World Building started as a conviction — not an assignment. I identified the gap, initiated the concept, and spent months pressure-testing it with artists, TDs, and engineering teams before bringing it to senior leadership. Once approved, I led the zero-to-one execution: from first principles to shipped architecture.
Making complexity creative
World building — the creation of large-scale, populated environments — is one of the most demanding challenges in 3D content production. Whether building a city, a landscape, or a crowd, artists need to manage enormous amounts of geometry, assets, and relationships while retaining the ability to art-direct every detail.
This project set out to define a cohesive vision for world building workflows in 3ds Max — and potentially beyond, with an architecture designed to be decoupled from any single DCC. The goal was to bridge the gap between procedural power and artistic fluidity: tools that think like artists do.
"Fluid creation of a multitude of assets via artistic means — with procedural, contextually aware relationships that assist in complexity management."
- Enable fluid, brush-based creation and placement of complex environment assets
- Deliver procedural, contextually aware relationships that manage complexity without sacrificing control
- Provide low-level, granular art direction at any point in the process
- Build on 3ds Max's existing strengths while addressing longstanding gaps
What artists actually need
3ds Max already does some of this well. The modifier stack and Particle Flow / TyFlow give artists meaningful procedural capabilities. But through research and ongoing conversations with modelers, environment artists, and technical directors, four clear gaps emerged consistently.
World building spans a wide range of scales and disciplines — from dense urban environments to natural landscapes and populated interiors.
Where 3ds Max fell short
Brush-based scattering — intuitive, interactive, and fluid.
The Depot — context-sensitive, visual content browsing via thumbnails and drag-and-drop.
Artist-friendly proceduralism — the "how"
The vision centred on a single core idea: making complexity creative rather than simply manageable. That distinction matters — creative complexity opens new possibilities rather than just reducing friction with existing tools. Four principles guided every design decision:
The modifier stack as a model for artist-friendly proceduralism — understandable building blocks, combinable in different ways.
Forest scene — a complete workflow example
To ground the vision in real production conditions, we designed a complete end-to-end workflow around a representative task: an artist has been given a terrain mesh and tasked with creating a forest scene in early fall — knowing there will be art direction revisions, and needing to work quickly and artistically.
The scatter preset in action — tree placement across terrain geometry with immediate visual feedback in the viewport.
Three levels of interaction — under the hood
The artist-facing simplicity of presets and the Depot was underpinned by a three-layer architecture — giving the right level of control at every point in the workflow without exposing unnecessary complexity.
The Bridge Editor — hybrid graph/stack combining approachability with node-based power.
The Bifrost Board — portable, flexible, and the foundation layer that powers everything above it.
Smart assets — context-aware at every level
The world building vision extended beyond scatter tools to a broader conception of smart assets — geometry, assemblies, and scenes that understand their context and adapt accordingly.
- Smart assets. Geometry that changes form based on contextual information — topology, textures, and metadata
- Kit bashing. Asset assemblies that adapt based on context — references, transformations, scene graph position, rigs, animation variants, and overrides
- Scene assembly. Scene population that responds to the global scene graph — animation, overrides, and dynamic relationships between environment elements
Smart assets in action — office chairs are procedurally placed around a conference table with subtle randomisation of position and orientation, while always facing inward toward the table. A simple example of contextually aware behaviour that would otherwise require tedious manual editing.
A vision that shaped product direction
The World Building user story served as both a product vision and a design framework — articulating not just what to build, but how to think about the relationship between procedural power and artistic control in environment creation tools.
- Defined a cohesive product vision spanning scatter, brushing, asset management, and scene assembly
- Established the three-layer architecture (Presets → Bridge → Bifrost) as the framework for balancing artist friendliness with technical depth
- Articulated the Depot as a necessary UX component — visual, context-sensitive, multi-purpose content browsing
- Designed a complete end-to-end workflow (forest scene) that stress-tested every design decision against real production conditions
- Laid groundwork for a DCC-agnostic implementation — architecture designed to be portable beyond 3ds Max
Add specific shipped features, adoption data, or downstream product outcomes here as they become available
Where world building goes next
- Deeper contextual awareness — buildings, roads, and fences altering scatter placement; weather states driving animation and material changes
- Crowd systems integrated with landscape and environment tools
- Expanded Bridge operator library covering a broader range of environment creation scenarios
- Full decoupling from 3ds Max — a portable, DCC-agnostic world building toolkit deployable across Autodesk's content creation ecosystem