Create full houses or Modular with Blender?

Ezycod

Hello, i try to find out whats the best way to make buildings for my level.

Should i create a Modular system?
I saw a lot of posts where that didnt work that well with the lighting (bleeding etc.)

Or should i create whole buildings, unwrap an texture them?
If yes, how should i handle the UV unwrap and the Textures/Materials?

EliasWick

Hey,
What you are asking is not going to be answered with a straight answer. This totally up to you. Think about the scope of the project. Will the modular pieces be reused for another building? If you are building one level and the house is going to be the only focus of the level, go nuts. Divide up walls, floor pieces, ceiling, for better result on lighting.

I am currently in the situation that you are in. I have created the main building from scratch, one big mesh, and the rest of the game will be modular pieces. In my case, I had to divide up the main building into different pieces, room by room in order to get accurate lighting.

This might be some useful information regarding lighting:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?88952-Lets-make-Lightmass-EPIC-(and-understandable)
http://polycount.com/discussion/188536/ue4-lightmaps-rules-and-guidelines-for-creating-rooms#latest

About texturing and UV unwrap, DO NOT unwrap or texture anything until you are happy with your result of how your models look. You will definitely save a lot of time, (personal experience).
In 3Ds Max, there is something called UV Map. You can select all meshes and add the UV Map that will set the texture resolutions on all of your meshes to the same size. Very handy when you want everything to be the same size.
I did a quick search on google and found a tool that can help with texel density: http://polycount.com/discussion/184043/blender-texel-density-addon

Hope this helped!

Vollgaser

modular. saves ressources, gives re-usabilitiy and better performance. e.g. a door is ONE static mesh in Unreal and costs only once its model and textures. If you make youre whole house as a model instead, each door costs over and over again.

Obscura

This isn't true. Even, if you overdo the modular approach, you can get performance drop because of the too many individual assets to handle. Meshes placed in the level aren't instanced static meshes so its not like it costs only once.

Ezycod

i can i get rid of the lighting issue and bleeding with the modular assets?

Obscura

You will probably have very hard time doing that. Its kinda case dependent though. But it shows in the most of cases.

EliasWick

To get rid of the bleeding with modular assets, either create an end piece that covers the bleeding. Alternatively decrease the Lightmass setting called: Static lighting Level, I don't recommend doing this, since it will increase build times dramatically!

Obscura

That "dramatically" depends on the complexity of the scene of course, and also your cpu. This modular mesh seam thing is only a real issue whn you work with fully flat shapes, like real life house floors and walls with clean color. 

Also, if its a complex building like in the case of Elias, yes you will have hard time and you should consider forgetting in engine modularity, and it will be a headache to work with. But if its a simple house with a few rooms, I don't think its a problem, if you treat it as something non modular and you just build it in your 3d application. 

With something more techy/ non real life, you can hide those bleedings and seams much better. So it still happens though but its much less apparent. Especially when it has some grungy material.


These are my thoughts. In short, if you are trying to make a real life / realistic house with clean surfaces, you shouldn't try making walls and floors from modules inside Unreal.

Vollgaser

@Obscura: you have not understood even the most basic method how static meshes work and why they were introduced in the first place. one static mesh e.g. door is stored only ONCE in the VRAM and btw. also just once on youre harddrive and shipping-game size. No matter how often you use the door in maps. If you make a house instead then each door costs over and over again.
Please learn the basics before giving other people wrong advice.

Obscura

Starting now. sry.

Obscura

So you say 10.000 hand placed static mesh is the same as like 10k foliage or bp instanced meshes.

EliasWick

Vollgaser said:

@Obscura: you have not understood even the most basic method how static meshes work and why they were introduced in the first place. one static mesh e.g. door is stored only ONCE in the VRAM and btw. also just once on youre harddrive and shipping-game size. No matter how often you use the door in maps. If you make a house instead then each door costs over and over again.
Please learn the basics before giving other people wrong advice.

This can't be true, or we are not talking about the same thing. Performance wise, placing a mesh with 1 000 000 triangles in the scene, will not give me the same performance if I would place that same mesh 1 000 times in my scene.

Harddrive: The mesh will of course only be taking up space once on the harddrive, since you are reusing the mesh over and over again.

Unreal Engine 4 Level: I am a bit unsure, but I believe that UE4 Levels / maps store the data of mesh placements. Which means it stores a mesh and it's properties, such as rotation, location, if it shall cast a shadow or not, and so on... If you are using multiple meshes in a scene, the level needs to remember where all of those meshes are placed and it's properties.

NoRank

You can build it as modular and use the merge function inside unreal and create one whole piece for that if you want.

@Vollgaser since it's something that is not on their documentation, can you please share your researches with us?
As far as I know, static meshes don't work the way you said they do but maybe this "common belief" is wrong...