Is drawing ability required to 3D model?

Technically, no, you don't have to be very good at drawing to be a good 3D artist, as the process is more akin to sculpting.

However, the ability to look at the third dimensional world around you and translate that to create a believable image on a two dimensional surface (i.e. draw good) can really help out while doing 3D, from creating concept art for yourself and others, to learning about shape language, to hand painting textures, and more. Might be worth trying out on occasion, while working on 3D as your main skill set.

I started out in kindergarten, coloring outside the lines with wax crayons. I doodled in all of my notebooks throughout my school years, and received a lot of positive feedback, so I stuck with it.
I saw some real improvement when I started copying some of my favorite comic covers, found on an image repository, back when the internet was young.
Then saw another jump in skill when I started drawing things around me, and studied perspective.

There are tons of resources out there these days - from video tutorials on YouTube, Gnomon or Gumroad, to online articles, to forums with members willing to give critique, even books at the local library if you want to go old school.

It's true that you have a lot of catching up to do if you want to master the skills, but people much older than you have done exactly that, it's all about dedication.

About the age...irrelevant. People are older than you either still doing or just starting with doing...its all good.

About modelling without drawing...I think it can be done just fine. I'm not that much of an artist(though I probably would be much better if I dedicated myself to it) but I can do 3d modelling much better than I can draw. The only issue I run across is that it is much easier to model from references, and since I can't draw my references either come from somewhere else, or they just look really bad(think basic outlines if that, no real shading). So my self-drawn references end up being just "reminders" for what I had in my head at the time.

Thanks for your replies I appreciate it! I picked up a couple books, "drawing for utter beginners" and "perspective made easy". Might get "drawing on the right side of the Brain" too.

So I guess drawing is a bonus in terms of the modeling, but really helps in terms of being able to author your own original concept art to create things that you can't find real life references for? Would that be accurate?

Does drawing benefit for texturing and materials? Which I have no idea where to even get started there.

Thanks again for taking the time to answer me.

As the others pointed out, drawing isn't needed.

With that said most professional 3D artist can draw and do other art forms. it's inevitable. The principles that allow you to make 3D models, learning solid shape and forms, also allow you to understand how to draw. You just have to practice a bit.

When starting out you can focus on 3D first, then when you find it hard to learn things move into 2D or animation.

Character artist also have a great need for fashion design, it also improves your UV mapping; as making clothes is the reverse of UV mapping.(to think my grandmother was making 3D models before I was.)

Digital painting is also used a lot during texturing.

2 hours ago, elviscg said:

Does drawing benefit for texturing and materials? Which I have no idea where to even get started there.

Yes as you can fill in missing details. The references you collect will never be 100%, so being able to create stuff from nothing is important.

Not a book but way more useful:

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Polycount

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/TexturingTutorials

Polycount is a community of experts and hobbyist. You will also see that they have forums for 2D because like I said, most 3D modelers move into 2D over time.

18 minutes ago, Scouting Ninja said:

As the others pointed out, drawing isn't needed.

With that said most professional 3D artist can draw and do other art forms. it's inevitable. The principles that allow you to make 3D models, learning solid shape and forms, also allow you to understand how to draw. You just have to practice a bit.

When starting out you can focus on 3D first, then when you find it hard to learn things move into 2D or animation.

Character artist also have a great need for fashion design, it also improves your UV mapping; as making clothes is the reverse of UV mapping.(to think my grandmother was making 3D models before I was.)

Digital painting is also used a lot during texturing.

Yes as you can fill in missing details. The references you collect will never be 100%, so being able to create stuff from nothing is important.

Not a book but way more useful:

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Polycount

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/TexturingTutorials

Polycount is a community of experts and hobbyist. You will also see that they have forums for 2D because like I said, most 3D modelers move into 2D over time.

Thanks for the reply. What do you mean they move in to 2D? Like what?

So I shouldn't worry about learning to draw right away? It's all overwhelming so I'm kind of confused right now on what I should be doing to progress.

If 3d is your interest, I don't think you HAVE to worry about drawing right away. That being said, it wouldn't hurt anything if you did get into drawing. And yes, it could indeed help with making concepts much better, allowing yourself to better get ideas from your head onto paper, instead of doing bad concepts(like I do) and relying on your memory of your original idea.

