1. 3D Rendering - Expose yourself to photography.
   Composition and the different styles of lighting is an essential skill to pickup. Training the eye and mind to see and replicate the mood and feel of a space is crucial to any 3d visualiser.
   
2. 3D Rendering - Do not let the tools you use control your renderings.
   You must be able to visualize the outcome of a rendering eg lighting/ambience/mood while creating the rendering on the computer. This way, you wont end up with a rendering that’s is a result of chance. Eg Randomly placing lights in a 3d program and let the computer render what ever it wants without truly knowing the outcome. The secret is to develop your eye/mind to know what looks good and be able to recreate it.
   
3. 3D Art  Study Materials in the real world and know how to recreate it on a computer.
   You must know what a particular material look like in real life in order to be able to create a realistic version of it on the computer. Surface reflectance, specular highlights, glossiness etc.
   
4. 3D Art - Study color and lighting.
   Know how light behaves in real life. How it affects the colors around in a space. How it bounces around and how it cast shadows. The realism of your visuals will usually be limited by how well you understand the above. Our eyes look at reality 100% of the time. If something is not quite right, our minds will pick it up almost immediately.
   
5. 3D Environment - Study scale and proportion of everyday stuff that’s related to what you’re drawing.
   Learn to estimate accurately dimensions of objects in reality without actually measuring it. It helps when you’re modeling stuff in a 3d program cos you’ll be able to keep things within reasonable dimensions and objects won’t look wrong in the final rendering.
   
6. 3D Image - Constantly Challenge yourself and be extremely critical of your work.
   If you come to a point where you are not sure what’s wrong with your piece of rendering, you’ll be stuck at a plateau and not make progress. To keep improving, you’ll need to be able to remain critical of every piece of work. Before you can fix or improve something, you’ll first have to know what needs fixing.
   
7. 3D Benchmark- Constantly benchmark your skills with the best in the industry and work towards that lifelong goal.
   Compare your work with works that you consider to be better or worse then yours and seek ways to match or improve it. Constantly training your mind this way would gradually improve your skills subconsciously. If you don’t, you’ll start to lag behind and many will catch up and you’ll loose the edge and competitiveness.
   
8. 3D Vray -Always let people critic your work. Including lay people.
   Take every critic’s remarks positively and constantly improve. Keep on learning and improving. Comments from people no matter how negative will only help us if we use it to constantly improve our skills.
   
9. 3D Styles - Expose yourself to the different styles and themes of the type of work you are drawing.
   By experiencing these styles, you’ll have more ideas in developing your drawings to a higher standard.
   
10. 3D Libraries -Build up your personal library of reference material.
    Most people cannot remember reality exactly as it is and recreate it directly from the mind. It’s always easier to have reference images to mimic. Go around snapping photos of the world around you and use it as reference. You’ll never know when those pictures can come in handy.
    
11. 3D Perfection - Practice your art constantly.
    Keep on working on it and see your work improve over the years. Skills don’t come overnight.

 

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