Kinmoku wrote:How long did the scene take for you to make?
Thank you! The whole scene (3d+2d) took about at least 16 hours (I did it in 3 days IIRC). It was a time where I was still figuring things out in Blender so I did a lot of tests and experiments to achieve the effect I wanted. My modeling skills back then was also underdeveloped so it took a lot of time to model things.
Kinmoku wrote:Do you find it better to work this way with 3D?
To be honest, I prefer doing things by hand now - the 2D artist inside me wants to able to draw things in perspective without 3D. I used this method before because it guaranteed nice looking perspective and I was able to freeroam the scene. The thing is, the more I used 3D, the more I neglect my perspective drawing skills (and my general 2d drawing skills to some extent). Perspective drawing is a fundamental drawing skill and I'm sidestepping it by using 3D!
It bit me hard when I was working on a background that needed a lot of edits. I couldn't even correct the errors by hand, so I had to go back to 3D and fix them there, then back to 2D for polishing, back to 3d to fix errors... you can imagine the back and forth suffering haha. And I realized, I could've fixed it on my own if I actually continued improving my perspective drawing skills, at that point I hated myself for relying too much on 3D. I somehow convinced myself that being able to freeroam the scene, reusing assets, etc are things that I absolutely need and outweighs the actual drawing skill. But the reality is, I just convinced myself to take the easy way out. Getting good at art takes time, and taking shortcuts will just hurt in the long run.
I still use 3D today, primarily as a reference - when I have complex scene that I have trouble with, I mock it up in 3D and recreate it all in 2D. 3D reinforces my understanding of perspective that I can't usually acquire with photos. Actually, there is a bigger reason why I'm not using 3D as much, and it's because I gradually fell in love with painterly looking art. I used to aim for the very clean and polished anime background art but painterly art is just so fun to do. And I found if I use 3d, my art tend to become too clean and sterile, like everything is stiff and fixed in a grid.
Well that turned out pretty long, but I wanted to explain why I don't use 3D as much and why it's not a good thing to rely on it if you want to draw environment art by hand as well. I hope this doesnt discourage people from trying 3D or 3D+2D, it may not have work for me in the end but it doesn't mean it wont work for someone else. But anyway I hope that answered your question!
