PART II — Viewport Visual Design

5 minute read

Figure II.1 | Sol LeWitt,  Wall Drawing 305, 1977.

What is three-dimensional design?

At first this sounds like a question with an obvious answer. We are born into a world in which our bodies occupy and experience space, after all. We come to understand 3D intuitively through sheer exposure; akin to the way we learn our first language. In the case of the mother tongue, we come later to understand a vocabulary and grammar that allows us to write and speak with greater fluency, precision and depth: some of us even become poets.

So, too, it is with the visual world of three dimensions. As artists, as visual poets, we understand there is a visual vocabulary and grammar. We have studied it, codified in the rigor of what is known as basic 3D visual design. Perhaps it's been a while since that basic 3D course, or perhaps you come to 3D modeling from a primarily graphic background. Whether your circumstances make this a review or an introduction, in this title we will explore an overview of a basic 3D course. However, we'll do it with a strong, unfamiliar twist... contextualizing this information to a digital world, creating or discovering metaphors to help us understand the relationship between digital and tactile spaces.

A good visual basics course introduces exploration of the visual world as a set of Elements and Principles developed through various Means of Expression. We will of course be emphasizing how these are manifest specific to the 3D context, but this isn't always such an easy distinction to make...

There are disciplines that are unequivocally 3D: sculpture, installation art, performance art, architecture, industrial design. There are others we accept as analogously 3D, even if mediated by screens: video games, cinema, perhaps photography. Yet, even drawing, painting and graphic design have reference to depth, through such visual devices as volumetric hatching, linear and atmospheric perspective, and phenomenal transparency. We need to keep in mind that output is the ultimate way we experience the 3D in 3D modeling... a still image rendering akin to a photograph, an animation akin to cinema, a 3-D print akin to a sculpture.

That said, a specifically 3D visual design course is intended to train tactile 3D thinking as a sculptor or architect might require, and because you are about to become a virtual sculptor, it's this we will review.

Even seasoned artists sometimes confuse visual elements and visual principles, but the distinction can be made by a chemical metaphor. In chemistry, an element is a fundamental entity, like hydrogen or oxygen, while chemical "principles" create compound or molecular structures as a way of organizing elements into particularly functional arrangements. Want to breathe? Organize the element oxygen (O) into the oxygen molecule (O₂) as in Figure II.2. Want to drown? Organize the elements oxygen (O) and hydrogen (H) into the water molecule (H₂O). The element oxygen has not changed, but its arrangement radically changes how it functions. In art, principles are akin to molecular organization, elements are akin to atoms.

This section contains a dense amount of information in 6 chapters as follows: