> One big problem holding devs back from enjoying gamedev is a lack of quality 3D assets.
There are plenty of 3D assets available. There's TurboSquid, SketchFab, ArtStation, and the Unity and Unreal asset stores. Some are free, some cost. Everybody is moving to glTF format, and import and export has much improved.
If you want a good hard project to work on, write something that takes an overly-detailed 3D asset, with extensive detail in the 3D model, and turns it into a much smaller game asset where much of the fine detail is represented in the normal map.
This has been done, but not all that well. Nobody has done it since machine learning started to work. Since the goal is to have the visual appearance from all directions match, you need a good evaluator for "looks the same to a human".
There are plenty of 3D assets available. There's TurboSquid, SketchFab, ArtStation, and the Unity and Unreal asset stores. Some are free, some cost. Everybody is moving to glTF format, and import and export has much improved.
If you want a good hard project to work on, write something that takes an overly-detailed 3D asset, with extensive detail in the 3D model, and turns it into a much smaller game asset where much of the fine detail is represented in the normal map. This has been done, but not all that well. Nobody has done it since machine learning started to work. Since the goal is to have the visual appearance from all directions match, you need a good evaluator for "looks the same to a human".