I’m pretty impressed by how much good work is being posted lately. It seems right after Z3 was released a ton of great stuff has been posted. I can’t believe that the program has improved that much… or has it? Or… are more talented users coming out of the woodwork. Anyone have an answer or see the same thing?
Craig
The tool will never make an artist an artist. Z3 just came out so there’s a lot of buzz around it, and people are eager to show off their stuff. Z3 certainly makes it easier to do things that were incredibly difficult before, but these are just tools. Traditional sculptors started out using stone chisels, then moved to bronze chisels to iron and then steel. These tools made the artist’s life easier, but they don’t pick themselves up and start carving out a masterpiece for you 
Yeah- I got that. I guess I wasn’t asking if Z3 has made everyone more talented- I was asking if the use of Z3 made things easier and therefore the quality of the work has improved, or are the artists using it that much more talented then they used to be, or… is it just me and the work hasn’t improved at all. Though the tool doesn’t automatically make the art, it has made the challenge of doing the work easier- art works are produced faster and precision and refinement has been made much easier. I don’t think we’ve improved upon genuine talent- but the tool definitely has an impact on the work produced.
Craig
The work being shared had definitely gotten better… just look way back at some of the early “top row” pieces compared to now. Sure, some things will always stand the test of time, but it does appear that standards just keep going up and up and up.
Many things that people used to consider impressive, no longer are (as much).
Part of it is as ZBrush has taken hold of real-time sculpting industry (not really an industry, but you know what I mean), it has attracted a lot of professionals who now use it in their pipelines… they produce great work with it, which then attracts other artists…who then pick up ZBrush and produce their own great work…and so on.
I remember seeing ZBrush early on, but dismissing it because I didn’t really see any “exceptionally-oh-baby-rock-my-world” work produced with it (like you see now all the time). Years later, that changed and I was like, “wow, I should take another look at this funky piece of software”. But that’s just me.
I’m sure everyone’s a little different.
As for Z3 specifically… it does make some things easier, but I do agree, it doesn’t make great art for you. It still takes a great artist to do that. And some people producing ZBrush work are so good it’s scary. I mean really. 
some things arent possible in the old zb what you can do know in zb2/3 but the reason why the topwrow has better stuff is that it isnt as easy as in the old days to get in the toprow.
i think it’s more a case of ‘the less you have to think about the pencil the more you can concentrate on the drawing’
plus some people don’t stop raising the bar- and more power to them
Both!
Cool- at least I don’t feel alone in my opinion that better work is coming out. Honestly- I’m not even just talking about the top row… I started just looking at posts in general, and I saw work that maybe wasn’t top row worthy… but I still liked it (and to be honest… I used to dislike much of the work). Still- I’m not naming any pieces… but top row still shows the occasional “Huh? How’d that get there” image… but overall- pretty sweet.
Artist will always get better no matter the tools. It what makes us the most fascinating people on earth.
it’s only a matter of time before we can create images simply by downloading thoughts… we already have kids playing Space Invaders with their minds…
http://news-info.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/7800.html
The more technology advances, the more enabled we are, and the quicker it continues to advance. We’re going to see some amazing things in our lifetimes.
Yesterday was the final session of an experimental class I had the pleasure of participating in. It was called Seeing Sideways. The teacher decided to gather a bunch of students for one giant brainstorm on the subject of creativity. What is creativity, what blocks us from it, how do we nurture it?
In one of the exercises we did, I thought about this and wondered. What will art be in the future? Will every art school just be a bunch of Seeing Sideways classes? If any image we want is produced for us, then the quality of the image will rarely be consequential. It will be the content that matters.
Right now, we marvel at photorealistic 3d images, because few people can make them. They’re a treasure for their rarity and showcase of skill. I recognize tons of people in the art community that do nothing but push their skills and marvel at the skills of others, and pay little attention to the content beyond the details.
The quality of art IS improving because ZBrush 3 does things easily that would have taken 10 times as much work, technical knowledge, and expensive equipment to accomplish just 3 or 4 years ago. Anybody can pick up ZBrush 3 now and easily produce work which would have been considered major achievement a few years ago. It’s not going to stop. It’s just going to keep getting easier.
Eventually, anybody with an idea in their head will be an artist. I’m enjoying the hell out of ZBrush 3 and getting everybody I know interested in it. I think it’s wonderful. At the same time, I’m a little apprehensive.
Will there come a point where art is no longer special? Will those who are so obsessed with craftsmanship now get bored, disappointed, and left behind in the future?
I’m sure it will always be there. Fish always taste better when caught by your own hands, right? Still, I see it becoming a minority interest, and though we’re enjoying ourselves now, alot of uncertainty ahead for artists.
