Environment modeling and texturing, with an aim towards architectural visualization, is my niche field of expertise. I’ve spoken to many guys in real-life over the years about 3D modeling, so I know some of you reading this are interested in this topic.
Scale
Centimeters are the most stable unit of measure, since that is the expectation most of the time. Using a consistent unit of measure saves you a lot of time, since you can drop your assets into a scene without having to deal with resizing it. I used to prefer modeling in meters but switched to centimeters because that is the standard for Unreal. Scale does affect lighting and physics simulations. You can also run into problems when converting between imperial and metric, so while it’s possible to model in imperial, I recommend metric.
Always model to real world scale, when possible.
It’s critically important to drop a human (or something else of a known size) into a scene to establish and maintain the sense of scale.
Whiteboxing
Also called grayboxing, whiteboxing is used to loosely block out an environment with primitive shapes to get things working before going to town with the heavy modeling.
Unreal vs Unity
The two most widely used game engines are Unreal and Unity. The engines each have their strengths and weaknesses, but for Environment Art, use Unreal. Unreal is more artist friendly while Unity is more programmer friendly. Epic, which makes Unreal, gives away tools for free, most notably Quixel Megascans for photorealism. It also gives away Twinmotion for architectural visualization. Unreal is harder to code for, though, because it's based on C++.
William Faucher has an excellent YouTube channel to help learn Unreal.
Concept Art
Don’t use your own concept art for your portfolio. Portfolios are not about creativity. Portfolios are about demonstrating your skills at executing the specifications on a brief. Concept art is a highly valuable skill for your personal work, and I definitely recommend learning it, but concept art is its own profession. If your concept art has poor shape language or art direction, it will hurt your modeling. Instead, either find good concept art and ask the artist if you can model from it (and give them credit), or model real-life environments. For real-life environments, I recommend using Google Earth Pro to measure buildings and use Street View mode for details and walking around interiors, or model from photos.
Blueprints
Blueprints are helpful, but they’re not great. Blueprints which you find online are often not made by the manufacturer and don’t match up and have errors. You end up doing creative interpretation.
Premade assets
It’s necessary to use premade assets to reach the standards of commercial art in a reasonable amount of time. You do have to, in a sense, buy your way into commercial art. If you have been modeling for years, you may have a large library of assets which you modeled yourself which you can reuse or re-purpose. You would be shooting yourself in the foot if you tried to model everything from scratch for a big environment, because you would run out of time (and very likely burn out). Model things yourself when you’re learning, but when you have enough skills to model most things and don’t have anything to prove to anyone and are simply trying to save time, you can buy premade assets from other artists.
You need to be careful with premade assets, though. Premade assets have the problem of not matching the style of the environment. You can’t just drop any table and couch into a living room. What kind of table? What kind of couch? You need to think about the personality of the owner of the home. What year is it? Different eras use different fonts on signs. What country and city is it in? You need to match the species of trees and plant life of the region, and the “species” of street lamps, stop lights, and such. I once took a vacation to Germany and noticed the class of motorcyles are different in Europe than the United States. You may also need to modify the premade assets to fit the scene.
Focus your time on things which need to be uniquely modeled.
Link: "What Are The Different Lamp Posts Of Paris?"
Maps
With the exception of normal maps which are colorful, maps are black-n-white images which allow you to control of the intensity of a material property along the surface of a model. The lips on your mouth, for example, have more specularity than the rest of your skin.
For terrains, you can get a height map of terrain from anywhere in the world at :
https://tangrams.github.io/heightmapper/
and use it as a displacement map to turn it into 3D.
UV unwrapping
You must learn how to properly manually UV unwrap. There are automated ways of UV unwrapping, which can be good enough for certain situations, but you will eventually run into big problems.
Maya and 3DS Max
If you're doing modeling just for fun, use Blender. The fact that Blender is free is a feature. However, if you aspire to work professionally, and your work is near the professional level, you should seriously think about Maya or 3DS Max.
When it comes to working professionally, price is not a feature. Studios use the best tools for the job and don't care about price. Blender's development is promising and may be "the future" of the industry (or maybe not), but you need to make decisions based on how things are right now. And right now is Maya and 3DS Max.
If a studio is looking for a full-time employee, a highly skilled artist who uses Blender can get hired (it sometimes happens), because the studio can train them. For freelance work, it might not matter what software you use. However, Blender does introduce compatibility issues within a pipeline, and it's easier to build teams for contract work for individual projects with professionals using Maya or 3DS Max. You can make amazing art with Blender, but the performance of Blender breaks in the context of large scale productions. Blender users invade the comments section of YouTube videos about other 3D software and say "Why don't you just use Blender?", but most Blender users have no experience with serious productions.
