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Artist in training: PowerBook or MacBook? Online Courses?

by Steven Peterson · in General Discussion · 07/06/2008 (3:14 pm) · 1 replies

My buddy is a talented artist as far as drawing and painting, but only does it as a hobby. He basically never used a computer until he bought an IMac the beginning of the year and has really taken to it. Now he's talking about doing one of these 2-year/4-year online-schools and making the career-jump to 3D-animation or game-design. He has talent and passion though, and I have no doubt he can do it. I want to help point him in the right direction.

- Has anyone done the online-school thing? Whats the best way to find out if the school he's looking at is "for real" or not?

- He travels some and will need a laptop for the online-courses. He keeps talking about about a "Mac Air". Should I push him towards a PowerBook? I have no idea what the online-courses will require, but if has to do rendering...

- Also is pointing him towards GIMP(2D) and Torque-Constructor(3D) a good place to start? I want to show him some "real-world" tools so he can get his feet wet - before he invests in the big-guns.

Thanks for any advice you guys can give, I know the tools, but i'm a coder not an artist myself.
I want to get my friend off to a good start.


Steven
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Torque 3D Owner Ronny Bangsund
Torque Cheerleaders
#1
07/07/2008 (9:25 am)
I think the Airbook is rather underpowered for an artist. There are also very few expansion options (one USB port!). A regular Macbook is better, even a Macbook Pro (Powerbook is the old PPC generation - make it die out already :). The MBP means the computer can be used for some fancy gaming, too. It's especially useful in 3D software which uses OpenGL a lot, as the integrated graphics on a regular Macbook aren't all that fast.

He'll hopefully get a student version of Adobe's bunch of monopolistic software through any serious school he goes to, or at least a student discount through an accredited school of any sort. The GIMP is fine for simple needs, though, but NOT ON MAC! By gosh, stay away from it on a Mac :)
(None of the Gtk+ hotkeys seem to work for me, and none of them are Mac-standard anyway..better invest a few bucks in a slightly more Mac-friendly program. I use GIMP all the time on Ubuntu and Windows, though. It's great there. Great for my limited needs, anyway.)

For graphics editing, there are lots of little Mac programs you could have him try out. Pixelmator is a nice one with GIMP-like features, and relatively cheap.

For 3D, there are the usual big players. Cheapest is of course to start with Constructor or something. Some have produced nice results with Blender. Moving up to the commercial ones, I have my own list of acceptable software..the expensive ones are Maya and 3D Studio MAX, both from Autodesk. Then there's Modo, Softimage XSI (pretty good and cheaper than Autodesk software), Houdini (special deal from GG, too!), Rhino and Hexagon. Any of these may be part of online courses, and some might as usual have student versions.

Now, let's hope an actual artist posts some opinions :)

I dunno how to spot the good and the bad among online schools, really. I just tend to hear about them from people who've had the misfortune to run into bad ones. You'd have to ask around, read Game Developer ads and so on. Yes, ads are good. Ask for opinions on any school advertising there.