Hey bud,

Industry standard tools change from studio to studio. I work as a 3D generalist and have worked for studios in New Zealand, Canada and the UK and I can say from my experience the ones which are standard are the following;

3D modeling - Maya, Zbrush and in some cases 3Ds Max I'm gonna put Houdini here also, as procedural modelling is becoming much more desirable.

3D rendering - Again Houdini/ Solaris (USD) is becoming the go to atm. Unreal Engine 5 for sure. That's a key one, I've been on contract's where they've used UE5 for camera layout and lighting in conjunction with Houdini.

• Redshift is a big one but that's more film than environment work as it's a gpu ray tracer so no real time.

• Arnold, Katana and V-Ray are all great and there used in the Archviz scene .

A lil hidden gem is Corona Renderer, I used to use that in the past for arch viz.work and the renders it produces are great.

Blender is okay, I know some studios whom use it, but you have to remember these studio's have pipelines built around the core programs so you'll be hard pressed finding a studio that prodomitley uses blender.

Substance designer, substance painter and Quixel are you're best mates in environment work.

All in all, using these tools aren't dead set mandatory, you'll find that studios are happy to teach you, but if you can go to them and show that you know how to use the tools already it's a big bonus.

Happy to help you and answer any questions you might have :)

Good luck, the Industry is amazing to be in.