3 hours ago, elviscg said:

Thanks for the reply. What do you mean they move in to 2D? Like what?

When you start you have a clear path, there is a lot to learn and lots of tutorials and books on it. Then you hit a wall, you can make anything but for some reason it's not as good as the best 3D artist.

It's at this point where you start to learn art, what makes good art. Learning this means studying and often doing traditional art forms. The good news is at this point you have developed a "Artist eye" that allows you to break objects into forms and solid shapes; you use the same skill in any visual art.

What is meant with you need to know how to draw a object to be able to model it, means that the same knowledge that allows people to draw is what you need to model.

4 hours ago, elviscg said:

So I shouldn't worry about learning to draw right away?

I wouldn't advice it. I was already a professional 3D modeler, environment artist, before I learned 2D. That said I couldn't make realistic humans before I could draw a face.

If your just starting, you should focus on 3D.

It was learning how to draw both sides of the face that thought me the trick for modeling a face. Tip, turn the reference upside down because your mind will no longer think of it as a face; allowing you to see the shapes and forms.

45 minutes ago, Scouting Ninja said:

When you start you have a clear path, there is a lot to learn and lots of tutorials and books on it. Then you hit a wall, you can make anything but for some reason it's not as good as the best 3D artist.

That kinda depressed me lol.. that if I get good at 3D I'll realize it's still not that good

51 minutes ago, Scouting Ninja said:

When you start you have a clear path, there is a lot to learn and lots of tutorials and books on it. Then you hit a wall, you can make anything but for some reason it's not as good as the best 3D artist.

It's at this point where you start to learn art, what makes good art. Learning this means studying and often doing traditional art forms. The good news is at this point you have developed a "Artist eye" that allows you to break objects into forms and solid shapes; you use the same skill in any visual art.

What is meant with you need to know how to draw a object to be able to model it, means that the same knowledge that allows people to draw is what you need to model.

I wouldn't advice it. I was already a professional 3D modeler, environment artist, before I learned 2D. That said I couldn't make realistic humans before I could draw a face.

If your just starting, you should focus on 3D.

It was learning how to draw both sides of the face that thought me the trick for modeling a face. Tip, turn the reference upside down because your mind will no longer think of it as a face; allowing you to see the shapes and forms.

If you could've told your beginner self any advice when you started learning 3D without drawing ability, knowing what you know now, what would it have been?

35 minutes ago, elviscg said:

If you could've told your beginner self any advice

There is no such thing as negative criticism. A person criticized your work took a interest in it, learn to mine that for ways to improve.

Don't bother trying to make everything one mesh. Learning how to use clipping meshes creates amazing effects, looks more realistic, lowers the poly count, makes texture baking easy and is easier to model. (I wasted a lot of years trying to make "perfect" meshes only to find that they are imperfect.)

A perfect normal map does not exist, because it would be blue and unneeded.

8bit is as good as 16bit except for height maps.

Use primitives and Booleans to block out designs. This saves a huge amount of time and means you don't need to go back.

Learn 3D sculpting and modeling. There is no "best" way to make models and the more you know the better you can work.

There is no magic bullet, don't waste time looking for software and tools to make things easy. They never worked as promised and the ones that do work quickly become world know; so they are easy to find.

There are hundreds of things but these where huge time wasters for me.

When your more experienced it won't matter what software you use. However it will matter to employers and for the wrong reasons, so when they ask just tell them you use the best on the market. Since there is no real best, it isn't even a lie.

One thing I could add to that list...especially if you aren't working in the AAA industry(but even then) is that sometimes you have to stop and call it "good enough." We are our own worst critics, and the work will never be perfect, and if you keep judging your work like that, you will never finish it.

Also, I agree that there is no "magic bullet" but there are lots of tricks you can do to get things done quicker. Prims and Booleans are good examples. Modifiers are also great ways to do things. A quick asteroid base model can be made by making a sphere out of a subdivided cube and then applying displacement maps(with cloud textures for that). You could make a spiked ball by duplicating the same spike onto each vertex of a subdivided cube(sphere shaped once it is done). Even the free Blender has lots of these neat little tricks to get things going. The same applies to 2d sometimes, mainly with Photoshop and all the filters it has.

