LogInExplore May’s top tools and courses to boost your 3D workflow, sharpen your skills, and support creative work.
Throughout May on 80 Level, we featured a wide range of tools and courses designed to support 3D artists at every stage. Now, we’ve handpicked the best of the best – the standouts that truly help streamline your workflow, sharpen your skills, and keep your creativity moving. No fluff – just solid resources that are worth your time.
3D for Beginners
To kick things off, we’re starting with resources for beginners – perfect for those just getting into 3D or looking to solidify their foundational skills.
3D for Beginners – Ultimate Bundle is a solid starting point for anyone new to 3D. It includes six intro courses covering Maya, Blender, ZBrush, Substance 3D Painter, Substance 3D Designer, and general sculpting – all beginner-friendly and designed to build essential skills from the ground up.
Each course combines clear instruction with hands-on practice, helping you get familiar with industry-standard tools and workflows without needing any prior experience.
Buy 3D for Beginners – Ultimate Bundle here:
Full Process of Street Night Scene
In this course, Senior Concept Artist Ryan Millard walks through the full process of building a vibrant Japanese night street scene – from early 2D sketching to final render. The 20-hour series covers 3D blockout in Blender, asset creation, lighting, rendering, and final paint-over in Photoshop.
It’s a detailed look at integrating 2D and 3D for concept art, with techniques tailored for environment design. The course includes project files and lifetime access, making it easy to follow at your own pace.
Purchase the course:
BagaPie Assets & Baga River Generator
Once you’ve built a solid foundation, it’s worth exploring tools that can streamline your workflow and open up new creative possibilities. If you’re working in Blender, Antoine Bagattini’s BagaPie is a great place to start.
In May, he released BagaPie 11, a major update to his Blender add-on. It introduced over 20 new tools, an improved Node panel, and an upgraded Group system. For those using the paid BagaPie Assets, the update also brought 40+ new scattering presets and 100 additional assets, making environment creation even more efficient.
Antoine Bagattini also launched the Baga River Generator, a Geometry Nodes tool that lets you draw a curve to generate animated rivers with rocks, vegetation, and other details. It’s fully customizable and built to integrate smoothly with the BagaPie ecosystem.
Learn more about the BagaPie 11 release here and the Baga River Generator launch here.
Get BagaPie:
Get Baga River Generator:
Physical Open Waters
If you're looking to create realistic oceanscapes in Blender, Physical Open Waters is a powerful tool to have on hand. Used in the award-winning movie Flow, this add-on lets you generate cinematic water in just one click. The add-on works with both Eevee and Cycles, with options for customizing wave behavior, reflections, and refraction.
It’s useful for building large-scale water environments quickly, especially for artists who want to save time on setup without sacrificing visual quality. The add-on continues to receive updates and can fit into a wide range of 3D workflows.
Learn more about Physical Open Waters here.
Get the add-on:
Toon Studio for Redshift
One of May’s standout resources was the Toon Studio collection for Redshift by The Pixel Lab in collaboration with Theo Daley. The pack includes 100 customizable shaders in anime, comic, sci-fi, and painterly styles – all designed for drag-and-drop use and easy tweaking inside Redshift. It’s a solid pick for artists working on stylized animations or illustrations.
Learn more about the toon shader collection here.
Try it out:
Godot Shaders Bundle
For anyone diving into shaders in Godot, the Godot Shaders Bundle by Jettelly Publishing is a solid learning resource. It includes a shader guidebook and two interactive tutorials that walk through foundational techniques, complex advanced tips and tricks, step-by-step explanations, and real-world examples and practical exercises.
The bundle also features community support, where buyers can ask questions and get feedback from the instructors and peers. It’s still actively being developed, so by getting the bundle at the current price, you will receive future updates for all included books for free.
Learn more about the bundle here.
Get it here:
Modern-Self Defense AnimSet
Another highlight from May was the Modern-Self Defense AnimSet, a versatile pack of 21 dynamic keyframe Unity animations created by wemakethegame. Designed with fluid motion and realism in mind, the set covers dynamic interactions between two characters – attacker and victim – and includes a wide variety of self-defense techniques like punches, kicks, and grapples. Each animation is available in humanoid and root motion versions, along with in-place motion and a T-pose.
This pack is a great fit for action RPGs, fighting games, or training simulations that rely on realistic combat choreography. With custom VFX and your own character models, these animations can be dropped into street fight scenes, cinematic sequences, or one-on-one brawls to add impact and polish.
Learn more about Modern-Self Defense AnimSet here.
Get the pack: