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Comment by igl | Hacker News Reader

However: It won't be an career upgrade :/

I know very talented people and i guess that unless land a well paying job in the gaming or movie industry (good luck with that) you end up freelancing for construction companies and architects. Aligning sofas and tables...

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Yep. I'm not doing it to do client work. I already have a my own startup that gives me income.

I want to do stuff with VR though as a maker, entrepreneur, artist, or however you'd like to call it. If it's monetizable that's a fun side to it. But that's not the priority here. Fun is!

I do see it as a skill in the future, just like coding is now. If you can combine that with making an app, game, art, business or anything really, that's good for me.

3D stuff is definitely fun(I say this as someone who's been doing it for almost 10 years across various industries), however the one thing is the amount of work you need to do is an order of magnitude higher than traditional 2D media + code.

That usually scares off all but the most serious funding.

Once you start playing with Unity you'll see there's a whole nother side of the 3D pipeline that takes just as much effort.

I have no experience with Unity. Can you please explain the kind of work involved? (btw I have no interest in gaming, but am interested in all non-gaming things you could possibly do with 3d-modeling, Unity, etc.)

Dealing with interchange formats(which Maya and 3DSM excel at, no idea on C4D). It's very common to find that something you've build in your authoring package doesn't import cleanly and figuring out why can take time. If you bring animation in at all you'll have to deal with skeletal rigging, and then the tooling you want to build around interaction on the unity side of things.

There's a reason that games budgets end up running very high unless you're dealing with 2D/simplified content.

There's a lot of optimization that needs done for realtime.

For any given asset you may have a pipeline like so:

Sculpt hi rez model in Z brush > create low rez model and retopologize (can be a very manual process) > UV unwrap and bake the high rez details down to Normal maps for the low rez mesh > Use DDO or Substance painter to create custom textures for diffuse, metalness, etc > Rig model (if you are animating it) Then export to the engine. Rinse and repeat based on major art changes.

Hey Peiter - your scene looks great, especially for a first time.

If you're already in Cinema 4D you should look into the various post-processing and rendering options. I think a little bit of DoF, ambient occlusion, global illumination and volumetric light could really make your scene shine.

Nice! I'll try that for sure. I'll be improving it over the next few weeks but wanted to get this out for the deadline!

Since this is for fun for you (in the short term at least), did the price tag of Cinema4D come into play when choosing it as your tool? I've been getting into 3D as well as a hobby, and given a choice I'd use Cinema4D because it is popular among professionals in the domain I'm interested in, but that $3k+ price tag is hard for me to justify.

You could start with Blender. It's very advanced and totally free.

Blender's pretty awesome. I've been using it since it was Not-a-Number shareware. I think that the "Free Blender" campaign was the first crowdfunding attempt that I ever experienced. It's been awesome watching the program continue to grow and flesh out with pro-level features over time!

To do 3D modeling professionally, you have to be very good and very fast, and have very clear mental images of what you're doing. I used to do physics engines for animation software, so I've met people in Hollywood who do theatrical animation. I've seen an animator draw a face by freehand drawing cross sections (circle for the top of the head, bigger circle, curves with indents for the eyes and outdents for the nose, etc.) and then have the program skin the result. The result was a good face model, the first time.

Pros and amateurs use drawing programs quite differently. Pros don't edit much. They redraw. They don't spend a lot of time pulling control points around.

There are 3,467 union animators in Hollywood, according to The Animation Guild. It's not a big field.

I don't know the 3D scene in Hollywood. But skimming the credits at ends of blockbuster movies reveals that a lot of the 3D work is being done in eastern Europe or in the Far East. How much is really produced in higher-wage countries?

There's a lot of outsourcing. In 2013, Rhythm and Hues both won an Academy Award and went bankrupt.

Simply providing a clipping path which separates the foreground from a background is widely outsourced. Effects movies use this heavily. It's manual green screen. Some outsourcing companies for this job:

    clippingpathindia.com
    offshoreclippingpath.com
    clippingpathasia.com

This ought to be automated by now, but apparently the automated approaches are not good enough yet.

There is a lot more to that story, and to say it was entirely due to outsourcing is a half truth.

That being said the state of the industry in Hollywood, especially for animators and artists, is pretty dire.

Plenty of 3D work is done in Vancouver and London. I don't have real statistics but 3D work is done all over the place, low wage and high wage areas.

I'm also a programmer who does 3d modeling as a hobby. I'd never do 3d modeling as a job. Not only does it pay less, but a lot of the novelty would be lost. There's something endearing about being able to come home, shrug off my job for a bit, and model something.

I think VR might be able to change this and open more doors for people here.

Yeh i think levels is generally quite forward-thinking. He's gonna turn this into a VR game IIRC

3D modeling is a prerequisite skill for emerging tech like VR/AR/MR. The ability to manipulate 3D models competently is soon going to be a pretty essential foundation, like using photoshop

And the best part: he will live on a rollercoaster riding the economic cycles..

You can do prosthetics to a certain degree, too.

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