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Geologist? :)
You have it or you don't, is true with ANY creative medium. From cellos pianos to graffiti art.
And lest we confuse Photoshop insta-artists with the other 99% of COMPUTER ARTists from ZBrush/Modo/Blender...including the creative PAs of Daz3D stores....
2D computer art is just a subcategory of CG art. Creating an image with digital 3D subject/objects is hard. Creating many frames of 3D things, astromically exponentially insanely harder.
Myth: "computer know-how make it easier to make art"
Reality: it is at least 1000% HARDER to manifest the same creative vision using 3D brushes vs traditional brushes.
Any talented traditional painter sculptor who persevered and crossed the 3D threshold know computer art is far harder to create.
3D is hard.
Give an elephant oil paint brush, sure. Give a smart chimp ZBrush and see what happens.
One day, I took my established 6-figure-per-commission-painting artist sister (medium: oil/water/mix), on a trip through the best works on CGsociety, ZBrush, DS galleries.
She noted without prompting: It takes FAR MORE technical discipline AND creative imagination to translate one's vision onto digital canvases.
She called me and "my kind" perfectionistic masochists. I laughed, she's right.
The point here:
Art-ness is not a subjective thing; talented masters of traditional brushes will appreciate the talented masters of digital brushes...
Artists who mastered their tools, no matter their style/medium/taste, know art when they see art.
Computer aided animation just take out some soul-destroying grunt work, that's all. But if you want to play with 3D digital paint brushes you better have extra discipline, time, money reservoir on standby.
The way way higher entry cost - mental energy + time cost - is why, very few traditional media artists bother to go 3D.
But honest traditional artists no longer claim physical ink is harder to master than digital pixols and voxels...
Because
The evidence are all around us if we care to SEE....
Given the same talent capacity, computer art demands far more mental and creative energy than traditional media.
Again, go back and actually read the definition of art vs. fine art.
The problem is that you can't take your own personal definitions of art and make others accept it as their own, because in the end art is a personal and subjective thing and there's no law that says that anyone has to agree on a common definition. Which is pretty much how it's always been since the inventor of the first airbrush decided to brighten up his cave wall with a few bison renders. No doubt there were at least three other groups of cave people who came by afterword, with one group thinking that the whole thing was pretty neat, a second group thinking that the idea was interesting but the execution sucked and used way too much ochre pigment and a third that was upset that the natural beauty of the wall had been horribly defaced and began kvetching about a possible future in which teenagers would run rampant spraying this nasty graffiti stuff everywhere. And yes, there was probably a fourth group who wanted to know where the pornogrphic cave paintings were being kept, but we're not talking about them sinced the porn artists of the time were mainly into sculpture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurines
.
The issue is "Poser art" = "click art", too much of it is just someone loading in pre-built everything and hitting render.
I get in that trap again and again:
"Pose my figure, choosing some props and click render ... wait that light looks weird. then sspending at least two more houres on the lights. Now click render ... oh no a poke through. Send to zbrush fixing the spot. Perfect, allthough her right arm doesn't look right. Back to zBrush creating a pose fix morph. Haha... ahm maybe this prop whould look better over there. ect, ect final render after 7 more houres."
So much about a click and render, that never happens to me allthough intended. ;-)
From my observation, the 'Poser art/click art' is what you get when people want to 1.) Accomplish something quickly and 2.) Accomplish it cheaply. Natural result: it looks bad, artificial, hasty, like that unique phenomenon of 'Poser art'. where often the most important part is a naked or near-naked body posing for the viewer.
Willing to spend time? Money? Both? It's not the same. But you know how art has therapeutic benefits? Let me tell you, arranging and dressing and lighting virtual dolls in Daz Studio can provide those same benefits.
Without falling into the 'is it art?' trap, I will observe that creating a picture with brush and paint requires a certain eye for shape and outline, as well as technical proficiency with creating the vision of what you want on the page. Tools like Poser do not require that 'eye' for shape (but, to my sadness, sculpting in Blender et al. does), and in that sense is more akin to photography in that the art is in setting up shots with 'existing' subjects. And knowing about light and color, composition, and so on. Technical proficiency with getting your vision into the picture is of course part of it too.
