The thrill of sculpting over?

[rouncer]

I was into making video games, and the models we used to use for them were composed of blocky polygons, and the detail was present in colour textures on the surface.
I first saw zbrush and sculpting in general last year and I was totally shocked when I saw the professional level you get when you use sculpting software.

All the models were amazing to look at! When I first saw a sculpted model I thought it must have been some genius that made it and I was jealous and envious and felt like a stupid idiot.

But then I went a downloaded zbrush and had my first go at it and I realized these amazing models are pretty much made by any of us, its just the new modelling style helps you make models this lifelike.

Now, I look at colour photos and they just look dead to me, because ive seen too much real art, now even looking real looks fake to me!

Like a lot of us say, a lot of sculpted models just wir past the bottom row never seeing a single comment because its just noones really thrilled about it anymore.

I imagine in the future, all this sculpting lifelikeness we get will all get taken for granted and all the old games will just look c grade instead of b grade and the kids wont be thrilled by them anymore.

With the advent of the new geometry shader with the latest cards out. (which look really big in the computer, you can hardly fit them in anymore) we can now perform displacement mapping on the fly and have the exact model going in the game realtime… and everyone is going to expect this graphics, and games wont be lesser to the movie graphics we see on the tv - which always was better offline up until about now.

Theres SSS shaders coming out for the new video cards to handle and we can draw so many points we should be able to do hair per strand very soon.

But if you want someone to even blink an eyelid when they see your sculpt it better be damn good. And its all old news now.

[larsstranden]

I see your point, and in some ways I can see how this might be harmful to the beginning artist if no one will comment his/her works on the basis of it being stimulating to watch anymore. However, I think it is a necessary evil we need to have happen to push the whole digital artist culture forward. If you go back 5 years or so, just creating a model that looked somewhat realistic would give you all the praise in the world, since it was a much bigger technical achievement. Now that the technical part is more or less taken for granted, and the entry level of detail is so high, we as artists are going to have to start thinking outside the box and come up with artistic ideas that people havent experienced a thousand times before. It will come more down to the design and feel of the picture, its artistic ideas, than the shear “oh my god how did you make that” that used to come with every image of a realistic car model, a generic human sculpt with a lot of anatomical detail in bindpose or a dinosaur on a flat plane.

Another positive angle of this is that as more artists around you keep pushing their artistic knowledge and understanding, raising the bar to what is the quality median of the works that get put out, you will be forced to push yourself beyond your current level, when settling for mediocrity can no longer get you by.

And in the end, that is in my opinion where we at some point need to arrive at to make sure our whole culture doesnt get stuck at a status quo.

[fabiod]

First of all, you have to put things in the correct perspective. The way you put it sounds like you are just looking at artworks only for their technical aspect. If you think works that are dated now were impressive back then because nobody was doing it, I disagree with you. If you look at artworks this way you will ended up bored. If something is good enough to stand the test of time, most likely the work has some content to it rather than just technical tricks. Technical proficiency is not the end of art itself, it’s just another tool for expression. Some people care more about it than others.

The majority of the cg art is extremely shallow in artistic intentions(IMO). It just happens that this technology is widespread, and people post it often. But it doesn’t mean that anyone can do good works just because the technology is improving. Actually it’s the other way around, because, like larsivar said, some 5 years ago or so, people were doing realistic things just for the sake of a big technical achievement. Now the technical aspect is more accessible to everyone, so nobody cares if your model has a realistic SSS shading effect for instance. But that’s EXACTLY what should happen. Because then people will start to think more about their intentions before doing any work.