Why did it take us so long to be able to draw in 3D while humans have been sculpting 3D statues for millennia?
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Because traditionally you draw on paper. Which is 2 dimensional. Drawing things 3d on 2d platform is just visual manipulation off 2d art to appear 3d
If you’re talking about 3d computer graphics then its because everything started with just pure math and computer code. We had to figure out how to make that math represent squares and color and their location on a screen, then further develop that code to make a picture. Then make that picture move by using multiple static images that look like they’re moving when played in sequence, then use it to make a “sprite” (think Pacman) so you can make a game. Then make that image look less blobby, figure out how to make that less blobby picture look more like actual artwork by bumping up the pixel count (number of tiny squares on your screen). Then use tricks in art techniques to visualize the space that would be there if it had height and depth (3d). Add in other things like light sources, gravity/weight, textures and more. Its a long evolutionary crawl, but we’re up to some pretty crazy and detailed stuff these days that use incredibly complex physics.
I can grab a lump of clay and I just “know” what to do to turn it into a sculpture. Our real world comes with all the natural physics in our corner of the universe, so we don’t have to do anything else other than squish and smooth until the object looks like a thing. Computer science had to start from words, numbers and pure science based imagination. We’re actually moving along quite quickly. Look at how much as been done in the past 40+ years. Now compare that to the timescale of the universe.
We had to really fight to get to the easier 3d tools we have today for creating 3d models (the stuff that does the majority of the work for us). A lot of really genius minds had to start by making something from nothing. There is no real metaverse just sitting out there somewhere in a void waiting for you to figure out how to get there. That endless “space” is just an idea that we wanted for ourselves, so we had to figure out how to represent light, how to represent shape, how to represent all these various physics, polygons, vertices, skeletons, 3D rigging so on and so on… until, here we are.
I can’t wait to see what we come up with in the next 40+ years, I hope I get to see it all. Its going to be nuts.
It’s not that “3D” drawing was unknown, it’s that the idea of art as being representative rather than figurative is a pretty new concept. Artists in Ancient India and Medieval Europe weren’t aiming and failing for realistic depictions, they were in a way abstracting for some aesthetic reason. The introduction of perspective in Renaissance art was controversial particularly in the context of religious art, because depicting heaven realistically blurred the line between the transcendent metaphysical world and the “real” physical world.
3D animation requires a computer that can track the coordinates of thousands of points and accurately render an image of what all those points would look like from a certain angle with a certain light source. It wasn’t until the second half of the 20th century that technology could accomplish that.
If you didn’t mean 3D animation, then whatever you’re thinking of we probably *have* been doing for millennia. Mobiles, puppets, automata…
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