How do you learn?

[kehlje]

What was the single most instructive and growth-producing experience you had in terms of CG artistry and technical skill?

[racoonart]

Learning to code, by far.

[philippelamoureux]

I'm proud I have spent 2 years learning Unreal Engine 4. Now I understand how games are made (mostly).

[maru]

Is the original question about specific things that were learned, or the method of learning?

[kehlje]

Deadclown - that's really interesting; I wasn't expecting that answer. Why was that so helpful to your technique?

Phillipelamoureux - that's really cool; what industry are you in? archviz?

Maru - I'm equally interested in method as I am content. I hope to embark on a very intentional study of some sort in hopes of improving my technique and eye. I've thought about the following courses of action already:

taking painting or graphic design courses at a local design college
attempting to build a small but very sophisticated architectural scene, aiming for photorealism and learning more sophisticated texturing/vegetation techniques.
taking some kind of advanced material/texturing course or tutorial

I work at an architecture office with pretty long hours, and I do alot of rendering here but it's all focused on design iteration and production of 'options' so there isn't much time to create something really precious. I don't have a whole lot of extra personal time on the side to push my skill so I'm trying to be deliberate and focused in my strategy.

[mraw]

I'm with Deadclown- If I could go back 20 years I would have slapped my younger counterpart and said "Yes, I know you are an artist and you don't like maths, but shut up: Go and learn to code!"

If you want to learn about color: Go and read 'Interaction of Color' from Josef Albers.
https://www.amazon.com/Interaction-Color-Anniversary-Josef-Albers/dp/0300179359

[kehlje]

Great - thanks for the book rec mraw. I've heard of this title in the course of my own education but have never read it. I'll go buy it.

Also, wow I'm so surprised you echo'd Deadclown. Can you elaborate on the benefits and advantages of learning to code? What languages do you know?

[racoonart]

Scripting/coding can be useful for all sorts of things. When I started writing my first lines of maxscript I only tried to randomize a bunch of noise modifiers on a number of objects which would have taken me a lot of time doing by hand. At first you are obviously slower but you'll get things done faster and faster and at some point you can write one-line scripts that can do tasks which would take hours or days to do by yourself.
The point is: if you know scripting you can solve difficult tasks... and if you can solve difficult tasks easily you can do more crazy stuff in less time.
Basically, it's a huge improvement in efficiency and thus can/will boost the quality of your work.

But it's actually more than that. Learning to code is not just learning the syntax of a language and combining some keywords. You'll learn how to think more and more like a programmer. It can help a whole lot with different problems. Understanding how programs work can be very helpful in solving problems, even though you do not write a single line of code in that case (like render engines, if you know how they work)
I mostly write stuff in maxscript, but I also learned some other languages on the way which proved to be an excellent way to improve your coding skills and thus the maxscripts. I went from Maxscript to Python to C# and now basic C++.

There's hardly any day where I'm not writing at least some lines of code ;) By now I cannot imagine to work at a company where no one is able to write scripts to solve all those problems that come up day by day.

[Edit] there's one more thing that came into my mind: Learning to code will help you learn a lot of other stuff too. Like Compositing - it's only simple math wrapped in loops - or learning game engines like UE4... if you want to do stuff with Blueprints it will be so much easier this way. I've only used UE4 a handful of times but I can read surprisingly much of the blueprints and understand what's happening without ever having read the documentation.

p.s. and yes, I really regret not having learned math properly in school. That shouldn't stop anyone from learning to code however. If you need something to solve a problem and are as stubborn as I am, you'll learn it while coding :D

[maru]

I always preferred learning in practice than theory. You can't exactly compare these two things, but for me experimenting has always been the fastest and most efficient way of learning. So I prefer exploring menus and clicking random buttons (even if it's going to crash!) than following a tutorial on some specific subject.

A good tip for learning anything is that you shouldn't be afraid to ask around (like OP asked here and received awesome answers). Even the silliest questions may bring a lot of knowledge, and people are often surprisingly friendly in helping with the most basic stuff. Also, I will more likely remember what someone else said to me, than my own thoughts. (at least it works for me :) )