Nice talk, only I would rather use ZB2 in stead of ZB3 speaking about the progress!
Anatom
Its partly just that Z3 is that good. It helps people who use it do more and do it more quickly. And also because it allows the kind of creative freedom that sculpting clay or drawing with a pencil allows, it attracts artists from other media. Then there’s a community effect mostly through this website. People who have been artists in various media learn from one another and inspire one another.
The complaining just before the Z3 announcement had some truth behind it. The board was losing that dynamic juice because this software wasn’t the only kid on the block anymore, there was something newer and cool people were either playing with that, or playing with the beta and forbidden from talking about it here. When our heroes stopped posting, we stopped watching this channel. Now the announcement has been made, we can see what they’ve done and we’re back to drool over it an learn. And so are a new crop of people who have come either from other programs or from non-digital media.
To get a sense of the importance of the tool just look at the progress of 3D modeling/rendering and animation in general over the years. I’ve been trying to learn to work in these artforms since 1995. Maybe it was a mistake to be so impressed and titillated by the dimensional and technical aspects of the medium, as so many artists in the early days were, because we geeked out too much on the technology and that very same technology was holding us back, placing all kinds of constraints on what we could do. We learned to think within those constraints. At least a lot of us did. Others pushed the envelope, mixed media and expanded what we could do.
Today the tools are no longer so clunky and limiting, they allow the kind of artistic expression and reward the skill we should have been nurturing all along. Its because of programs like ZBrush that we enjoy the best of both worlds, extreme visual realism married to stylistic control and a removal of constraints on what can be done.
Beyond that, while I have some skepticism about how easy creating art could ever become, I share Sebcesoir’s dissatasfaction with the focus on technique and realism to the exclusion of style and idea. Really, if I see another over-muscled cyborg-orc with a square skull and vertical scar over the eye-socket I think I’m going to hurl. I’d rather see models of chubby guys with skinny arms hunched over the computer or cartoon bunnies or something.
But I think I also see an increased trend towards originality already beginning. And this too is part of the freedom of creativity the software allows and the community of artists with diverse backgrounds that is coming together on this website.
I note that Syd Mead wrote in a CG Talk interview fairly recently that idea trumps technique every time. I’ve put this motto on the wall above my computer to remind myself that idea is an important thing to bring to the work.
I’d advise people to require a higher standard of originality or idea or theme from artists of all kinds. Even on a board where the focus seems to be primarily on technique. I learned a lesson once when reading a modeling board where someone had posted some pictures of a horrible creature that he called Frankenstein’s monster. Someone pointed out to him that it was implausible that even a Dr. Frankenstein would work to produce such an obviously flawed being, and after a brief back-and-forth the artist simply announced that he wasn’t going to talk about it anymore. The moral I took from that was that being an artist doesn’t excuse stupidity about your work or a failure to think deeply enough to propose at least a somewhat plausible back-story. This will become more clear as excellent technical abilities become more common. Technique without idea, theme or thought is an empty, thing.
Not to change the subject- or maybe to redirect it back to the original point… I don’t know that when I said “good work” in my original post, I meant “art”. I’ve worked in the “art” industry for a few years… and I kind of think the term art industry is an oxymoron. I consider myself a craftsman more then an artist. The work posted here impresses me, but not because I find it to be amazing art… I enjoy seeing the technique and talent. I don’t think talent equates art.
So that said- here is what I think will be the future of visual fx/animation industry. you heard it here first (unless you heard it someplace else):
I believe that instead of trying to imitate life- we will start to create it. So the next time we need a Jar Jar Binks the production artists will get to work designing his DNA Matrix* and then growing him out of Genetic Gloop* (*technical terms). After Jar Jar finishes his live action shot in camera, he will be lead into a dark room with a trap door in the floor. The door will drop out and he will fall into a grinder, broken down into Genetic Gloop (It will be quite painful) for tomorrow’s shoot with Kangaroo Jack.
I can’t wait for the future- its going to be awesome.
Well, I use the word art in a way that seems to mimic the way I see people using it reasonably well, as to whether art is something special that can only be done by geniuses or people with some kind of fine feeling that ordinary people lack, I remain a principled agnostic. The problem with setting art apart from craft is that everyone has their own private definition for it and very many people will absolutely refuse to settle on any criteria that determines art from non-art. Most people who feel somewhat strongly about it are opposed to any kind of definition or standard that could pin it down. So that’s a discussion I refuse to join anymore.
