When someone looks at your finished work and says "Wow, Did you paint that?"

"Ray, when someone asks if you're a god, you say YES!" ~Ghostbusters~

"Yes, thank you." A simple "thank you" after a compliment is better than all the shuffling of false modesty "gosh, well, it just happened" or boasting of "I just tossed it off." Carolly

When someone looks at your finished work and says
"Wow, Did you paint that?"

Hmmmmmm....I can interpet that question in multiple ways.

I suppose that it would depend upon the inflection with which the question was asked.

It could be: "WOW! Did you paint THAT?"

Or, it could be: "WOW! Did YOU paint that?"

Or, alternately: cough cough cough "Uh....wow. Did you paint.....uh.....cough........that?"

So, I would say that it all depends.

((Wait a minute.....I don't paint anything, anyway........))

You know.....in the past, I have worked as a professional photographer. As a sideline.

I always appreciated it when people looked at the pictures that I had taken of them, their weddings, their kids/pets/whatever.......

They liked the pictures.

And then they'd say: "You've got such a wonderful camera........! Just look at the great pictures that it takes!"

Yes, the question is a bit ambiguous, but it's positive praise of the work... This is the Poser Forum so I'm talking about work with a significant portion of other peoples work, models and textures. But we all know that it's not unrealistic to spend days on setting-up, rendering and then post-work. So likewise a large amount of personal toil. I guess renders are closer to photo's that drawings in that sense. I just feel uncertain about claiming a Poser work as My Own. As in "Yes, I did that". Not a copyright issue more of a personal feeling of what's mine and what's someone else's praise. Where do you draw the line?

kaveman, I'm not an artist, just a some-time modeller, so you can take my opinion FWIW but I feel the person creating the render has, by far, the hardest job & more than deserves the credit for the finished piece. All I do is fire up lightwave, push a few points & vertices around & out pops a model :-) You artist types have to compose, light, texture, set up camera angles, & do test renders from every point of the compass. And that's before you even get around to thinking about postwork. After all that you SHOULD be able to say "Yup I made this" :-) I doubt seriously that Da Vinci stepped back from the Mona Lisa & thought... "someone else made the paint, someone else made the canvas, someone else made the brushes, someone else made the easel, etc, etc.... who should get credit for painting the picture?"

Is photography an art? If it is, or it can be, then a Poser render can be too. I think of it as virtual photography. Photographers may give credit to the beauty of their model, or to Mother Nature for the landscape they've captured, but the finished work needs an artist's eye to be successful.

"All I do is fire up lightwave, push a few points & vertices around & out pops a model :-)" LOL! I know it's intentional, but that's probably the understatement of the year. If that's all there was to it, then Poser wouldn't be needed. Just like how someone rendering a scene needs to understand lighting and perspective, a modeler (as you know) needs to understand topology and shape, much like a sculptor. Forming a model and editing UV's so that the texture doesnt look like crap is a critical part of the whole 3D process. A great texture on a horrible model isn't going to help much. Good modeling means less hair-pulling in post. Especially if you're an animator. ;-)

Renders combine the artistic skills of several people under the finesse of the renderer. modelling, texturing, lighting, posing, character assembly (costuming), technical tricks (python creation and use) -- all of these things are widely recognized as arts. Don't take my word for it, though. Look at the full list of the academy awards -- beyond the actor awards -- and think for a bit. Directors and producers are in there for a reason. It is their vision, their effort to corral and combine all those disparate artistic skills and capabilities, which produces a final piece. We are the directors and producers when we assemble a really good poser image. And that's my response to this week's "is poser art?" post.

When I take a photo of a real world sculpture and say 'I have made this picture', everybody understands that I talk about making the photo (an Art) and not about making the sculpture ( an other Art). If I talk about a render of a digital sculpture (the model), this distinction may be not as clear to most people. So a bit more explanation may be necessary. That has nothing to do with the fact that both making the render and making the model can be art.

