 how is it going let's go so today we're going to be talking about the secrets of making high quality art in blender and everywhere so but before we get started let me just briefly introduce myself to get it out of the way so my name is Gleb Alexandrov I have a wife a kid a cat a blog blender 2.8 test built a blind guardian t-shirt a useless L account a useful YouTube account some fancy renders some renders that suck the panic monster to help me fight procrastination and a caffeine addiction so why do some renders suck and others don't or how should I put it why do some renders get in the editor's pick on art station receive lots of love our words stuff like that and others even from the same artist end up in a gray zone not bad but not great either I think most people in this room have had this experience of creating something in blender say concept art or a 3d model for game or just a render and then realizing that something about it looks terribly off it looks off but you can't put your finger on what exactly is wrong about it so you go to blender artists or maybe you go to Facebook and you ask your Facebook friends hey what's wrong with my render and everybody really adds to your confusion you get a bunch of mutually exclusive comments like add some interest odd details or keep it minimal remove something out of it or maybe it's about colors or check your references or my favorite improve composition thank you but what exactly so today I want to talk about one particular theory in composition that in my opinion has a great potential for explaining many many things and for preventing such situations when you render obviously suck but you don't know what to do and where to start so this is kind of a secret of making high quality art that is being used I believe by successful artists from Blizzard Dreamworks industrial light and magic Pixar by artists like Torfreq Vitaly Bulgarov Neil Blevins many many others by blender artists of course like Daniel Bysted Master Zeon me so in fact all these renders that you see behind me have this thing in common but before we begin talking about what the heck is this thing let me just say a it's not a prescribed mathematical method be it works see how many of you guys have heard about Neil Blevins by show of hands one two just two people alright how many of you guys haven't heard about Neil Blevins the rest of you especially for those of you who haven't heard about Neil Neil is a professional 3d artist who specializes in robots alien creatures sci-fi landscapes stuff like that now working as a digital artist for Pixar animation studios Neil has a blog Neil Blevins.com where he's posting extremely useful tutorials on composition on 3ds max on many things so a couple of years ago I stumbled across one of his tutorials that was called primary secondary tertiary shapes and the main thought of this tutorial was that if your image has a nice distribution of big medium and small shapes the resulting image will tend to be more pleasing to the eye and once I read this tutorial and once I saw this diagrams of the right and the wrong distribution of big medium small shapes inside the composition I thought well that's great I also love simplifying stuff like that like arrange your big medium shapes inside the composition like this you win arrange it like this you lose and I wanted to kind of crash test this theory that Neil has planted into my head so I took a bunch of top-rated works from CG Hub actually these are from art station back then it was CG Hub one of the most popular online galleries like porn hub for CG artists if you know what I mean so I took a bunch of top-rated works and I started painting big medium small shapes with red blue yellow like this and after some painting I started to realize that the distribution of shapes in all these images really looks similar it really looks like what Neil has described in his tutorial and I think that's very important thing that helped me just in my work and had an incredibly positive influence on how I tend to the things but before you ask what the heck let's try to make sense of it so definitions first primary shapes are your big shapes it's a kind of a shape that you see if you squint at an image as soon as you blur your eye it's already reads secondary shapes are your smaller shapes that break up or sit on top of the primary shapes tertiary shapes are again even smaller details successful images tend to have all these three levels in place and they are balanced against each other big shapes are needed because they help to organize all other shapes small shapes are needed because of many reasons one of which is pure curiosity and desire to explore the image and obviously secondary shapes are needed to give a transition between big and small miss one level things go haywire all bad renders in the world have this sin of breaking a balance say whether it's a wall a huge wall that is covered with tiny tiny bricks without any middle ground or whether it's a robot which lacks just intricate details the successful renders on the other hand tend to have all these three levels in place and they fall into a certain kind of balance and we find images pleasing that fall into a certain kind of balance just like we find music pleasing that has all frequencies represented imagine your favorite song now imagine the waveform of it like try to cut off the high frequencies and it will sound muffled and if you cut off the bus it will sound teeny you can't crank up or cut off a certain band of frequency without ruining the sound and appealing design is no different have big medium small shapes have them in a certain balance but then the natural question arises is there any way to determine the right size for the shapes say certain proportion golden ratio the answer would be yes and and no I try to calculate using these renders for example but I didn't manage to find out for sure is if there is any kind of common proportion manifesting itself