Reality: With DS, I can make pictures that I like, and some other people seem to like too. I will never be able to do that with traditional media.
The assertion, "It is at least 1000% HARDER to manifest the same creative vision using 3D brushes vs traditional brushes," is not _my_ reality.
Incidentally, consult Daniel Pinkwater's children's book, 'Bear's Picture', for Wisdom on this subject.
A person who knows nothing about anatomy or sculpting, will not fair any better sculpting in 3D than they will sculpting in clay, and there are plenty of animations and renders on the internet that attest to that fact. Actual scupting takes some skill and practice no matter what medium you use.
And regardless to what one thinks of Daz base figures, they are without a doubt much better than a complete novice is likely to turn out on their first attempts at modeling. A bad picture done with completely original content is going to be looked at no differently than a bad picture done with "click art". The bar for what people expect when they see good 3d art has been raised for the public, the same as it has for most graphic art. Stuff you got away with 20 years ago while state of the art then, and a real accomplishment in the medium, would be laughed at by the average neophyte today who knows nothing about the process, and doesn't really care. A lot of people creating stuff for public consumption seem to want to be oblivious to that fact and rail against audience ignorance, but that is the landscape ALL artists find themselves in over time, unless they simply want to "Ed Wood" it, and live in their own world where everything is judged on an equal playing field.
Everybody is not at the level of an Alex Ross or a Piotr Kolus, and they still wouldn't be even if they weren't using Daz/Poser, but because those programs exist, they give people someone they can point a finger at and call inferior or "non-artists" thus making them in effect the n***s of the art world.
But what about a Bob Ross?
Seriously, though, a lot of the art that people see on display in public places is as much about technique and process as it is about creative vision. Go to one of those "starving artist" sales or a mall art boutique and look at the sides of the unframed paintings. What you'll frequently find, especially on landscapes, is that the painted areas continue to the very edge of the canvas, as the artwork was actually cut from a huge canvas where roughly the same image was painted over and over again side by side, then split apart and remounted seperately... and in many cases there are multiple artists working on the same canvas. For that matter, many of the great artists had multiple assistants who actually did a large portion of the hands-on work, while others used technical devices like the camera obscura and magic lanterns. While there's a definite degree of skill required to slather on the paint, does the simple fact of being done on canvas and applied manually with a brush make a piece of factory art somehow inherantly superior to something that's done in the virtual realm? And at what point are you simply using the best tools available and not "cheating" somehow? The division between fine art and craft isn't a hard line, it's a graduated fade and the only term that encompasses all of them is art.
I don't think that's true. People can paint without having these skills and/or applying the effort to use them. For example, I've seen plenty of paintings featuring animals by artists who clearly never took the time to study the animal or how it moves.
And this is why these programs are so great. So many have the drive and the imagination to show the world amazing things but they may not have the ability through traditional means to do so. Just because one cannot draw, sculpt, or paint does not mean they do not have the heart of an "artist". Now if you have that imagination and the knowledge of how to use the computer you can make whatever you desire a reality, and nobody should belittle you for being able to do so. That is why I like Poser/Studio, because my drawing style is a little too Elfquest like and I wanted a different look for my own character designs, something with a little more depth, something that I could add effects and backgrounds to, something that would relieve me of my own long list of shortcomings.
These programs made that easier for me achieve. I could learn how to create nice looking scenes with tutorials online in less than a few hours a day, if I were to try to learn new techniques with my drawing skill I would be working and working for much longer to get to a desired level, and even then as I have my own style just like everyone else, the change may not reach my goal. Trust me I've tried to move away from the stylized comic look to the anime look and it did not work out at all no matter how hard I tried.
But with Studio I can go from a realistic image to a cartoon image in just a few clicks. It was stated above very well in a few words, point and click. This is one reason CG artists are looked down on from the traditional artist standpoint, this was the point I was trying to make as I am coming from both sides. Poser/Studio artists are hit from all sides, from those that believe computers do all of the work, to those who work with CG art and who feel that they are merely dressing up a computer generated barbie, throwing some light on it, and clicking a button to render it.
