130+ Resources For 3D Artists and Creators
Whether you’re a 3D master or a 3D newbie, we’re sure you can find some ideas for your digital toolbox in our collection of resources. We grouped all the resources in several batches — Tutorials, Texturing, Events, Artists and Content creators, Blender community, Productivity and others, to make it easier for you to digest and added a short description.
This list will be updated with more finds on the web, so if you, gold diggers, have any suggestions — go ahead and post a link in the comments below, and we’ll add it to the list!
And now — happy surfing and happy improving!
Download a free Zbrush materials bundle from Art Heroes here. Brand new character creation program is starting soon!
Tutorials
- 3dtotal — books, resources and tutorials for 3D artists
- Udemy — lots of courses and tutorial priced as low as 9.99
- Lynda.com — LinkedIn company on e-learning, subscription-based.
- Pluralsight — one of the biggest technology learning platforms
- Gnomon — computer graphics education for careers in the entertainment industry.
- Zbrushguides — learning hub for 3D artists
- Texturing.xyz Good amount of tutorials on how to use their maps
- ZClassroom — Pixologic official site with a bunch of excellent ZBrush-related tutorials and tips
→ Bonus — Art Heroes: we can't skip our own programs at Art Heroes! So if you're into character creation, make sure to check out what's coming!
Events
9. ZBrush Summit 2019 — Free annual event by Zbrush creators in LA
10. SIGGRAPH — two of the world’s largest, annual conferences on the theory and practice of computer graphics and interactive techniques: LA + Asia.
11. Trojan Horse was a Unicorn — epic annual event for 2D and 3D artists
12. Animayo — international festival with smaller editions all around the world
13. E3 — large-scale event covering a wide range of gaming, VFX and art domains
14. BFX — The UK’s largest visual effects, computer games & animation festival
15. FMX — Conference on Animation, Effects, Games and Immersive Media (Stuttgart)
16. SXSW — annual conglomerate of film, interactive media, and music festivals and conferences that happens mid-March in Austin, Texas
17. LightBox — California-based event, bringing together best artists from animation, live-action, illustration and gaming
18. Monsterpalooza — American multigenre convention focusing on horror, creatures and makeup work
19. IFCC — Croatia-based international digital art festival
20. IndustryWorkshops — one of the leading creative industry events, based in the UK
21. Playgrounds — conference and festival about concept art and design in animation, film and games
Artists and content creators
22. Marlon Nunez — 3D character artist, known for digital doubles and iconic pieces
23. CaptainDisilluision — a famous superhero debunking internet hoaxes.
24. Vitaly Bulgarov — concept designer, 3D artist and hard-surface modeller
25. Tor Frick — art director, concept designer and 3D generalist
26. David Revoy — a digital artist using 100% open-source
27. Ben Nicholas — senior concept artist, designer and photographer helping people to deal with depression by tweeting his journey
28. Kris Costa — kick-ass hyperrealism artist
29. Rafael Grassetti — Creates characters for games, toys and comics, and documents his process
Communities
30. CGSociety — Massive 3D art community, holds contests and workshops, regularly publishes production spotlights, and has a premium membership option
31. 3DTotal — the UK equivalent of CGSociety
32. ZbrushCentral — the major focus here is digital sculpting in Zbrush
33. Conceptart.org — ConceptArt is one of the premier forums on the web for artists who are interested in learning character, creature, and environment design. Not necessarily a 3D, but we all need the younger brother, right?
34. DeviantArt — a massive community for artists of every variety with hundreds of thousands of pieces of art uploaded every day
