Attached Link: American Gothic

http://www.artic.edu/artaccess/AA_Modern/pages/MOD_5.shtml To be honest, my post was a "deer in the headlights" reaction to the comment I got. Sure, any time you poke your head above the crowd, by posting an image, you've got to be resigned to the reality that somebody may take a potshot at you. I posted a gallery image of an adventurous girl stumbling on a witch stirring up a spell in a cauldron. I didn't expect thunderous applause, but I also didn't expect somebody to give it the lowest possible rating solely because of how it was created. Had I not taken the time to credit the models I used, this poster's reaction probably would not have been negative. That's why I thought it might be an interesting topic to post. The comment had nothing to do with the image I had produced. It was something to the effect of saying that anybody can produce an image with a bunch of models and why don't I come back when I do something original. The same comment could be levied against nearly every Poser artist. I didn't take the comment too seriously (hence the subject line of it being about a cranky comment). I didn't report the poster to the Moderators, so had nothing to do with the comment being removed. The poster wasn't a typical troll and has some skill as a modeler, but doesn't have an artistic gallery as much as one that shows off the models (such as this tire sample http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=462978). That's not a negative comment as much as a description of how this individual is using the gallery--it showcases the models and was never intended to be art. I take nothing away from modelers--the best modelers are artists with the same talents as the best sculptors. It was so bizarre to see somebody get so worked up over the technique of producing the image instead of the results of the image. That's why I thought it was worth posting. At issue is a philosophy of whether a work should be taken on its own or be judged on how it was created. One of the most famous paintings ever produced is American Gothic (link above), a painting showing two weathered people standing in front of a barn. I found a book about the painting at a library and learned that the two figures are based on photographs (one being the artist's sister). If one wants to take an extreme purist attitude, the painting is crap because it used photo references and did not solely spring from the artist's mind. The Mona Lisa is crap because DaVinci worked with a live model. It's a viewpoint that is so narrow-minded as to be ridiculous. In some ways, a person, with such obsessively defined logical rules, can almost be pitied because a lot of enjoyable things in life are going to be trashed when they conflict with those arbitrary rules. As others have suggested, applying the same logic to the poster's models would make them seem worthless because they were not created with original code, but used 3dsMax. Computer artwork is taking off because the computer provides capabilities that traditional art media doesn't have. The greatest reason to use Poser is because it simplifies some tasks. With the existing models and textures out there, one can render a very realistic human character. There is very little reason to want to create a new human figure from scratch when there are many good ones out there already. Since I had downloaded a cauldron many months ago, there wasn't a reason to build one. The same goes for the background. The latter two items are not beyond my ability to create, but why spend a few more hours to create something that already exists? Sure, it's nice to point to them and say they're mine, but all I wanted to do was create an image that was in my head. If it takes me less time to find an existing model than it does to jump into a 3D program and build it, then I'm just taking advantage of the tools available to me. It's the image that matters and whatever shortcuts that get the image I want onto a screen or canvas is all that counts. Unless I need a very specifically shaped cauldron or other object, it's rather pointless to spend lots of time creating one because I just needed a cauldron. It's not the focus of the image. There's no sin to using what's already available. In fact, it's kind of silly to expend dozens of hours to create a model when the goal is to produce a drawing instead of a model. The hardest thing to get used to with Poser, from regular drawing, is that the amount of time and effort to do a drawing has been reversed. With a traditional drawing, laying out the drawing takes the least amount of time and rendering it with fleshed out details and shading is where the real work occurs. With Poser, laying out the drawing is the most painstaking process and rendering it is done entirely in the computer without human assistance. That's taken me a long time to get used to. I can lay out a drawing in a few minutes and flesh out a fairly good rendered pencil drawing in a few hours. Going beyond that to a painted image has always been a more difficult task and I often lose the spontaneity of the original image whenever I paint. I spend hours in Poser composing an image, getting figures into natural poses, getting the camera angle right, and getting the lighting right. Then it becomes the time-consuming process of pose-render-pose-render to achieve the look I want because a lot of problems aren't uncovered until the image is rendered. Due to the drain on computer resources, I often have to work in a piecemeal fashion one model at a time before integrating the complete image. At times, it's a tedious process, but I'm finally starting to become happy with the end results. Seeing somebody getting so bent out of shape because I used a bunch of existing models for a drawing simply struck as such a weird reaction. I essentially got the drawing I wanted, so it doesn't matter much that one person got so wrapped up in internal obsessive rules that the person lost the impact of the drawing. There are still little things that I want to do to flesh out the image, but I thought the image stood out enough on its own that it was worth posting for Halloween.

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon