The Science of 3D Environment Design: From Concept to Creation

3D design isn’t just for gaming anymore—it’s become significant across multiple industries. Whether crafting epic game worlds, building jaw-dropping visuals in films, or creating virtual models in architecture, 3D design is everywhere.

In movies and TV shows, 3D design introduces an entirely new dimension (literally). Have you ever questioned how incredible space battles or alien landscapes are brought to reality on film? This is 3D design in action, showcasing the impossible as possible and enhancing visual storytelling in films.

Now, think about architecture and real estate. Clients are no longer required to strain their eyes when looking at two-dimensional blueprints. Because of 3D design, they can navigate a virtual building before any actual construction occurs. It feels like getting an early glimpse of what's to come, offering a true feel for the layout and design that goes beyond what 2D designs can achieve.

Next, we have the automotive sector, which utilizes 3D modeling to perfect and adjust every aspect of a vehicle before its release. Designers can create a model, conduct tests, and simulate the vehicle's performance within a virtual setting. Whether it’s about aerodynamics or tiny internal components, everything gets a trial run before the real thing.

Across all of these industries, 3D design stands out because it allows for experimentation without limits. It’s where creativity meets precision, letting creators push boundaries and turn wild ideas into something real.

3D artists have many different specializations in the game industry. Some work on textures, others create objects and assets for 3D games or focus on visual effects. However, today, we want to discuss one particular category of digital creators and their craft – 3D game environment artists. They focus their skills and channel their creativity into constructing stunning landscapes, locations, and scenes. You shouldn't underestimate the impact of their work, as it is one of the main pillars that uphold every modern video game.

Source: https://discover.therookies.co/2020/03/21/interview-with-ash-thundercliffe-3d-environment-artist/

Before proceeding to art creation for the 3D games guide and discussing its details, let us briefly clarify the basics. A 3D environment refers to the virtual space within a video game, simulation, or digital application that players or users can interact with in three dimensions. So, naturally, 3D environments are much more believable and realistic than 2D ones. These environments can range from realistic depictions of real-world locations to completely fantastical or fictional worlds that exist only in the developers' imagination.

3D environments are constructed using a combination of 3D modeling, texturing, lighting, and rendering techniques. They may showcase a variety of settings, including open fields, urban areas, enclosed spaces, or extraterrestrial landscapes. Whether aiming for realism with intricate details and lifelike features or striving to craft artistic, imaginative landscapes, 3D environments are designed to submerge users in the online universe and enrich their overall enjoyment.

With the tools that developers and designers have today, achieving outstanding levels of realism is not a problem. With the rapid evolution of 3D graphics and their mass adoption in all industries, it has become possible to build unique fantasy worlds that appear in games, on big screens, and in advertisements. Behind every successful project that utilizes 3D graphics, a team of talented 3D environment artists always creates the scenes where the action takes place.

3D environments are essential to crafting immersive game worlds. From natural landscapes to urban settings, each type plays a key role in enhancing gameplay and storytelling. Below are some of the most common 3D environments used in game development.

1. Natural Landscapes. These are the vast outdoor spaces like forests, mountains, and rivers that players explore. Creating these environments requires careful attention to detail, ensuring nature feels realistic and immersive. A good example would be Red Dead Redemption 2, which is known for its beautifully crafted, lifelike wilderness.
2. Urban Settings. Urban environments focus on cityscapes filled with buildings, streets, and other urban elements. The detailed city of Los Santos Grand Theft Auto V offers an interactive living environment, perfect for both missions and free-roam exploration.
3. Interior Spaces focus on the inside of buildings or structures, such as homes, offices, or spacecraft. Designers must pay close attention to how light interacts with surfaces and objects to make the space realistic and functional. Interior environments are critical for storytelling and immersion. The Last of Us Part II features detailed, atmospheric interiors that set the tone for a tense, post-apocalyptic world.
4. Fantasy Worlds. Fantasy environments are entirely imagined, built from scratch for unique storytelling. These worlds can break the rules of real-world physics and logic, offering players magical realms or alien planets. Designers use creativity to make these worlds engaging and believable. Skyrim offers players a massive, magical world filled with castles, dragons, and enchanted landscapes.
5. Historical Recreations. These environments are based on real-world history, requiring designers to research and build settings that reflect past times.
6. Sci-fi/Futuristic Environments. Sci-fi environments are set in futuristic worlds or space, featuring advanced technology, alien worlds, and spacecraft. A space-faring RPG Mass Effect, where players explore distant galaxies, interact with alien civilizations, and navigate advanced technology and spacecraft, showcases a great example.
7. Post-apocalyptic Environments. These environments depict ruined, desolate worlds, often after a catastrophic event. They feature decayed buildings, barren landscapes, and eerie atmospheres. Set in a nuclear-ravaged wasteland, players must survive in a world of decayed cities, mutated creatures, and desolate landscapes, showcased by 3D environments in Fallout 4.

