The Ultimate Guide to Learning 3D
Resource links for all things 3D/AR/VR design
Published in
4 min readDec 11, 2017
Maya
- The Maya Learning Channel on YouTube streams videos on various Maya workflows and features; provides content authored by Autodesk.
- Getting Started playlist on the Maya Learning Channel, which includes several Quick Tip videos.
- Maya YouTube channels: Maya Mondays, Maya Series of videos and My Oh Maya!
- Autodesk’s Maya Tutorials
- This free video gives a Maya tutorial for Beginners
- A series on Low poly for game assets using Maya 2015
Blender
- Blender 3D — Noob to Pro: for the basics
- Blender tutorials by Grant Abbitt
- Blender Nation — tips and podcast episodes
- Secrets to Creating Low Poly Illustrations On Blender — great intro to making some low poly goodness
- CG Cookie — a website that has a bunch of awesome tutorials on many softwares.
- Low Poly Game Asset Creation tutorial
- Blender Guru — 9 part free video series
- Blender tutorials here by Manuel Graphics
- Blender Cycles rendering introduction
- More Blender Tutorials
- Export a rotating GIF in Blender
- Helpful Blender tips and tricks
- All 50+ Blender modifiers explained
Unity
- Unity Tutorials
- More Unity Tutorials
- Unity Hotkeys
- Good lighting resources for Unity
- How to Render your Blocks with Unity
- Unity Compute Shaders
- Mixed Lighting in Unity
All things 3D/low poly
- Creating a low poly treasure island
- PigArt: rad speedart/timelapses of adorable looking low poly art, lots to learn from watching these
- Digital Tutors has loads of 3D modeling tutorials, some free some paid. Tried a few of those and they’re pretty cool!
- Creating flat colored low poly art
- The Polycount forum and their low poly thread
- Reddit’s /low_poly
- Modo: Another popular 3D modeling tool
- Figma x Vectary for inserting 3D models into the rest of your design frame
Cinema 4D
- Lots of Cinema 4D project files for download here
- C4D Fundamentals playlist from Christoph Doe
- Shane Benson’s Sub-D modeling tutorials on Vimeo
- Grant Warwick’s 90 min tutorial on hard surface modeling
- Video tutorials here
- Youtube: Intro video and some helpful tutorials
- School of motion’s video tutorials
- Cineversity’s video tutorials (including project files)
3D Printable things
All things VR/AR Design
- The UX of VR
- I Am Learning 3d
- UX pointers for VR design
- Immersive Design
- Explorations in VR
- Get started with VR: user experience design
- xR.design — AR & VR tutorials and examples
- The Coming Wave of Virtual Reality Creation Tools
- The product design challenges of AR on smartphones
- How to Get A Job in VR
- Spark AR Studio
VR/AR Tools
- Engines: Unity, Unreal
- Frameworks: A-Frame, ARKit
- Modeling: Blender, Cinema4D, Maya, Google Blocks
- Animation, Rigging: Mixamo
- Toolkits: Virtual Reality Toolkit, NewtonVR, Normcore
- Sketching / Prototyping: Tiltbrush, Quill, Sketchbox, Gravity Sketch, Storyboard VR, Halo Labs, Hubs, Maquette, Altspace
Best practices and resources
- VR Glossary
- Oculus Best Practices
- Microsoft HoloLens: 3 HoloStudio UI and Interaction Design Learnings
This video discusses some best practices for 3D UI and interaction design - Defining the best practices for HoloLens — Welcome to the wild, wild west
A Slack channel to discuss best practices for HoloLens design - Microsoft Mixed Reality Toolkit
Asset libraries
- Sketchfab — 3D models; largest libraries to find and publish models
- Clara.io — 3D models
- Archive3d.net — 3D models
- Sketchup library — geared toward architecture 3D models
- turbosquid — 3D models and texture maps
- Poly by Google
- kenny.nl — 3D and 2D free/paid game and character assets
- 360° images
- Pixellab — 3D models with newsletter signup
- CGTrader — 3D models
- Free3d — mix of free and paid 3D models
- 3docean — 3D models/textures/shaders
- Adobe stock —free images/videos/vectors, 3D models/lights/materials
Textures
- Texture Haven — free, high quality scanned textures
- Texture Ninja — public domain textures
- Textures.com —giant library; download up to 15 free textures a day
- HDRIs
- HDRI Skies
