No idea why my voice sounds so rough here. You'd think I've been smoking unfiltered Woodbines since I was five. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The years learning the proper way to do things is not wasted. “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” ― Pablo Picasso

AKA the method Ian Hubert made famous haha! Great video as always mate

Probably one of the most important things they taught me in art school: Dont waste your time rendering fine detail with a three-bristle-brush, learn how to create the illusion of it with a single stroke.

As a musician, it took me many years to learn the same thing. I used to create my sounds from scratch and tweak all my effects from scratch. Often the result was WORSE than just using presets. Often times, more work does not mean better. It just simply means time wasted. The end product is all that matters.

This is why you gotta ask the question before you start: “What are you trying to do”

It seems Ian Hubert really hit the nail on the head huh. And as someone who came into 3D modelling from mathematics, this absoluteness hounds my every action

This is perfectionism. It is a "disease" I struggle with as well

As someone who recently spent several hours modelling a lovely detailed shopfront awning, complete with brackets and screws into the walls, only to discover i can only see about 5% of a dark outline in the final scene anyway... I did a lot of nodding during this video...

I know nothing about 3d modelling and came here by chance drinking evening beer, but yes I am fully convinced now this is the way to go!

The best analogy I have come up with is "you don't need to build a world behind you camera"

The highest level of animation is about knowing how much you can cheat and get away with as long as the final product looks right, and doing so in the most workflow-efficient manner.

There was a children's show (Sesame Street, Electric Company, or maybe even a sitcom, I forget) episode that commented on how unnecessary texture is when the object is being viewed from a distance and isn't the focal point. One of the kids in the scene was painting a brick wall as the backdrop for a theater play. The girl was paining each brick with fine detail, and it was taking a long time. One of the adults on the project came along and let her know she didn't need all that detail. As an example, he showed her that her classmate was painting another brick wall with very simple detail. Man, that's a deep-cut memory you've sparked.

There's also a thing called "blocking" where you rough out your animation using only crude "stand-in" models and textures. Once you know where everything will be in the scene and what's lit, you'll polish the models as necessary.

I liked when you point out Rembrandt quote at 5:48 “It’s actually distracting to the viewer if everything has the same amount of attention drawn to it”

That's exactly what Ian hubert has been trying to tell us. I have the same super detailed approach and I am not even an advanced blender user so it's especially difficult for me but seeing a video like this once in a while helps. thank you

Great tips - I have to keep relearning this lesson all the time.😬

This is very inspirational. I find myself getting sucked into perfecting small, inconsequential details and then getting very frustrated when I can't get them just right. It usually affects my mind set for the rest of the project. I will keep your advice in my mind and soldier forward.

Good comment. One thing to add: Mastering the "correct and clean" way first is still vital to comprehend what and why you can omit or brush over. Those broad Rembrandt strokes work so well because he knows exactly how to do it proper, but is masterful enough to abstract it to fit the overall "feel" he was trying to communicate. This abstraction is prolly the highest form of artistic achievement. To put it differently: Don't educate yourself to be sloppy. Do the hard work (i.e. learning it proper) and then use your experience to deviate and use time-savers to your advantage.

So I'm a games programmer. This stuff happens at every level of the process. A UI designer, artist and programmer spent a combined 100 hours making a button animation that's visible to a player for 4 frames. It's always best to keep things in context, it's only cutting a corner if there's a corner there to cut! This took me so long to learn too, don't worry yourself, funnily enough, I'm pretty directly related to Rembrandt too.

"Perfection is the enemy of Good Enough." as a solo Artist, Designer, and Coder, in that order, I learned long ago that sometimes sacrificing quality in order to ensure you actually finish is necessary. You can always go back later and fix things if you aren't working on a strict deadline. Having anything is better than having really beautiful nothing.

Here's some actionable advice: if your end goal is a single frame or a simple animation, the camera should be one of the first things you set up. Check camera view periodically, and get used to thinking of that as the default view for the scene. Whenever you start to add detail or work on textures, go into camera first and think, "is this change going to be noticeable in the final result?" The desire for perfection isn't a flaw, it just needs to be tempered with the demands of time. This is why deadlines and time management are super important, even for a personal project. Assign a certain amount of time for each project, and figure out how much time that gives you to do each aspect of it. If you're not satisfied with one part of it at the end of the allotted time, you might be able to squeeze in extra time elsewhere, but it'll have to be at the expense of something else. Practice teaches, along with how to make things, how to make the right things at the right time for the use they're going to be put into.

This is actually quite a common approach in movies too, even when working with a team. Get the scene up super quick and rough, and progressively refine from there. That way your not wasting time on details nobody is going to see, and you can catch problem areas early on.

