foreWord

This is not a software manual

Now, no one questions that digital modeling, rendering, and animation depend on practical knowledge of software. When starting a class in digital modeling, students’ first assumption is that they are there to learn Maya, or 3ds Max, or Blender, or Fusion.

But what most don’t assume is that they must learn first about visual thinking.

I don’t want to sound elitist, but this is an odd premise. Think about a traditional drawing class. No one assumes that know-how about pencil sharpening is all we need. Sure, an artist needs to know that. But it’s a rare drawing instructor who has to endure the question, “Are we going to learn about sharpening pencils in here?” Software is just a more complex iteration of a drawing instrument, a tool, a means to an end.

Yet, art courses in computer labs remain fully obsessed with software know-how at the exclusion of visual thinking. Specifically, I refer to the visual, theoretical, and art-historical contexts in which that know-how is applied. Anyone who wants to gain full-on know-how of what modeling software does pragmatically needs to grasp these fundamentals — what I’ll call the know-why. I dare you to find much know-why in even the best software manual.

The world of digital modeling is a big one: conceptually, it’s infinite. So: where to start taming your corner of it? Developing a general theory — a philosophy of modeling — is a better place to start than software. Why?

Making the model tangible

Creating a digital model is a weird and hermetic exercise. The work exists in a space you can see but can’t touch. It occupies a world where the laws of physics and biology have been repealed. You can balance a cubic kilometer of concrete on a chicken’s lips. It contains nothing of the quality of a thing made. A model of a wooden table contains no tool marks to bear witness to its crafting. An artist cannot expect a general audience to experience the model through an expensive specialized software interface. So this strange, hermetic non-thing must find a way into the society of stuff. To be seen, the model must always be made, somehow, tangible.

Thus, any reasonable philosophy of modeling should be guided by this understanding. The model needs a goal beyond simply being in the software. The artist should “survey the plot.” That is, they should first account for the final circumstances the model is created to occupy. Whether for a mediated experience like animation or a game, a design such as an architectural environment or a prototype, a matrix for fabrication of an object from actual material, or a tool for choreographing the complex assembly process of a jet plane, a model is a means toward some end. The nature of the model will conform to that end.

To understand the amazing places we are going with digital modeling and visualization technologies in this still relatively new digital world, we need to survey the plot upon which it is built.

Everything new is old again

This text embeds a general discussion of modeling software in the larger study of formal analysis and principles of design. It’s a mash-up of AutoDesk with the Bauhaus Basic Course, the visual design curriculum from the famous German design school of the last century. This blending should not be misread as either romanticizing the Bauhaus or vilifying AutoDesk. It should rather be seen as the acknowledgment of a powerful historical precedent.

The opportunities artists discovered at the apex of the industrial revolution almost a century ago compare fundamentally with those of our digital revolution. The cultural climate that fostered Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus Manifesto led to a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between art and craft. In our time, we are reformulating the fundamental relationship between art and media, between the mind and the machine, between idea and object. In many ways, the Bauhaus artists and we live in parallel universes.

One hundred years and a second revolution after the development of the Bauhaus Basic Course described in Johannes Itten’s book Design and Form, something’s missing. A collage of the seemingly disparate agendas of the Bauhaus and AutoDesk becomes necessary — but it is absent! This is the vacuum this author aims to fill.

It’s a pretty robust vacuum. Formal studies in art curricula have been on the back burner ever since the late 1980s saw the triumph of an incredulous Post-Modernist historicism. Simultaneously, the rise of the digerati necessitated addressing practical knowledge of software in the art studio. While these events responded to the same zeitgeist, they were coincidental, not causal. The unfortunate byproduct? The language of basic visual design has rarely been integrated with the exponentially increasing body of technical knowledge underpinning digital representation and fabrication.