Thanks for your replies I appreciate it.

As an amateur self-taught 3D artist, I've definitely found drawing to be a useful skill. However I'd say your priorities are a bit different if your focus is solely on learning to draw your own concept art as opposed to learning to draw nice pictures for their own sake. The phrase "Concept Art" usually invokes beautiful digital paintings, but if your goal is just to make a reference to help you build a model, your needs are far simpler. You don't really need perspective, or shading, as these are things that the model will handle for you. You certainly need an understanding of how the forms should look in 3D space (which you would need to know for shading), but I honestly find that this is something more easily figured out when you're actually working in 3D, rather than drawing.

The key here is taking advantage of how much faster it is to draw a sketch than to make a model. You can more easily figure out the proportions and work with the overall silhouette a lot easier when it's just a few lines than when its a few hundred vertices. By contrast, once you find a design you do like, it seems much easier to refine it as a 3D model than as a sketch, so I rarely spend that much time polishing the 2D side.

Learning how to paint is definitely an important skill for hand-painted textures, but I personally don't have the patience for it. I've gravitated toward styles that require very little texturing, like flat shaded low poly, and enjoyed all the time I've spent *not* texturing.

That is a lot of the point I was making for my personal drawing skills(lack of really). I'll make crappy drawings at times just so I don't forget what I'm modelling, and it is basically filled in outlines, no real shading or anything like that, just enough so I have a "direction to go" with my modelling, and so I don't forget what was in my head at the time.

3 minutes ago, kburkhart84 said:

That is a lot of the point I was making for my personal drawing skills(lack of really). I'll make crappy drawings at times just so I don't forget what I'm modelling, and it is basically filled in outlines, no real shading or anything like that, just enough so I have a "direction to go" with my modelling, and so I don't forget what was in my head at the time.

Yeah, that's basically my approach to it. I feel like a a "real artist" would tell me to focus on the fundamentals or something before trying to do half the stuff I've messed with, but honestly I feel like my game art has improved more from actually making stuff (for real projects that actually interest me) than from practicing drawing in a vacuum.

I'm with you...actual practice is better than fundamentals often enough. And quite often the fundamentals come with said practice too.

It would be really nice if I knew how to draw. I need to spend a lot of time studying anatomy and such and trying different ideas. I think drawing/painting that would be faster and allow me to study more.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to draw although I've studied it just a little bit after enrolling in a 3D modeling art program.

Talking about "fundamentals", I can speak from my experience as a musician. Fundamentals are everything. I think that's just as true for painting and drawing as much as music, from what I've seen not being really able to do either myself.

Fundamentals for drawing would be things like drawing circles and ellipses as well as other primitives in 3D perspective. Those are skills that you are going to use like all the time and you can only get good at them by practicing. Learning perspective is also all about "fundamentals". Having correct perspective is one of the primary differences between an amature and a professional, although I've noticed a lot of professionals have perspective that's a slight bit off and manage to get away with it even in professional art. But having it right, really takes pretty much any piece up a level.

Practicing fundamentals is probably the most important thing. Bad practice would be practicing the same thing over and over again that you already knew how to do years ago. That's not practice. Practice is about doing things you can't do and growing from the experience of learning to do the things you could not do last week. Fundamentals is at the core of that.

For musicians, it's about how many hours you practiced fundamentals that you could not do last week. Thus, every week, you are learning new fundamentals that increase your dexterity with your instrument, your muscle memory, your ability to hear, your rhythm, and your knowledge of what you are doing. Knowing more than you knew the week before, every week is what makes you grow. Practicing the same thing you've been good at forever is not practice.

From what little I know of painting and drawing it works the same way, although practice is really the key here and sometimes you may be practicing things that make you better or fundamentals even without realizing that you are practicing that. There is no substitute for just "doing it". Hope that's helpful advice and not just being "preachy".

On 18/01/2018 at 9:05 PM, BBeck said:

It would be really nice if I knew how to draw. I need to spend a lot of time studying anatomy and such and trying different ideas. I think drawing/painting that would be faster and allow me to study more.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to draw although I've studied it just a little bit after enrolling in a 3D modeling art program.

