Building Modularly....Advice

[Enlighter]

So I have a very curious question for all of you here at PC.

We have a game world we are working on that includes many different styles of environments, everything from snow covered mountains, to city blocks, with a large number of environmental objects and interactive objects that will be within each.

My question to you all is how would you advise we create a solid modular building system to build out different levels that look unique but recycle objects etc.

Like for a city block, could we use building pieces and just stick different textures on them? The idea being we have the same building parts, but have 5 different textures for each? Or is that not really how it's done.

And for the terrain, I assume that it's silly to try and build terrain modularly and we just have to do each terrain map by hand?

Thanks in advance.

[scourgewarper]

You could create 5 different textures for the same building blocks but if you only changed the texture of near identical looking buildings it's gonna be noticeable. The bottom line is you want a set of modular pieces which can be combined in a variety of ways to produce noticeably different buildings and structures.

On top of the skill of actually making the modular pieces in 3d you need to sit down and plan exactly what those pieces are, maximize the number of ways they fit and can be arranged and just make them flexible for a level designer to work with.

As a general rule you want pieces to conform to regular dimensions like multiples of 64/128/256/512 units high or wide (Assets in games like unreal follow this rule generally for exampe so that pieces can be snapped and rotated easier etc) and you also want to make 'greebles' which can add variety to the bigger pieces.

An example would be to make a very basic section of a building and a corner section which connect seamlessly, then add a windows section, pipes, windows boxes, air conditioning vents, fire escapes, ledges, stairs etc. depending on how much variety you want.

Again you have to think about it in advance and balance how much variety you want with the amount of different modular pieces you can afford to model.

[Enlighter]

indeed,

I did not even consider the smaller building blocks "greebles" as you call them. That would make things wonderfully more customizable/unique.

[Eric Chadwick]

Some more info in here that might help you.
http://wiki.polycount.net/CategoryEnvironment

[Enlighter]

incredible resource.

Thanks