Know-how vs know-why

No publication — no manual, course, or online tutorial regimen — has dealt with formal analysis and visual principles within a modeling software environment in a systematically thorough way. Few among the endless parade of intimidatingly fat 3D software texts or LinkedIn Learning videos bother to place practical software knowledge in a critical, formal, or theoretical context. Fewer still take an open-ended experimental approach to the medium more appropriate to the way artists are trained when working in tactile media. In some digital circles, it seems taboo to even mention visual design theory — as if the notion one can work without theory is not itself a theory! This text will remedy the folly of this situation. In an era of rapid technological evolution in which know-how is at best ephemeral, it is far more important to develop an understanding of know-why as a foundation.

In 3D digital art and design, gaps persist between content and form, thinking and making, the digital and the tactile. These gaps represent lost pedagogical opportunities. Seizing them allows this text to distinguish itself from others. This text promotes high intellectual standards in a field of study governed by a fashionable but ultimately unsustainable pedagogical populism. It does so by establishing clear links between digital and tactile media expressions. This leads to formal investigation and risk-taking experimentation. This foundation allows content and practical applications to follow, as they should.

A few years ago, I was asked to take on the development of a new media program in art. I began by searching for resources that would permit me to organize an art studio around art instruction rather than software instruction. The rise of online software tutorial video programming had proven somewhat useful, yet the shallow examples used to illustrate implementation and workflow were not particularly inspiring.

My model for this text

This is why I was so pleased at that time to run across Design Foundations: Introduction to Media Design. Design Foundations is a unique Creative-Commons licensed publication by xtine burroughs and Michael Mandiberg. They created a self-described mash-up of the Bauhaus Basic Course with Adobe Creative Cloud and other, open-source software environments.

I was equally happy to discover many inspirational parallels in Graphic Design: The New Basics by Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips. I was relieved that resources were available that could so easily adapt to my pedagogical ideas in digital art making. Simply put, these inspired instructors hardwired software tutorials with basic principles of 2D visual design, allowing the studio to be a studio once again.

But then, as I began authoring a modeling course, I was dismayed to discover a gap. Virtually all published tutelage in 3D modeling is devoid of any mention of basic visual design. True, I could find some nods to precedent in some competently presented tutorials for digitally recreating a 1964 Ford Mustang, the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe, or the likeness of Captain Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek.

But such by-rote tutorial homage at best assumes a beginning modeler already has a foundational grasp of why any particular example has cultural value. At worst, it gives the beginner little opportunity to develop their own invention. I found nothing of the depth I enjoyed with burroughs, Mandiberg, Lupton, and Phillips for my 2D courses. So, I was left with little choice but to craft my own. Inspired by their example, this text is dedicated to filling the gap in 3D modeling instruction that those authors ably filled in 2D graphics.

Wikification of this text

Initially, I did not think about a formal text. I rather launched the development of all this by creating a wiki. It was a flexible context in which formal problems, solvable with digital tools, related to tactile environments via metaphor. These formal exercises were followed by open-ended projects that allowed students to apply their formal knowledge to creative content. The exercises challenged students to tackle formal issues — phenomenal transparency, transformation, pattern, framing, continuity, montage, et cetera. The projects contextualized the creative use of digital tools within a larger sweep of precedent which all too often gets swept under the tutorial rug.

Unwittingly, by writing the wiki I had written the first draft of this text! In the wiki, students and colleagues contributed to and modified content. This allowed participants themselves to contribute to the production of the course. While a formal text is necessarily less flexible, this one is the product of the exchange that happened in the wiki. Both are bounded by the pedagogical framework subscribed to by this foreword: the basics.

Basic back-to-basics

Basic 3D visual design is an abstract formal language governing visual relationships occurring in space, independent of meaning. This does not mean meaning is irrelevant! Rather, it means that the rules governing relationships among 3D forms can be decoupled and independently analyzed. This facilitates better content creation. These rules have a relationship to 3D visual art akin to the relationship grammar has to poetry or notation has to music. To write something richly, culturally, intellectually, and emotionally meaningful, an author needs to know the rules, even — especially! — if the artist intends to break them.

