Creating Digital Art

I've been searching various digital art sites, and alot of people have been designing stuff that looks like this:

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or even as advanced as:




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anyway, i was just curious if anyone knew the first step in creating something like this? At what point do you use 3ds, and where do you use photoshop....its all a mystery to me


any advice?

-jonathan

wow....goddamn it...
what the **** is that man?...so powerful!~ I like the first one

Those are both very nice indeed. It would be hard to say exactly where to start, except start learning photoshop and if can afford 3D software go there. There is probably a lot of 3d work in there. But you would be an amazing genius if you could whip up that in a few tutorials, you will have to master the basics. I mean do you start with quantam physics or basic math?

i have both 3ds and photoshop, i know photoshop pretty well. I guess im just basically looking to see where the person exported from 3ds and into photoshop....

The bigger spiky things were most definataly created with 3ds max. Just a noised shape basically.

The sparkly mist effect is just the blur tool and some colors, then set to color dodge or something. Test is self explanatory.

The trendy lines all over the place is pen tool + artistic sense.

Then the border, and placement and stuff is just design stuff... it's basically either you have it or you don't. Or you can just follow general rules, like the rule of thirds. Or something.

These peices only look all über... when they're really just simple... and a little overdone. I mean, people have been making those since like 2000 from the days of Photoshop 5 and 3ds max 2 or something.

Well ... about a week ago i created this one

http://art.torn.be/detroit/detroit-1600.jpg

I know it's not as good as the 2 examples, but i think it's the same principle.

Create your shapes in max or another 3d program ( i used maya ). And after that open them in photoshop and start copying, adjusting, coloring, playing with blend modes, add blurs, 2d elements, text etc etc.

It's a lot of hard work i can assure you that.

Yeah, that's exactly what I meant.

On a side note, how is Maya? Better than 3ds max?

Dammit, you all make me sick. Where you've been is where I want to go! I love all that was shown in this thread. I'm going to get there eventually. I'm messing with brushes now and I'm amazed at the possiblities.

By the way, I'm interested in that Maya / 3D St Max debate as well. I want to make sure I know as much as I can before I plunk down the money for either one of those bad boys!

Originally posted by Malevolent_Jester
Yeah, that's exactly what I meant.

On a side note, how is Maya? Better than 3ds max?

I wouldn't say better ... i would say different.

For example, in max ... for modeling you have:

polygonal modeling
spline modeling
patch modeling

In maya:

polygonal modeling
NURBS modeling
Subdivision modeling

You can do amazing things with both. I chose maya because i took evening classes in maya. (2 years) So everything was explained to me. Before that i worked with max for about a year, but this was just basic.

But in think that there are more tutorials for max. For example it is very hard to make a wireframe object in maya, but in max it's just a click on a button.

But when you want an effect like fire, it's very easy in maya, and in max you have to experiment with combustion (i think its not that easy).

Go to www.highend3d.com for more info about plugins, tutorials, examples etc. for maya.

A really great 3d site is www.raph.com

And for miscellanious 3d stuff, (like textures) www.3dcafe.com

i really don't like max, so yes, i'd say its way better ;) to each their own tho, download the ple and see if you like it.

chris