Game Props! 3D Modeling & Texturing for Beginners

In this lesson, we officially begin our project by learning one of the most important habits of every professional 3D artist: working with solid reference. You’ll install and explore PureRef, a free and lightweight tool that lets us collect, organize, and display our images while we work.

Together, we’ll build a clean and inspiring reference board for the entire diorama, discuss what makes good reference, and how to elevate your work using storytelling elements. We also go through the mindset behind successful projects: curiosity, observation, patience, and knowing how to research before modeling!

In this lesson, we create our very first game prop: a simple but charming sugar cube. You’ll learn how to soften its silhouette using Blender’s Subdivision Surface modifier, and how to use modifiers to achieve clean forms quickly. This is a perfect introduction to non-destructive modeling and the power of procedural workflows!

By the end of this lecture, you’ll understand how to shape and refine objects with smooth edges and support loops, giving you the foundation you’ll use throughout the rest of the course.

In this lesson, we take our first steps into modeling slightly more complex shapes. Using our reference board as a guide, we’ll learn how to break a detailed object, like a ceramic sugar bowl, into simple, manageable forms. This approach is one of the core skills of a 3D artist: understanding how to see complexity as a collection of manageable, basic shapes.

You’ll practice working with the Subdivision Surface modifier to achieve smooth, elegant curves, and you’ll learn essential modeling tools such as extrusions, insets, and Blender’s powerful Grid Fill for building clean, predictable topology.

By the end of this lecture, you’ll feel much more comfortable creating polished forms with good geometry, setting the stage for all the more intricate props ahead!

In this lesson, we continue developing our modeling skills by creating the lid for our sugar bowl. It is a shape that looks complex at first, but becomes much easier once we break it down into simple forms. You will learn how to use proportional editing to create smooth, controlled curvature, and how to solve common Subdivision Surface issues that often appear when working with rounded objects.

We also look at how to connect different edge loops cleanly and maintain flowing topology across curved surfaces. By the end, you will understand how to approach tricky shapes with confidence and build geometry that subdivides beautifully, which is an essential skill for any 3D artist

In this lesson, we explore how to model soft, organic shapes by creating our tea-time sandwiches. You will learn how to work with Subdivision Surface to shape smooth, natural forms, and how to build convincing bread layers and fillings with simple, controlled geometry. We also introduce the Mirror modifier, which helps you model symmetrical objects more efficiently and keep your workflow clean and fast.

By the end of this lecture, you will understand how to combine subdivision modeling with the Mirror modifier to create appealing organic props while saving time and maintaining clean topology!

In this lesson, we take on one of the main hero props of our scene: the Sweetroll! This is where your modeling skills start to level up. You will learn how to duplicate and reuse parts of your mesh efficiently, as well as how to select, edit, and manipulate geometry with more control. We explore the Solidify modifier to give our shapes proper thickness, and look at several non-destructive modeling techniques that keep your workflow flexible and clean!

We also take our first steps into Blender’s sculpting tools to create the stylized icing and organic surface details that add personality to our Sweetroll. By the end of this lecture, you will feel comfortable mixing our traditional Subdivision modeling with light sculpting to create expressive, game-ready shapes!

In this lesson, we continue refining our subdivision modeling workflow by creating the blueberry and cherry tarts. You will practice building clean, smooth shapes while focusing on efficiency and reusability, two key principles of game asset creation. We explore how to reuse and adapt existing meshes to create variations quickly, saving time while maintaining visual consistency across our props!

In this lesson, we model the plate and the cake stand while learning efficient techniques for creating clean, elegant shapes. You will explore the Solidify modifier to give your meshes proper thickness, and learn how to use curves in Blender to quickly build complex structures like the cake stand frame with flexibility.

We also cover practical techniques for merging round objects and cylinders seamlessly, helping you maintain clean topology and smooth surfaces. By the end of this lecture, you will understand how to combine modifiers and curves to create polished props without unnecessary complexity!

In this lesson, we model the napkins and the napkin holder while learning powerful tools for creating repeating and organic shapes efficiently. You will explore Blender’s Wireframe and Array modifiers to build structured forms quickly, and continue working with curves to create more complex shapes with minimal effort.

We also take advantage of Blender 5.0’s new randomization features to introduce subtle variation, helping our napkins feel more natural and organic without manually sculpting each fold. By the end of this lecture, you will understand how to combine modifiers, curves, and controlled randomness to create clean, believable props suitable for games!