35. PARTcloud.net — Artwork showcases, 3D challenges and interviews with active members
36. Polycount — Polycount community focuses on game art
Images, textures, HDRIs, icons and photos
37. TextureHaven — high quality textures (8K, PBR) by Rob Tuytel. Licensed under Creative Commons 0.
38. HDRI Haven — High-quality HDRIs
39. HDRlabs — collection of HDRs from different fields
40. Poliigon — a huge library of textures, materials and HDR’s.
41. Creative Market — icons, images, graphics, fonts and more. Free content every week.
42. Unsplash — a library of free beautiful photos
Texturing
43. Texturing.xyz — High-end content library for 3D artists
44. Textures.com — Up to 15 free textures daily
45. Texturer.com — large variety of textures for artists and architects
46. CC0 Textures — public domain PBR textures
47. Texture Ninja — public domain textures
48. Materialize — a stand-alone tool for creating materials for use in games from images.
49. PixaFlux — PBR texture composer, visual scripting of image operations.
50. ArmorPaint — a stand-alone software designed for physically-based texture painting.
51. Substance 3D — 3D material creation tool, defacto the standard in the 3d graphics industry for PBR texturing.
3D assets
52. yobi3d — a robust 3D model search engine with the Search by Image and Search by 3D Model functionality.
53. CGtrader — 3D Models for VR / AR and CG projects
54. Turbosquid — Buy 3D models for your project
55. Free3d — 3D Models for Free
56. Archive3d — Download Free 3D Objects
57. Cadnav — Free 3D and cad models
Typography
58. Google Fonts — an extensive catalogue of open source designer web fonts.
59. Fontsquirrel — as they describe themselves, Free Font Utopia. High quality free fonts licensed for commercial use.
Blender community
60. Blender Network — Blender Foundation’s official partnership program, an online directory and social network for Blender professionals.
61. Aidy Burrows — CG artist, veteran game developer
62. James B. Candy — 3D scanner and film maker at Classy Dog Films.
63. Bill Barber — tutorial maker, runs BlenderBrit website.
64. Leonardo Braz — 3D artist with a huge potential.
65. Grant Wilk — 3D generalist, creator of Remington Graphics.
66. Troy Sobotka — acolyte of moving pixels, an expert of color science.
67. Paul Chambers — professional CG generalist, runs a blog.
68. Mason Menzies — environment 3D artist
69. Rachel Frick — a super stylish CG artist
70. James O’Brien (Vadim Ignatiev) — CG artist. Check his car and city renders!
71. YanSculpts (Yanal Sosak) — a passionate hard working character artist.
72. Penfinity — Blender tutorials and amazing hard-surface modeling expertise by Wesley Vanitou.
73. Lawrence Jaeger — 3D & motion Designer
74. Jim Morren — 3D character artist and asset creator.
75. Sean Kennedy — professional VFX artist, runs OpenVisualFX blog with tips and training for free & open-source VFX software.
76. Daniel Martinez Lara — the director of award-winning animated shorts, artist, developer of Grease Pencil
77. Daniel Bystedt — Blender artist, senior character artist at Goodbye Kansas Studios.
78. Jerry Perkins (masterxeon1001) — creator of HardOps and other add-ons for Blender, member of TeamC.
79. MACHIN3 — creates modeling add-ons and 3D assets.
Free and Paid Blender add-ons
80. Animation Nodes — Free: a node-based parametric modeling and visual scripting system designed for motion graphics in Blender. How cool is that.
81. Sverchok — Free: a powerful parametric modeling toolset for Blender, featuring >150 nodes for creating and manipulating geometry.
82. FLIP Fluids — a paid liquid simulation add-on for Blender, based on a modern FLIP-based fluid solver.
Alternative game engines
83. Godot — free and open-source game engine, being developed at a high rate. The Blender of game engines.
84. Armory — an open-source 3D game engine with full Blender integration.
3D content publishing platforms
85. Sketchfab — the biggest 3D content publishing community, aimed at turning 3D into a mainstream media format. Sketchfab is a marketplace as well as a hub for Creative Commons content.
86. Artstation — the leading showcase platform for games, film, media & entertainment artists
Marketplaces to Sell Your 3D Models
87. Turbosquid — Friendly marketplace
88. Sketchfab — a community and a marketplace
89. CG Trader — Earn up to 80% royalties
90. Shapeways — open your 3D model shop
91. Daz3D — software and marketplace
92. SketchUp 3D warehouse — A 3D file repository and marketplace
Print services
93. Printful — on-demand online printing and shipping, can be paired with Gumroad for semi-automatic orders.
Website creation apps
94. SquareSpace — a paid website authoring, marketing and analytics platform.
95. Wix — create your website in a few clicks
Image editing apps
96. Canva — create designs and documents in your browser, drag-n-drop style.
97. 8Bit Photo Lab — a photo filtering app capable of simulating the ‘8-bit’ look of various computers and consoles from the 80s and 90s.
