Large non-modular buildings?

jordank95

im working on a big environment that has one building that’s unique. Meaning it won’t be used again throughout the game. What’s the best way to go about this? Should I make it one big mesh and split it into sections for lightmap purposes? The building is pretty big, with a lot of unique pieces that can’t really be modular or repeated. It’s a pretty stylized building.

what would be the best way to go about this?

Mark Dygert

If you can't make it out of modular pieces then you can try to use a lot of tiling textures in smart ways. Try to stay away from using a lot of similar geometry with a lot of unique textures.

jordank95

Mark Dygert said:

If you can't make it out of modular pieces then you can try to use a lot of tiling textures in smart ways. Try to stay away from using a lot of similar geometry with a lot of unique textures.

Thanks mark. Though my question was more should I split up large structures at all? Or should I keep them as one solid giant mesh? What’s the proper way to do this? For example, in the new ArtStation challenge, one of the big Japanese style houses. If there’s only one in my scene, with really no repeating parts, should I just import this to UE4 as one mesh or split it up for lightmap purposes?

Mark Dygert

If it's just for a scene with very limited scope, just a pretty shot, it is probably fine to leave it as one giant piece if that works best for your workflow.

If you're setting the building in the larger scope of a game world, you might not want something that large in the scene. You might want to be able to hide pieces of it if they aren't on the camera. With it as one giant piece, its all or nothing.

Personally I would break it up into chunks and modularize the design as much as possible, while trying to still hit the overall aesthetic. But I skew toward real-time spec because it's a workflow I'm familiar with and allows me to create a lot of things quickly while managing as few pieces as possible.

There isn't really a right or wrong way to do it, just different ways that need conform to the specs of the project.

m4dcow

You should probably split it up reasonably, simply for the fact that it allows frustum culling to work better. So if it was one big mesh, once you see any small part of that on screen it renders that whole mesh, but if it is broken into different pieces only the pieces that are visible get rendered and not the whole mesh.

There are always exceptions though, because if this building is a relatively low poly background sort of building then it might be better to keep it as a single object.