Getting your own start in the Digital Arts

By John Wagner

Hopefully, many of those who followed my previous series of ITS Newsletter articles on Animation and Rendering will have had their interest whetted to the point of wanting to actually begin to explore the creation of digital art on their own. Others may be intrigued, but still hang back on the theory that it’s "just too hard."

Well, one of the big stumbling blocks for many people is what I like to think of as Wagner's First Law of Digital Art: Technologists Don't Trust Art, and Artists Don't Trust Technology. Before anyone out there rushes to protest, this isn't an across-the-board Eternal Truth, and there are a lot of notable exceptions. But historically the interests of the two groups have been rigidly compartmentalized.

Today, though, we face a (relatively) new phenomenon—an art form that requires technology in order to function. These are the Digital Arts, and they demand a new breed of practitioner who has at least a basic grounding in both the artistic and technological worlds. That means that this is your chance to be part of the cutting edge while it's still sharp; to learn your way around this fascinating new field. And just as you don't have to be able to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to pick up a paintbrush or be able to design a new microprocessor in order to install software on your laptop, neither do you have to be a working professional artist or computer specialist to begin familiarizing yourself with pixel-based art.

Fortunately, there are more doors than ever before open to the interested individual who wants to test the heady waters of Digital Art. In this article, I'm going to talk about a few of them. A user warning in advance: only one of these products is cheap, and that's because it's (currently still) free. As with all software, it may be hazardous to your wallet!

1: Adobe Photoshop.

I can already hear the shrieks of outrage. "What? There's nothing new about Photoshop, it's been around forever! I thought you were going to tell us about cool digital-arts stuff!"

Photoshop

Patience, my friends! Yes, Photoshop has been around forever (since about 1990, anyway), and in the process it's become the de facto standard in its field. Everywhere from Hollywood SFX studios to the art departments of magazine and advertising offices, Photoshop expertise is in ever-increasing demand.

To those who are only superficially familiar with it, Photoshop often seems to be nothing more than a glorified, overpriced version of MS-Paint (or GIMP, if Linux is your background). It isn't. Photoshop is a full-blown artistic/image-manipulation/graphic-design/special-effects package that's capable of truly mind-bending output in the hands of a skilled artist. Each release is more feature-packed (and yes, more expensive) than the last, filled with capabilities that may seem useless and daunting to the newcomer but will prove their worth with each step up the learning curve.

With Photoshop, you'll find that things you never suspected were possible can be done with photographs, and if traditional painting is your talent, you'll be pleased to know that you can do that in Photoshop, too.

As a side note to prospective Photoshop buyers, I might add that for really fine work (digital painting; photo retouching and restoration; image compositing, e.g.) a mouse isn't likely to give you the kind of pinpoint control you need. For that, you're going to need a digitizing tablet—that is, a hardware device that resembles a pen and notepad, but plugs into the USB port of your computer. There are several brands, but probably the most common (and hence best-supported) come from Wacom, Inc., whose American headquarters are in Washington state. They aren't cheap, but if you're serious about Photoshop work, you'll find that a digital tablet soon becomes indispensable. I have done digital artwork with a mouse, and trust me, after a couple of hours learning the true meaning of carpal-tunnel syndrome, you'll understand why Wacom sells so many of their products.

As an introduction to the concepts inherent in all other areas of the digital arts-as well as an outstanding product in its own right-I can't think of a better piece of software than Photoshop. Available in both Windows and OS X versions.

2: Poser

Poser

Poser, a product of Curious Labs, Inc., is a product that's pretty much unique in its field. The creation of photorealistic human (or humanoid) figures in a digital environment is something that's much in demand. However, it's also one of the most time-consuming aspects of much representational art, for a convincing illustration of a human face and/or body is no small accomplishment, especially when facing a deadline. Poser tries to fill that gap.

Poser began as a mere digital equivalent of the traditional jointed artists' wooden posing marionette, a visual reference to assist in the correct posting of body parts during the illustration process.

Today's Poser, however, is a very different beast. In place of the virtual wooden dummies of the past, Poser is now based upon characters, photorealistic three-dimensional figures with jointed bodies that can be moved and posed into any desired posture. Once rendered, the resultant images can be imported into any imaging program (such as Photoshop) and used as if they were photographs of actual nondigital humans.

Of course it all sounds much simpler and easier than it is. Simply using Poser isn't difficult, but using it well takes skill, practice and talent. In the right hands, its capacity for producing very realistic human images in a drastically shorter period of time than traditional methods has been a blessing to art departments all over the world (you've probably seen dozens of Poser-produced advertisements and paperback covers without even realizing it).

And, though it's no substitute for traditional artistic skills, Poser can be—and is being—used to generate works of genuine digital art that stand on their own with no apologies to anyone.