How would one rate the ability of a person who can draw a lifelike reference of someone, to the person who can render a lifelike image of a Daz model? Their work may hold the same merit, but the person who drew the image by hand has a natural born talent for it and no schooling, while the person who rendered the image did not have an inkling of artistic talent in their bones.
This is where everyone has their own opinion. Some judge art by the end results, others judge art by the means on which one attains the end result.
Some random thoughts:
If you're creating art with traditional media, is there a difference in the artistic merit of the piece between one where the artist onbserved people on the street and then created his synthesis of the human form, or one who looked up the average dimensions of a human being and used a ruler while doing his preliminary sketches? Is there a difference between someone who has an innate talent for painting the pattern of light and shadows for a particular time and place, and one who hires a model and places lights and then paints the light and shadows that fall on the model? Or between someone who has a natural instinct for the Golden Ratio and one who has guidelines drawn on his sketchpad as a compositional aid?
It seems to me that while someone who can do some of these things without any artificial aid has a special talent, the fact that some artists can do some things by eye and uses artificial aids to do other things doesn't make their art any less artistic. There's no hard line that says using X amount of technology is okay but using any more than that makes something less worthy of being called art.
Actually... I'm not sure I know any traditional artists who look down on CG. Heck, I'm not sure I know any traditional artists who don't use CG to enhance their art somehow. And the (professional, non-3d) artists I do know personally don't seem to look down on me at all for making stuff I enjoy. The people I worry about looking down on me are the people who don't actually make art at all, because the ones who do are happy I've found an enjoyable way to express myself.
Though I do feel the need to point out that the ability to ''draw a lifelike reference of somebody' is no more inborn than using a mouse. Twenty years ago I spent quite a lot of time engaged in studying 'traditional art' and it always drove me nuts what people called 'talent' and what had actually been the result of years of study and practice. The only 'talent' there is the interest and drive to keep studying.
(OK, my eldest son has 'inborn talent' but he's also autistic and not distracted by the visual processing glitches that distract most early artists.)
ETA: Think of it this way. I can absolutely draw an amazing portrait of somebody with a pencil (or ink). I've studied it (for years, I might add. 'Art' is a college major, y'know.) I know the techniques, people have oohed and ahhed over them. Or a leopard or whatever. Now, to do a great picture, I'll need my own reference. This is true of almost all artists, though--it's something early artists are quickly disabused of, the idea that great artists don't need photo references. And frankly, by the time I've done the detailed, shaded sketch, I'm out of art time. Which is a shame, because what I _really_ enjoy is coloring and shading and lighting and mood and experimenting without ruining everything (aka 'save file').
Daz lets me focus on what I enjoy. Am I doing great stuff? No, I just started two months ago, and man, does this software have quite a learning curve. Just like drawing and painting in real life. Whether you call yourself an artist or a technician or a hobbyist, whether your skills transfer between mediums (and some do. Framing and perspective transfer, I've discovered) or whether you're helpless outside the medium you've studied, if you want to make something really _good_, that makes everybody go 'Wow!', you're going to have to work really hard and learn techniques and practice.
I think we've got two different discussions taking place, and they are getting intermixed. People put down poser art, but not necessarily CG art in it's entirerty. Also people don't tend to put down all poser art, but rather a potion of it; that portion generally being people who use the program at a very elementary level and submit it into the public arena.
Because Poser is easy there simply seems to be a lot of it; hence people tend to comment on work done with poser more in sites where cg art is discussed. You would see a similar version of this same discussion going on in traditional comic art boards where people tend to disparage Westerners who try and emulate Japanese manga techniques, and do it badly. The discussion isn't so much about "art", but rather what constitutes good and bad art, or rather good technique vs mediocre technique. One can say that there is no such thing, but audiences have preferences and things that they like or don't like and there is NOTHING an artist can do about that, other than keep their work in a closet and never show it to anyone. The Poser debate is nothing new in art. I'm pretty sure this discussion will eventually find it's way into 3D Printing as well.
If you want to see people up in arms about an "artist" (and even I use that term loosely in this case) look up the name Greg Land see what he's doing and the stuff people are saying about him.
Well said and some beautiful examples of art...
