[3Ds Max to UE4] - Splitting up a model [Solved]

EliasWick

Greetings, I'll make this short and easy.

When do you split up a model into multiple parts? (To use in Unreal Engine 4, (Focusing Quality and Optimization))
I'll guess the answer is, it's your choice but there are advantages and disadvantages.

Some pieces are going to be modular, for instance the hallway consists out of 3 Parts:


But what I can't decide on is how I should solve the apartment:


Should I split each room into a separate model. Should I do floor, walls and ceiling in each room? Should all of the apartment walls be one mesh, floor one mesh etc..? This apartment is only going to be used once so it feels stupid to break it up in to many different parts, but at the same time I want it to have a great light map. (I know that the lightmap isn't affected by the mesh but rather the Unwrap). But having one large model with a high Lightmap resolution seems bad.

Can I get some insight on how this should be solved for the best quality while keeping it optimized?

Thank you all and I wish you all a happy new year!

Obscura

If you want to keep it optimized, you should split it up into rooms, so occlusion culling can do its job. But on the other hand, we are talking about like 1000 tris that barely puts any stress on your videocard (or any device) so I'm not sure if it worth the effort. 

If you would want to reuse the pieces and build something bigger, a modular approach is always the best. But if you would only want to use this as it is, I'd say its completely fine as one mesh.

About the lightmap resolution thing:
Unreal will re-pack and group things when it comes to lightmapping. It will create an atlas of lightmaps. You can set the atlas resolution in the world settings\lightmass. So you'll get one huge lightmap anyways.

EliasWick

@Obscura Wow thanks, this helps a lot!
If you were to split it up into pieces, would all of the walls for a room be one mesh and the floor in each room be one mesh?
Or would you make each wall face its own mesh?

Obscura

If its not going to be reused and you don't want to build multiple differently shaped rooms, so its not a modular thing, and you want to split it, I'd split it by rooms. So a room would be one mesh including its walls,floor and ceiling. There is not much point of splitting it into that small pieces as walls, floors etc, unless you want modular meshes - Now that would make it worth to split. That amount of polygons is literally free. It won't improve anything if you cull the walls and floor and ceilings separately.

As I wrote above, since you have really simple, low poly geometry, you could even leave it as one and it would be fine. But the question is still, how would you want to use them. If you want reuseability, its good to split. If you are not going for that, and you have this simple assets, its fine as one. An another case that would make it worth to split, if you would have much higher poly geometry, like a modeled brick wall or something that is ten-thousands of tris. Then splitting would help a lot because you could cull the heavy assets very efficiently. But your ones are very light.

EliasWick

That clears up a lot! Thank you very much!