I agree with Kavaman, At the moment, my scenes consist of other peoples models, other peoples props, other peoples clothes and other peoples poses. All I'm doing it putting them together. I would feel very uncomfortable taking credit for anything other than putting the pieces together and hopefully making it look nice. When I was younger my main hobby was landscape photography, I'd trundle off up the motorways to some hill or lake or whatever and snap off a couple of rolls of film, then spend the next day in the dark room processing them. Most of the time the prints were no more than average and were consigned to the rubbish bin, but every now and then I'd get one that would make me go "Wow", I felt the same way about those prints as I do about my renders, If I took enough photos, I would eventually have one that looked good. I'm not of course trying to disparage any of the increadibly talented arists on here, the whole 3d thing for me is a hobby, and I'm smart enough to know where my limits are.

Since I never do postwork, nobody will say "did you paint that." My renders do not look painted. Did I make it? Yes. I use tools and materials made by others - and by myself, if I can't find something that I need, I model it myself, and combine and tweak and test again. Some sets that can be bought contain ready-to-go building blocks, including scenery, figures, poses, lights and camera settings, and all the Poser user has to do is click a few times in a few libraries and hit the Render button. In such a case, there is no real contribution of the Poser user. The settings in such a set are useful as a kind of tutorial, that's the way I view them. I NEVER use predefined light sets. They don't do what I want. I always set up ligthing from scratch. Poses: I often use a base pose from a library that looks a little like what I want, and then I tweak it until it's right. So is it mine? Sure. Could I have made it without the base materials? Definitely not. And, like cooler said, did Rembrandt make his own pigments, did he weave his own canvases, did he construct his own easel from a tree he chopped down himself? I don't think so.

hmm..my renders could look a lot better if'n I'd use other people's stuff more, but then I wouldn't learn nothin'..;) If they like it, say 'thank you', and move on..;)
Actually, a lot of painters until the 19th Century did make their own pigments, but the canvases were bought..;)

"Since I never do postwork, nobody will say "did you paint that." My renders do not look painted."

Just to be clear, postwork does not always mean making a render look "painted". You can render something photorealistic, and do some postwork to enhance the illusion of realism further. In general terms, postwork in 3D is widely known as doing things like color correction and compositing. It's something that's done in the film industry all the time. In fact, I don't think I'd ever do any serious animation work without taking it to post in AfterEffects or Combustion.

:-)

"I doubt seriously that Da Vinci stepped back from the Mona Lisa & thought... "someone else made the paint, someone else made the canvas, someone else made the brushes, someone else made the easel, etc, etc.... who should get credit for painting the picture?""

I always thought this was a faulty analogy. No offense. :-) The problem here is, making your own pigments, etc. really does not compare very well to what we do (or don't do) with Poser. Something more comparable to a traditional artist, like Da Vinci, making all his own tools would be a digital artist who writes his own software applications, then uses them to make great things. No, I think a more fair comparison to what we do in Poser would be if Da Vinci had someone else draw a pencil sketch of the Mona Lisa, to which he later added the color, shading, and depth with paint.

Message edited on: 02/01/2005 13:18

LOL! I know it's intentional, but that's probably the understatement of the year. If that's all there was to it, then Poser wouldn't be needed. I agree 100 percent. Takes hours to get a character to look the way you want. Takes hours to dress then, pose them and stick a prop with them to render the animation or the image. It's the only thing I can say I own when I make it. :) Why would anyone refer to 3D digital art as paint anyway?

It isn't grinding the pigments which is the problem... that is just labor, and the skill of knowing when they are fine enough. Even digging for blue clay isn't too bad. The problem is going to Siberia in the depths of winter and climbing ice-bound trees to catch those darn Kolinsky squirrels when their coats are at their best. Ever try pulling tail hairs out of a grumpy woken-from-his-nap squirrel? While balancing precariously 80' up? While the temperature is so cold that your curses have frozen solid in the air? :brrrr: Carolly

"Ever try pulling tail hairs out of a grumpy woken-from-his-nap squirrel? While balancing precariously 80' up? While the temperature is so cold that your curses have frozen solid in the air?" Let me see... There was that time... Come to think of it, no. Glad to be able to do art inside where it's warm. The cursing, yes, I may have done some of that... :)