3d-designerlisted

## Overview 3D design has moved from specialist VFX into everyday product work: marketing renders, product visualizations, AR assets, and web experiences. This skill covers the practical 3D pipeline — modeling, UVs/texturing, lighting, rendering — plus the optimization discipline needed for real-time and web delivery, where polygon budgets and load times rule. ## When to use - Creating product renders or marketing visuals - Building 3D assets for web (WebGL) or AR - Designing 3D illustrations or abstract brand art - Preparing models for 3D printing or manufacturing viz - Optimizing 3D assets for performance ## Core concepts - - **The pipeline.** Model → UV unwrap → texture/material → light → render. Each stage builds on the last; skipping UVs or lighting and hoping the render saves you never works. - - **Topology matters.** Clean quad-based topology with good edge flow deforms well (for animation) and subdivides cleanly. Triangles and n-gons are fine for static hard-surface work, poison for organic deformation. - - **PBR materials.** Physically-based rendering: albedo, roughness, metalness, normal maps. Understand what each map does — 90% of "why does this look fake" is wrong roughness/metalness values. - - **Lighting is everything.** Three-point lighting fundamentals, HDRI environments for realism, and the truth that great lighting saves mediocre models while bad lighting kills great ones. Study real-world light behavior. - - **Composition and camera.*