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Wtf are these balls?
🕑 Added 2025-01-25 14:13:40 +0000 UTCLet me explain what are those balls you saw in previous my posts.
Shortly - Its a Super Useful Technique to Improve Creative Skills!
How it works? Just draw a concrete sphere on your photo!
I really love this practice—simple and useful. All you need is a phone and a cheap $5–10 stylus for you smartphone. Then, during lunch breaks or walks, sit on a bench or while waiting for food, or watching you kids playing, sitting on the toilet, spend 10–15 minutes sketching. Do this exercise every day, and not only will your skills grow, but your back won’t ache as much from sitting.
Why is this practice useful?
If you’re not familiar with drawing at all, at the very least, you’ll develop a habit of drawing and holding a pen properly—not like a caveman, and not just for signing documents or writing essays in school.
It will teach you to see lights, shadows, and reflections in scenes and locations. You’ll start paying attention to these details and observing objects. Sure, there’s a slight risk that police might stop you and ask what you’re doing (it’s not like you’re hiding something suspicious!), but hey, at least you’ll have stories to tell your grandkids.
You’ll learn how to set up lighting properly on your objects, understand how the atmosphere affects the color of an object, and see how the sky and sunlit asphalt below create strong reflections on the underside of an object. In our terms, that’s global illumination. You’ll also analyze shadows—figuring out their direction, brightness, color, and how soft or sharp they are.
You might ask: Why do I need this in 3D if everything is automated there?
Firstly, this practice will develop your eye for colors and lighting, enabling you to understand what you want from your render when the time comes. No matter how physically accurate a render might be, it’s still fake and can often produce something unattractive or off. You’ll need to manually tweak it to achieve a satisfactory result, whether by adding fake light sources or adjusting it during compositing, especially in realtime (UE, Unity and etc).
Secondly, if you plan to integrate your 3D object into real footage (like the tons of videos on Instagram right now), you absolutely need to dedicate at least a month to this practice—just 15 minutes every day. Why? Because when I scroll through Instagram, I constantly see the same glaring mistakes in these videos: shadows with incorrect color, wrong softness or hardness, incorrect transparency, or even facing the wrong direction. And if it’s indoors, people often fail to match the light sources to the footage, and the whole thing falls apart. Enough is enough!
Thirdly, on a subconscious level, this practice will gradually improve your overall creative skills and your ability to craft visually appealing images. Don’t expect that after a month you’ll be ready to apply as a concept artist at ILM or Weta, and don’t expect instant results in your work. It’s like going to the gym—after 1-2-3 months, you might not notice much difference. But after 1-2 years, combined with other exercises, you’ll see an amazing boost and powerful results!
For a deeper dive into this technique, check out the amazing artist Marco Bucci and his video on this topic (link). His videos taught me a lot—I watched them in one breath and practiced everything he talked about daily. He gives incredibly helpful advice! I highly recommend starting with this video and exploring the rest of his channel.
Good luck, everyone! 🎨