In the visual arts, strategies for analyzing visual language found their most essential expression in the Bauhaus Basic Course. Bauhaus instructors approached visual form-making as a language with a vocabulary and grammar equally applicable to a multidisciplinary, non-hierarchic mash of fine art, craft, and design. This visual language was defined by geometry, Gestalt theory, and technological processes such as mass production. Bauhaus instructors declared this to be universal, and thus transcendent of content and culture.

Wassily Kandinsky and others developed an analysis of form that followed a dimensional prescription formulated in the title of Kandinsky’s text Point and Line to Plane. As you’ll see in this text, I extend Kandinsky’s logic to Mass in the third dimension and Kinematics — time and motion elements — in the fourth. In their model, Bauhaus instructors included visual elements such as color, texture, shape, and the like. They explored principles such as pattern, rhythm, unity, and balance, among many others.

Persistent pedagogy

Why does Bauhaus pedagogy persist? It has survived a century of art and design education, long past the industrial revolution that gave it birth. The diaspora of Bauhaus personalities that occurred after the Nazis disbanded the “degenerate” school ensured the pedagogy would spread across the globe. This was especially true in America, from the 1940s through the 1970s. Seeds of the Bauhaus came to flower in the work of Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelley, Donald Judd, Tony Smith, Ad Reinhardt, and other artists in the Abstract Expressionist and Minimalist movements.

Not everybody loved Bauhaus pedagogy in this country, however; many came to hold it in contempt. Yet ironically, schools whose faculty today might cringe at the mere mention of any Bauhaus association with their pedagogy still develop foundation programs that purport to create a common visual vocabulary among multiple visual disciplines — a pedagogical innovation born in the Bauhaus!

So, in response to the cries of irrelevance and accusations of sentimentality that I know are out there, let’s examine historical parallels that build the case for a new pedagogy of form.

Eras of disruption

The Bauhaus was a child of the latter-day industrial revolution. It responded to the artistic ramifications of mass production and new materials.

We are likewise dealing with the ramifications of a revolution: a digital one. Perhaps being more self-conscious, we do so comparatively more early in the game. Both of these revolutions are characterized as eras of disruption. Such eras lead to rethinking the role of art. Among the major rethinks of the Bauhaus, we observe Gropius’s desire to level the playing field among the fine arts, design, and craft. Under the influence of 3D modeling and other art-making digitalia, we find a similar crossbreeding of disciplines including sculpture, jewelry making, ceramics, architecture, industrial design, interactive media, and cinema.

Even non-art disciplines like cartography — Google Earth’s 3D rendition of the globe — and medicine — where organ “printing” is imminent — are blurring the boundaries. The Bauhaus embraced the use of mechanical technologies and processes for design. Later, Donald Judd expanded on this by sending out shop drawings to create his art in a factory, eliminating the direct hand of the artist. We now embrace code, software, and digital fabrication, circumventing even the mediated condition of Judd’s shop drawings. The Bauhaus defined the aesthetic response to mechanical realities. We are defining the aesthetic response to digital realities, even as they evolve.

The power of metaphor

From these parallels, we might conclude that artists, students, and educators need a dialogue that links 3D modeling to the visual language of basic 3D design in a critical, rigorous, and systematic way, informed by history, theory, contemporary media, and software. We desperately need a dialogue that links design and fabrication, thinking and doing, software and theory, digital and tactile. Too often these are perceived to be irreconcilable pedagogical constructs with non-intersecting agendas.

This perception is at best unhelpful and at worst intellectually bankrupt. As I do in my professional artwork, I aim in this text to reconcile the tactile with the digital while examining the formal vocabulary of visual design through the lens of the 21st century, a time when it is ripe to speak of the digital revolution as a fait accompli.

