JanusJsenwark posted at 1:58 PM Fri, 19 May 2023 - #4465794

I didn't mean it badly. But that's all way too technical for me, here's a little blue, 0.02 of that a little... where's the fun, the beautiful and interesting? Maybe I'm not in the right place. I'll keep my mouth shut in the future. Sometimes I piss myself off.

I don't think anyone took it badly.  And that image with the spheres is amazing!  I hope you had a script to help you place the spheres, instead of doing it by hand.  [grin]

I think part of the situation (I won't go so far as to call it a "problem", because I don't think it is one), is that the posts here have two different philosophies behind them.

Many of the posts are from the technician artists, a category I would fall into if I was an artist.  They find art in getting the shaders just right, doing the math for the most realistic effect, or the most spectacular or most beautiful effect. They're concerned with the minutia of the right depth of field settings, the subtle differences of lighting techniques, bump/displacement/normal maps, subdivision of meshes, reflections, transparency settings, all of the "mechanical" settings that can affect the calculation and appearance of the rendering of the image. So, some of their images have given less thought to poses and expressions and look more like technical how-to drawings.  They're a bit like song writers who don't necessarily sing well, but their art also lies in the area of creation.  There's nothing wrong with that, per se.  They are the ones who give us incredible shaders, amazing figures and props, powerful scripts, and tutorials on how to do some of the harder stuff, or some of the more obscure stuff, or the stuff newbies need to know, but don't seem to get from the manual.

Then there are the Art For Art's Sake people.  They may or may not know anything about the shaders or how to tweak them, could not care less about f-stops or if the light is at 104% or 107%.  They may never use anything but pure stock shaders, but rarely pure stock expressions or poses. Or they may, but that's not how they create. They create from intuition. They are the ones who put laugh lines around the eyes, know how to make those marbles look like eyes with a rogueish sparkle in them, the tilt of the head, the spontaneity of the candid shot (very hard to reproduce in computer generated art where there's damned near zero spontaneity in the process), they've studied body language, and how hair blows in the wind or looks on a humid day.  They don't know the difference between what looks natural and what looks like a mannequin; they FEEL the difference.  One kind of artist knows how to make a character look like they're actually touching the ground, the other knows how grass feels on bare feet and how it sticks out between the toes.  How a walk on sand looks different than a walk on grass.  Some of its conscious, an awareness of perspective and negative space, and making of point of not making the centering of a pose TOO perfect.  And some of it is intuition. But this is the sensuous artist, the one who pays attention to the senses of both the intended audience and the characters they create. They make it possible to not just see the roses, but smell them, too.

Then there are the mechanics, the ones who fit in neither camp and frankly, aren't as brilliant as either camp, but they want to have fun, and so they do so.  It may not be art, but it's what they like.  Or . . . close to it, at least. This is probably the category I belong in.  When I repair an electronic instrument, I read the manual.  When I cook something, I cook from the cookbook. I don't create things so much as I direct them.  (And directors are artists, too, their medium just happens to be people.)

But amazing things happen when the intuitive artists and the technician (maybe engineering, as engineers DO create things; technicians tend to use things instead of creating them) talk to each other and share their skills, offer creative criticism and in short, help fill the gaps in each other's strengths. Not everyone can take constructive criticism, just as not every actor can take direction.  The ones who can are usually the better off for it.

Almost everyone has SOMETHING they can offer.  Don't fall silent just because the techies are dominating the thread; they want to learn, too.  :-)