Digital 3D exists at an intersection of many disciplines such as computer science, art, and mathematics. The history of digital 3D is a fascinating story of how digital 3D has evolved alongside increases in computing power and allowed people from many different walks of life to create worlds.
Early 3D
The first digital 3D scenes and objects required a programmer to define the position of each point, line, and face in text form, either with mathematical functions or by manually entering the position and connections for each component. The programmer wouldn't know whether the scene looked correct until it was rendered, often taking hours to generate a single low-resolution image.
3D expands into other industries
As time passed, programmers started to create tools and applications to help accelerate the process of creating 3D scenes. By the early 1990s, multiple mature 3D applications like Autocad, CATIA, Cinema 4D, and others existed to assist with 3D modeling for fields like architecture, product design, simulation, and video games.
These applications generally had a few things in common:
- A graphical user interface that showed simplified versions of the geometry in 3D space. These interfaces allowed the user to manipulate points, lines, and edges without coding, making digital 3D more accessible to artists.
- Tools that allowed you to quickly perform certain operations like extruding shapes, bridging between components, and aligning components with one another. These tools drastically increased the speed with which artists could work.
- Software to render the geometry at a high level of detail, often simulating light, fog, and camera settings.
Digital 3D as a sculpting tool
As time passed, computers continued to grow more powerful, and during the 2000s, applications like Zbrush and Blender used this power to create better tools for artists. Instead of moving each point individually, artists could move hundreds of vertexes to create complex shapes or modify the surface of a model. This became known as sculpting due to similarities with traditional media like clay.
A new generation of 3D
More recently, computers have become powerful enough to render millions, or even billions of polygons in real time. Advances in computing power and software algorithms have made this possible. As the number of polygons has increased, so has the need for new tools to make the creative process easier and faster.
This is why the Substance 3D tools were created. Modeler allows you to work with complex 3D geometry in an intuitive way, while Painter lets you create highly realistic textures with it's powerful tools. With Substance 3D you can focus on the creative process instead of fighting your tools.