If you are serious about learning to draw, you might take a look at the book "How to Draw: drawing and sketching objects and environments from your imagination".

As far as texturing, we are moving into an era where no one really draws or paints textures anymore. PBR is starting to become an industry standard and so texturing is done with programs like Quixel and Substance. I've used both and I can't draw or paint to save my life. With both programs, you don't really texture by drawing or painting. In Substance, I do most of my painting with fill and masking. That's like painting in Photoshop with the bucket. Here is my DeviantArt page with some of my models on it:

https://www.deviantart.com/?section=&global=1&q=VirtuallyProgramming

All of those were "textured" with Substance. (The backgrounds are actual photographs.) I'm probably going to be posting a space ship interior that I've been working on for the past couple of month here in a couple of weeks when I finish it up. It used a lot more advanced techniques than anything I've posted so far.

And clothing for 3D games is starting to go to programs like Marvelous Designer. For that you don't need to study painting and drawing; you need to study tailoring. A friend of mine was half joking when he said, "You're probably going to start seeing advertisements from game development companies that say 'Tailor Wanted!'". It's true. The industry is heading towards ultra-realism to the point that you need real world skills, rather than the ability to draw and paint.

Don't get me wrong, I have mad respect for those who have the ability to draw and paint. They are going to be able to do things I'll never be able to do, most likely. For one thing, they are in a better position to do more "artistic" looking art. Hyper-realism is something I tend to prefer. But some of the games that have really blown me away visually are the ones that go in the complete opposite direction and make something artistic or surreal.

Plus, for concept art, I think it's generally easier for them to draw and paint ideas faster than modeling them allowing them to just learn and explore more ideas in the same amount of time.

But personally, I'm such a beginner with painting and drawing that it's a very low priority for me to learn. I need to spend thousands and thousands of hours on it to get even reasonably decent at it. I could be spending those hours modeling (and learning how to tailor - lol).

Advice I might give (and keep in mind I'm still very much a beginner at this): get into an art program or find a mentor/teacher.

For me, I started out (after my previous life as a musician) as a programmer (well, I actually started programming at age 12, but I didn't really start understanding how to program 3D graphics until about roughly 8 years ago). I got into modeling just because it was difficult to find really great free models someone wanted to donate to my non-revenue generating code projects. And my modeling skills were horrible. Really bad. Non-existent. Although I had spent years learning 3D Studio Max from books and such and had been using Blender for a couple of years. I knew I needed to practice in order to get decent. But my models were the 3D equivalent of stick figure drawings. I mean check out the intro montage to my YouTube channel because that has some of my models. Those were examples of coding projects I had done about 5 years ago. The nice looking car I got offline from someone else's tutorial (Riemers I think it was). The X-Wing, likewise was a download. And professor Zombie is a tutorial from a book that I went through. But like the block car and the horrible looking boat, those were my models.

I went from that to the stuff on my DeviantArt page in 6 months after I enrolled in the art program at Game Institute. A lot of that was because they push you to achieve more than you believe you can because if you had of asked me if it was possible for me to improve that much in 6 months, I would have laughed and said, "NO way!".

So, I think drawing and painting ability is useful and great for 3D artists, but my DeviantArt page shows what I've been able to do so-far without knowing how to draw or paint at all. I'm not the best 3D modeler out there. But those were all done after just being in an art program for 6 months and I continue to learn and get better every day.

Oh, I might also mention that I am about to publish a tutorial series on Blender on my YouTube channel "VirtuallyProgramming.com". I've already recorded about 80 minutes and I'm going to record at least another 30 tonight after I finish this. So, I'm hoping to have an entire series published out there in about a week from now. It's going to be an introduction to Blender for absolute beginners where I walk through all the processes I use by modeling a kitchen table and explaining everything as I do it.

My previous videos have all been about game math and coding because the art thing is relatively new to me.

Hey thanks for taking the time.

Those are great models.. what software do you use?

After thinking about it I just don't know if drawing is really necessary. I mean yeah for concept, unique stuff but in terms of your real world assets, I don't think it is. I have no desire to be an artistic person who can draw great on paper. Just enough to make something half decent. Rough sketches if you will.