๐Ÿบ Modeling

3D modeling is the process of creating the geometry, textures, and materials that make up your gameโ€™s visual assets. Most web game developers use Blender (free, open-source) as their primary modeling tool.

Modeling Tools

For detailed 3D modeling, sculpting, and scene composition, Blender is the industry standard for indie developers. For voxel and low-poly block-style assets, Blockbench is a lightweight alternative. Spline offers a more design-oriented 3D editing experience in the browser.

You can use custom properties on objects in Blender to pass metadata into your game (e.g., marking objects as colliders, spawn points, or triggers).

Painting and UV Mapping

UV mapping defines how a 2D texture wraps around a 3D surface. Each vertex of the mesh gets a 2D coordinate (U, V) that maps it to a position on the texture image. Good UV unwrapping avoids stretching and makes hand-painting or baking textures much easier.

For 2D texture painting and creation, Krita is a free, professional-grade option. For pixel art and spritesheets, Aseprite is the go-to tool.

Baking

Baking pre-computes expensive effects (lighting, shadows, ambient occlusion) into textures. This trades texture memory for runtime performance โ€” baked lighting looks great and costs almost nothing to render.

Exporting

glTF (GL Transmission Format) is the standard format for web 3D assets. It comes in two forms: .gltf (JSON + separate binary/texture files) and .glb (single binary file). glTF supports PBR materials, animations, skinning, and morph targets out of the box.

Resources

๐ŸŽจ HTML/CSS UI๐Ÿƒ Model Animations