Modular Level Design Texturing

apollo580

Hello All,

I'm working on a game with buildings that will have interiors and exteriors. The plan at the moment is to build it using a modular approach where the inside and outside walls are one piece. I would make several types of wall sections and connect them in Maya and build other buildings with the same kind of workflow. My issue is with texturing and resources. How should I go about making the walls and textures? Basically if I have 1 building, should I have all the textures on one UV space? Or should I have a different texture for reach wall, floor, and roof sections? Hopefully I made myself clear, but I appreciate any input!

pixaeiro

If you place your building textures in one UV space, then you will have fewer render calls, which is good, but a lot of duplicated textures, which is bad. 

Having duplicated textures means that your game will need to load a lot of data, and there are limits on how much memory you can use and how fast this data can be loaded.

Having lots of render calls means that your CPU and GPU will work harder.

What kind of game are you developing? For what platform?

musashidan

pixaeiro said:

If you place your building textures in one UV space, then you will have fewer render calls, which is good, but a lot of duplicated textures, which is bad. 

Having duplicated textures means that your game will need to load a lot of data, and there are limits on how much memory you can use and how fast this data can be loaded.

Although it can be engine specific, instancing generally means 1 call for the mesh, 1 call for the texture. So, for instance, if I place 100 instanced walls sharing the same texture, the mesh and texture are only loaded into memory once.

pixaeiro

musashidan said:

Although it can be engine specific, instancing generally means 1 call for the mesh, 1 call for the texture. So, for instance, if I place 100 instanced walls sharing the same texture, the mesh and texture are only loaded into memory once.

Yes, the engine will load only one mesh and one texture to instance it anywhere.
What I understand is that he will mix all the textures needed for one building into one bitmap, using something like copy paste in Photoshop. In this case he can end up with many different bitmaps with an exact copy of the same pixels.

apollo580

pixaeiro said:

If you place your building textures in one UV space, then you will have fewer render calls, which is good, but a lot of duplicated textures, which is bad. 

Having duplicated textures means that your game will need to load a lot of data, and there are limits on how much memory you can use and how fast this data can be loaded.

Having lots of render calls means that your CPU and GPU will work harder.

What kind of game are you developing? For what platform?

Im working on survival type game on the unreal engine. Its going to be third person and I'm attempting to get the best graphic quality I can get.