In this lesson, we focus on creating the ornate saucer and introduce sculpting techniques that are perfect for decorative, symmetrical details. You’ll learn how to sculpt radial patterns directly onto a mesh, using symmetry to work faster while maintaining perfect balance across the surface.

We also explore the Multiresolution modifier, allowing us to sculpt fine details without destroying our base geometry, and discuss when this approach makes sense for game assets. Along the way, we use the Bevel and Weld modifiers along with the Solidify modifier to enhance edges and merge geometry smoothly, keeping everything looking great and subdivision-friendly!

In this lesson, we model one of the more complex props in our scene: the tea cup. This lecture focuses on how to approach intricate shapes by breaking them down into simple, manageable forms, and then combining those forms into a polished final object!

You’ll learn how to use more advanced Blender techniques such as Data Transfer, Vertex Groups, and the Shrinkwrap modifier to blend different parts together seamlessly while maintaining clean geometry. These tools allow us to create smooth transitions and refined shapes without resorting to destructive modeling!

In this lesson, we model two simple but essential props: the cake server and the spoon. This lecture is all about developing one of the most important skills every 3D artist must master: simplifying complex, curved shapes into basic primitives and refining them step by step.

We continue practicing subdivision modeling while using bevel and solidify techniques to add thickness, softness, and proportion quickly. By the end of this lecture, you’ll have a stronger intuition for building curved objects efficiently, helping you create polished props with minimal geometry that look awesome!

In this milestone lesson, we tackle the Teapot: the most complex prop in the section, and the moment where everything you’ve learned so far comes together. Starting from simple shapes, we combine all the modifiers we saw during the previous lectures, curves, and sculpting techniques to build a the final mesh, and we also learn many new techniques during the process!

You’ll learn how to use the Screw modifier to create perfectly round and cylindrical forms, how to loft curves together to build the spout, and how to blend these shapes seamlessly into the main body. We also refine our sculpting workflow by using masks to isolate specific areas, allowing us to add detail without destroying our work done in specific areas! This lesson is perhaps the culmination of all your hard work so far, and it will put all the things we learned during the previous props to the test. You got this!

In this final modeling lesson of the section, we create two tablecloths using Blender’s cloth simulation tools. This is a relaxed and enjoyable project to end Section 2 that introduces you to a simple cloth workflow while showing how easily organic, natural shapes can be achieved with simulation!

You’ll learn how to work with Blender’s timeline to control and refine the simulation, adjust settings for believable folds, and how to tweak results using different material presets. This lecture is designed to be approachable and satisfying after all that hard work with the more complex props, serving as a nice wrap-up to the modeling section before we move on to preparing our assets for UVs and baking in Section 3!

In this lesson, we introduce the concepts of UV mapping and baking, two essential steps in creating game-ready assets. We start by walking through the full pipeline at a high level, so you can see how UVs and baking fit into the bigger picture before diving into the details.

Using the sugar cube as a simple example, we demonstrate how to place seams, understand smoothing groups, and prepare a mesh correctly for baking. This hands-on approach keeps things clear and approachable, helping you build confidence with these concepts before we tackle more advanced shapes in the next chapters!

In this lesson, we prepare our sweetroll for texturing by optimizing its geometry using a technique called retopology. You’ll learn what retopology is, why it’s important for games, and how to do it quickly and efficiently using the Shrinkwrap modifier you already know!

We then move on to UV unwrapping soft, organic shapes, focusing on clean seam placement and readable layouts. To speed things up, we use UniV, a powerful add-on that comes with Blender, to organize and optimize our UVs!

In this lesson, we prepare our tablecloth meshes for texturing by turning them into a lightweight, game-ready asset. You’ll learn how to create a set of shells, or cards, that capture the visual detail of the cloth while dramatically reducing the amount of geometry needed. This technique is widely used in games and allows us to keep performance high while keeping our mesh looking nice!

This lecture sets the groundwork for all the techniques we'll learn in the next section regarding using Color ID masks and Transparency in order to optimize our tablecloth while retaining control and quality over it

In this final lesson of the section, we focus on packing our UV islands efficiently to get the best possible texture quality from our assets. You’ll learn the core concepts behind UV packing, including how to scale and prioritize UV islands based on the size, importance, and resolution needs of each mesh.

