Both personally and professionally, 3D modeling skills are becoming more and more valuable life skills. So, it might be a good skill to foster early on. But if you were to introduce your children to 3D design concepts, where would you start?
If you think sitting kids in front of tutorial videos for hours on end may not ignite their interest, video games could offer an engaging introduction to the concepts and skills needed in 3D design. Below, we’ve listed five games – accessible to a wide variety of ages – that teach players some basic design principles, instill a sense of joy in creativity, and can scale to the skill set of your fully blossomed 3D artist.
In Minecraft, the wildly popular sandbox game, players in a procedurally generated world build with a deceptively broad set of blocky resources.
Minecraft has both survival and creative modes that encourage very different design processes. Survival motivates players to build while forcing them to consider their environment and needs, while creative is a free-for-all where players have unlimited resources at their disposal. With an in-game resource called “Redstone,” you can even create logic gates for complex devices.
Even Autodesk recognizes the value of Minecraft in learning 3D design. They added a “blocks” feature to Tinkercad that makes it easy to import 3D models into the game by using a popular mod called MCedit.
Spore
Spore tasks players with guiding a species through evolution. Though no longer supported by its developers, it’s still a tremendously fun game with design and creativity at its heart.
Players are given a variety of model components (body parts) to change their species with at each stage of their evolution. Creatures grow from spore to land-dweller, to city-builder, to spacefarer over time. Players design not just a species, but their buildings, and vehicles too.
With simple mechanics, Spore is a great place to start younger kids and get them excited about unique creations. It’s also simple to export and 3D print your Spore creature to add a touch of 3D printing.
Fortnite
Think fast! Fortnite, the massively successful battle royale game, has a key component to train designer reflexes: building.
Fortnite’s building mechanic teaches players how to think on their feet using at-hand resources. Players learn that widely used designs are accepted for a reason, and that experimentation can be extremely rewarding.
On the flip side, Fortnite’s creative mode gives players a place to build together and share maps of their own design with the wider community. The game’s developers have even said they see creative mode as an extension of their game engine and hope players transition from Fortnite to developing more advanced content with the Unreal Engine.
Kerbal Space Program
In Kerbal Space Program players are tasked, at first, with building an orbit-worthy spaceship for their species’ space program.
It’s really a physics simulator where players design spacecraft that persistently fall victim to science. Since figuring out why a launch failed falls to the player, it enforces design problem-solving skills. Players change their designs to account for launch difficulties until – finally – success!
Failure is a core component of Kerbal Space Program, and genuinely makes mistakes fun. The consequences of a dysfunctional design might cause your launch to fail and nosedive to the ground, your vessel to explode, or send ships spiraling out of control.
Roblox
Roblox is a massively popular online game that familiarizes users with 3D modeling through a highly active community of designers.
The base Roblox software is a platform where creators can freely share, or sell, creations of varying complexity. Players build objects, cosmetics, or entire games from either “Parts” (in-game assets), or by designing and importing custom meshes. Roblox has no core gameplay, it’s all community built.
Because of Parts, the fact that they’re modifiable, and the ability for more advanced players to import (and sell) their own meshes, Roblox is incredibly scalable to design skills – but great fun no matter a player’s ability.
Looking for the next step? Find out how you can take 3D printing to school and help kids learn. Or, read our list of 2021’s best free online 3D modeling software.
Did we miss something? Shout out another video game that teaches 3D design concepts in the comments below!
License: The text of "Five Games that Teach 3D Design" by All3DP is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.