Modular question...

polygonfreak

I just recently watched the 3D Motive modular building tutorialand it seems to make a lot of sense. But to me it also seems to be very limited. The whole part of taking a plane in 3ds max and modeling everything from the plane seems to me to be limited to very basic shapes. For example, I want to make a building that has walls, windows, and hand railings... the hand railings looks too hard or taxing to build out of the plane. So my question is this method described in the tutorial with texturing and modeling with a plane just for simple models? and if so, what is the standard way to doing something more complicated?

thanks

Mik2121

I don't think there's a standard method.

The method described in the 3D Motive tutorials (awesome btw, I purchased the videos too) seems to be more useful for buildings and the link because it's mostly straight lines and flat surfaces. But I'd say you can do handrails too, quite easily. It depends on what kind of handrail you wanna make. Mind posting some reference pics?

Anyway, there are other methods, and many games just have one texture for a certain prop, and then play around with the parts from said prop to make a different one, or even re-scale and rotate around the prop to use it somewhere else.

passerby

there is no real way to do this the idea is to just stay on the grid in both your 3d package and with your texture flats and try to use parts of 1 flat in multiple props which doesn't mean you need to model everything off from a plane.

it is more of a planning thing think of all the props you want in a scene than think about how they will unwrap and if it is possible to just apply tiling textures to parts of them that you have in a texture flat.

example for a railing the supporting bars and the cross bar can be unwraped into flat rectangles which you can just roughly place the UV chunks on a metal texture you got in your texture sheet.

and than there is just scaling and rotating stuff around if you look at some the of udk example maps and some UT3 maps most of the outdoor maps only got 2 or 3 rock props, but they can make it look like there is a lot of variation because they are all detailed on all sides and are rotated and scaled for different uses.

polygonfreak

Thanks for the advice... and for some reason when I added the texture inside of the uv edit window, everything kinda just made more sense. I am almost done with my project... as I am writing this, udk just crashed. Oh joy. Better get back to the project.

gamedev

Hey Guys,

I just wanted to say that @passerby is right on. The goal with modular bits is really to stick to a grid to make building out large spaces fast and easy while also allowing you to re-use meshes and texture memory.

For the video I chose something rather simple to make the concept easy to understand and get into. But as noted, you certainly don't have to model off of a plane. You can model however you'd like so long as you keep to the grid. This can be done with some pretty complicated shapes as well, not just boxes.

For something like hand railings, really all you're worrying about is the length of the rail and ensuring it starts and ends on a grid point. What happens in the middle is up to you. Corner pieces and other bits for the railing can follow the same guideline - as long as pieces start and end on the grid everything will work out.

Thanks for supporting us - we really appreciate it. And if there is anything you'd like see in the future, please drop by our feedback / idea forum and share:
http://3dmotive.uservoice.com/forums/84931-general

Cheers,

Tyler

passerby

well tyler maybe you guys could do a tut on material effects sometime, iv been trying to make a spawn effect using a opacity mask with a hot edge using the emissive channel with the mask being compared to a parameter controlled by matinee but i cant find a way to make the effect move over the model in the direction i want since it is all dependent on the UV layout of the mesh.

gamedev

@passerby - UDK effects is certainly on our radar.

@dustinbrown - Thanks. You're brawl entry is coming along!