We introduce the idea of texel density and explain in simple terms how to keep texture detail consistent across different props. You’ll also learn how to use checker textures to see the results of our work! This is the last step before we can jump into Substance Painter to bake and texture our props in Section 4!

Baking can make or break your textures, and today we're making sure yours turns out flawless! We'll get our high and low poly models export-ready for Substance Painter, then walk through baking those high-poly details onto your clean low-poly mesh.

We're covering best practices that separate crisp, accurate bakes from smudgy, artifact-ridden ones. Cage issues, UV seams, and many more. This lecture kickstarts Section 4, and you'll walk into your texturing work with clean maps and zero headaches, setting you up for success for every lecture that follows!

Time to bring textures to life! We're diving into Substance 3D Painter using a humble sugar cube as our playground, and by the end you'll actually get how this powerhouse tool works. We'll set up the interface, bake our maps, and unlock the non-destructive layer system that makes texturing feel like magic.

Then we'll break down PBR values (albedo, roughness, metallic, height in a way that's easy to understand and visualize, and use generators and masks to add the final touches to our sugar cube. This is the foundation for everything else in Section 4!

Let me guess, somebody stole your sweetroll?! We're taking everything you've learned so far and applying it to a more advanced prop: The Sweetroll. This time we're learning about Color ID maps to speed up masking and give us precise control over where each material lives on our mesh.

We'll layer multiple effects together to build up rich, believable details like glaze, dough texture, and toasty edges, pulling together everything from PBR values to generators to masks into one cohesive workflow. This lecture is all about combining techniques to create organic textures that have personality!

With the sweetroll under your belt, we're scaling things down (literally) to see just how far textures alone can take us. In this lecture, we tackle tarts topped with blueberries and cherries, proving that you don't always need extra geometry to sell intricate detail, and how the right texture work can do the heavy lifting!

We'll dig into creating the delicate skin of a blueberry and the glossy surface of a cherry, we'll learn about Perlin Noise and how to make some nice Jam with it! Applying everything from the sweetroll lecture at a smaller, more refined scale. It's a great lesson in how much life you can breathe into a simple mesh with nothing but smart texturing

Time to sink our teeth into something extra tasty! We're bringing an iconic coronation chicken sandwich to life in Substance Painter, layering up textures that make bread, filling, and garnish all feel distinct and appetizing side by side on one mesh.

We'll push our masking and layering skills further here, creating a soft bread texture, glossy mayo-coated filling and fresh herbs, each with its own material identity. It's the perfect exercise in combining multiple materials convincingly on a single object!

We're closing out Section 4 with our most refined exercise yet: turning simple cylinder meshes into a rich, believable tablecloth, baked down from a fully simulated high-poly cloth mesh. This lecture brings shaders and opacity into the mix for the first time, letting us fake the delicate weave, folds, and translucency of real fabric on incredibly simple geometry.

We'll lean on Color ID once more to keep our masking precise, and pull together everything from the section, layering, generators, PBR values, masking into one cohesive final pass. But just as important as technique here is restraint: we'll talk about knowing when to add wear and damage versus when a prop calls for a clean, pristine finish that draws the eye instead of distracting from it. It's the perfect capstone for Section 4, tying every skill together into a final texture with real intention behind it!

Welcome to Section 5! We're kicking things off with a concept that's about to change how you think about texturing efficiency: trimsheets. We'll break down exactly what a trimsheet is, why studios rely on them so heavily in production, and how a single, well-organized texture can be reused across dozens of different meshes without ever looking repetitive.

This lecture is all foundation, no baking or painting yet, just building a rock-solid understanding of why trimsheets matter before we start creating our own. By the end, you'll see why this technique is one of the most valuable, time-saving skills in a game artist's toolkit, and you'll be ready to start building trims of your own in the lectures ahead!

Time to start building! Before touching a brush, we're setting up our Substance Painter project and learning how to plan a trimsheet that actually holds up: prioritizing which materials your scene needs and how much prominence each one deserves. Not every material carries equal weigh, and knowing which ones matter most now saves you hours later.

We're also introducing one of Substance Painter's most powerful features: Anchor Points, your go-to tool for zoning and controlling different areas of your trimsheet with ease. By the end, you'll have a solid plan, a ready project, and a sharp new tool in your kit, set to start building for real in the next lecture!