I don't think wrong is the word, as Bruce Lee said: "Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick." The overdetailed perfectionism path is the learning part, mastering techniques, improving quality, training perception, being capable of doing very quality things, the simplifying and optimization sounds look the final stage, where "a punch is just a punch". The video is amazing mostly because of the ,amazing work, but a beginner trying to apply your last approach can do very awful things, because of skipping his own development.

I work by the philosophy that the time spent on a certain part of a scene should be proportional to the time the viewer will spend looking at that component relative to all others.

I haven't been using Blender for years, in fact, I just started this year. But I am SO glad I stumbled upon this before I got too accustomed to the way I was doing it. You are right. No one can see all those tiny details in the final render. Definitely appreciated this!

So much important stuff in one short video, nice! This is good advice for beginners and advanced users. All of those things are so simple and yet so difficult and advanced.

I desperately need to start doing exactly that. It took some time to realize this but you're totally right. It's nice to know there are more artists going through the same stuff and actually being able to simply solve this problem they simply didn't know it existed!

This video sums up what I ended up learning in roughly the same amount of time. So don't worry. You're not the only one. Thanks for informing people about it!

Recently I discovered that this quick and dirty way worked very well for me starting out at blender again. It’s a lot of fun to see quick and good results

Really happy I stumbled upon your video in my recommended feed. As I’ve been learning more in depth with animation and modeling, I’ve been losing the forest for the trees. This really helped me mentally visualize my work flow.

Real nice, especially the anecdotes about Rembrandt and your own painting - stuff like that really helps to understand your basic thrust but more importantly shows that you know what you are actually talking about - not just another screen recording of someone awesome at Blender.

You nailed it man!! It took me like 10 years of practice to understand that. And I still sometimes do the mistake of spending too much time on invisible details.

Absolutely crucial bit of advice! Personally I try to establish a camera angle early on, make a small viewport that's always visible, and evaluate my scene through that during the creation process. That way I have an idea of what will be seen in the final frame at every stage of the process.

Awesome video! This was some extremely useful insight I probably needed, thanks very much. Good luck with your animation!

Thank you! I've been working on a couple of short animations, and I've been getting so caught up in modelling background stuff in great detail that I've become frustrated and shelved them. This video has given me the freedom to pick them up again.

I have had this problem working on my graduation project at university, though sometimes I think I have had it "in reverse". I have created a few assets that I did not think were up to snuff, and wasted hours tinkering with improvements to make, only to realize that the model I was working on would be obscured by depth of field, motion blur and aerial perspective, sometimes the added details were much too small to be resolved at the final render's resolution, even absent those other effects. Focusing your time and effort on the focal point of your image is a much more efficient way to work, and it will ultimately lead to a better quality result.

Ah man, you hit the nail on the head. I'm making my first 3D film at the moment (been animating in 2D for years now). I have this long scene inside of the ruined train station. I started animating my character entirely, climbing up the stairs, walking into the room, starting up an old computer etc. I've spent hours making sure the entire character is animated properly, cleaning up every single step, gesture, face expression. But when I finally set up cameras I asked myself, "why do all this work?". Most of what I animated wouldn't even show on screen, the feet of the character would show in maybe two shots, in some he wouldn't even be seen at all. And as you said, I animated in 2D for years, I know how and when to cut corners to save myself needless work and time! So now I rember to animate and show only what I need. Good thing I strarted 3D scanning my assets before I began building them from scratch and hand-painting them all!

Wonderful video! This kind of stuff cannot be overstated!

Realy helpful tip. defintly changes my approach at my illustrations and now, to my learning process for blender.

I think the vending machine is the donut of messy blender usage. Everyone seems to be making them to figure out this quick and dirty style of working.

A friend of mine used to say "Perfection is the enemy of 'Good enough'". When I was working previz, I found out how dodgy a scene can still look great. Anyone working in games knows too. If the object or scenery is far enough away in the shot, it can be shoddily modeled, rendered, touched up in Photoshop and put on a forest of image planes in the background to thicken up the scene. You can have billions of polygons worth of scenery in a shot that way. Anyway, love the cheap coverups. Great suggestions. Man, we put a lot of labor into making things *not* look perfect, clean and freshly made. It's a shame when we waste time on "B" scenery that could be better put to use spending more time on something that will be seen.

Fantastic video mate. When you're working in an environment where anything and everything can be made super high res, it often takes away from the final product like you say. Human brains are great at interpreting very basic shapes and the best artists know that and use it really well.

In my opinion, this is the most helpful video I've seen all these years learning blender trough KZfaq channel. Keep on making such inspiring and motivating videos,

This is one of the things I wish I learned earlier on. It clicked for me when I spent an evening modelling one of those nitrous canisters that litter the streets in London. I modelled it, simulated squashing it and then textured it, it looked perfect. In the final scene it was no more than the glint of a couple of white pixels.

Makes perfect sense. Hollywood has been doing that for years using facades as their sets and matte paintings and so forth. Thanks for the video.

