Modular 3D environment kit where one important piece breaks the grid
Hi all, I've been doing 3d character development for quite some time, but still very very new to environment modeling. I've searched the forums/online for an answer but not having much luck.
This is my first attempt at making a modular kit, right now working on the interior of a building. I have the grid set up to be in meters, but I also have it subdivided by eighths, so 1/8 of a meter is the smallest snapping increment. Making the individual wall and floor pieces 2m x 2m works great and they snap together wonderfully, but I also have another piece, a variation of the wall piece, that has a window embedded in the wall. Problem is, this piece can't be 1 m or 2 m wide like the wall/floor pieces - for the dimensions of the window to look correct, this piece has to be about 1.25 meters wide.
In red and green are the standard 2m x 2m wall and floor pieces, in yellow is the wall with window piece that's 1.25 m. Of course, because it doesn't adhere to the 1 m or 2 m grid I've established, it breaks the grid... and things won't align.
I know there isn't a "one solution fits all" method to this, but I'm curious about what others do when they run into a situation like this? Is there a general approach to a problem like this, when a piece of your modular kit has to break the grid, but still somehow needs to be integrated without messing up the rest of the grid? Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
This is my first attempt at making a modular kit, right now working on the interior of a building. I have the grid set up to be in meters, but I also have it subdivided by eighths, so 1/8 of a meter is the smallest snapping increment. Making the individual wall and floor pieces 2m x 2m works great and they snap together wonderfully, but I also have another piece, a variation of the wall piece, that has a window embedded in the wall. Problem is, this piece can't be 1 m or 2 m wide like the wall/floor pieces - for the dimensions of the window to look correct, this piece has to be about 1.25 meters wide.
In red and green are the standard 2m x 2m wall and floor pieces, in yellow is the wall with window piece that's 1.25 m. Of course, because it doesn't adhere to the 1 m or 2 m grid I've established, it breaks the grid... and things won't align.
I know there isn't a "one solution fits all" method to this, but I'm curious about what others do when they run into a situation like this? Is there a general approach to a problem like this, when a piece of your modular kit has to break the grid, but still somehow needs to be integrated without messing up the rest of the grid? Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
Replies
Once you nail the entire kit as a greybox then you can model the final pieces with the benefit of being able to use the already established greybox kit as a template.
2) When you make pieces smaller than your grid size you're actually subdividing your grid. Your grid is now 1.5m (party horn / confetti) but you have 2m pieces that don't work on that grid because you didn't divide or multiply it evenly (boos). If you pick 2m as your major grid, your options to divide are 1m not 1.5m. If you had picked 3m as your major gird, 1.5 would work because two 1.5m pieces fit within a single 3m tile. But you're just pulling incompatible numbers out of your ass so of course it's not going to work.
3) If you're going to make 1.5m pieces you need to fit them to the major grid that is on 2m, or adjust your grid.
But honestly you're making a lot of problems for yourself, in a system that is usually used to help you get around those types of issues. It's like getting a car and then putting square wheels on it and then complaining it won't roll.
You should also start thinking about wall thickness... (opens a can of worms. Places it gently on the ground and walks away)
Thanks Mark. All the other wall pieces will align nicely to the grid, but it's only this single piece. I'm working from some reference images and I'm trying to keep it pretty close to the reference (this is going to be for a VR experiment so I'm hoping to keep the proportions accurate, or at least as much as I can! Otherwise I'd just rework the piece to fit the grid). With this window piece though, it's the only one that breaks the grid. I do understand why it doesn't work, but was curious about different approaches when it's just one piece that seems to mess with the grid and everything else is groovy. About incompatible numbers - I subdivided the grid into 1/8 so I could potentially fill the empty gap with a new wall piece that's 25/50/75 cm without getting some funky numbers (which I see now is the solution kwyjibo and musashidan were suggesting). Thanks for the info/suggestions, and the heads up about wall thickness - fortunately in this case, the thickness won't need to adhere to the grid at all! (thaaaank goodness)
wirrexx said: I was initially hoping to go with something like this at first, since it's an interior scene, but was afraid if I ever needed to expand and show a bit of the outside. Thanks for the suggestion!
Nice! This one of the thoughts that ran through my head, I just have to sit and think for a moment about how to make sure the textures run into each other nicely while hiding seams, I'll be using substance designer/painter. This solution seems to be the way to go without having to rework everything, thanks very much!
Just to be clear, I was suggesting (crappily) merge all of the windows together and add .125 of wall (or support beams) to the left and right making it a 4m tile. Rereading my post it might have sounded like I meant to do that to each window, which probably would have made the space between them too thick.
Coming up with thin wall sections works too, but you need to be mindful of draw calls. The more individual objects you have in a scene the more things the engine has to iterate over for various operations. You could optimize that later by combining pieces, but that can be a bit cumbersome if you have to make changes or the buildings are being procedural generated. You can write combining algorithms but sometimes its easier to just be as optimal as possible from the beginning.
Good luck, you're off to a good start!
I don't have the window pieces in this scene yet, but I managed to get them to fit in the grid nicely. Thanks again for the tips!