Creating Mid/Vista Assets for Games — 3D Art Tutorial

This 12.5-hour intermediate-level course teaches the complete process of creating vista assets for games, including mountains, billboard foliage, and buildings. Instructor Emiel Sleegers, a Lead Environment Artist with over 13 years of AAA game industry experience at studios like Playground Games and Ubisoft, breaks the course into two focused parts. The first part covers creating static vista mountains using World Creator, Marmoset Toolbag, ZBrush, and Photoshop, then demonstrates how to add billboard trees to those mountain ranges. The second part focuses on building vista structures, starting with workflow setup and a "hero" building, followed by techniques to produce additional buildings efficiently. Bonus chapters address optimized, faster, and non-Nanite building creation approaches.

The course provides over 31 videos organized into logically numbered chapters, making it easy to follow along step-by-step. Source files are included for all mountains and buildings, plus save files outside of Unreal Engine, though large sample scenes are excluded. The primary tools covered are 3DS Max (with techniques applicable to Blender or Maya), Photoshop, Substance Painter, ZBrush, and Unreal Engine. Intermediate artists should have prior experience with 3D modeling software, Unreal Engine 5, and some familiarity with Photoshop and Substance Painter. Subtitles are available in English, Chinese, and Spanish, though they are auto-generated.