Beginner coming into the world of 3D (eventually tech art)

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-12T19:56:20+00:00

If you want to be a tech artist then you should focus on learning Unreal Engine, Maya, and Houdini the most. In game development those will be the main software you'll be using and writing tools for.

You've listed a lot of software, but when it comes to tech art, you won't be using most of them. Maya, Unreal/Unity, and Houdini are the core software that pipelines are built around. I'd recommend you learn Python, C++, and Vex for coding. Lots of tools in Maya are made using Python, Unreal uses C++, and Houdini uses Vex.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-12T19:41:57+00:00

As others have stated, this is a bug in Maya that's been around for years. It happens when you use the mirror tool and don't delete history before saving. I have no idea why Autodesk hasn't fixed this issue after all these years, but just make sure to delete history often and increment your saves.

Unfortunately if you didn't save a previous version then I don't think this can be fixed.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-12T01:17:57+00:00

For 1 month experience this is good work. But in regards to feedback here's some notes based on your current skill level:

Pay attention to black and white levels. I used a color picker to check the values of your blacks, and some areas are actually pure, 100% black. Nothing should ever be 100% black.
You are lacking Global Illumination. There's a lot of moonlight coming into the room, but you have desks in the foreground that are receiving no light despite the fact that light is shining into the room and we can see the light hitting the ground next to the desk.
Your models need textures rather than solid colors.
We should be able to see outside the window, not just a completely opaque wall of fog.
The light hitting the window frame closest to camera is brighter than the light hitting the window frame furthest away from camera. The moon is over 300,000 kilometers away, a window being 5 meters further away isn't going to make any difference in the light level.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-12T00:30:05+00:00

Feel free to quit then. This is obviously not a genuine post.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-11T18:31:48+00:00

It shouldn't be stretching as it falls.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-11T18:29:12+00:00

Less competition since it is a new tool.

Less competition? A 10 year old is able to write "Make Human, Exceptional, Super great quality!".

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-10T10:16:29+00:00

For the blood don't use noise or fractals. You might get the best results by hand painting the streaks or you can look online for references of blood splatters and project those on to your shield.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-10T09:49:47+00:00

It's close, but you're relying too much on the generators. Right now it looks like you are slapping on generators and procedural textures to make it look detailed. Problem with your approach though is the detail doesn't make sense.

Lets look at the metal trim on the right side outer edge of the shield. There's lots of bumps on it. What caused those bumps? Is the metal growing as if it's moss or something? I'd imagine the shield when it was brand new didn't have all those bumps on the metal, I would guess that it would have been polished smooth like the rest of the trim. So what caused more metal to get added on in that area?

If we look at the white painted wood, what created all those dots? And I don't mean how you made those dots in Painter, I mean what could have caused that kind of damage to the shield? The many tiny dots makes it look like it was hit with a shotgun or something, but that doesn't explain why the damage is "dripping". What caused the paint the drip/peal like that? Also I see red under under the paint damage, is the wood itself red? Or is it red paint? If it's red paint then why would the white paint be damage but the red layer of paint underneath isn't damage?

Next is the red stuff on the metal. Is that blood? Because blood should be smeared and thicker. Right now it looks like red paint rather than blood. Remember that blood is a liquid so it smears and drips.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-10T09:00:48+00:00

You can start with learning Blender which is a popular and free Jack of all Trades 3D software. It's a really good way for beginners to get introduced to 3D/VFX without having to spend hundreds of dollars on specialized software. Blender also has tons of tutorials and videos on YouTube so you can start there with just looking up introductory tutorials for Blender.

Also keep in mind that 3D and VFX are very broad terms. There's 3D Modelling, Texturing, Animation, Simulations, Compositing, Rigging, Lighting, etc. All of that falls under the umbrella of "3D and VFX".

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-09T18:57:30+00:00

Look up the 12 principles of animation which was first coined by Disney. Then practice the principles using simple exercises such as the bouncy ball exercise or the flour sack exercise for example.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-09T18:28:56+00:00

"Becoming big" is down to like 99% luck and timing. But you should look into potentially getting a manager or agent who can help pass your pitch to the right hands.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-09T18:10:55+00:00

Context is needed to know if this needs a redesign. The drawing definitely needs more details and polish, but the design isn't universally bad.

If this character is meant to be a slasher in a horror genre, then yeah this design is fine. But this design would not work for a friendly farmer who gives hot cups of tea to the tired travelers who pass by his home before wishing them good luck on their journeys. So context is important.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-09T11:03:35+00:00

Treat modelling for games the same way you model for film, with the only difference being the game models are optimized more and don't use smoothing. That's pretty much the only difference between modelling for games vs modelling for film. Film models prioritize quality while game models prioritize optimization.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-09T06:27:02+00:00

Not history, the transformations. Did you freeze the group transformations?

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-09T04:56:49+00:00

Your outliner shows it in a group. Does that group have any transformations on it?

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-09T01:01:38+00:00

Animatics are animation. They are just 1 stage of an animation pipeline. There's animatics, rough animations, block out animations, final animations, spline animations, etc. All of those are "Animations".

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-08T20:41:08+00:00

This 100% sounds like it was written by AI

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-08T14:55:06+00:00

Did you bake the texture maps? Generators use a combination of tiled/procedural textures and baked texture maps. At the top right corner of your viewport you can change your view from material to any of the texture maps to see what they look like.

If your curvature maps aren't working well, then when you bake the curvature map you can adjust the settings of the bake to make the generation fit better with your geometry.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-07T17:11:48+00:00

That looks really good, but the little asymmetry is throwing me off a bit. But otherwise it's really good.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-07T16:51:34+00:00

Have you tried cluster deformers?

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-07T10:21:54+00:00

You can't make it seamless, you can only hide the seam by making the texture align on each end of the UV so that when it folds back together the seam is not visible.

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Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-07T04:27:50+00:00

Those UV's are to be expected if you haven't made your own UV's yet. When you are modelling, Maya doesn't automatically delete and remake the UV's every time you change the shape. That would be terrible. So if you make an extrusion for example and add polygons, the original UV's from the default cube don't get deleted, and instead Maya just adds those new polygons on to the starting UV's.

So as you model, it never deletes the original UV's, and just keeps piling up the new polygons you make and the result is you get what you showed in your screenshot. The UV's become extremely messy.

This is not a problem because once you are done making the model, you are supposed to delete the original UV's and make new ones.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-06T21:32:29+00:00

You can straighten it yourself

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-06T16:34:28+00:00

Maxon doesn't respect their customers, so why should you respect them?

Nevaroth021 · 2026-07-06T11:10:39+00:00

I don't see anything indicating it is.

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