Mental Design…or something
One of the most important parts of design, particularly 3D modeling in my case, is how you think about a project. The way you develop and hold the information in your head will change your work flow.
What really got me into 3D modeling and animation was that it gave me to power to bring ideas to life. My overactive imagination would be responsible for conjuring up an idea and molding it into shape, while the computer software just does the job of bringing it into reality. Most of the planning and problem solving takes place in my head before I begin, leaving the act of creating it to a simple conversion from brain to computer screen.
I’ve attempted to describe this concept before, but was unable to find a suitable metaphor before stumbling upon the article below. Although it was written with a computer programmer in mind, the concept is exactly the same for a 3D artist or any graphic designer.
“A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he’s working on. Mathematicians don’t answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their heads: they try to understand a problem space well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the house you grew up in. At its best programming is the same. You hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at will.
That’s particularly valuable at the start of a project, because initially the most important thing is to be able to change what you’re doing. Not just to solve the problem in a different way, but to change the problem you’re solving.
Your code is your understanding of the problem you’re exploring. So it’s only when you have your code in your head that you really understand the problem.”
-Quoted from Holding a Program In One’s Head
