Modeling is the process of taking a shape and molding it into a completed 3D mesh. The most typical means of creating a 3D model is to take a simple object, called a primitive, and extend or "grow" it into a shape that can be refined and detailed. Primitives can be anything from a single point (called a vertex), a two-dimensional line (an edge), a curve (a spline), to three dimensional objects (faces or polygons).
Using the specific features of your chosen 3D software, each one of these primitives can be manipulated to produce an object. When you create a model in 3D, you'll usually learn one method to create your model, and go back to it time and again when you need to create new models. There are three basic methods you can use to create a 3D model, and 3D artists should understand how to create a model using each technique.
1. Spline or patch modeling: A spline is a curve in 3D space defined by at least two control points. The most common splines used in 3D art are bezier curves and NURBS (the software Maya has a strong NURBS modeling foundation.) Using splines to create a model is perhaps the oldest, most traditional form of 3D modeling available. A cage of splines is created to form a "skeleton" of the object you want to create. The software can then create a patch of polygons to extend between two splines, forming a 3D skin around the shape. Spline modeling is not used very often these days for character creation, due to how long it takes to create good models. The models that are produced usually aren't useful for animation without a lot of modification.
Spline modeling is used primarily for the creation of hard objects, like cars, buildings, and furniture. Splines are extremely useful when creating these objects, which may be a combination of angular and curved shapes. When creating a 3D scene that requires curved shapes, spline modeling should be your first choice.
2. Box modeling: Box modeling is possibly the most popular technique, and bears a lot of resemblance to traditional sculpting. In box modeling, one starts with a primitive (usually a cube) and begins adding detail by "slicing" the cube into pieces and extending faces of the cube to gradually create the form you're after. People use box modeling to create the basic shape of the model. Once practiced, the technique is very quick to get acceptable results. The downside is that the technique requires a lot of tweaking of the model along the way. Also, it is difficult to create a model that has a surface topology that lends well to animation.
Box modeling is useful as a way to create organic models, like characters. Box modelers can also create hard objects like buildings, however precise curved shapes may be more difficult to create using this technique.
3. Poly modeling / edge extrusion: While it's not the easiest to get started with, poly modeling is perhaps the most effective and precise technique. In poly modeling, one creates a 3D mesh point-by-point, face-by-face. Often one will start out with a single quad (a 3D object consisting of 4 points) and extrude an edge of the quad, creating a second quad attached to the first. The 3D model is created gradually in this way. While poly modeling is not as fast as box modeling, it requires less tweaking of the mesh to get it "just right," and you can plan out the topology for animation ahead of time.
Poly modelers use the technique to create either organic or hard objects, though poly modeling is best suited for organic models.
A Workflow that Works
The workflow you choose to create a model will largely depend on how comfortable you are with a given technique, what object you're creating, and what your goals are for the final product.
Someone who is creating an architectural scene, for example, may create basic models with cubes and other simple shapes to create an outline of the finished project. Meshes can then be refined or replaced with more detailed objects as you progress through the project. This is an organized, well-planned way to create a scene; it is a strategy used by professionals that makes scene creation straightforward. Beginners, on the other hand, tend to dive in headfirst and work on the most detailed objects first. This is a daunting way to work, and can quickly lead to frustration and overwhelm. Remember, sketch first, then refine.
Likewise, when creating an organic model, beginners tend to start with the most detailed areas first, and flesh out the remaining parts later, a haphazard way to create a character. This may be one reason why box modeling has grown to be so widely popular. A modeler can easily create the complete figure before refining the details, like eyes, lips, and ears.
Perhaps the best strategy is to use a hybrid workflow when creating organic models. A well planned organic model is created using a combination of box modeling and poly modeling. The arms, legs, and torso can be sketched out with box modeling, while the fine details of the head, hands, and feet are poly modeled. This is a compromise professional modelers seek which prevents them from getting bogged down in details. It can make the difference between a completed character, and one that is never fleshed out beyond the head. Beginners would be wise to follow this advice.
Mesh Topology
Another aspect of proper workflow is creating a model with an ideal 3D mesh topology. Topology optimization is usually associated with creating models used in animation. Models created without topology that flows in a smooth, circular pattern, may not animate correctly, which is why it is important to plan ahead when creating any 3D object that will be used for animation.
The most frequently discussed topology is the proper creation or placement of edgeloops. An edgeloop is a ring of polygons placed in an area where the model may deform, as in the case of animation. These rings of polygons are usually placed around areas where muscles might be, such as in the shoulder or elbow. Edegeloop placement is critical when creating faces. When edgeloops are ignored, models will exhibit "tearing" when animated, and the model will need to be reworked or scrapped altogether in favor of a properly-planned model.
Next Steps
The next step to creating great models is simply to practice and examine the work of artists you admire. Some of the best 3D modelers are also fantastic pencil-and-paper artists. It will be well worth your time to practice drawing, whether you're a character creator or a wanna-be architect. Good modeling requires a lot of dedication. You'll need to thoroughly understand the software you're using, and the principles of good 3D model creation laid out above. Character artists will need to learn proportion and anatomy.
