Advice for Designing Environments / Levels in 3D

Any advice for designing 3D environments? I've read some tutorials like this: https://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.co...ide-to-designing-video-game-levels--cms-25662 and in my head I can understand concepts like separating your environment into chunks and thinking about your game's story / gameplay needs.

But when I have Unity open and I'm staring at a blank terrain I'm just so lost. For me, creating environments is like having teeth pulled. I've done one or two in the past but honestly, they were not good at all. They were boring, ugly, and unrealistic (design-wise -- art-wise I'm going for a stylized look).

 

I've always loved this resource. Shows most of the more well-known level and environment designs for games we all love. I figure if it's worked for a AAA studio and their games, these types of design principles should work for smaller studios as well.

https://gridpaper-maps.tumblr.com/

 

Oooh thank you - this is nice.

 

As stated the problem seems also to be about a lack of art education in terms of composition and alll, I would also look at art tutorial, notably landscape painting, with an attention on composition (where to place elements).

 

Have you done any planning before this? I'd do something like sketch out a map, and note down the purpose and look and feel of each area before jumping into the editor and trying to make anything.

 

When it comes to terrain Gaia is a must, doing terrain for hand will make it look off. You want organic feeling to the terrain which Gaia solves for you.

For my latest map I started with the buildings (under ground base in this case)



I then stamped a terrain with gaia, you can see its not orgianic looking at the foot of the mountain but its not viisble for player.


After that I fixed all visible transitions from terrain to mesh using built in raise and smoothing tools (I think the smoothing tool is pretty new, its a god send)



Last piece of the puzzle is to hide the underground base were the terrain is not visible. This can now be done using the pretty new stamp hole feature in Unity, but before that it was done using rock meshes instead of terrain. I did the mesh approach

 

Thank you everyone for all of your advice! I was feeling a little demotivated because not completing this level was holding up my game's progress but I'm going to take everything you've said and give it a go!