3D Environments
for Games.
A workshop-based program where you build complete game-ready scenes from scratch — terrain, props, lighting, and export. Every week ends with something you can actually show.
Weeks of active work
What you work
through week by week
Spatial thinking and scene structure
You start by building rough blockouts — no textures, no detail. The goal is to understand how space reads before any polishing begins. Blender and Unreal Engine are introduced side by side.
Modular asset creation
You model a set of reusable building pieces — walls, floors, trim — that snap together cleanly. The assignment: tile a 20×20 metre interior without visible seams.
Materials, PBR, and texture maps
Substance Painter is the main tool here. You bake normal maps from high-poly to low-poly, then build a full PBR material set for one hero prop chosen from your blockout.
Lighting and atmosphere
Two lighting scenarios — daytime exterior and artificial interior — using Unreal's Lumen. You adjust exposure, bounce intensity, and shadow softness until the mood reads clearly in a still frame.
Optimisation and export
LODs, draw call budgets, texture atlases. You run the scene through Unreal's profiler and bring it within a 60fps target on a mid-range GPU. The final packaged file is your submission.
Portfolio presentation and peer critique
You record a 4-minute walkthrough of your finished scene, upload it, and give structured written feedback on two other participants' work. Instructors respond within 48 hours.
Tools used
Blender 4.x · Unreal Engine 5 · Substance Painter · Marmoset Toolbag for portfolio renders
Before you sign up
Answers to what participants usually ask before starting. If something is missing, write to us directly at contact@online-3dspay.shop.
Some familiarity with Blender or any 3D software helps, but the first two weeks are designed to level everyone up. If you have never opened a 3D application before, plan to spend an extra 3-4 hours in week one on the provided pre-reading materials.
Roughly 12-16 hours per week: one 2-hour live session, one 1-hour critique call, and the rest on your own assignment work. The texture and lighting weeks tend to run longer because the iteration cycles take time.
A dedicated GPU with at least 6 GB VRAM (Nvidia RTX 20-series or AMD equivalent) and 16 GB of system RAM. Unreal Engine 5 with Lumen enabled will not run acceptably on integrated graphics. A mid-range gaming laptop from 2021 onwards is usually sufficient.
No. Every session is recorded and uploaded within 24 hours. Assignments have fixed weekly deadlines regardless of whether you attend live. Participants who engage in the critique calls tend to progress faster, but the async path is fully supported.
Character rigging, animation, gameplay scripting, and procedural generation are outside the scope. The focus is strictly on static and semi-static environment art. Those topics may appear in future programs.