By understanding these basics of modeling you'll save yourself a lot of frustration and discouragement, and you'll be well on your way to becoming a prolific 3D artist.
Below are a few schools that offer relevant 3D Modeling courses.
The BFA program in Animation focuses on the preparation of the artist to meet the challenges of tomorrow's production workplace. Through a strong foundation in traditional visual and performance arts, students develop their digital content creation skills within a classical framework. During this program students study foundation art skills; including illustration, painting, photography, sculpture and film making, as the prerequisites to an equally diversified animation core curriculum.
Take classes in artist-designed labs and facilities. Learn from experts in digital artistry. Work with industry-standard animation tools, 3D software, and imaging technologies, and one of the only Motion Capture studios in the Southeast U.S. All at Digital Media Arts College
The Art Institute Online-this school offers courses that have been tailored to let the aspiring video game designer have loads of fun while making baby steps towards imaging and animation. With courses like Motion Capture, 3D Animation, Low-Polygon Modeling, Game Level Design and Character Development, among others, you are definitely on your way to completing a portfolio that will not just wow your would-be employers but your future market as well.
The Game Art & Design program concentrates on the artistic side of games - not computer programming. This unique program is your first step toward becoming an artist and designer in the multi-billion dollar game design industry.
Your main workstation has a lot of power, so free it up to do better things.
When you work with 3D or video rendering, you quickly realize—excuse the tacky, car-salesman tone of this cliché—that time is actually money. Under a tight deadline with very demanding tasks, you need more than just a faster machine. You need a lot more power, and one of the main ways of getting it is to divide your task among networked machines.
In my recent Mac Pro review, I mentioned that a workstation computer (whether from Apple, HP, or Dell) is designed to be good at a lot of tasks that are demanding on the CPU and, increasingly, on the GPU. But a workstation can be too much machine for some things, so often you want to free it up to use for asset production instead of saturating it with render tasks. Work stations are overkill to use as what I call "dumb muscle."
Dumb muscle machines are like mafia button men: they lie dormant until the boss calls them in for a job and then they go beat the hell out of something—in this case, a set of 3D frames or video composites. After, they go back to sleep and wait for the next call. Dumb muscle has one job to do essentially: keep pummeling. If you put all your money and CPU cores into one box, you are going to be in a really bad spot if that machine goes down. But if you suddenly must get your workstation serviced without warning and have a lot of networked muscle, you can instantly work from a laptop and use a render server to keep your efficiency relatively high while your main machine is MIA.
I opt for the 3.0GHz 8-core Xeon E5 v2 machine because, for anything that doesn't stress more than 8-cores—almost everything but 3D rendering or certain video encoders—the 8-core would perform better than the lower-clocked 12-core. I decided to save the $1500 upgrade cost to go from the 8-core E5 v2 that would give me better performance with tasks that couldn't saturate all cores. Instead, I spent a bit of extra money to get another 10-core 3.0GHz Xeon E5 v2 and put that in a machine that will run only during V-Ray for Maya renders. If you use a 3D renderer that has network rendering support, you can use it on the host machine and the dumb muscle to quickly take down render jobs. And the resulting combo should be much faster than what you would get with a single workstation jacked to the hilt with tons of cores or dual socket CPUs.
Now, there are a lot of variables and questions to answer for anyone considering this route. If you're not much of a system builder, it's hard to know what CPU to buy, what OS to run, how to set up your host machine to talk to the muscle, and what, if any, render management software to use. While I'm not an IT guy for Pixar, I've used networked 3D renderers for a number of years and have built some personal render nodes, both Xeon and desktop-chip based. If you are looking to build a room full of HPC nodes and are concerned about heat, performance, reliability, etc.—this guide is not for you. This guide is intended for people who just want to get set up with some added networked power, to maybe learn the basics of Linux and remote administration with ssh, and to understand the foundation of networked rendering and workflows.
A home build vs. retail units
While I personally wouldn’t go near a home build for a workstation, we’re demanding relatively little of our render workhorse. We don’t need sound to work, we don’t need the latest video drivers, we don’t need an OpenGL-driven user interface. It just has to render, and it can’t crash while doing it. A home-built box should be perfectly fine. For the build machines I recommend, there are two main routes you can take: a beefy Xeon with lots of cores or a cheaper desktop CPU that is more for the budget-minded. A Xeon chip is designed to give you a number of things that aren't seen in a desktop processor, and it has certain advantages:
You don't need to buy a video card for server motherboards because they have built-in VGA output (yes, VGA)
Lower power consumption for more rendering power
Most Xeon boards come with dual NICs for Ethernet link aggregation
ECC RAM for dependable simulations, if you’re a scientific user who needs added data insurance
Potentially a lot more cores and more cache
More PCIe lanes for stuff like link-aggregated Ethernet, USB3, PCI devices, and fast RAID arrays. If you’re doing GPU rendering with more than one PCIe x16 card, you will need a Xeon to accommodate all that bandwidth
While a Xeon chip can’t be overclocked, it will give you more render power per Watt. You pay a premium for that energy efficiency, but, if you are planning on getting more of these systems, it makes a difference. Overclocking a desktop chip usually comes at the expense of energy efficiency, and you still won’t get close to the rendering power of something like a 10- or 12-core Xeon E5 v2. (That is, unless you are one of those guys with a closet that doubles as a dry ice fortress of solitude.)
