From Absolute Zero to a Complete Level Design

Inspiration

We enjoy doing Environments as a hobby, so we decided to show that everyone could do one too!

What it does

In this tutorial, we guide you through creating a complete level design in Blender that can be brought directly into Horizon Worlds. Starting completely from scratch, we not only cover the essential Blender hotkeys and navigation tools, but also show how to apply them in practice while building a project that feels real and game-ready.

We begin with the fundamentals of Blender’s Object and Edit modes, learning how to scale, rotate, and transform objects. From there, we use basic modeling techniques like loop cuts, extrusion, and inset faces to turn a simple cube into a cute, stylized house. Once the house is complete, we expand into environment building: creating ground planes, walls, fences, roads, trees, and rocks, all while keeping performance optimization in mind.

We also walk through preparing assets for Horizon Worlds by cleaning up the scene, managing materials, and setting up a single export-ready texture. By the end, we understand not only how to make individual 3D models, but how to assemble them into a coherent level design that players can explore.

This is a step-by-step workflow designed for beginners but also structured to help us think like level designers. The final result is a small but complete playable environment — a house, a landscape, and natural elements — that we can export and place in Horizon Worlds to start building our own game experiences.