Source: https://www.renderhub.com/sathak/rpg-game-environment-game-ready-pbr

Every type of 3D environment is crucial in engaging players and improving the overall gaming experience. These settings are crucial in crafting unforgettable game worlds, whether futuristic or post-apocalyptic.

Building a truly mesmerizing and highly detailed 3D environment takes hours of combined effort from experienced digital artists. Their job is not limited to drawing scenes and landscapes—they also have to visualize buildings, vehicles, objects, and other assets that complement the environment. On massive, complex projects, 3D environment artists usually work exclusively in their narrow niches, while in small studios, they must be proficient in multiple specializations.

Apart from the scale of the project and team size, there is another important factor to consider while assigning tasks to the 3D environment design team: the level of expertise—junior, middle, or senior. Junior 3D artists usually work on small portions of the scene or complementary objects. At the same time, more experienced middles and seniors take on more complicated tasks and oversee the process.

A great environment designer should be good at a few things:

1. 3D Modeling and Sculpting: Mastery of tools like Blender, Maya, and ZBrush is key. Artists create everything from detailed landscapes to stylized objects, handling organic and hard-surface models.
2. Texture and Material Creation: Creating textures of high quality is vital for texture and material creation. Artists utilize Physically Based Rendering (PBR) to make sure materials such as stone, wood, or metal interact authentically with light, creating a more realistic environment.
3. Environmental Storytelling: Great environments tell a story. Artists use object placement and visual details to convey mood and lore, working with designers to align with the gameplay.
4. Optimization and Performance: Artists ensure that environments run smoothly, balancing high-quality visuals with performance across platforms. Optimization is crucial, especially in large, open-world games.
5. Game Engine Proficiency: Artists integrate assets into game engines like Unity or Unreal Engine. They also troubleshoot, use level editors, and ensure environments function correctly within the game mechanics.
6. Collaboration and Communication: Working with the team is vital. Artists collaborate with level designers, developers, and others, staying open to feedback and ensuring the environment complements the game.
7. Staying Updated: The gaming industry moves fast. To stay relevant, 3D environment artists must keep up with the latest tools, technologies, and trends. Continuous learning and following the trends are essential for 3D environment artists to remain competitive.

Source: https://usv.edu/blog/why-become-a-game-design-artist/

Good 3D video game environment design has several crucial conditions to meet:

• it must be in line with the game's lore;
• locations should be atmospheric and immersive;
• the world must be fascinating to explore.

Creating a level or location that meets these requirements is difficult for beginners, so the process can only be directed by experienced creators (preferably with knowledge of architectural styles or landscape design).

Creating a cool-looking environment is just one side of the coin. The global task for 3D designers is to support and enhance the gaming experience with their environment art. Everything within the game world must be in its place; all elements must have reasons to be there and convey a certain feeling or perform particular functions.

The main tasks of 3d artists include:

1. Design and create immersive game environments (landscapes, buildings, settings).
2. Model, texture, and light 3D environments for visual appeal.
3. Ensure environments align with game mechanics and narrative.
4. Optimize assets for performance across different platforms.
5. Collaborate with game designers and developers to enhance the gameplay experience.
6. Integrate assets into game engines (Unity, Unreal Engine).
7. Continuously update skills with the latest tools and techniques.

Certain rules must be followed when building 3D environments. For example, if the game uses a first-person or third-person camera view, designers must put extra effort into the details and create complex geometry. This is important because players will be able to see all models in the immediate vicinity.

When constructing environments for 3D games, level composition, and artistic expression must be considered. This involves paying attention to the world’s history, main zones, and other key aspects that players will surely learn. Clever environment designers understand how to utilize even the smallest objects and details to explain the story of a particular place or accent the narrative.

Some designers prefer to boost the number of details in central locations and leave less important areas a bit less decorated. However, you need to keep the balance right. An abundance of objects, textures, lighting, and other assets will make even the best scene look overcomplicated and incomprehensible. In other words, it is chaos without any signs of artistic significance.

As you can imagine, this process involves lots of planning and preparations in addition to drawing and sculpting in 3D. To give you a better understanding, we will go through the 3D art development stages from the very beginning to the point of importing materials into the chosen 3D video game engines.