A rigorous examination of visual design is more necessary than ever. The digital revolution has handed us a creative age increasingly marked by code and script, social networking, time-based media, and transmedia publishing. The montage, the collage, the assemblage, and the mash-up are the default modus operandi. We recycle whatever happens to exist in popular media — not a bad thing to do, mind you. However, artists and designers who work with a pop-culture stew still need the basics: rigorous and systematic formal thinking. Why? Please. It’s like asking the wolf why he needs teeth: the better to quote you with, recycle you with, mash you up with, my dear…

Content vs the matrix

The digital revolution provides a good pot to boil the pop-culture stew. The Internet, peer-to-peer file-sharing, and cloud computing have facilitated the endless recirculation of existing popular content. It gave rise to the very notion of the word “content” as something distinguishable from the matrix in which it is presented. How many ways, after all, can you watch Star Wars today? But the digital revolution also forced art instructors to spend inordinate amounts of time on software. This twists an art or design studio into little more than a vocational training environment and steals valuable time from the higher-minded aspects of studio culture.

Irony alert: while we had our backs turned, software authors were pounding out programs that rigorously and systematically organized image- and object-making into menus (a metaphor) and palettes (a metaphor!) that transform the Bauhaus concept of visual principles and elements into a robust set of visual tools. This is accomplished largely through metaphors in the tactile world. These have become a parallel digital universe to their tactile equivalents: the darkroom for Photoshop, the mixing board for GarageBand, the editing table for Premier, or the sculptor’s turntable for Mudbox.

Reconciliation

Authors of instructional media continue to ignore this. They churn out tutorials instructing students to re-create monstrously heartless McMansions or characters whose defiance of physics or anatomy reveals more innocence than abstraction. Explanations of a user interface, if they even occur, leave students with no understanding of why color is expressed in HSV or why data is expressed in coordinates, never mind how any of this originates in the tangible world.

It should come as no surprise. When a tutorial specifies the construction of a banal digital product in a linear process, student production emulates it when it comes time to create. The consequences of these lessons cross over into the tactile world the moment a prototype gets sent to a fabrication device or a building gets constructed. This text aims to invigorate software instruction with metaphor. This ensures that the intended audience understands it by investigating visual precedent, history, and formal theory. The endgame, of course, is to elevate the cultural, intellectual, and emotional depth of the work created by aspiring 3D artists.

How to use this text

Because it’s not a software manual, this text rarely describes workflows or processes particular to one or another software title. When it’s important, I do illustrate a point about Maya, 3DMax, or Blender. With respect to platform, the text remains ecumenical, avoiding tedious debates of Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux.

The bulk of the text is organized in five parts:

• History, contemporary concepts, and the future of modeling
• Use of elements and principles of visual design in modeling
• Geometry and its material and digital expressions
• Metaphors of digital modeling to physical art activity
• Basic best practices for pre-production, production, and post-production

A non-linear compendium

Don’t think of this text as a linear read: it’s a compendium. Use the text to supplement software instruction in whatever order is logical.

You will find hyperlinks to articles, videos, files, and other assets throughout the chapters. These all expand on a basic idea presented in the text. Use these as you see fit, but don’t just think of them as supplemental. For the sake of brevity and the fact that many people can represent their area of expertise better than I can, these links contain foundational knowledge you will find useful. Click and enjoy!

Educators will find a post-script that discusses curriculum modeling in response to digital and tactile art expressions.

For those who are self-educating, I describe some exercises and projects we have used in the studio, and I often link these back to the exercises found elsewhere in newMediaWiki. Exercises generally reinforce knowledge of visual elements and principles. Projects can kick-start the imagination to create original works. Instead of cookie-cutter tutorial results, you can populate a portfolio or demo reel with a high degree of authorship.

Finally, 3D modeling generally touches upon and integrates many disciplines with many jargon sets. This can be frustrating! Thus, the text refers to a group of Glossaries that define terms germane to modeling, visual design, drawing, photography, cinema, and performance art. You may be unfamiliar with more than one of these disciplines. That makes any metaphor that references them opaque to you! So these glossaries will help you understand unfamiliar terms and processes.

1. Shakespeare, William. “The Second Part of Henry the Fourth: Scene III.” In Hylton, Jeremy, ed. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare | MIT. 1993-2010. http://shakespeare.mit.edu/2henryiv/2henryiv.1.3.html[↩]