The shift from 2D to 3D is not just big, but it’s transdimensional. Do you find this move a little difficult? Don’t panic! We will help you ease the painful transition with a powerful gaming plan which will help you to get your game ideas into a 3D space.

Deceptively, 3D  games are simple organisms and those who take the most care with their environment create non-intrusive tangibility. A place where the player does not feel that they are surrounded by artificial geometric shapes to give the illusion of a living world to play in. This is how programmers trick the user into thinking they are trapped in the ocean’s depths when they are actually sitting in a comfy computer chair. All this takes careful planning, iterative execution and a lot of trial and error.

What your gaming environment is composed of is completely up to you and how much content you need to populate that environment will highly depend upon the type of game you wish to create. Here, we have covered some essential tips to help you create an ideal 3D gaming environment:

Don’t Fret

In order to create a 3D environment, it is imperative to have tight restrictions on texture sizes, polygon limits, draw calls and other technical garble. Here, you should be concerned about making things functional and make things look nice. Don’t worry about finishing a scene, there will be a lot of time to develop the best practices for optimizing the performance and finishing things off.

Find Reference Material and Plan the Scene

Finding reference material is the process of amassing images that you can draw inspiration from which will help in the creation of your scene without obstructing it. Further, these images can be used as color palettes to help you pick lighting, fog, sky and texture colors. Some of the 3D games are highly inspired by 2D elements. Pick and select images will best help you facilitate your own unique environment with its own set of different requirements. While making a full-on 3D Mobile game, do see a 2D image with a color palette you like.

Make sure you look around for plenty of images and think about how these scenes might look in the editor with collision volumes and basic geometry, light sources and more. All gaming environments are unique in their own way and mostly, all games have their own requirements both through play and visually. An excellent rule of thumb for choosing assets is to consider whether you can start them as basic primitives and later on, replace them with higher-end assets. Is it possible for you to put in cylinders and cones for tall trees and cubes for cars? If yes then go to town. However, if you are throwing together various tubes in an effort to create a gnarled magnificent oak, there is a great chance you are taking the scene too far.

Keeping things simple will help you and you can actually spend weeks trying to get massive and finely tuned collision on strange environment assets and these will only make your game worse. Most of the assets have simple collision geometry and usually, boxy or cylindrical silhouettes to boot. It is easily implemented and works superbly.

Lighting – It’s Time to Getting our Hands Dirty

3D environments are quite difficult to make, have more technical restrictions, require a broader toolset. Lighting in a 3D space is one such element of a scene which is simple, powerful and a lot of fun to play with.

For instance, if you are to make a game with lots of adventure where at one moment, the player is discovering a vibrant colorful area full of the notion and you want it to seamlessly transition into a brooding area with cloudy fog clouding the player’s senses. In 3D, there are so many tools and technologies available to make this transition easier and in a real time.

When starting on lighting, create a sanity test asset which you will use to ensure lighting and materials don’t go out of whack. Put a decent-sized and single sphere in your game scene. Do ensure it has a straight white material with a touch of specular. Achieve the mood you want on your spherical sanity object then strike the ideal balance in your materials and texture so they look fantastic.

Pretty Vs. Play

Being a 3D environment artist, you have 3 tasks – make things pretty, make things play well and find a way to make the first TWO work together. Devote some time learning to compose things in visually appealing ways. Attack scenes with an eye for color with composition and slick looking assets. You need to tweak bloom settings, adjust fog values, find all the ways to inject more knobs, color depth and expression into your scene. If you are drifted more towards design the put visuals on the black burner. Discover the space with collision volumes, terrain objects, power up placements, enemy spawn locations, whatever that makes your game vision playable.

Start with block outs, determine the types of collision volumes you need in the gameplay, go in and create the visual elements afterward that fill them up. Several games pace themselves by having moments of grandeur where the scope may change drastically and you find yourself atop a big ornate bridge with enthralling landscapes in all directions. During this moment, gameplay could be slow but it does not matter because the scenery is the STAR here. Later on, you may find yourself in a dull box-like room with enemies spawning from all locations. The simplicity of the gaming environment allows for the gameplay to be the focus so wave after wave of the enemy can burst in without a problem.

Modularity – The Significance of Reusing Assets

Now, if your game lacks exacting city spaces, kitbashed sci-fi hallways or other modular things it would be recommended to think of ways to reuse your assets to create fast methods for populating your scenes quickly.

Telling Your Story Through Your Environment

Your levels will explain your game story. Whether your game tells an epic story of an action game where as a vobo you violate people for street change or as a wandering adventurer saving the universe, it does not change that. You can watch any Pixar movie and spend your viewing time thinking about how the story is amplified by artistic changes in the color and tone of lighting. Even, the roundness of objects and softness are enhanced to deliver a particular mood. We can say that some things in storytelling are universal.

Finishing Touches: Tweaking Settings and Making Adjustments

There is a very popular saying,”Games are never finished”. The more you improve graphics, the harder it becomes to reach the benchmark. There are plenty of layers which can be refined over a period of time: lighting, textures, materials, topology, composition, collision volumes and many more. Does your game look awesome at runtime? Did you spend a lot of time putting finishing touches on it? Superb! Now, do it again for other detail levels too.