3D Artist

You make the things that go in the world: props, modular kits, their textures and their materials.

Read these, in this order

Why
1 Naming Conventions Everything else depends on it. The name decides the folder.
2 Project Folder Structure Where what you make ends up, and the Raw / Source / Exported split.
3 Bubbly Games/Workflows/3D Models/3D Models Blender to Unity, and the conventions that only apply in Blender.
4 Modular 3D Assets Grid, scale, forward axis, and pivots, which cost level designers the most time.
5 Splitting a Piece When one element is several parts: panels, inserts, trim, corners. How a facade gets built.
5a Roofs · Openings · Balconies The rest of a building. Read the one you are about to make.
6 Modular 3D Assets - Texturing Trim sheets, vertex painting, RGB masking. How we get variety without shipping a thousand textures.
7 Texture Workflow Texel density, categories, import settings.
8 Materials Naming, variants, channel packing, and what SMM_ is actually for.

Pages 1–5 before you model anything. 6–8 before you texture anything.

Your tools

  • Blender + our add-on. The Asset Rules panel checks your names and pivots while you work
  • Gitea & Git LFS. .blend files are locked while you hold them

Your first task

Make a Prop: one small prop, all the way from a blank Blender file to a prefab in a scene.
Then Make a Texture Set for it.

Do a prop first, not a kit piece. A kit adds grid alignment, flat connecting faces, shared texel
density and a set-wide naming scheme all at once. Get the loop working on the simple case.

What actually goes wrong

Pivots. Bottom-centre for props, bottom-left corner for walls, top face for floors, bottom face
for ceilings, under the hinge for doors. On the parts of a split element it is the opening for an
insert and the wall plane for trim. Getting this wrong doesn't break
anything. It just makes every level built from your asset slightly wrong forever.
→ Modular 3D Assets > Pivots

Bevels on connecting faces. Any face that meets another modular piece is completely flat. No
bevel, no rounding. A 2 mm bevel is invisible in Blender and a visible seam in a corridor.

Texel density across a kit. Two assets seen next to each other must share a tier. Mismatched
density side by side is far more visible than low density everywhere. No tool can check this,
because nothing in the pipeline knows what ends up next to what. The kit owner enforces it.
→ Texture Workflow > Adjacency

Category case. It is Prop, not PROP. Every category is a capitalised word, because the
categories are also the folder names. Models: Character, Effect, Kit, Prop. Textures:
Surface, Cutout, Trim, Mask, Sprite, Effect. The old all-caps texture codes (SURF,
FX …) were retired on 2026-10-13.

Is it a Kit or a Prop? If it tiles, snaps and connects to its siblings, it's Kit. A tree,
a cliff, a one-off building is a Prop, however large. There is a decision ladder for this, and it
settles the argument.
→ Naming Conventions > Which category is it

Editing something under /Exported. It is generated. Change the source and re-export.