If a term is so resolutely incapable of definition then it is useless, and on that conception of artist I prefer people to call themselves painters, sculptors, animators, stylists, draftsmen, photographers, storytellers etc. And whether they are any good can usually be determined by whether what they produce is what they aimed to produce and whether people like it.
At its best the term artist seems to require people to have a deep understanding of a craft and all that touches on it, at its worst its used as an obfuscatory term to puff up people who have a certain training or who spin complicated words to justify the production of political messages in strikingly ugly ways.
It is a meaningless debate- I agree, so it ends now. My post before wasn’t saying what is art- it was saying “I don’t know if this is art” (meaning it could be or couldn’t be). My point is- people say that the tool doesn’t make the artist- which is true- but maybe the point isn’t about art, but technique.
But that is all unimportant- what really matters is that we make Jar Jar’s that can be ground down into paste. What about that point? Can’t argue against that can you? I WIN!
Craig
Sorry to sound like a hard-case, I’m not against you or accusing you of anything, just pointing out the dead end that lies beyond that fork in the discussion.
I think grinding Jar-Jar into paste is a fine idea.
I also think that as the tools offered to us become more freeform and open-ended, and as the culture of users of this tool increase we find that our abilities are set free to rise to greater heights. Both because we learn from each other and because the diversity of interests opens up new possibilities for projects we can work on.
When you make something in ZBrush you feel more than ever before that you are developing the shape in a way that is every bit as direct as working with clay or with a pencil.
People are beginning to realize that we are leaving behind the idea that it is the computer that does the work in 3d graphics.
the computer does not know art, no design, no feeling for the right shape and has no anatomy knowledge and so on. it is still the artist that does the good stuff. you can only realize more (better?) things with zb3.
Okay- I’ll be an ass and say- actually a computer can having amazingly detailed information on anatomy- you can have scans of form that no “artist” ever touched. If the “right” shape is something that can be defined (meaning not just a feeling… and if its just a feeling how is it “right”?) then a computer is capable of gaining that knowledge too. Some people are artists, some people know how to operate programs extemely well, some are both… I find I have appreciation for all three. I agree- computers aren’t artists… but I don’t know if its art I am talking about. A high quality study of the human form could be called art- or it could be considered a technical study- both are valid, both are worth paying attention to. So- we can argue if the computer makes us better artists (I think most folks agree that it doesn’t) or we can say art or not, is the current quality of work due to an improvement on the program, users, or both? Art doesn’t need to enter into it. But seriously- when can we get started on the genetic gloop vats?
Craig
Well whether you would say its possible at some point for computers to become creative and autonomous at some point in either the near or distant future kind of depends on metaphysical ideas and whether you think some humans are fooling themselves about how special their abilities are. Then your position on whether its going to be sooner rather than later just depends on your views about the pace of technology and your opinions about what problems are hard.
I don’t know about all that, but I think its going to take a while before programs replace artists (craftsmen).
The programmers of this particular piece have accomplished what they set out to do, give us a software product that mimics a flexible material extremely well. Its exciting and fun to use. People who have certain skills can build amazing things very quickly by using it. It has reduced the barriers to working with 3D designs in the computer. I think that goes a long way to explain why we’ve seen so much good work lately.
I don’t think genetic goop is on the menu, but I long to see another step soon involving touch-feedback and interface devices that are more specifically tailored to the 3D nature of the work. It should raise the level of skill yet again when we can learn though touching a model created from a scan of an antique masterpiece of sculpture or from a scan of a living body captured in a split-second, like a snapshot in dynamic motion.
When we can learn by informing our sense of touch as well as vision, as the old masters informed their hands with models made from plaster casts and we can feel the texture of our material as we work it we’ll see another dramatic step forward. A new renaissance perhaps.
I didn’t mean to spark a debate about the definition of art… I have my own opinions, but I realize that it’s a useless debate… I would venture that the nature of “art” is an exploration of perception, which renders any definition transient
so… I use the term art out of convenience… just because I dont want to say “painters, sculptors, animators, storytellers, etc” when I can just say “artists” and everybody generally understands what I’m saying
with that out of the way… here’s what I was really trying to get at… I personally believe that everybody is a potential artist… every life is a unique story to tell… it’s really hard for me to concieve of a person with nothing special to share with the world… the only thing that holds back most people is the technical skill to create… and how do most “artists” support themselves?.. unless you’re extremely creative, talented, and lucky, you make most of your money making what other people want you to make… making up for other people’s lack of technical skill so that they can see their ideas come to life
what will be the value of art (no matter what your definition of art) when everyone is so enabled?.. What will happen when technical skill is no longer necessary to create?.. personally, I’m fascinated with the question