Advantages to a desktop processor
If you have a tighter budget and just want a bit more help for a coming gig, a desktop chip like an i7 could be fine to get you some added oomph on the cheap. These have certain perks:
Cheaper than Xeon and you can squeeze out more performance with overclocking
Can double as a gaming rig if you add a decent GPU
Cheaper non-ECC RAM
Faster for things that don't scale well across many CPU threads. For a render machine, this is less advantageous since rendering scales well across more CPUs and cores
More likely to get support for suspend to RAM with a gaming board than a server-oriented Xeon motherboard that might only support hibernate
The speed advantage for the desktop parts is increased because, by the time Intel releases a Xeon variant of a chip like the Ivy Bridge i7, the next faster iteration of the desktop part has come out. This means it's smartest to consider the Xeon only if you know you want more than six CPU cores, ECC memory, a ton of fast PCI express lanes, or if you want to avoid a lot of machines to manage. You can typically build two faster i7 machines for the price of a single 10- or 12-core Xeon E5 v2, but that's more RAM that can fail, more CMOSes to reset, and more potential headaches that will bite you in the ass during a deadline. I prefer to spend a bit more to get the added insurance of a Xeon, since server parts are built more to run maxed out around the clock. I am a firm believer in the saying “the miser pays twice,” and I’ve unfortunately been proven right about this on a number of occasions. Also bear in mind that many 3D renderers charge more for render nodes, so more machines also increases your cost if you’re using a renderer like Arnold or V-Ray 3.
Potential builds
Ars already has very good system building guides, and we have a lot of ground to cover. I'll only briefly cover the build stuff since there really isn’t one specific way to go about this. There are just a few main things to keep in mind when building some dumb render muscle:
CPU
If you’re going to get a desktop CPU, opt at least for the i7 4930K CPU. With six cores, 3.4GHz, and a $610 price tag, it offers the best balance of speed and cost for a desktop part. The 4960K will get you slightly more power (3.6GHz), but it costs $450 more. Remember that the turbo clock speeds aren’t of much concern to us because we’re using all potential threads, which only uses the base clock rate.
Disk
Since the bottleneck in our setup is the network and not the disk, we don't need to put a super fast PCIe SSD in the muscle machines. Since my render-only builds tend to get used only for CPU-heavy ops, I usually throw my older SSDs in them and that’s perfectly OK. If you’re a video editor, this would be different for you, and you’ll likely want to look into larger, faster disks and quicker networking hardware. You’ll be pushing more data, where a 3D renderer is just crunching numbers most of the time (and, if it’s an efficient renderer, it's better about caching things like textures).
Networking
For my network, I’m not using link aggregation since that requires special routers and switches. However, I can give a simple tip to speeding up your network: put your machines on a dedicated Gigabit Ethernet switch. This separates your Internet traffic from your local traffic and guarantees better bandwidth across all renderer machines and the host. Even a cheap switch will do this; my old and cheap D-Link Green Ethernet switch successfully maxes out the 100MB/s transfer rate. Don’t use wireless unless you’re using something really fast, like the newer ac spec, in all machines.
Case and cooling
For my 10-core Xeon E5 v2 case, I went with a dirt cheap and smallish Antec VSK-4000, because all it does is sit in my painting studio in the back of the house. But I didn't cut corners on the fan. I don't want it to overheat or be too loud if I need to paint in that room while my renders run. I ultimately picked up a Noctua NH-L12, which made for a pretty quiet and powerful machine. By contrast, I bought a Corsair 550D for a gaming rig a while ago and hate it because it’s so stupidly large:
HDRi map and backplate image resource site Panocapture have released Volume 2 of their Automotive Rendering HDRi & Backplate Pack. The pack contains 17 HDRi maps (very high resolution 16000×8000 spherical & up to 12 stop EV) and 330 backplate images (24 megapixel) which are specially selected for automotive rendering.
This second volume of the highly popular Automotive Rendering Pack includes sets of matching backplate images for key images so cars can be quickly setup for incredibly realistic 3D renders. The backplate images were shot at the same time as the spherical high dynamic range environment maps to ensure matching environment reflections and lighting.
The Pack also includes the City Streets Night background image pack which is a set of city based images taken from a car mounted full frame DSLR rig shot using long shutter speeds giving real motion blurred background images suitable for dynamic 3D car renders.
To view the full PDF contact sheet for all the HDRi maps and images on the product click HERE (Right click and “save as” to download)
You can buy the pack on a non-commercial licence for £49.99 from HERE
A speeded up video of the process of rendering a motion blurred image using one of the static images from the rendering pack:
