Hi. I’m already pretty much about modeling, but totally new to the Unity engine. Here I’m gonna provide you guys with a simple house model (unfinished) I’ve been working on past few hours. Yeees, I am surely aware of the way it looks, mostly due to terrible textures - but, hey - is that all? What’s the secret - shading, lightning, or other stuff? There’s just something wrong and I have no clue what can I do about it in Unity.
In my opinion the secret is baking, the other secret is using a better lighting and material/shader engine but that is another matter.
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First all the basics: Proper texturing and or normal mapping. Lighting. Properly selected or made shaders. Then properly used image effects (Bloom, DOP, AO, etc). The rest is composition and color. You’ll be surprised to find out how something like choosing the right color scheme for your scene can have a huge impact on aesthetics. The placement of the props and their color will also have a great deal of influence in the final appearance of the level. You should really texture/color your objects having color harmonies in mind. Alternatively or in addition, you can use color correction to change the color schemes of your scenes at runtime.
Anyway, here are some videos and articles, which I consider excellent, and which may be of interest to you:
Blender Guru: Understanding Color (Video).
Blender Guru: Understanding Composition (Video).
Gamasutra: Lessons in Color Theory for Spyro the Dragon (Article).
Gamasutra: Color in games: An in-depth look at one of game design’s most useful tools (Article).
Color theory for game design 1: fundamentals (Article).
Color theory for game design 2: Glyphs and neutrals (Article).
Also, if you don’t know how to use color grading in Unity, you can start with this basic video:
How to: Color grading in Unity 5.
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I’d say also a bit of contrast in the right places. And know how contrast and the differences in light and dark colors make the composition that is your game scene. It’s kind of hard to gather what we are intended to see by only looking at a single asset. If you want something to be great, it’s got to make a sort of meeting between color theory and composition and some other stuff.
I’d recommend Master Studies - Noahs Art Camp. Its a bit long, and you don’t have to really watch it all. But there are some good points he makes about color theory, contrast, and composition. I’m sure you can extort some of his video to your will and your goals 
As for your house though, I like your house! It reminds of me a sun bleached beach house.
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There’s nothing particularly wrong with your model or scene per see, but it’s easier when you adopt a different mindset of looking at the world.
It’s most easiest when you’re copying from life, because life is already beautiful. (Golden ratio, anyone?) because then you have the power of observation.
Instead of thinking of your scenes as seperate things, think of them as a whole. You have multiple things that make up colours (lighting, textures) but people don’t see those. The trick is to try and get -all- of them to work in harmony, to create the look that you want.
People like sculpting in say, Zbrush, because they don’t have to worry about what effects the shaders will have or how much they have to put into texture work. They can put it all into forms. They can look at the overall whole first, and the details second. Your wall’s material can be portrayed in either mesh or texture, the human eye doesn’t care. It’s just how it looks. So you have to get the look you want first, then decide how you want to portray it. Note how many elements there are in your scene, what they do, and how they work together. Then try and create a harmony with them. That’s all beauty is, harmony in proportion between different aspects. Even human faces, there’s a harmony between how the eyes, lips, nose, etc are placed. You don’t need fancy shaders or techniques, even the simplest things can be beautiful if you create harmony with them. Composition, colour theory, etc are all the basis. But it won’t help you much when you’re getting swamped in a game engine.
But speaking of your actual picture, i’d skip the tiled textures. You want to step down the forms. The overall shape of your house is fine, but now you need to add in structural details. You started off with the support pillars, that’s a step in the right direction. Now what else can you do? You need window frames. Doors. Try filling in the background with a free skybox, and add some dirt to the plane it’s sitting on. Then make a path. Start with the big things first, the big shapes, then work your way down into the little ones. The big shapes you can model, and the resource budget you have will determine when those details start to get turned into textures. The grain of the wood will be a texture, but what about the nails holding it together? Again, if you get stuck on what to do next, gather some reference images. Mix and match different features from different houses to give you some ideas as to what to add. If you want a more cartoony look, try handpainting them. If you don’t have photoshop, you can try gimp, but my favorite is Krita. It’s far more painter-friendly. And free.
You are asking a deep question
A simple short answer is: Compare your render with a picture or painting. When you make a render then you are making a painting with a different tool. Make static ambient occlusion texture and/or with a post render, add texture that represent the correct material in the correct way proportion scale; bump, specular, tesselation, rim mask reflection, proper texture size color saturation and hue can help to improve the visual quality making it more comfortable. Also, the inclusion of post process filters can help a lot to give the air feeling. God ray, air color in the distance, the humidity color, the temperature color. Envirement afecting the house color and condition. Antialiasing, sharp the image and blur it make grains, border frame mask and focus for focal point. You must feel and smell it touching it. Where is in time? Where is the sun the tempeture color and how affect the environment. Where is the wind and what is the intensity. Where is life ecosystem. All this post process effect push your rendering out to reach reality. You can add color to the shadow, desaturate the color with distance. Composition is important as well as a focal point, contrast, good perspective, angle of view. The observer who is watching age, where is he/her. The gold is important as for example: what are your intentions add them in the scene renders. What you want to transmit. And there is much more. There is a lot of thinking and if this is not balance and well proportioned then it can have a negative effect as the sound of the noise. You are looking for a melody. Try to make the image harmonic.