In my view it's the end result that counts not the process when judging a finished artwork but I do know that there are times when process is also being judged.
Yep...there is two separate discussions.
If you took photos of a painting classes work and uploaded them to the net what would be the difference between those and the people who do that with Poser or DS. Both are beginners. I've been doing this stuff for ten years and would still rate myself around the middle level yet others start and within months are accomplishing wonderful artworks. We all have different aptitudes/skills and different levels of knowledge that we bring to what we do...no ones journey is going to be the same.
Yeppp
OP raised a very specific thing:
Daz Studio is a solid + the more popular creative tool. Why is Poser getting the genre alpha status? (answered already)
Some of the 'explanations':
Then it starts to branch to top level stuff...
Is digital art even art in the first place? Can CG art ever gain fine art status? Is style over-rated? Is taste a thing? My baby kitten made iPad doodle masterpiece?
It seems proliferation of branches is ok, so be it...
I want to clear a particular severe mix-up of Creative MEDIA = artwork QUALITY VALUE.
In any art universe, unless it's old mud crayon on a dirty stucco wall, your chosen paint/canvas has very little to do with your final artistry.
Synth music could give goosebump spiritual experience. A poorly played violin could kill (ask children of home based music tutors)
To make sure the overall digital art related conversation is in sync with the rest of the CG soceity on this planet...
Yes I am generous witht he valuation bit, I know I know, thank you thank you....lol
I hope it is clear now, the concern of 'is digital art also art?' is very very weird to most career artists. The pros haven't heard that one for some time now - even from the most purist Luddite friends.
Please also note the specificity of Daz Studio as a Digital Photography Studio vs the other advanced specialist 3D tools.
Still, keep it mind, the OP is speaking of the 2 lower level cateogories:
(DS/Poser user type; DS/Poser user output quality = image/reputation).
The entire discussion are being constantly steered toward the less relevant top 3 levels.
But now that we know how big the Art > Visual art > Digital art > 3D art world is, and where Daz Studio fits in, hopefully - regardless of our technical skill level or artistic taste, self-labelled 3D artists of Daz Studio forum will more likely be speaking from the same page!
Your photography analogy is spot on...
There are no 3D brushes in Daz Studio. There are exquisitely-made 3D Lego bricks for anyone at any skill levels to arrange and photograph their vision with ease.
These 3D Lego bricks of goddesses and props are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and HARD to create. The well-crafted ones are high quality 3D artworks in their own right, deserve better than being minimised as mere digital brushes....
Of course, for the minority of skilled DS users, making 3D things, piece of cake... But I was still understating it with It is at least 1000% HARDER to manifest the same creative vision using 3D brushes vs traditional brushes. And I said it as someone with traditional art flair. I don't think any competent traditional painters who've tried to crack ZBrush/ 3Dcoat/ Mudbox would argue that simple fact.
3D art creation can get even harder - depending on software design, and for every additional animation frame...
My point in relevance to OP: even most DS users are photographers, not 3D painters, for sake of art, please give the technical craft of 3D basics a bit more time, attention, and love.
Acknowledging the broader reality and scope of 3D art industry would help raise standards...
I am not an artist... just your typical DAZ/Poser hobbyist/content hoarder. The term Poser Art probably took hold before DAZ Studio became the dominant hobbyist software... just like Yahoo before Google... or MySpace before Facebook. I am sure there will come a time when DAZ art or DAZZling art will become the norm.
The other discussion of art I have no opinion except I feel hobbyist have every right to post their renders to DAZ galleries or anywhere else. Its not spam. Its their personal stuff maybe they want to store together or share with friends and family. Its DAZ who shows everthing together on the galleries tab not the user.
The other slightly offtopic comment I will make is so what if a user renders a character they bought as is.... if they see no reason to change the face why should they.. do we need to hide or cover up the great morphs we have bought just so its made different (probably not better). Same with bought textures ect. Do we really need to changes even though we don't have a reason too? Same with a bought pose... if it works use it as is... you bought it.