If you live in certain select countries, you can get Maya Indie or 3DS Max Indie for a little more than $250 a year, which is like going out to dinner once a month.
Scale
Centimeters are the most stable unit of measure, since that is the expectation most of the time. Using a consistent unit of measure saves you a lot of time, since you can drop your assets into a scene without having to deal with resizing it. I used to prefer modeling in meters but switched to centimeters because that is the standard for Unreal. Scale does affect lighting and physics simulations. You can also run into problems when converting between imperial and metric, so while it’s possible to model in imperial, I recommend metric.
Always model to real world scale, when possible.
It’s critically important to drop a human (or something else of a known size) into a scene to establish and maintain the sense of scale.
Whiteboxing
Also called grayboxing, whiteboxing is used to loosely block out an environment with primitive shapes to get things working before going to town with the heavy modeling.
Unreal vs Unity
The two most widely used game engines are Unreal and Unity. The engines each have their strengths and weaknesses, but for Environment Art, use Unreal. Unreal is more artist friendly while Unity is more programmer friendly. Epic, which makes Unreal, gives away tools for free, most notably Quixel Megascans for photorealism. It also gives away Twinmotion for architectural visualization. Unreal is harder to code for, though, because it's based on C++.
William Faucher has an excellent YouTube channel to help learn Unreal.
Concept Art
Don’t use your own concept art for your portfolio. Portfolios are not about creativity. Portfolios are about demonstrating your skills at executing the specifications on a brief. Concept art is a highly valuable skill for your personal work, and I definitely recommend learning it, but concept art is its own profession. If your concept art has poor shape language or art direction, it will hurt your modeling. Instead, either find good concept art and ask the artist if you can model from it (and give them credit), or model real-life environments. For real-life environments, I recommend using Google Earth Pro to measure buildings and use Street View mode for details and walking around interiors, or model from photos.
Blueprints
Blueprints are helpful, but they’re not great. Blueprints which you find online are often not made by the manufacturer and don’t match up and have errors. You end up doing creative interpretation.
Premade assets
It’s necessary to use premade assets to reach the standards of commercial art in a reasonable amount of time. You do have to, in a sense, buy your way into commercial art. If you have been modeling for years, you may have a large library of assets which you modeled yourself which you can reuse or re-purpose. You would be shooting yourself in the foot if you tried to model everything from scratch for a big environment, because you would run out of time (and very likely burn out). Model things yourself when you’re learning, but when you have enough skills to model most things and don’t have anything to prove to anyone and are simply trying to save time, you can buy premade assets from other artists.
You need to be careful with premade assets, though. Premade assets have the problem of not matching the style of the environment. You can’t just drop any table and couch into a living room. What kind of table? What kind of couch? You need to think about the personality of the owner of the home. What year is it? Different eras use different fonts on signs. What country and city is it in? You need to match the species of trees and plant life of the region, and the “species” of street lamps, stop lights, and such. I once took a vacation to Germany and noticed the class of motorcyles are different in Europe than the United States. You may also need to modify the premade assets to fit the scene.
Focus your time on things which need to be uniquely modeled.
Link: "What Are The Different Lamp Posts Of Paris?"
Maps
With the exception of normal maps which are colorful, maps are black-n-white images which allow you to control of the intensity of a material property along the surface of a model. The lips on your mouth, for example, have more specularity than the rest of your skin.
For terrains, you can get a height map of terrain from anywhere in the world at :
https://tangrams.github.io/heightmapper/
and use it as a displacement map to turn it into 3D.
UV unwrapping
You must learn how to properly manually UV unwrap. There are automated ways of UV unwrapping, which can be good enough for certain situations, but you will eventually run into big problems.
Maya and 3DS Max
If you're doing modeling just for fun, use Blender. The fact that Blender is free is a feature. However, if you aspire to work professionally, and your work is near the professional level, you should seriously think about Maya or 3DS Max.
When it comes to working professionally, price is not a feature. Studios use the best tools for the job and don't care about price. Blender's development is promising and may be "the future" of the industry (or maybe not), but you need to make decisions based on how things are right now. And right now is Maya and 3DS Max.
If a studio is looking for a full-time employee, a highly skilled artist who uses Blender can get hired (it sometimes happens), because the studio can train them. For freelance work, it might not matter what software you use. However, Blender does introduce compatibility issues within a pipeline, and it's easier to build teams for contract work for individual projects with professionals using Maya or 3DS Max. You can make amazing art with Blender, but the performance of Blender breaks in the context of large scale productions. Blender users invade the comments section of YouTube videos about other 3D software and say "Why don't you just use Blender?", but most Blender users have no experience with serious productions.
If you live in certain select countries, you can get Maya Indie or 3DS Max Indie for a little more than $250 a year, which is like going out to dinner once a month.