Is true that Unity does not provide a beautiful scene by default (compare with U4 Udk & Cry). But this provides more flexibility since start. Beauty is subject to us by where we was worn and the environment in wich we grow up or education and the relationship of it with feelings. The fact that the Unity default is improving but is not complete is also good, so that you can learn how to do it the way you like it and all games will look different. But a simple asset in the asset store with a beautiful simple setup with components in the camera can be handy for a beginner. Unity has the ability to do almost all you need.
There are a lot of videos on how to set up the first scene.
An example Scene:
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Go to Assets > Import package and add Asset packages… “Cameras” and then “Effects”, “Environment” and “Characters” Standard Assets. In the Consol Tab, press “clear” button.
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Pick up your ground plane and scale it 100 x 100. Make it static in the top right since you do not want to move it in the game.
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Pick up your house material and scale Tiling down 3 x 3 and the game object “static” as well. Save the scene often.
Go to Edit > Project Settings > Quality and choose “Fantastic”. Look for Anti-Aliasing and select Disabled. -
to Edit > Project Settings > Player and change Color Space to Linear (and render mode if is visible to Forward Rendering). Save the scene often
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go to Hierarchy window and delete the “Main Camera”.
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In the Project window look for the “t:prefab RigidBodyFPSController”; drag and drop it to the Scene window. In Inspector Window move it up in Y to 1. Now if you press play mode you can walk pressing W S A D. Stop the game.
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In the Project window, delate your search text in the search imput. Expand Assets folder and go to Standard Assets > Environment >Speedtree and select one tree. For example, expand folder Conifer and select Conifer_Desktop. Drag and drop into the scene. it will take some time to render.Save the scene often. Add more trees and make them static.
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Go back in Hierarchy window and expand the RigidBodyFPSController looking for the Main Camera and select it.
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In Inspector make “HDR” enable and then press “Add Component” and a long list will appear with a slider to scroll down. if it does not appear, delete the text in the input zone. Go down (is not visible use the slider on the side or mouse wheel to scroll down) and select “Image Effects” > Other > Anti-Aliasing.
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Press “Add Component”, type Tonemapping and add it to the camera. Save…
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“Add Component”,delete what you type, scroll down, “Image Effects” > Color Adjustment and select “Color Correction Curves” and add saturation for example to 2.
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Now play with all the other effects inside “Image Effects”. Add one at the time, play with settings and enable / disable the component to look the difference.
There are good course, | videos,| blog,| free courses,| pay courses and assets about this.
About other stuff
But you can become an artist. You must feel the image in your mind, capture the illumination, transform it into an image in your imagination and then put it in the real world by construction or instinct. For helping this process, you need inspiring examples, curiosity, and visual skills can help. Explore the visual world. You can learn all this and is simple.
Answering your deep question in a more deep way:
The secret of beautiful graphics is: “Harmonic Resonance”
In the same way you make music. Simple as that. There is a lot written down about beauty. To understand that need a lot about proportions, visual exploration and knowledge. You can do it with out if you have talent but talent is not necessary. You can start reading about how color born in our brain “color history”. this will give you a notion of what is beautiful in each period. I think in Italy there are the best school in the world for this but latin is necessary. Learn about how perspective was discovered. How architects makes geometry and primates architectural structure. All the history combo will help you to understand our traditions from Egypt ,the greeks proportions and thinking, etc. Gold ration is a tiny part of it. At that point you can understand Leonardo DaVinci and the Florencia combo and learn from it. If you want to make yourself a big shortcut read about the discipoli of migel angel. they will explain you in short that kind of beauty can be more attractive and how can take you out from selling in the strees (taking oyu out from the roar literally). S shapes and color combinations etc. We are in the nuevo renacimento or the second renacimiento where art is exploding one more time. You can’t pretend that pressing one play button, your game looks as awesome as your favorite game, movie or canvas by defoult. There is a lot written down about beauty. french Impressionist can teach you about color. Look a canvas Monet When you make a rendering in realtime then you are making a drawing painting with a different tool.
Nice video about rendering.
A house rendering. A simple house picture: link. A US example. A impressionist house.
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Don’t obsess over tech. It only complicates things. If you’re new to creating 3D content, don’t even attempt to use normal maps. Beautiful game artwork can be created with nothing but diffuse textures and lightmaps.
And postprocessing won’t fix poor art or lighting, but can enhance decent art. But subtle use of fogging can make a surprising difference to scenes with long draw distances.
Game art is hard, and environment art is possibly the toughest job in game development to do well - simply because there’s so much to build, such high expectations for quality, and you need so many skills - from traditional art and architecture, through to working with highly technical tools, and understanding how the game engine and shaders will affect the appearance of your assets. All while considering rendering performance and keeping polygon/draw call counts under control…
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+1 to that. Specially about keeping up with the graphics budget part. It requires a lot of consideration and work to make something look nice and be performant at the same time.
The default Unity skybox contributes a lot to the blue/ washed out poor contrast ‘unbeautiful’ effect you get IMHO, and I completely sympathise. When i initially bring assets into Unity I always feel a bit deflated.
Try adding the color correction curves image effect (Standard Effects package) which should by default apply sigmoid RGB color curves to the scene, and look at the initial effect. Then try playing with increasing the reds in the scene with the curve, and perhaps dropping the blue.
Also try using a real HDR cubemap instead of Unity default.