Design and Reference

Almost every person over the age of 6 knows how to hold a pencil, how to use it to make marks, and how to erase marks previously made. Very few people are able to create a convincingly realistic drawing with that same pencil. The difference is less a matter of hand–eye coordination, tool use, or any other mechanical skill, but one of observation skills and understanding of the subject. When a skilled artist picks up a pencil to make a drawing of a model, he knows what kind of marks to make because the combination of his understanding of figure drawing and his own on-the-spot observations tells him what to do. Holding the pencil is incidental to his observation skills and his knowledge of how to translate a threedimensional scene into a two-dimensional image (Fig. 4.1).

In the same way for a CG artist, your observation skills are more important than your knowledge of tools. If you don’t know what the object you wish to build is supposed to look like, how then should you expect to be successful? This means that you have to be able to describe, as well as recognize, your subject. There is a large difference between these two things. What makes a 1999 Buick LeSabre different from the previous year’s model? When you build something in 3D, you should be able to make the kind of observations necessary to define that sort of difference between two similar objects. Now that you have an idea what CG tools you have at your disposal and the technology they are built from, it is time to consider your target object. The object you want to build is your target (Fig. 4.2).