Time to put the plan into action! We're diving in and creating all four materials for our trimsheet: Ceramic, gold, silver, and cloth, getting real, hands-on practice with everything we learned along the way!

Anchor Points take center stage here, letting us zone out each material cleanly and adjust where they land on our trim without a headache. By the end of this lecture, you'll have a fully realized trimsheet with all the materials we need to finish the scene, and greater command of Substance Painter as we make several diverse materials together!

This is where all that planning pays off! We're exporting our finished trimsheet out of Substance Painter and bringing it into Blender, where we'll apply it to our meshes and see the whole workflow click into place. One texture, applied across multiple objects, doing all the heavy lifting!

We'll also dig into practical UV unwrapping tips and tricks specifically for working with trimsheets, and how to lay out your UVs so your trim reads correctly on different shapes and scales. Armed with these techniques, you'll be able to rapidly texture a whole batch of background props in a fraction of the time it'd take to paint each one individually. The very last lecture of Section 5, and a serious speed boost for the rest of our pipeline!

Welcome to Section 6! This is where all our hard work finally gets to shine. We're kicking off with an inspiration-first look at professional presentation and rendering. Studying real industry work to understand what separates a portfolio piece that gets scrolled past from one that captures the eye!

We'll talk through exactly what shots to render for your props (hero angles, detail close-ups, wireframes, and more), and the key elements you should always include in a presentation to boost your perceived value as an artist. This lecture is all about mindset and strategy before we get hands-on, setting you up to present every piece you make, in this course and beyond, with the polish and professionalism it deserves

Now we bring everything together! This lecture is all about set dressing your scene with real intention, using composition techniques to arrange your props into something that feels alive and purposeful rather than just scattered. We'll get hands-on with variation tricks that let you stretch a handful of assets into an entire scene's worth of unique-feeling props!

We're diving into Blender's new Array modifier and Lattice modifier, plus creative UV work and simple mesh operations, to generate fresh variations of existing meshes without modeling or retexturing a single thing from scratch. It's a huge time-saver and a genuine game-changer for populating a scene efficiently. By the end of this lecture, your scene will be fully set dressed and composed, ready for the lighting and rendering work coming up next!

Now for the magic! With our scene set dressed and ready, it's time to bring it to life with cameras and lighting. We'll set up our shots properly, then dive into HDRIs, understanding what they are and how they let you achieve fast, accurate, realistic lighting with minimal setup!

From there, we'll build a classic 3-light studio setup from scratch, giving you full creative control when you need it instead of relying on an HDRI alone. To finish, we'll push our renders further with beautiful effects like subsurface scattering, adding that extra layer of realism and polish that turns a good render into a breathtaking one. Get ready to see all our hard work finally lit the way it deserves!

It's finally time to render! We're capturing our beauty shots and diving deeper into camera settings and placement, learning exactly how to frame your work so every angle does it justice. We'll also create several different background versions, giving you flexibility to showcase your props in different contexts and moods.

From there, we jump into compositing nodes for post-processing, the final polish that separates a good render from a great one. We'll wrap up with practical tips on how to actually choose your shots: which angles best showcase the details you worked hardest on, and how to present your work in a way that does your skills full justice. This is the last step before our breakdown shots can be taken!

Beauty shots aren't the whole story, now it's time to show the craft behind them! We're planning and building a full set of breakdown shots, learning how to clearly display your UVs and wireframe topology so viewers (and potential employers) can see exactly how your models are constructed!

The centerpiece here is building a stunning 360-degree turntable, complete with a wireframe animation layered right on top, all created natively inside Blender. We'll also go through how to create clay renders, how to make even technical shots look great and by the end, you'll have every tool you need to present your models like a true industry pro!

We've made it to the finish line! In this final lecture, we'll cover what actually makes a thumbnail stand out: the composition, contrast, and framing choices that grab attention in a sea of scrolling portfolios. We'll take our final render and refine it further using image editing software, polishing it into a true hero image worthy of everything you've built.

From there, we'll talk next steps: how to keep building your portfolio, where to go from here, and how to keep growing as an artist. This isn't the end of your journey, it's the foundation for everything that comes next. Congratulations on making it through the entire course. You've earned every bit of the skill you now carry with you, and I can't wait to see what you create!