Where should i begin exactly?

Eggy995

Hi everyone.

Im new to 3D art, I am currently studying a diploma of interactive media which involves are a whole lot within the digital entertainment industry. I may follow into a bachelor of 3D design in the future if my finances allow me too. For now, I would like to spend some of my the free time learning the fundamentals, building a portfolio and even creating user-made content for some moddable games like Skyrim and whatever else allows it. The area that interests me the most is environment and world design but i have no idea where to start. I have very little knowledge of Maya, i made a sword, a cup, a box and a spaceship once, not textured and not rendered. My goal is to be able to create immersive worlds for people to explore and show people what i see and love.

dropyhop

I would recomend to aim for those models uv'ed/textured and game ready. Post screengrabs on forums, discord art groups and get as many eyes as you can to see your work and feedback it. There good free tutorials on Youtube from Tim Bergholz for beginners with whole process.

Since you aim for making worlds, get a small environment concept art piece that you think will be fun. Everyone has there own way to tackle them but here are some pointers-

1) Blockout of the environment from basic shapes then exporting it to any free game engine. Unreal or Unity.
2) Move around and look for what fits and what doesn't. Scale is very important factor while making environments, so getting human scale template in Maya and modeling props accordingly is crucial in making believable worlds.
3) There will be a lot of back and forth to get things right after this stage but once you're set, start fleshing out blockouts to props, adding/tweaking lights.
4) Finally you fiddle with post process to tweak your scene as per concept.
5) Fixing you camera angles from blockout stage can be helpful as you can tweak composition and tune it as you want.

There are plenty of tutorials, videos on Polycount, youtube for each and every aspect from starter to advance level. I would like to recomend to stick to a style of art (realistic or stylized) and make a folio based on it. Specialization is important if you'd like to work in AAA companies or Indie companies generally look for person who can wear different hats.

I hope I got some points in there as the topic is super broad. Interact with people,learn and share. Answer to every how is just starting with it.

Eggy995

Thanks for getting back to me. This information does help me, as i had no idea, now i do. Thank you again

Brian "Panda" Choi

If you haven't taken still life painting classes, or plen-air painting classes, or foundational fine art courses, I would recommend doing that.

Giving yourself a solid art foundation is almost irreplaceable and helps more than it wastes time.  Design.  Composition.  Values.  Color theory.  A lot of tutorials that game art has don't cover this because it assumes it.  It's a good idea to learn the asssumptions.