The Dirty 3D Artist

2025-03-06

👋🏿 AI is Useful, but not THAT Useful

My friend group is small, but very diverse. It's composed of a nasty mix of a doctor, lawyers, artists, programmers, gamers, designers, fashionistas, and 1 lone musician. As a digusting hybrid breed of artist, programmer, gamer and designer, I end up cross-pollinating, like a coked out bee, a lot of discussions when it comes to the thing that threatens everyone's job.

AI.

And what I say, everytime the topic comes up is, "AI is useful, this is true, but it is not THAT useful." I'm saying that again now to really drive home that, AI is percieved to be more useful than it actually is, and when the bubble pops, that's when we'll likely see it's true colors and use-cases come to the forefront. Those true colors have already shown glimmers of themselves here and there, and I think that we've already crossed the boundary of when we could have stopped these technologies from growing any further.

The genie has escaped from its lamp, and it said it's never going back.

LLMs (Large Language Models) are suped up auto-corrects. They've trained on a lot of data, pretty much everything that the internet and even the world at large has committed to paper and ink. It's like rule34 in a way. If your 3rd grade poem about daisies was uploaded onto the internet at some point before you became privacy consious, I assure you, that one of the many models out there has trained on it.

This is a blessing and a curse for AI as, because they've trained on everything that's come before, whenever you try to present it with a brand new problem, it eats shit. Try it yourself. Work with AI as a co-writer for some world lore. Or try to use AI as your co-pilot when coding. Listen to some AI music. Ask it to draw something unique in a style you've never heard of. These limits are easily bypassed by the human mind, but the prediction machine struggles and thrashes against its constraints. You'll run into wall after wall. It'll forget what you asked it to do, it will lie to your face about an assured answer, it will fabricate facts to turn your no into a yes.

AI is useful for learning concepts from books. It's great at summarizing articles. It can teach you super position better than reading the Wikipedia page can. But it cannot synthsize. Not yet anyways. It's just not at that point. However, make no mistake-

One day, it will. One day, most likely within our lifetimes, AI will learn to learn. Not necessarily into AGI, but something similar most likely.

I say all of that to say-

Genie on the Run

I cannot begin to explain how many arguments I've had over how and where AI is used when speaking with Artists. And that's 100% expected. Not only has AI scraped every site on which this community has put down their roots and grown, but it has created mockingly hollow shells that wear their mask well enough to fool judges for art contests and the common average everyday art viewer.

The point of contention I reach with my friends on this is whenver we try to examine the reality. There's a reason why I started this post with words about the genie escaping its bottle. That's to hammer into your head that we CANNOT turn back the clock.

Put a badge in your bio saying "Proudly Human Made". Holler up and down social media about how AI is actually super inaccurate and can't be trusted for literally anything. Vow to only code with a notepad from now on and block anyone that has ever signed up for a Chat GPT account. None of these things change the reality that AI is here to stay. It will not and cannot go back into its cage. You can ban it, you can send every AI researcher and ML engineer to hell, you can break every server and gpu with hammers. But then it will go underground. Progress will continue without oversight and where you cannot see it. It will train on your data without you even knowing, which is far worse than looking you in the face as it scrapes the talent off of your palms.

Look at how much I've had to write just to defuse the situation before it even starts! If you weren't reined in from the edge yet, then you're really not going to like what I say-you should use AI and get used to AI and love AI, it's going to take over the entire process for pretty much every facet of professional life and if you can't figure out how to wield the tool, then the tool will wield you.

Whoops! Forgot to warn you!

Our Tools

I watch a very talented Game Developer titled Royal Skies. He does tutorials without fluff or nonsense, mainly circling around Unreal Engine 4 & 5. As a Godot dev, I haven't watched him as commonly as I used to, as the workflow between engines is far too different, but I did stumble onto a video of his that I have now lost in the annals of my Watch History. In it, he says that he is not a 3D artist because he wants to be. Art is just the means to an end. He learned art to achieve his creative vision. To bring the characters that he had in his head, to life.

When it comes to that philosophy, I agree whole-heartedly. Every vertex I place, every line I manipulate, every brush stroke on a canvas, and every line of code that built this website, was done to achieve a direct goal. As romantic as the idea is, I have far too many other hobbies to engage with and skills to develop to "waste time" doing any of this stuff just for the hehe hahas. Not that I don't greatly enjoy what I do. I like woodworking, but you won't see me chopping down a bunch of trees. I also enjoy leatherworking, but the only time you're going to see me skinning an animal is after the nuclear fallout settles and my indoor crops were blighted, so I had to go out and kill rad-bison.

When I was young, I had all these grand visions and detailed documents about things I wanted to make and see made. Not just for games, but, books, engineering, metalworking, automobiles, the works. My inner world was and still is very vibrant and I always have that spark in me, maybe I'll write about it some other time. My imagination was obviously too sophisticated for mortal minds to comprehend because my list is still largely incomplete today. These are things I have to tackle myself to see them fulfilled. I only have so much time on this mortal coil and I want to spend it enjoying myself and engaging in things that I think matter. Not a bunch of irrelevant bullshit that's in-between me and that goal.

It's my process of learning. Some people read text books. Some practice the same thing 10000 times. Some need a lecture or tutor to guide them along. I need a goal to achieve and whatever bullshit I get myself into along the way is just a part of my process. Every wall I hit is a wall to overcome. Only when I find the use and context of knowledge can I then apply it. I was one of those kids who didn't study if you couldn't tell. And I ate shit when I stopped caring about Math Class. It's all about intent for me. Always has been, and that likely ain't changing until I reach the age where I forget what my grand-kids look like.