Such a useful product, with so many possibilities, could be expected to excite a lot of third-part interest, and it has. Poser characters, texture maps, clothing, props, background objects and even entire scenes can be had from an ever-expanding list of vendors. Many of them are of an astonishing degree of realism; others are whimsical or specialized figures, such as dragons, trolls and an assortment of monsters variegated enough to make even Lord Voldemort chortle with joy.

A Poser Example

Poser comes with its own rendering engine, called FireFly. Its options aren't going to shame Maya's any time soon, but its output is quite respectably good. You can also create and manipulate very useful shader networks to control the appearance of Poser objects.

Where Poser falls short, in my opinion, is in its handling of lighting. Lighting options are few, and trying to position the existing lights effectively is likely to make users of more sophisticated rendering environments gnash their teeth in frustration.

Fortunately, a third-party vendor has rushed in to fill this void, but that's another product (see below).

Poser figures can be animated, and in the hands of a Poser expert, the results can be quite impressive. But unfortunately the resulting animations aren't compatible with the high-level professional animation environments like Maya or 3ds Max.

Saaay… creating realistic human characters is just about the most labor-intensive aspect of working with those animation packages. Wouldn't it be great if you could create a character in Poser, then import it into, say, Maya as a fully-rigged figure, ready to animate?

It sure would, and an awful lot of Maya animators would love to be able to do just that. Unfortunately, the task of translating a Poser character—and its framework—into a Maya figure construct isn’t as simple as it looks. There is already a product from Reiss Studios called BodyStudio that will import a posed Poser character into the Maya workspace where it can be rendered (extremely useful for still scenes and storyboarding), but it’s imported as a static object, not a rigged, animatable Maya figure. (Note that BodyStudio will retrieve an existing Poser animation into a Maya workspace, but this is not the same thing as bringing over a Poser character as an animatable Maya figure.)

Nevertheless, whoever accomplishes the job first is going to have the animation world beating a path to their door, and you can bet your last pixel that there's a lot of little-publicized behind-the-scenes work going on in that area even as you read this.

In the meantime, if you're a Maya animator and you want to really get ahead of the crowd, there's a freeware (so far) Maya plug-in called Trinity (aka "T4M," or Trinity For Maya) that will do the conversion, albeit with some scripting and considerable manual tweaking involved. It's currently a beta from RenderMagix, only in release 0.2 at this writing. Trinity is certainly a large step in the right direction, and it remains to be seen if the larger software vendors beat RenderMagix to the elusive Holy Grail of seamless Poser-to-rigged-Maya translation.

The Poser interface is rather unique, with lots of rotating balls and hand-and-arm icons that are intended to make it more intuitive. Whether they do or not, the individual user can decide, but the Poser GUI isn't difficult to either learn or use.

Poser has evolved into a really interesting product, with possibilities that have only begun to be explored.

Poser is available for either Windows or OS X. At the time of this writing, Poser 6 is the current version.

3: DAZ Studio

After reading my ill-natured (but eloquent!) griping about the shortcomings of the Poser lighting environment in the preceding section, you may be wondering just why other Poser users haven't noticed the same thing. Well, they have, and some of them work for DAZ Productions, a group of enterprising people who are in the business of supplying third-party Poser accessories.

One of these is an intriguing product that has just reached release 1.0 at this writing (and still available as a free download). It's called DAZ Studio, and, like Poser itself, it's quite ingenious and unique.

You can think of DAZ Studio as a sort of Maya for still scenes. That is, it's an environment into which you can import objects (including Poser figures), arrange them, create complex lighting for them and then render them, either as scenes complete in themselves or as input to images constructed in some other package, such as Photoshop. The Poser figures can even be posed, just as if they were in their native environment. This is an audacious concept, and DAZ Studio pulls it off fairly well.

Did I say "Maya for still scenes?" Well, that's true, but interestingly enough, the later beta releases began including an animation timeline, for creating Poser-type animations within the DAZ Studio workspace. Interesting! I wonder what DAZ has planned for this product in the long run.

One of the many attractive facets of DAZ Studio is the actual GUI itself. Clearly, the folks at DAZ (Digital Artists' Zone, in case you’re wondering) have more than a passing familiarity with Maya, because the working environment for this product shows heavy Maya influence. In particular, the object manipulation handles make it refreshingly easy to move your characters and props to where you want them in an intuitive way.

Likewise, it's possible to create multiple lights of varying intensity, color and direction, positioning them wherever they need to be for your scene's needs, a huge advantage over Poser itself.

With all this going for it and a price that can't be beat (free!), what's not to like?

Definitely worth a download, if only for a tryout. Runs on OS X and Windows.

To be continued…