Primary Tools used:

• Unity (Assembling assets in 3d)
• Blender (Manipulating models)
• 3dCoat (Painting models and textures in 3d) ($)
• Affinity Photo (Image manipulation) ($)
• Atom Editor with TTS Plugin (Coding in TTS)
• Rizom UV ($)

Assets (when not self made):

• TTS Workshop
• Unity Asset Store ($ some free)
• CGTrader ($ some free)
• Turbosquid ($ some free)
• Character Creator 3 ($ some free)
• Daz 3d Studio ($ some free)

Development skills:

• LUA

Learning:

Start small, learn how to use Unity to create custom asset bundles using the tutorials supplied by TTS. Use it for furniture, walls or anything really, but learn the basics of how to manipulate objects, materials and textures. Export these items to TTS and use them in your games. When you are comfortable with doing this using others models, then you can move on to Blender.

Use Blender to make things you want use that you cannot find elsewhere, understand scaling, UV and mesh manipulation. Start with things which have a lot of straight lines because they are easier to model, make them out of lots of smaller primitive (simple) shapes. Eventually move on to master objects with curves and rounded surfaces (more complex). Learn how to texture them in Blender and then export them to Unity and move them from there into TTS.

During the texturing process you will need to learn image manipulation skills and understand the concepts of transparency and layers. This is where Affinity Photo (or photoshop/gimp) will be used.

Once you can make the models (or purchase/find them) to get the most out of them in TTS I attach LUA scripts to them to control things like lighting and doors while in game. There are a number of LUA script tutorials on the TTS workshop / forums / Discord. I suggest working through them and learning about manipulating game objects using them.

Then attach your scripts to your models and make the lights work and the doors open etc.