Modular Environments (UE4)

programmer23

I am fairly new to level design and have just recently obtained UE4. I decided to try and make a modular interior level, and this is what I cam up with using square modular pieces for the plain walls, a wall with a door in it, and the floor. Below is also a texture sheet for the enviro, only a few of the materials on there that I have used yet. My question is if this is the best way to do this. I would be really appreciative if you guys could give me some guidance on what I should do.

SaboR1996

Texture atlases are used quite a bit, the EAT3D UDK tutorial is based off that and vertex painting. I would try setting up a vertex paint shader to try and create some variation in your materials.
I guess you will be adding more in the future?

sprunghunt

In UDK making a texture atlas for multiple objects is a waste of time.

Unreal engine counts each separate object as another drawcall, sometimes called a section. The renderer pauses every time it goes to draw another section. It does not matter if objects are sharing a shader or textures. This means that there's absolutely no performance gain from using the same texture in the way you have it there.

You may even experience negative memory impacts by being unable to stream out textures as they get further away from the player. If you had several separate textures they would unload from memory as you moved away from them.

programmer23

Thanks for that valuable info sprunghunt. If texture atlases is not the correct way of doing materials, what is the best way to do interior environments in UE4?

sargentcrunch

n/a

programmer23

Just as clarification, when I build the environment, should I still use the modular pieces such as square blocks for walls and such, or should I make entire portions of the map into one mesh in blender and export that and apply materials in Ue4

d1ver

Separate pieces are better. On top of the in-editor flexibility you'll also be able to frustum-cull the geometry that's out of sight which is always good. Unreal is also supposed to batch geometry when possible to make for more efficient drawcall distribution.