Collecting references. It is a good practice to start a new drawing project with brainstorming followed by intensive reference hoarding on Google or Pinterest. Almost everything from old historical photos and videos to concept art and presentational clips will do the trick at this stage. Sometimes, you can include images not connected to your particular job but can inspire and improve your initial 3D environment design.

Concept and initial composition. It is time to work on the 3D concept design your fellow artists prepared. Improvise with colors and various assets to create new, original combinations that can improve your 3D environment.

Blocking and assets creation. Artists use simple shapes and geometry to create a rough version of the environment. Blockout helps establish scale, layout, and key spatial relationships, allowing game designers to test how the level feels before more complex work begins. In addition to blocking, artists plan the placement of important assets, landmarks, and points of interest. This is where they consider the player's movement through the space, ensuring the environment supports intuitive navigation and enjoyable gameplay.

With the blockout complete, it’s time to focus on 3D environment modeling, which involves creating the detailed elements of the environment.

1. Low-Poly Modeling: To optimize performance, high-poly models are often simplified into low-poly versions suitable for real-time rendering. The goal here is to reduce polygon counts while maintaining visual quality.
2. High-Poly Modeling: Artists first create detailed, high-polygon models of assets like terrain, structures, and vegetation. These models aim for a high level of realism and detail, which can then be baked into lower-poly versions for performance purposes.

Once models are created, UV mapping and texturing bring them to life by applying realistic surface details. Artists create UV maps to unwrap the 3D models into 2D space. Proper UV mapping is crucial to avoid texture stretching or distortion, which can diminish the model’s visual quality.

Source: https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/pirate-environment-ue/533244/2

Afterward, artists apply textures (diffuse, normal, specular maps, etc.) to the UV-mapped models. These textures add the fine details—such as dirt, scratches, or natural wear—that give the environment its realistic appearance. Techniques like PBR (Physically Based Rendering) ensure that materials interact realistically with light.

Material and shader development are essential for achieving realistic visuals and controlling how assets behave in different lighting scenarios. Artists develop shaders that define how materials reflect or absorb light. Shaders are responsible for the way surfaces like metal, wood, or water appear under various lighting conditions, contributing significantly to the realism of the environment. Alongside shaders, artists create and apply materials to models to control the look of different surfaces, adding layers of detail through multi-map textures (roughness, metallic, etc.).

Artists design the lighting using both natural (sunlight, moonlight) and artificial (lamps, neon lights) sources. The lighting must interact with the materials and shaders properly to ensure the scene looks dynamic and realistic. Environmental effects like fog, dust particles, and post-processing (e.g., bloom, color grading) enhance the scene’s mood and immersion. These atmospheric touches help bring the environment to life and improve the player’s emotional connection to the world.

Importing the assets. When all the pieces of the puzzle are complete, it is time to import them into a game engine and do some digital magic. This process is lengthy, as it requires linking the assets to the textures, working with shaders, adding lighting, etc.

Of course, before saying the job is done, you will have spent hours polishing and finalizing the environment. Even the most experienced artists cannot complete such complex tasks in one easy sweep.

The arsenal of tools of seasoned creators that produce art for 3D games is immense. It includes programs for drawing, sculpting, modeling, and much more. Apart from that, each 3D environment artist should know how to work (at least at a basic level) with popular game engines such as Unreal and Unity 3D.

There is also a starter "modeler’s package” you should be familiar with as an environment artist. It consists of the most common 3D environment software for the job: 3DS Max, Maya, and Modo. Needless to say, that the king of digital art – Photoshop – will be extremely useful for creating textures and assets. Alternatively, you can use Substance Designer or Painter. In addition, it will not be superfluous to throw some 3D modeling programs like ZBrush or 3DCoat into the mix.

3D environment modeling plays a pivotal role in creating immersive worlds. However, some forget, that optimization is key to ensuring smooth performance. Poorly optimized environments can result in lag, dropped frames, and longer loading times. And this can negatively impact the player's experience.

Developers can deliver impressive visuals without compromising performance by implementing optimization techniques throughout the 3D model environment process.

