What is 3D digital painting : 5 precious fundamentals

Did you ever wonder how you can improve your 2D digital painting with 3D ? in this article we'll dive into some key fundamentals that will allow you to have some ideas about how you can connect these two universe together ! 

In this article you'll see

What is 3D digital painting ?

3D digital painting is the art of modeling a 3D modal while texturing it at the same time in real time. Which allow you to quickly fix errors and flaws in your model. The texture always define what your result will be. 

Therefore, the 3D digital painting workflow allow you to paint texture at different level ( map, specular ) with ease. There is some cases where unwrapping a 3D model make you end up with strange shape, the human head below is a great example.

Simply imagine if you had to put textures on this 3D unwrapped model from your 2D software. That would be a mess, you'll have to save it multiple time, checking it every ten to twenty minutes. 3D digital painting workflow make it easy on you, you paint directly in real time.

Some Key fundamentals about 3D

High poly or low poly ?

High poly is a 3D workflow that implies lot of polygon, therefore, the geometry is more complex. We use high poly process for movies, marketing ADS and big projects where we do not care about the render time, weight and complexity of the project. All we want is details. 

Low poly is exactly the opposite and it's used on video games, real time engine such as Unity, unreal engine and projects where we target an average level of detail and we want to reduce render time to the maximum. 

Procedural maps

Procedural maps are simply textures that can be generated with a computer using a fixed set of parameters. Thus, it allows to make unique variation that would be impossible otherwise (with human hand for example ) the process itself is called : procedural generation

Where do we use procedural maps ?

Procedural maps are oftenly used in video games where we need auto-generated variation of a tile for the landscape. A good example of that may be heroes might and magic, minecraft that both use generated map to make larger maps.

You can also find Procedural maps in 3D software by default such as Substance painter

Game shader

A shader is a piece of code that you can add to a render scene in order to tell light and texture how to behave in a specific environment. How they are displayed. For the vast majorities of case you don't need to know in details how shader work. That's because most of 3D software include it by default using PBR ( Physical based rendering ) 

What is a 3D rendering ?

3D rendering is the process of a computer taking raw information from a 3D scene ( polygon, mesh, materials, lighting ) and calculating the final result by compiling everything together just like you would do when creating an app by coding.

Conclusion

If you want to go further in your understanding concerning procedural maps, 3D rendering, 3D digital painting, you can fetch these ressources : 

Best websites to download textures and ressources for artist

Digital painting : understanding fundamentals