When designing a 3D character, I find it very useful following a reference. This reference could be a drawing of a character you made or a collage of different people you may like. Take your time making of finding a reference image because this is what your character is going to look like. Next, you would want to decide what method you want to use to create your character. This could be sculpting and retopology, where you need to first block out your character with basic shapes. I found that using spheres is a good shape for blocking out characters because they do not contain edges so this would make it a lot easier to combine and smooth it out. You also need to focus on one section of the body at a time so you won’t overwhelm yourself. During the sculpting process try not to subdivide too much because it may slow down your computer and make it harder to change major details. The YouTubers Ryan king art and Yan sculpt go into more detail on how to sculpt. The other method is poly modeling, this is where someone would use polygons to form a character or an object. When starting out try to use as little geometry as possible so you are able to make easy changes to your character. You only want to add more vertices/faces when you are done blocking out your character. The Youtuber flip normals and Diko have great tutorials you can follow that will help you.

3D environment building can be very time-consuming and can get very frustrating when mistakes are made. First think of what biome you want to create and what’s going to be in your 3 grounds. The three grounds are the foreground(upclose), midground(not too far but not too close) and background(far). I would recommend sketching three or more different versions of the landscape you want to make and then draw a final version with a decent amount of detail.If you really don’t want to draw, you can find image references on google or any other search engine. These references will help you from drifting too far from your original idea. Then you would take your idea to a 3d or 2d software and make your landscape. Keep in mind, when modeling your landscape try to avoid making something that won’t be in your render and don’t add high detail on everything because a lot of that detail will not be visible from afar. Blender is a great 3d software to start because it has a large welcoming community that is more than willing to answer any question you might have and the software is free. I will provide some links of great tutorials that will help you get started.