Free 3D software
98. SculptGL — a digital sculpting web app with sources available on Github. Features dynamic topology, remeshing, matcaps, you name it.
99. MagicaVoxel — a free lightweight 8-bit voxel art editor and interactive path tracing renderer.
Collaboration and productivity
100. Perforce — collaboration tools that are compatible with Unreal Engine among other things.
101. Dropbox — An all-purpose cloud storage tool with a desktop app
102. Online 3D Viewer — A basic free tool to view and inspect 3D models.
103. Google Docs — online editing, sharing, and collaborating on documents
104. Trello — organize images and links into visual kanban boards
105. iMeshup — 3D game repository and online viewer
Freelancing
106. Upwork — General freelance jobs
107. Guru — another general board with good volume
108. People Per Hour — job board primarily used by small businesses
109. Freelancer.com — One of the oldest freelance job sites
110. Fiverr — Good for micro-gigs and for getting started
Careers and advice
111. Indeed — Best if you’re looking for a job in the UK/Europe
112. Glassdoor — great for salary information and insiders’ information on employers
Portfolio tips and tools
113. This article on Patreon — What does junior-level art actually look like
114. P3d.in — An online portfolio tool for 3D artists
115. GrabCAD — Online 3D printing modelling community and portfolio space.
Books
116. Anatomy of facial expression — Must-read for all artists that work with human faces. A lot of examples of different facial expressions.
117. Art Fundamentals: Color, Light, Composition, Anatomy, Perspective, and Depth — Art Fundamentals addresses key basic subjects such as color and light, composition, perspective and depth, anatomy, and portraying emotions
118. Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter by James Gurney — A meticulous study of color and light in paintings.
119. James Elkins: How to Use Your Eyes — A book that gives you a glimpse into the inner workings of our visual system.
120. Portrait Sculpting — Anatomy & Expressions in clay — Philippe & Charisse Faraut — modeling the human face in water-based clay featuring more than 100 new sculptures
121. Beginner’s Guide to Zbrush — all Zbrush fundamentals in one place, published by 3D Total
122. ZBrush — Digital Sculpturing Human Anatomy — This full-colour, illustrated guide teaches you the basics of human anatomy, so you can create captivating human figures that really come to life on screen
Podcasts
123. Character art podcast — created by Jon Troy Nickel and Galvin Goulden
124. Art Cafe — a podcast with a focus on concept art
125. The collective podcast — covers a variety of digital art trends, created by Ash Thorp
126. Allan McKay podcast — a creative and career-related podcast focused on artists in Design, Film, Visual Effects and Video Games.
127. GameDevUnchained — Game development podcast
YouTube channels
128. The New Boston — tutorial series for 3ds Max, UDK, Adobe Premier, & After Effects, but beyond that there are also lessons on GUI programming, Python, Android/iPhone development, HTML5, and every variation of C, C#, C++, Objective C, and even basic algebra.
129. The World of Level Design — Their videos are focused on UDK, CryEngine, level design, modeling, and asset production in Maya
130. FZD School of Design — Led by the masterful Feng Zhu, the channel is actually focused more on concept art, design, and digital painting than 3D production
131. AcrezHD — It’s a cool channel for the motion graphics crowd, made even cooler by the fact that some of their training just can’t be found anywhere else on YouTube
132. Zbro Z — There are videos on both organic and hard surface sculpting, texturing, anatomy, and design, but it’s not so much an instructional channel as it is a showcase of one person’s dedication to improvement.
133. ZBrush 4 Tutorials — The playlist contains over 90 different Z4 tutorials and links out to a few more channels that are definitely worth your subscription.
Misc
134. NormalMapOnline — an online normal map generator.
135. terrain.party — the easy way to extract real-world height maps.
Originally published on 9 September 2019 at http://artheroes.co/