This is encouraging to users like me who see all the elaborate work others do sometimes which is beyond me... but for simple still renders and even simple video animations that are not needing that kind of detail and perfection... even I can pull that off!

Wow, you made a bunch of improvements in this update! Well done!

It's a delicate balance, with destructive extremes on both ends, that's for sure. I'm a programmer primarily, been for a long time, I dabble in Blender here and there, but I recognize the same struggle in both fields. It's got a lot to do with your general attitude and motivation. You can slip into that mode where you're using "perfectionism" as an excuse to just show off, to do unnecessary things just to prove that you can do them, and so that nobody else might think there's even a single thing you haven't thought of, not a single outlandish future you haven't proofed against. And on the other end, you've got your Chads with "being thoughtful and thorough is for wusses" attitude, who use that overconfident machoism as an excuse to just be reckless and overall do sub-par work. Sweet-spot is somewhere between those two extremes, and its position will depend on what the job is, who you are, what your skill set is, what's expected for the future of the project, etc. There isn't a simple answer, but what can help you is to always look back on your process with brutal honesty, and admit to yourself when you see it actually made no sense to put so much time and effort into a thing, that it made no real impact; and also, when you see that cutting corners in some area really came back to bite you down the line. The more honest and realistic you can be in those assessments, the better you will calibrate your inner compass for such stuff, and you'll have less misfires in the future.

Yeah, Ian Hubert's videos really get me inspired with 3d. Makes you realise that you can make good looking results without an insane amount of work.

I like how you applied this idea to drawing as well, something I needed to hear

Bro you're a wizard and an inspiration. I tried to follow but you said so much stuff that i have no clue. But wow. Amazing man.

So much this. I feel that a lot of the Blender community is geared towards making models for selling on websites. Most of the stuff I do is for specific shots, animations and uses, and it's that that defines how much work I put in. I think getting the level of detail right usually involves going *slightly* beyond what can be clearly seen, but not by much.

My biggest problem is remembering that not even little detail matters, not that I don't know. I have the same issue drawing too ;-;

Thanks for posting this. I tend to swear the small details like this when I am modeling and texturing. I’ll be using this to remind myself to relax on that more.

Thank you, I needed to hear this, for both 3D and 2D art. I know that for patterns its best to leave something to the imaginaton but I can get lost in the woods with over-detailing

I picked up Blender at around the same time and have somewhat consistently been able to create animations for clients. Exactly as you pointed out, that precise way of working had to be thrown out the window. Compositing can also be extremely useful, especially working with any type of fluid sim.

my mind is blown, now it's time to jump into blender and see what magic we can do with that starting cube

i really appreciate artist who can take a step back from their work and go, hey maybe i dont need to put so much effort in that bit. really makes a difference in the work

Thank you. I needed this. I was spending too much time on detail, and forgot about the big picture!

Excellent observations. I am so guilty of this. It's funny, 15-18 years ago I worked a lot in Second Life. I used to iterate so fast, mainly because SL made it almost impossible to create the kinds of complex meshes we take for granted in Blender. Now that I’ve spent a year in Blender, I appear to have forgotten the value of keeping things simple. :)

3:32 Harrison Ford: “Kid, it ain’t that kind of movie “ boy was he wrong.

Fantastic advice. I'm glad I found this early. Just getting started and my OCD has me microediting faces that won't even be visible in the render. I like that this is focusing on the final shot, not the integrity of the scene in 360 as if the end user will explore it in VR, looking for crappy areas. It reminds me of Van Gogh. It's the feeling of the piece... if that part hits, nothing else matters. But it is pretty cool to know you made an air tight world in case you want to visit it again from different perspectives. Either way, I haven't seen any other videos that approach this subject, so big up yourself on this one.

Very well said. This has actually changed my outlook on my work in a positive way. This is something every 3D artist needs to watch.

I've known this for a while but have soooo much trouble actually doing it. I can't stop myself making stuff look 'right'. I think it's because while we model each individual element they ARE the hero shot.

I have spent three days trying to get an animal toe just right. This video is in the nick of time! Thanks.

Yep, I need to come back and watch this vid, oh, about once a week. My old-skool start in 3d (think Lightwave and 3d Studio R4) haunts me to this day. Subscribed, for sure.

This is actually exactly what I've been looking for as well! I recently realised that I've been spending far too much time on the individual parts. Yeah, I do spend more time on my procedural textures and other renders - for my other reasons - but I just realised what was wrong with this since I've meant to do some smaller videos as well. Thank you so much for all this advice, and I can't thank you enough for helping me learn as much as I do about Blender! You're amazing!

I work as a designer and concept artist on animated shows. We use Blender to get our ideas out because it's very fast to work in and we don't concern ourselves with clean typology, Ngons, 3D modeling best practices otherwise we're not going to get anywhere. Once design gets approved then all that stuff matters as the Modelling department builds the asset.