1. Level of Detail (LOD) for Environments. Similar to character models, environment assets should use multiple levels of detail (LOD). Using varying levels of detail based on the player's proximity helps reduce the computational load on the game engine. For distant objects, low-poly models should be used, while close-up assets should maintain higher detail.
2. Polygon Reduction for Terrain and Structures. Environment models often consist of complex structures, from large buildings to natural landscapes. Reducing polygon counts on objects like rocks, trees, and architecture can help boost performance. Mesh simplification techniques can be used to optimize geometry without sacrificing the overall shape or detail of the environment. Tools like Simplygon and Sloyd make this process seamless by automatically reducing polycount while maintaining visual fidelity.
3. Texture and Material Optimization in Environments. Texture atlases are particularly helpful in environments with repeated elements, such as foliage or brick walls, as they minimize texture lookups during rendering. Additionally, simplifying material shaders can reduce the rendering load, making environments run more smoothly.
4. Lighting Optimization for Rendering Environments. Lighting is crucial to creating atmosphere, but it can be a resource-heavy aspect of environment design. Developers should optimize lighting setups to ensure real-time shadows and reflections are not overtaxing the game engine. Using baked lighting for static elements and applying dynamic lighting only where necessary can significantly enhance performance without sacrificing quality.
5. Efficient Culling and Occlusion. In large, open-world environments, it’s important to optimize which objects are being rendered. Techniques like frustum culling and occlusion culling ensure that only visible objects are being rendered by the game engine. This helps reduce unnecessary calculations and improves overall performance, especially in highly detailed environments.

Several tools can assist in optimizing 3D environment models:

• Simplygon: A tool for polygon reduction and LOD generation.
• NVIDIA Texture Tools: Great for compressing textures and reducing texture sizes for environments.
• Unreal Engine & Unity: Both engines offer built-in tools for LOD management, texture optimization, and real-time lighting adjustments.

After optimization, it's essential to test how your 3D model environments perform across various devices. Testing should include profiling the environment for performance bottlenecks, running tests on different hardware configurations, and benchmarking against industry standards. Regular feedback from playtesting and monitoring performance metrics will ensure environments run smoothly, offering the best experience for players.

While 3D environments are commonly associated with video games, their application extends far beyond the gaming industry. These immersive, highly detailed virtual worlds are now widely used in various real-world fields, offering innovative solutions and improving experiences in multiple industries.

Architecture and real estate use 3D environments heavily in their work, as we can interact with the virtual space before it is built. Users should be able to walk through buildings and experience various layouts in 3D model environments, and at the same time, they should be able to make real-time updates on designs. In addition to improving visualization, this enhances decision-making, leading to fewer mistakes, happier clients, and higher satisfaction.

In entertainment, 3D environments are used for visual effects and virtual sets. 3D environment modeling is the buzzword for filmmakers—they use this to build up their futuristic cities, discover alien worlds, or revisit historical settings that are next to impossible and too expensive to create in real life. With virtual production tools, directors can see and mix digital with physical worlds on the fly.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-t3bQ9GMzE&ab_channel=TheGnomonWorkshop

VR and AR rely heavily on 3D environments to provide immersive experiences for users. For gaming, virtual tourism, or medical simulations to show reality, specialists use 3D models in environments that users can move around in, learn from, and interact with. For teaching and learning, e.g., virtual environments replicate real-life environments to enable students and stakeholders to perform safe, controlled-combat-like exercises.

Car manufacturers and industrial designers use 3D environments for prototyping and testing products in a virtual space before physical production. By simulating real-world conditions, companies can test the performance, safety, and design of vehicles or machinery, saving time and resources. 3D environment models also enable manufacturers to showcase their products virtually, allowing customers to experience them in a fully interactive space.

In healthcare, 3D environment modeling is utilized to imitate medical procedures and educate healthcare professionals. Medical students have the opportunity to practice surgeries or other medical treatments in a virtual setting prior to treating actual patients, enabling more secure and efficient training. This immersive learning approach enhances skill growth and minimizes risks linked to conventional training techniques.

3D Environments are also popular in educational resources, enabling 3D objects to recreate elements of history, places across the world, or scientific phenomena. Students may visit the ruins of an ancient city, experience exploration of space, or interact with complicated scientific models in ways that traditional textbooks cannot replicate. Additionally, museums and historians leverage 3D modeling to archive precious historical monuments and relics digitally, facilitating global access via virtual tours.

3D environment design has changed the appearance of video games and elevated them to a new level. Modern 3D graphics allow artists to create beautiful environments with various highly detailed objects that enhance immersion. Any indoor/outdoor scene can become a breathtaking masterpiece if done by experts.

Producing compelling 3D environments that back up storytelling and let players dissolve in the gameplay can be difficult and time-consuming. That is why outsourcing this type of artwork is always a smart choice. Here at Argentics, we have a team of skilled artists ready to take on any job and any scenario you may come up with! Our 3D environment design services are affordable and variable, so we can guarantee that your project will be done on time no matter the difficulty!