There is something instalntly recognisable about Poser/Daz art that I can usually pick. I can often distinguish between Renderosity and Daz products and the PAs who make them by how they look. I've been in the game for a long time so perhaps I just recognise products in "Poser Art" renders that gives the game away. But that said, there is a quality (not necessarilary a bad one) about different rendering programs that is recognisable. To me Vue renders look different to C4D or Max or DS, but Poser renders look about the same to me as DS and vise versa.
Exactly...
There's no hard line that says using X amount of (CREATIVE MEDIA OF CHOICE) is okay but using any more than that makes something less WORTHY of being called ART.
Model media could be: sea shell, diamonds, socks, 3dsmax vertices, iRay paint. Music media could be tin can, chopsticks, gongs, xyz brand digital strings.
What has any of these to do with the worth of final product?
What has any of these to do with the art-ness of the piece of artwork?
Also one should take into account that saying "you never get a second chance to make a first impression". The first flurry of poser art that people began to see show up on a regular basis predominately came from the fetish communities and any stigma those might have had attached to them carried over to the program itself.
A similar thing happened with the introduction of anime to America. While every type story you can imagine has been done in the anime medium in japan, it was typically hentai (a subgenre of explicitly sexual content), or extremely violent anime which first showed up in the states identified as anime, and even to this day that is the image that first comes to mind in many people when they hear the word. Control of your brand is important, because once people have attached an image to your brand it takes much more effort to change that image in the minds of the public. Semi-nude and nude, blank faced overly endowed women no matter how wonderfully rendered are going to continue to give people that poser-vibe, simply because there is and was so much of it, and to be honest going by Sturgeons Law, a great deal of it is simply bad.
I'll say that when I load up Deviantart, I'm struck between wildly different stuff:
Jaw-dropping amazing art, paint or CGI.
Really amateur drawn/painted stuff. Really clunky terrible Poser CGI.
Fetish stuff that makes me want to bleach my eyeballs.
Nude photos.
So, yeah, lots of stuff. And I see just as much bad Poser art as bad drawn art. So hey
In deviantart they want you to categorize them under stock characters that is why I never bother joining the cg groups there.
Jeweller?
It's been said, but I will add my agreement that mainly people see it all as "Poser Art" because Poser has been around for a very long time, AND, there's a very specific sort of look to the vast majority of images that people share with the internet world. Go to any online art gallery for 3D art and you will see 1000's upon 1000's of poorly done images with no shadows, no grounding of characters, no expressions and no thought put into the work... and even worse is that a very large part of it is all that PLUS porn as well (and that's both DS and Poser images). It's become synonymous with the program as for many years Poser was the program used to create that sort of image. If that is the majority of art you see made with that tool set it will eventually be assumed that those tools are only good for that sort of art. It also didn't help that much of this art was posted to galleries that were intended for more serious artists or students who were learning to go into the professional CGI industry and it gave everyone a bad sort of impression of the capabilities of both the program and its users... and as they say "the first impression is the one that counts..."
Unfortunately, once a person has formed an impression or an opinion on something, it is often impossible to change that impression no matter what you do or what you show to prove it otherwise, and it has in effect given us all a bad name by association... and the fact that people have a tendancy to look down on those less skilled or educated than themselves doesn't help.
As for the other question being discussed here... Is it art? If a 2 year old dips his fingers in paint and then spatters it all over a peice of paper it would still be called art... It might not be taken seriously, but art it is... and you'll notice that in the first part of this post I refered to even the bad Poser/DAZ images as art. There's no real difference between a badly done 3D image and a kid splattering paint on paper... it may not be good art, but it's still art..
I do have to say though that I often post my work to sites that cater to "high-end" programs and "high-end" GC artists, and I've never once been put down for being a Poser artist or attacked for the software I use... and I make no bones about the fact that I use DS and Poser... but perhapse that's more because I take my time, work out what I want my images to say, and am willing to take more than a half hour to set up and render an image. I often spend hours or even days just tweaking lights, nevermind positioning items, posing figures and etc before even hitting render the first time (and my first render is almost never the final one, I render frequently as I tweak things to see how it will affect my image) and it shows in the quality of the finished image. Lesson here is that if you don't put the effort into your work it won't be taken seriously any more than the 2 year old and his finger paint... If your art is being put down for being "Poser Art" then instead of complaining about it being because of the "elitists", perhaps you should examine your own art more closely to see what you could do better...