I'm primarily a software developer but premature optimisation and perfectionism can apply to us as well. Many years ago, after a successful handoff of my first program to a very happy client, the feedback from my boss was: "If you can deliver a program that is that good, you could have delivered a program that was good enough in half the time." *Breadth first, then depth only where it is needed.*

Man i think you're 100% right. I recently learned that i care way too much and spend way too much time on my renders/modelling when the client would have been happy with it 2 hours/days ago. Really need to stop being such a perfectionist and just get it done quick - nobody really notices that much! great video

Really nice video and I’m impressed with your skills in short times

Good point at all. In this case, I strongly recommend to all be armed with Hardops, Mechmashine, Zenuv and other small tools like Miratools, Machinetools, Decalmachine, Kitops and so on. It will take some time to learn and even can break your view at vanilla Blender, but in the end, you will be amazed how fast you can approach the same results.

It's definitely about what you want to do and how you manage yourself doing it. There's not point to make a complex mesh for 50 pixels on screen, but likewise half-assing a key object can kill a render. Know what you want to make, allow for some experimentation and balance your time doing it.

Nice one! I feel like this is super relevant to my own process right now.

Great advice. Finishing up my first VFX heavy project now, and it took a while to learn this lesson. It's super tempting to feel like there's a "right way" to build out a scene, or that it was "cheating" to take shortcuts. Something that's helped me is just figuring out where I can use a 2D asset within a scene instead of having to model or simulate something complex (trees, smoke). Sometimes supplementing a render with photographed elements will even make it look better.

Knowing what and when to go quickly is a key to being a pro. After 20+ years of graphic design I realized that subtle details are usually pointless and make little difference in the final result! Unless they DO make a difference, and it's up to you to know which is which. ;)

Man I can relate to this so much. Not 3D, but the feeling is the same. You polish every small bit of a turd in the corner and you don't even feel accomplished when you look at the final result, where none of that hard work is there to be seen.

Great video. Really applies to so many art forms

Totally needed to see this video, that's amazing!

I remember that story by Mark Hamill. He does a great impression of Harrison Ford while he tells it lol!

Brilliant!

Those cans looks really awesome dude, wonderful job :)

You are not alone, thank you for sharing Decoded :)

I can't say you have doing it wrong. Basically it's and workflow depends on your goals and porpoises.

fuck yeah

I think it's good to be aware of all the little details and try to perfect them for yourself. Kind of a challenge to proof that you can improve them and hone your skills when it is necessary, but otherwise keep it simple :) Thanks for the reminder!

This is a very professional view of how to proceed and a very efficient way of working. I case efficiency is what you looking for. I learned this lesson from an experienced art director during way work in the multimedia industry years ago.

1:25 made me literally laugh out loud 😂😂😂

As someone said "Perfection is an enemy of Good" and btw which resources you came across to learn to make clean UVs, topologies all this standard "correct" methods, because from start I followed Ian, peter france all this guys who make stuff faster and I love this way but I'll also want to get decent knowledge of standard way.

Very good video, in my case I learned folllowing the correct way to do the work, following the "this is the way it must be done" and I'm still strugling trying to do what you say in this video, becaus you're right, this is the best way to do something

Very helpful-just starting out so MUCH APPRECIATED!

hah I love this because I'm a previz artist these days, and this is my life! first day of the previz job, coming from a game company where each model had to be as good as it could from every angle, and we spent a few weeks or months making every asset.... I sit down and I"m told to make an entire environment, 3 characters and some effects.... by the end of the day! I picked up a lot of the tricks you mentioned really quick (been doing previz for more than 10 years now, I love the speed of the work)

Keep up the great work, love the content as always

So true, thanks for pointing it out in such an eloquent way

I think what helps me is considering top-down and bottom-up design applications to whatever you're creating. Especially with artwork. great vid

Glad I stumbled across this. I take the same approach to painting, only add detail where necessary. But since I've been using Blender (1 week luckily) I have been trying to add super amounts of detail everywhere - My artistic brain went out the window and I have been completely geeking out on the technicals. At a point I started thinking "this would take ages if I was building a whole scene" - Luckily you have saved me from going down that road!

I find this video very informative, not just in terms of practicality, but in the approach to Art itself. I'm a painter and Sketch artist and this approach is something I discovered a long time ago. I only recently started learning how to create 3D art in blender and Unreal Engine. I completely forgot about this very basic artistic principle of minimalism versus detail when creating the 3D art. Thank you for the reminder.

I'm just about to start down the path of learning 3d modeling / rendering and this feels like really important knowledge. Thanks mate.

I'm not a Blender user but that was interesting with somes very good advises there, and yes I think some of the most important is to know wich details to focus on, it's like mastering where you want the viewer eyes to focus.