Question about modelling interiors for unreal engine

SummonedSpirit

Hey guys i'm currently modelling a room to be placed into unreal engine i'm not exactly sure whats the best way to pull it off. Should I use a cube/plane for each wall or should I create a combined mesh encompassing the room. As seen in the picture. This room is located in the basement of the ship connecting to a hallway which leads out of the ship or to the next floor. 

Would appreciate any advice on this!

Deathstick

Kind of hard to tell what's going on in your screenshot but I'll give some general advice.

Separate wall meshes are nice if you made it as a tile-able/modular mesh set, as you can keep reusing a few assets to create rooms quickly vs having to make unique content for everything. One thing to keep in mind though is your draw call amount will increase with each static mesh placed even if they use the same model, unless you either combine them within ue4's editor itself as a mesh (I believe they added this feature in some version) or use static mesh instancing. It's not that big of a deal though until you start having rather large draw calls.

If it's a one-off/not built with modular in mind I'd personally have the room be unique/one solid mesh if it's supposed to be visually interesting/somesort of setpiece. One other thing to keep in mind though is on the flip-side, you usually don't want huge single meshes as no culling will occur if one little piece is seen. A single instance static mesh component containing say a 100,000 meshes also works the same, the exception being hierarchical instance static meshes which do cull individual instances. When you get into ridiculous amounts of meshes collision complexity can also become a problem. (Then again, we're talking something like 40,000-100,000+ meshes)

If it's a ship, you could always have the exterior hull be one piece, and the interior rooms be others.

Honestly do what you think is best for the quickest way to model it. You can always block out pieces super fast and try out both ways to see which one works best for you.

SummonedSpirit

gotcha, I'm just trying to find the most optimized way for performance as I build the level. 

sprunghunt

Something to keep in mind is that using smaller meshes means you can use distance culling to keep the object count lower. Obviously you can run into problems if the objects being culled are too noticeable. So smaller props can be culled quite close to the player  but larger pieces will be really noticeable. 

There is also visibility culling which is automatic. Smaller objects which are occluded will be culled.
So if you make all your meshes one big piece it can mean it will stay visible much longer than needed as it's more likely you'll be able to see parts of it. 

SummonedSpirit

sprunghunt said:

Something to keep in mind is that using smaller meshes means you can use distance culling to keep the object count lower. Obviously you can run into problems if the objects being culled are too noticeable. So smaller props can be culled quite close to the player  but larger pieces will be really noticeable. 

There is also visibility culling which is automatic. Smaller objects which are occluded will be culled.
So if you make all your meshes one big piece it can mean it will stay visible much longer than needed as it's more likely you'll be able to see parts of it. 

Gotcha Sprung, so you mean lets say if I have a Musuem accross the neighbourhood for example I should keep the exterior of the Musuem as a large unified mesh so its reasonably visible and scales in LODs well instead of piecing it together piece by piece. As for the musuem interiors though that aren't visible on the outside and or only a series of close range walk ways and corridors. Would it be better to build the interior rooms with seperate meshes for each walls instead of a combined mesh?

Eric Chadwick

Yes.

SummonedSpirit

gotcha