Looking for Guidance on Creating Realistic Environments for My Cartoon Series

Question

Hello everyone,

I hope you’re all doing well. I have a great passion for creating cartoons, and alongside that, I also work a government job. I recently purchased a paid CG Cookie subscription — and honestly, I must say this is one of the best courses I’ve ever seen. Everything is explained in such great detail!

I have a question: I want to learn how to create realistic environments, like the ones we see in real life — roads, streets, markets, and fields. Could you please guide me on which instructor or course I should follow to learn this as quickly and effectively as possible?

My main goal is to eventually create my own cartoon series.

Thank you in advance for your help! 🙏

— Zeeshan

Answer 1 · 2025-10-17T11:04:14Z

replied October 17, 2025 11:04am

Regardless of what you want to eventually do, if you're new to Blender, CORE is always a great place to start. Beyond CORE, specificially for doing a city, I'd suggest Kent Trammell's CUBICITY, and the follow up course by Mike Hodgetts B-CITY. Kent's is a more straight forward modelling approach, but Mike's takes a similar concept but using geo nodes. While the latter isn't strictly necessary, it probably could help to generate different looking cities, or parts of cities, pretty quickly. Also, Jonathan Lampel's ASSEMBLE course is a great geo nodes primer and also is around a project that would fit in a city landscape.

If you want to get into characters for your comics, Lucas Falcao's BASEMESH is a great place to start, and Wayne Dixon's RIG, SHAPE, and the new EYES course can take what you learn from his CORE course and teach you what you need to know to rig so you can bring characters to life.

And if you're really wanting to do comics, check out Paul Caggeggi's DRAW and PANELS courses. The first is a primer on Grease Pencil and the other is about using Grease Pencil to draw Comics (and grease pencil can be combined with 3D models to make a comic look). Also, he has a CONCEPT and TURNAROUND course on using Grease Pencil to design your characters (and the ideas could be used to design pretty much anything you could think of if you really wanted to).

There's not a lot here (as of now) about doing 3D for 2D cel shading, but there's lots of other things that could be used, depending on what the look/style you're going for is. Hopefully, this will at least give you a place to start I know I mentioned a lot... You don't necessarily have to go through it all (or at least certainly not all at once) but I was trying to be thorough on the ones I thought, based on what you were asking, would be most in line. There's lots of other stuff on CG Cookie as well that might not seem like it relates on the surface, but could spark ideas or ways of doing something that you might not otherwise considered, so while these would be a good starting point, by no means is it exhaustive of everything that might possibly help.

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Answer 2 · 2025-10-17T11:09:12Z

replied October 17, 2025 11:09am

(Speaking of characters... there's a lot of different character stuff here on CG Cookie. Even some of the older stuff might be worth looking at, even if for only understanding the techniques and principles. A lot of the older stuff has techniques that have changed in Blender, though the underlying principles still very much apply)

1 love

Answer 3 · 2025-10-17T12:31:26Z

h

replied October 17, 2025 12:31pm

Thank you so much for such a detailed and helpful response!

I really appreciate the time you took to guide me step by step — this gives me a very clear roadmap to follow.

I’ll start with the CORE course first and then move on to CUBICITY and B-CITY for environment creation. After that, I’ll definitely check out ASSEMBLE for Geometry Nodes.

Also, thanks a lot for mentioning the character and Grease Pencil courses — I didn’t know about those before, but they seem perfect for my cartoon series goal.

Your explanation truly motivated me to stay consistent and explore each area gradually. Thanks again for your kind and detailed advice! 🙏

— Zeeshan

Answer 4 · 2025-10-17T13:04:00Z

Omar Domenech replied October 17, 2025 1:04pm

One thing to keep in mind if that you don't have to watch a specific tutorial on what you want to do, it is helpful and you'll be able to do it if you follow along. But a better approach, if you ask me, is to learn broad and then you'll be able to do any specific you want. So you can just start to learn everything there is to learn on CG Cookie and in time you'll be able to do anything by yourself, which is better than to know a single specific. Go I'd say just start watching tutorials and courses and you'll get the hang of things broadly.

Answer 5 · 2025-10-17T13:55:14Z

h

replied October 17, 2025 1:55pm

Thanks a lot for the advice!

You’re totally right — it makes sense to learn broadly instead of just focusing on one thing. I’ll start exploring more courses and build my foundation first. Really appreciate your tip!

🤘🏻