Modular Building Design Workflow?
I have been trying to learn how to do this and so far I have decided to make buildings using smaller set pieces ( I make walls and door ways that are 128x128x6 units and than design roofs and other things around the final results of the buildings) but lately I have noticed that modular design example seem to be done with much larger pieces.
Do you all think I'm doing this wrong? I was told that by using modular design I can instance each piece and each set piece would only show up in RAM once at run time in an engine like UDK or Unity.
I cannot find much information on this and a lot of the example tutorials show people making buildings that a player cannot walk into.
Does this all depend on the type of game and weather or not the player gets to go inside the buildings or are these methods meant to be universal? This method for designing buildings are pretty new to me, any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Do you all think I'm doing this wrong? I was told that by using modular design I can instance each piece and each set piece would only show up in RAM once at run time in an engine like UDK or Unity.
I cannot find much information on this and a lot of the example tutorials show people making buildings that a player cannot walk into.
Does this all depend on the type of game and weather or not the player gets to go inside the buildings or are these methods meant to be universal? This method for designing buildings are pretty new to me, any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Replies
http://wiki.polycount.com/ModularMountAndBlade?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryEnvironmentModeling%5Cb%29
Sorry I'm confused, what do you mean?
I can tell you everything I know about modularity, but you are a unique snowflake as are we all and we all do things differently, go about them in different steps, choose different methods and make different products.
Go with what you know and what makes sense to you, if it doesn't then maybe there's another way, maybe you need to do it differently altogether. Maybe something doesn't need to be modular. Something annoying I run into is getting all into modular-izing everything when really, it might not matter. Is it for mobile or an MMO? Modularity is more prevalent here. Is it a single player? Uncharted may be modular, but not everything needs to be stressed.
Figure - cool looking versus optimal running.
Insides can also be made in a modular way. Insides are a different model from the exterior, because you want to exclude the exterior from being rendered when you are inside, and vice versa.
Some games use an S-shaped entry hall, so they can hide the exterior completely once the player goes inside... while in the S curve, there is never a time where you see both outside and inside at the same time, so that's when the models are swapped.
Other games use a portal system, where the view of the interior from the exterior is only rendered for the small view thru the doorway. The artist places a special object inside the door that activates this rendering trick, and adds a bit of data to all interior pieces to identify them as render-interior-only.
Others, like SkyRim, use a loading screen to disguise the rendering switch between interior and exterior.
I hope that makes sense.
A lot of these things you learn on the job, because each studio (and each game) have different requirements.
It is a single player RPG the player in cities has free non linear exploration.
For example, in the Modular Mount & Blade tutorial, the nine textures at upper left should ideally be packed into a single large bitmap.
http://wiki.polycount.com/ModularMountAndBlade
This reduces draw calls, because each house only has to fetch one set of textures (diffuse, normal, spec, etc.) for all its triangles.
Packing a texture is good advice for a PC game, but some consoles work better with multiple small textures instead of one big packed one, because the smaller textures fit into memory better.
It's something you need to test on the target hardware and game engine to figure out what works best. This is where it's invaluable to work with a graphics programmer and/or a technical artist.
Still my buildings look blocky and when compared to the professionals I'm doing something wrong.
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Here is a new building I'm trying to design with modular design in mind. My original design had smaller pieces where you see the edges but apparently I was doing everything wrong. I guess they are supposed to be part of larger pieces so for now each story of a building I'm making one big piece. I kept the edges so I could separate each piece of the wall to better tile on the UV Map.
My original design also had these separate pieces with multiple material IDs to fit into UDK and Unity and each ID would have a different texture applied but I guess most people just make one giant texture for the final result?
I honestly don't even know if this new design is right
Buildings are going to be blocky. One trick is to add detail meshes on corners. See the Modular Mount & Blade buildings for example. They also used a nice modeling trick to add depth to the roofs.
One texture with multiple smaller textures packed into it... that's the way to go for a building for a PC game. It's a slightly more difficult process than using separated smaller tiling textures, and multiple materials. But the framerate improvement is worth it.
Interiors are usually in the same locations as the exteriors, as they would be naturally. Same scene, same scale. You just make sure they are separate models, so you can cull one or the other. The culling is done in code, you usually have some tech that identifies when the player is inside vs. outside.
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryLevelDesign#Units_and_Scale
How you set up the UVs is completely up to you and the needs of your project. It helps to set a goal of how many pixels per meter you want, so you can try to maintain an even pixel density in your scene. Something like 100 pixels per meter, or whatever makes sense for your scene. Mobile is going to be much less resolution than PC for example. Then when you UV your meshes, try to keep to that scale.