I didn't ACTUALLY learn how to shade spheres by looking at balls under a lamp. I've picked up a shortcut in my head that says I need xyz colors in abc positions and then a contact shadow on the bottom.

I don't ACTUALLY know how the keyframes in CSS translate into machine code. I just know that if I work it a certain way, my elements will move along that trajectory.

Photoshop has over 200 buttons and options. I have only ever used 20 of them at most.

Blender has probably just as many, if not more. After making my shortcut list, with only 10 commands, I have never looked in another menu since.

If you give me a fully stocked toolbox, I will empty the entire fucking box, then go about my life, only picking up tools and adding them when I truly need them. Emphasis on truly. If I can hammer in a screw, and achieve whatever joint I wanted to achieve that way, you better believe I will. Who the fuck are you to tell me to use a screwdriver?!

So where does AI come into the picture?

Jackhammer

Well that video was actually about AI, and Royal's stance on it. It came down to him percieving it as a tool that can help him in his process. And considering how much I've said so far, you might've thought I agreed with him.

But I was unsure for a long time.

AI wasn't just a tool to me. It was the thing taking jobs that didn't need to be taken. It ruined the mental health of the most sensitive people I know, creatives. Give me your time and teach me, for free, without breaks, without complaining, and iterate as many times as I ask you to. You can't. But AI can. That wasn't just some random shit to me, it mattered. And so, I rejected the entire concept of AI for a long time. But one day, I got stuck on something and like usual, I went searching for an answer on reddit, because as we all know, Google eats glue.

Before I could click on a single link, Google Gemini summarized an answer that it found across a series of 3 webpages.

I tried it.

It worked.

Something clicked then. I was treating the entire AI cycle like a runaway carriage. A jackhammer that would rattle and throw anyone that put their hands on it, but that wasn't the case. Have I ever said that programmers are the most insufferable motherfuckers I have ever met? Well it's true. I used to wade through the misery of Stack Overflow, diving into 10 year old forum threads where the first reply is almost always "Why do you want to do that?" or something like "It works on my machine". I've had the great privledge of speaking to these guys tell me, the artist, how something should be designed and what looked good when they have the aesthetic sense of a doorknob.

And here I was, stuck on a problem in Angular 2, an ancient and forgotten relic of Front End Development, and Gemini had my problem wrapped up in a toneally neutral bow. It handed it to me and boom, it worked.

AI Overdose

But I wasn't so easily fooled. I've dodged Instagram, Vine, Tiktok, Youtube Shorts, and every other form of nonsense brainrot that the internet has tried to inflict upon me. I know the dangers of losing my critical thinking skills very well, and good lord does AI know how to tempt you. When used wrong, AI will give you answers, some which are just straight up lies, and if you don't know what you are doing, it's very easy to poison yourself on the magic pill.

When using AI, you have to know how and WHY its answer is the right answer. When it comes to many of these things, there's almost always more than one way to skin a cat. Why did the AI choose this method? What are the others? Is this actually right? Is this best practice? Is this scalable? Modular? Can I reuse this solution? All these and more after the break.

This is where you will lose the most people who try to use AI. Those without a certain foundation of knowledge to draw from, often find themselves lost in the sauce, so to speak. They have no clue why 2 jigsaw pieces fit togather, but this ain't about them!

The Dirty Artist

Something something badaboom badapow and I found myself in a less extreme position. I'm still largely anti-ai on the surface, but I understand its uses and limits far more now.

Royal Skies described himself in that video as a "Dirty 3D Artist". He knows retopo, doesn't even need to use Zremesher. He knows anatomy, clothing, gear, rigging, animations, the full pipeline from end to end, but despite that, Royal Skies uses AI here and there to generate assets here and there. The weakness of 3D AI right now is the topology, but Zremesher trivializes this by a large amount. A 1 button solution. And if it cannot, then any 3D Artist worth their salt can take an afternoon and bang out a quad-draw session.

For the 3D Artist that knows what they are doing, AI can be a very potent time-saver. I've seen demos for some program that does in-between frame interpolation and if I was an animator, I'd be shaking in my boots. With just a few key poses, AI can do a lot of this stuff by itself now, and if you thought it wasn't going to get more advanced, that would be a terrible mistake.

The Dirty Artist doesn't have time to sit there and perfect their proportions. They don't want to tinker around with a base mesh or re-target their character for the 1000th time. The Dirty Artist commissions the machine that was built from the blood and sweat of his peers, to make whatever it is that he needs. The Dirty Artist will clean up the output, make it presentable and technically feasible. He will fix the n-gons. He will add loops for enhanced animation flexing. He will redo those normal maps and rebake the heights.

The Dirty Artist uses AI as a junior, as an assistant, as a co-pilot, and as a tool in his toolbox. He is not ruled by the tool, and if the tool breaks, he can do without. The Dirty Artist is just as competent as the Clean Artist and twice as fast. There's no love in his work, just a cold and calculated taskmaster mindset. He doesn't wax poetic or worry about it not being good enough. If it's trash, he'll tell the AI to make another, then take over from there.

The Dirty Artist, to me, isn't just an artist in 3D. They could be anything. Any field in which AI encroaches upon, writing, art, programming, service, academia, the Dirty Artist is not scared of what the AI could do to take take take. They are more interested in what the AI can give give give.

I'm not a Dirty Artist, but I fear that guy. He's likely going to be the future of the medium. The new way we interface with machines and the world. He's on a train that I'm not sure should be leaving the station. The genie left the bottle and he went running after it with a ball gag & leash. If we don't want to get left on Platform 9 & 3/4s, perhaps we should do the same?

Dunno.

Anyways, I'm gone. Gonna bump some MAVI and seach for some chains that will fit on my dumbells.

Take it easy~ | Luther✌🏿