — there are many different 3D software tools, but to start I would recommend using Cinema 4D or his little brother, the free and open source Blender. You can find many resources about these two, and the community is constantly growing.

That’s pretty much it!
I tried to give you a quick overview of what 3D is, and I hope it will help you understand where to start. If you have questions don’t hesitate to get in touch with me :)

Here are a few useful links about 3D (mostly about Cinema 4D) grouped by interest.

I want to …

Watch great tutorials

This is a non-exhaustive list of websites where you can find good quality tutorials. I tried to be concise and give you the best ones to start.

Cineversity: When it comes to Cinema 4D, Cineversity is the best place to find amazing tutorials made by the best. It’s a little difficult to search on their website, but you can eventually find almost everything you want to know. Some of their tutorials are free.

Greyscalegorilla: A must-have in the 3D world, with many great tutorials, resources, and products.

EJ Hassenfratz: I learned a lot from EJ Hassenfratz, the multi-Emmy winning freelance motion design artist. His tutorials are great and always really clear and approachable.

3dfordesigners: I’ve heard good things about this website created by Devon, a talented 3D artist. They have an intro class to Cinema 4D who seems really nice.

Don’t forget to check tutorials directly on Youtube and Vimeo, these are gold mine of great tutorials!

I want to …

Find crazy damn good (free) models.

There are many places to find great models if you want to focus more on materials and lighting, or if you don’t have time to model your own.

Turbosquid | Free models: A reference. A large collection of free models and a huge library of paid models.
GreyscaleGorilla | Free model pack: Some cool free models by the GreyscaleGorilla Team.
The Pixel Lab | Freebies: Just subscribe their newsletter to get access to their nice model library.
Archive 3D | 3D Furniture: If you need furniture models, this is the place.
Lincoln 3D Scans: 3D scans of objects from the Usher Gallery and The Collection in Lincoln.
British Museum Scans: 3D scans of objects from the British Museum
Smithsonian 3D Scan: Miscellaneous scans
Artec3d: Even more scans!
The Mantissa | Resources: Award-winning CG Artist shares some of his really good resources.
The French Monkey: Constantin Paschou is also a 3D artist who shares lots of great freebies.
Aaron Covrett: Aaron is motion designer at Stink with great resources to share.
XOIO: A little bit of everything on this German website, they have great 3D scanned people.
NASA 3D models: 3D resources from the NASA! From spaceship to satellite — you can literally recreate space!
Google | Poly: The free library by Google.
Sketchup Warehouse: Contains millions of models created in Sketchup, but you can usually use them with other software, too.

Note that when you download model from web, the file format is not always the one you need. Here is a great online tool to help you transform it to the one you need: http://www.greentoken.de/onlineconv/

I want to …

Find great materials and textures.

Poliigon: The place to find great texture.
Quixel Megascans: Super high-quality scan library.
Corona materials: Amazing material library for Corona renderer.
Octane materials pack : Material Pack for Octane by Vladislav Solovjov

Romain Briaux is a designer by day and 3D maker by night. He previously wrote about how to create 3D characters for the Interview. You can follow him on Twitter (by day or night). To submit questions to Dear Ueno, email hi@ueno.co with the subject line “Dear Ueno” or tweet at us with the hashtag #DearUeno. Include your (optionally fake) name, location, and profession.

Getting started with 3D was originally published in Ueno. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From Makiko in Tokyo:

“How do you create the 3D characters for the Ueno Interview? What software did you use? Did you try different types of people? Do you experiment with options? Why are they so great?”

Romain Briaux, Designer at Ueno NYC, replies:

Hi Makiko,

Thanks for your question. Creating characters for the Ueno Interview was one of the most challenging parts of the 3D work! I had never made characters before, so I was a bit all over the place at the beginning.

Getting inspiration

The first thing we did was get inspiration from others. That’s always a great first step, whatever kind of project you’re working on. Looking at great design just gives you the desire to push yourself further. Here is a non-exhaustive list of 3D designer/character designers I looked at: Aaron Martinez, Jean-Pierre Le Roux, Superfiction, Rocketboy Studio…

Sketching something

The second step is to put your ideas on paper. It will help you start somewhere and define your character style, without wasting hours modeling something that you don’t want.

Steffen was working with us on the project and made these sketches as a starting point.

Opening 3D software

Okay, so now that we got a sense of what we wanted, we started modeling our characters in Cinema 4D.

The particular 3D program you use doesn’t matter that much. Some people will prefer working with Maya, 3ds Max, or Blender. All of these are great, and it’s more a matter of which one you’re more comfortable with. I find C4D easy to handle, and because there is a really big community around it, you can find lots of resources to get started. C4D is also a great tool to put your 3D models in motion, and you can get very far with it.

I won’t do a tutorial about how to make a character because you can already find great ones online! But, okay, I don’t want to say “Google is your friend,” so I’ll give you somewhere to start. EJ Hassenfratz has some excellent tutorials on character modeling.

The first iteration

Here it is! As you can see, it’s pretty far from final ones. But it allowed us to think a bit more about where we wanted to go.

We decide to not follow this first iteration mainly because of a technical constraint. You can go super detailed when you have to model someone or something. But these characters would have to live in a WebGL environment, so it was important to keep rendering performance in mind. We needed to be extra careful about the polygon count.

After a discussion with Julien, who developed this entire experience, we made the crucial decision to get rid of arms and legs on our little people!

“Wait, what? That’s cruel!”

Yes, we are terrible people, but to save some time in animation and rigging, it was a really smart decision.

These constraints have obviously changed the design of our characters.
It became way simpler to model, but since we cut out a lot of details, it was also harder to give personality to each character. But challenge accepted, let’s jump to the next iteration.

Refining the model

So we wanted a simpler model, we got some inspiration from our old video games memories, like Rayman, or more recently Wii Sports and Animal Crossing.

This second iteration was… weird. Shapes and proportions were off, the head and the body looked too similar, and we were missing too many details.

Final characters

So we reworked this simpler base to have more contrast between the head and the body, gave them more details, and used accessories to reflect their look and bring them to life. You can see below some of the Ueno employees (Justin, Troy, and Najla) next to their 3D avatar.

So, that’s pretty much it, Makiko! I hope this answered your questions.

Oh wait! I’ve missed one actually!

“Why are they so great?”

Hmmm… that’s a good one! Honestly, the only answer that I can give you is, they are so great because Ueno’s people are great! 😉

Cheers,

Romain

Romain Briaux is a designer by day and 3D maker by night. You can follow him on Twitter (by day or night). To submit questions to Dear Ueno, email hi@ueno.co with the subject line “Dear Ueno” or tweet at us with the hashtag #DearUeno. Include your (optionally fake) name, location, and profession.

Dear Ueno: How did you create the 3D characters for The Interview? was originally published in Ueno. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.