I mean no offense to anyone, the point i'm making here is that your art is only going to be as good as the effort you put into it... if you don't take the effort then you can't complain if it's not treated like the Mona Lisa... I also realize that for every person that has tallent there will be many others that will just never be at the same level of skill because not everyone has the natural tallent that others might display... not everyone has the tallent of a master... I sure don't (I wish I could be a Da Vinci or a Van Gogh, but I'm just not that tallented and I've spent most of my life as a traditional artist)...
My 4 cents.
Poser, like Photoshop was the only game in town for a long while. That was the true answer to the branding - brand, literally being stamped/iron-branded in our minds.
Ask away- what ELSE do you use to edit photos?
What ELSE is out there for 3-d people?
Since it was so POPular, it was the goto. - and it extended beyond the people that use it. You start to name tools and programs - the reach tells you about the brand. Happens in every media. You know the names of sports figures, but never watched them play. You know celebrities and can't explain why they are famous.
Daz is known by Daz-users and that's about it. For a decade Poser was it so Poser is the established brand.
It is an insult to say something looks photoshopped.(When it's not supposed to)
It's an insult to EVER name the tools when it comes to art. Same with music etc.
"Looks like it was shot with a gopro" = insult
Well, gee GoPro was like the ULTIMATE invention when it arrived. Now there so many samey-looking videos, it's almost hackey to use a gopro'
Art only has two merits. Technical proficiency and a human statement.
You either go "Wow, that looks great" or say "Wow, that's meaningful"
You get both and you've done something.
The subjective part is How Much and Which one.
When 3-d was new, the look was impressive- it was different and new. That was enough.
Now you can create anything so your action seqeunce or effect better say something in context.
The look of today's B-Movie would have been a classic when I was a kid.
When you look at art, we always look for the human contribution. What was the artist trying to say?
"Poser art" and lots of art pieces are only suffering from the fact that the artist wasn't saying anything.
And in turn, their art doesn't say anything. Mostly, you need enough skill to express a sentiment.
If I see (and hear in music) too much of the process and the tools, you lose the ability to connect with the whole--
which is the reason you created this piece to begin with.
I prefer fruit juice. :P
As I see it, it ultimately makes no difference to me what software/renderer you use; what matters to me is whether the final rendered image pleases me. And I'm sure you can create a beautiful render with any software/renderer; it just depends on how you do it. Apart from that, our preferences for different types of software are IMO largely subjective. Some like DAZ, some prefer Poser. Let's live and let live. :)
On the other hand, the more experience you get with an artform, the better able you are to pick out the individual elements. It becomes nearly uncontrollable. And it DOES hurt your ability to connect with the whole... but that's you, not the general audience. Thus explaining the great divide between THIS IS AMAZING and THIS IS SCHLOCK to describe the same work that shows up in every field.
And it DOES hurt your ability to connect with the whole...
You have the same two choices. You either react to WHAT they chose to show you or you react to HOW it was done.
Being familiar with the process just gives you an informed opinion behind the mechanics.
I don't' create art to impress other artists. You usually do that at the start of your passion when you don't have an established voice.
It's the "Guys, what do you guys think about this?" phase. For me to be removed from seeing parts from the whole- there has to be something I don't understand about the creation.
How did he get that render so crisp? How did they get that reflection so right? What texture is that? what settings....ya ya ya...
That's the part where I struggle to understand the Technical Excellence/skill on display. That's someone doing something beyond my skill level- therefore it's impressive.
And it remains that way until my understanding and/or skills increase enough to remove any mystery.
-------------
The opposite side is how did they think to do that? That's creativity and imagination on display.
When that rises to a high enough level - beyond what you'd ordinarily think of, you're impressed.
Technical - hard to do
Creative - hard to think up
That's the highest aspiration of the human form.
You know it when you see it, you feel it when it's presented to you.
So in my trials and tribulations to get ANYONE to take a chance on my art, I had one person flat-out state that he just doesn't like CGI art for his books. (Although he said to convey some of my less CGI 'looking' stuff, because at least some of it seemed acceptable to him)