Building optimisation

danielgrey8256

Hi everyone! Got this large building from CAD software, it needs to be game ready. I'm going to reduce the polycount, clean it up, etc, but the question is - does it need to be separated to modulars and grid-aligned, like usual game ready houses? is it necessary to align everything to grid? I mean what is the best and fastest workflow for this types of houses

Fabi_G

Hi! I would say depends how it's going to be used. How close does the camera/player get?

danielgrey8256

Fabi_G said:

Hi! I would say depends how it's going to be used. How close does the camera/player get?

Pretty close(3rd person), and the player would be able to go inside the buildings

Alex_J

i think you'll likely end up wanting to break it down into reuseable pieces so that only things local to the player can be loaded as needed and also so you benefit from instancing, however since you already have complete models that are organized a certain way, I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to drop those in your game as is and start testing to see if there is actually a problem which motivates a lot more work. 

Basically I would want to test and only break it down to the next smallest degree if there is a clear indication that too many things are being loaded. So right now you might have entire buildings as a single model, and maybe you find this causes some sort of issue, so the next step might be to break them into floors, and maybe you find this works fine so then you don't need to go to the trouble to break them down to walls and doors and windows. 
in testing don't just play in editor but make an actual build and test it on target hardware. You don't have to be very technical to notice big problems but in order to profile to identify what is causing big problems you probably want to pay for a bit of consultation from an expert who can walk you through things - you can find some intro videos to using profiler on youtube which can help you narrow things down a little better than guessing, but properly using such tools does depend on having fundamental knowledge of how the engine works which you can't gain from a few youtube tutorials

A lot depends not just on the genre, but also platform, your time and budget, project goals, team composition and experience... a lot of things, so what is typical or best for one situation might not be the best thing for your own situation. For example if you have budget of 10,000 dollars, the granular workflow that 100,000,000 budget studio uses might simply not work for you because of time and money constraints. It might be a matter of simply accepting worse quality or performance, or reducing scope.

My experience seems to suggest that a modular workflow where buildings are constructed from units as small as walls and windows and doors is the slowest means of production, however it is obviously paying back at a certain scale, and for teams of certain composition it is pretty much only way to feasibly collaborate. But for other teams it might simply be a big waste of energy. But figuring out if you are at such a scale or not is only something you can determine through testing.

Eric Chadwick

If you want a quick automated solution, you could try our online optimizer. It's like Simplygon but better (imho). https://rapidcompact.com You get a bunch of free credits per month, as a try-before-you-maybe-buy kind of thing. CAD presets, customizable, etc. 

That said, for up-close in-game use I'd still go with Alex_J's suggestions.