through all these images or not because obviously artists tend to choose different proportions based on many things on style on the scale on personal preference on the time of the day but that being said I still see some kind of ratio in play to me the ratio between big medium small shapes in this bunch of renders that they have cherry peaked from our station looks something like one to five hyphen one to ten so when I say medium I actually mean five to ten times smaller than the big and when I say small I actually mean five to ten times smaller than the medium but don't take it too seriously it's not some divine proportion of awesome CG art or something like that hey at least we know that it's a range of sizes rather than some fixed size so it's very important to have variety to the sizes of shapes in each three categories and what's really crucial is how you distribute these shapes inside your composition straight ahead a rhythm gets boring very quickly if you take a look at these two diagrams you will notice that the right distribution is much more natural and kind of unpredictable as the result the eye stays in the image for a longer time the eye have some things to explore the eye doesn't get bored by this repeating pattern of small shapes because once the eye recognizes the pattern and solves the mystery its case closed I mean who still keeps looking for their shoes once they found them that would be stupid so I think the best way to talk about it is to take a look at some more examples here you can see the primary shape broken down into three rather boring slabs and also you can see the abundance of small shapes spread out kind of uniformly across this image and the uniform distribution like this is really uncomfortable to look at it doesn't give the eye any spot to rest and it doesn't have enough variety to keep us looking I wonder if you agree with me but this distribution of shapes looks much much more enjoyable because now we don't see this horrible block of small shapes spread out in the uniform pattern lots of things is going on here we see some areas of high frequency details some areas with practically no details medium shapes different looking medium shapes pattern breakers and it really adds dynamics it adds visual interest successful images tend to have a somewhat unpredictable distribution of shapes with just enough surprise to keep us watching whether it's a substance material or a concept art if you allow me and yet another musical metaphor imagine you have to choose between two drum tracks the first one being and the second one I bet you would choose the one with more groove because who doesn't love a good funky beat so so far we have big medium small shapes distributed in a somewhat unpredictable way the next thing we have to master is an empty space it's very important I think to have an empty space in your distribution of shapes because it gives the actual features more space to breathe it allows them to speak more loudly if all areas of your by the way this is amazing render by Mastersion I love it and if all areas of your image have an equal amount of energy you're doing it wrong you just have to balance the areas of visual detail with the areas of visual rest otherwise you will create something like this dinoboard from the last night and the age of extinction total rubbish here's musical metaphor number three for you guys imagine orchestra now imagine all musicians of this orchestra started playing at once with maximum loudness this would sound just like this dinoboard if you know what I mean you just have to balance areas of detail with the areas of rest if I had to create a transformer I would have definitely included some empty space inside the composition just to make sure that I avoid this dinoboard effect great renders always have some negative space to balance the areas of density some renders have lots of negative space just like this one by torfrak so let's imagine we have followed through all the steps of this theory and we got big medium small shapes with a variety to the sizes of shapes in each three categories we have a somewhat unpredictable distribution we balance the areas of details with the areas of rest the benefit of doing all this is having clumps or groups of shapes emerging here and there and that's the fourth and final hallmark of high-quality art for today there is a universal agreement on both ends of the spectrum from pixel art nerds to photographers that a having points of interest is good for your composition and be it's better to have three five seven nine objects rather than lots of objects is just a better way of organizing the space and guiding the viewer's eye through the composition and if you pretty much follow up through all the steps of this tutorial you will get this as a bonus as cynics the YouTube design genius points out our visual system enjoys grouping objects together into larger more manageable objects so clumping can make an image more brain-friendly hence makes it more aesthetically pleasing needless to say if you now take a look at all this editors picks you will see this clumps or groups of shapes everywhere and I can go through this endlessly just just check it out guys so these are very important things to consider when you're basically making an image let's once again recap them first have big medium small shapes have a variety to the sizes of shapes in each three categories make sure that the distribution of shapes inside the composition is somewhat unpredictable and chaotic balance the areas of details with the areas of rest and allow these clumps or groups of shapes to flourish and of course the rules like these are just guidelines much like every other rule in designing composition and it's up to you as a 3d artist to determine what's right or wrong for the composition but the next time you will have this question don't immediately go to Facebook just think about big medium small shapes and their distribution thank you