If you want to be a 3D artist using a 3d software such as Blender, but you actually never practiced any type of art before you might have asked yourself the next question, “I want to be a 3d artist, but I don’t know how to draw?” i would say a better question to ask is whether it is really necessary to have 2d skills before you jump to the 3d world or you can jump directly without being a talented 2d artist before?
The short and direct answer is that it is not necessary to have 2d skills to be a talented 3d artist but it will be a huge advantage if you have them. You might ask how do I know that it is not necessary to be good at drawing before becoming a good 3d artist? The answer is simple because there are a lot of great 3d artists who never practiced any form of 2d art like drawing or painting. But not everybody is going to have similar results because lacking the knowledge that is acquired from practicing 2d skills might slow you down or prevent you from becoming all you can be unless you put in an insane amount of time but at the end of the day it is doable.
One of the most important truths that many aspiring 3D artists don’t know, is that learning the foundations of visual art is the most important thing for all visual artists, regardless if it’s 3D, 2D, graphic design, illustration, VFX, animation, photography, etc.
If you look at bad 3D portfolios out there you can quickly realize that these artists Lack the understanding of the foundations like composition, perspective, lighting, color theory, anatomy, figure an so on.
As we said before drawing is not a necessity to be a good 3d artist because You can learn the foundations without drawing and painting, but the reason why people say drawing and painting helps so much is that 2D art forces you to learn the foundations, while 3D art does not necessarily do that. As a 3d artist, you can use great tools that automate a lot of important and highly valuable skills that might take a while to learn as a 2d artist like perspective, understanding colors, and generating realistic lighting. These things are way easier to do as a 3d artist but coming from a 2d artistic background can help you push to extreme levels because you basically know how the whole thing works.
So one of the most important differences between learning the foundation skills as 2d and 3d artist is that In 2D art, if you didn’t master the foundations, then you couldn’t do anything that’s half as good. But in 3D, because the way assets are generated, and the freedom you have like controlling cameras, lighting intensity and other rendering settings you can produce something “finished” looking, even if the foundation elements are not even close to what an average 2d artist can do on a 2d canvas. 3D allows people to put a lot of polish and adjustments to the results while 2D does not allow this easily.
Planing/brainstorming ideas
Many animators quickly sketch out what they want to animate. It is much faster and less tedious than starting to work in the software straight away. Being able to quickly sketch out a sequence of drawings to explore posing, choreography or just to get a feel for the scene is increasing the efficiency of modern animators workflow substantially.
There is an alternative to planning with sketches, however, Just as many animators choose to lock themselves in a room and record themselves performing what they imagine for the shot.
This is an extremely quick way of trying out thoughts as well as a great process to spark inspiration and quickly try it out. Especially for more realistic kinds of animation, this is just as valid a planning technique as sketching.
Proportion
Proportion refers to the dimensions of composition and the relationships between height, width and depth. this can be of a great help when modeling and sculpting life forms like human beings, animals or creatures. How proportion is used will affect how realistic or stylized something seems. which means if you want to create something realistic you will be able to sculpt or model accurate human beings or animals with accurate lengths and distances between body parts. because proportion also describes how the sizes of different parts of a piece of art or design relate to each other. The proportions of a sculpted piece or modeled piece will definitely affect how pleasing it looks and can be used to draw our attention to particular areas.
this is actually one of the highly transferable skills that you will take from being a 2D artist and it is hard to replicate in 3D if you have never practiced drawing proportions before but those who did practice this skill on a 2D canvas will be able to create something decent on a 3D canvas even if they never touched a 3D software before, they just need to get used to where the tools are and how they work.
if you are going to be a 3D character artist Understanding and using correct proportion allows you to create well-balanced, realistic representations of the human form.
Light and Color
understanding the fundamental of how light works is also a very important thing that can teach you a lot about how light behaves in different situations under different circumstances and how to achieve different lighting environments.
as we said before a 3D artist has automatic tools at his disposal that can help to create realistic lighting and render engines that can capture all the details of 3D scenes to render beautiful and realistic images without really having a solid understanding of what is really going on. but having experienced how all this works through trial and error in 2D art is going to help you achieve great things using the leverage of 3D computer graphics.
Anatomy
Learning anatomy is one of the best things you take from being a 2d artist to becoming a 3d artist. And this is especially important If you plan on being a character artist, you’ll need to learn some basic anatomy. You can actually start learning anatomy directly in Zbrush, Mudbox, or Blender. But having prior experience in drawing anatomy figures helps a lot because Muscle memory plays a huge role in art, and even though there’s definitely some overlap between drawing on paper and sculpting digitally, we can’t say they identical but the skills you learn are highly transferable. This means if you spend hundreds of hours mastering the art of figure drawing it will be the cornerstone of the sculpting abilities you will acquire.
And if you want to learn sketching in a sculpting 3d software it is also a great option because it has gotten to the point where it’s not really much slower than sketching on paper.
Perspective
As a 3d artist when navigating through the 3d space the camera, you are looking through in the viewport guarantees automatically that your perspective is perfectly rendered because the 3D software does that for you, but this not mean that knowing how to draw perspective manually on a 2d canvas is not important for 3d work.
Composition
Composition generally speaking refers to how well all the visual elements work together in an artwork. A well-designed composition will be inviting and convey the big idea of the artist. Everything will just look like it fits. and if you practiced this skill before on a 2D canvas you will be able to replicate the same basic techniques and understanding to achieve well composited 3D scenes.
Composition is important because it shapes the viewer’s experience of the artwork. it is a big part of what makes a piece eye-catching and dynamic, or calm and soothing, or disorienting.
if you Look at different pieces of artwork and how they are composited you will notice that they affect the mood of the view differently. which important to understand as 3D artists if you want to convey a certain message or you want the viewer to feel a certain way.
Matte painting/concept art
These are actually one of the Best 2D art forms that can help you if you have practiced them to a certain extent before. As we said in the previous video Matt painting is one of the best techniques that was created to help 3D artists and filmmakers to save time and money when creating huge scenes whether they are too expensive or impossible to shoot in those locations or the world you want to create simply does not exist in the real world. If you know matte painting as a 3d artist whether you are using Blender, Maya or 3ds Max it will help you a lot in creating your films or short animations because it will give you the opportunity to bring to life beautiful environment without necessarily having to create everything in 3d, especially because sometimes they need a combination of 2D and 3D elements. so basically if you know how to draw or generate 2D backgrounds that can fit perfectly with the 3D environment. it is a really huge advantage.
Matte painting will not only be useful in VFX and animation projects but it will also be useful for creating backgrounds for commercials and video games as well. And to be successful there must be precise perspective continuity. In some situations, you won’t have time to model an entire scene in 3D because all you will need to do is know how to merge your 2D art with the 3D scene.
Final thoughts
the take away from this video is, you don’t necessarily have to practice 2D drawing or have any form of 2D training before, but if you did it will be a good advantage. because 2D art focuses on the foundations first which allows you to build your experience slowly but surely. and the foundations of 2D are very useful for 3D artists as well. but if you look at it the other way around it is probably not going to work, because a 3D artist who did not go through a 2D art training will probably not be able to draw as good as he sculpts on a 3D canvas.
The surest way to really learn the foundations deeply and internalize those important concepts is through 2D, because everything you need to do in 2D requires those foundations, while 3D never forces you to learn them. And that is why 3D artists would benefit immensely from learning to draw and paint proficiently in 2D.
