My first attempt at modular building

Yozora

So im having a go at environmental modeling for the first time and I decided to choose a modular building~ I think im doing many things wrong but I would just like some confirmation.

It took quite a while to figure out the UVs but I still think they look really messy... I'm just wondering if I'm going the right direction with this because it seems like its going to be going above 30k tris when its complete! (its a really tall building) Each of those "floors" are almost 700 tris alone and I'm gonna need to stack up to 15+ or so!

I'm trying to fit this whole thing onto a single 1024x1024 sheet, and I have a feeling this is the biggest problem... Should I be using multiple smaller textures to take advantage of tiling?





these textures are not the final ones I will be using at all, they are just there to help place things.

Each window is 1 plane for the glass + 3x "frames" that consist of 18 tris altogether... I was thinking it would look a lot better with those frame bits modelled instead of using a normal map but now I'm thinking I better get rid of all the ones above the 3rd floor since they will be too high from the ground to see the geometry anyways.

I'm having trouble trying to reduce the tris in that very dense middle row too, what I got there is like 6,500 tris just for that area! How should I go about tackling that bit?

any comments/crits appreciated!

SHEPEIRO

i recognise that building its just in the northern quarter

good start, is this building viewed from the ground, if so reduce detail much more as you go up the building normal map the details in the windows for example, same for the detail in the middle section

Reich

Good start! Listen to what Shepiro has to say, he was a huge help when i started to work on stuff like this.

Right now i'd say focus on the modeling once you get it down start to work on tillable textering (most of the time that goes hand and hand with modularity). Right now you seem to be giving everything unique texture space. You'll want to try and think of re usable texture space. So for the wall you would do a strip of that wall texture and just slap in the walls that go to that ect.

end result looking like

Yozora

thanks for the comments

But reich, doesnt "unique texture space" mean every section of the wall/windows/everything uses its own texture so that nothing is the same? Im not doing that

btw I have a question about how you go about doing the "inside" faces of the window frame... do you detach the inside face and then place it above the "front" face of the window frame? Because from the texture it does not look like you "flattened" the frames out.



ok this is a terrible picture, that purple "Detach?" is meant to show one of those red inner faces being detached and placed onto the front of the window frame.


The problem with normal mapping the middle dense area is it loses alot of the silhouette which I'd like to keep;



Even if I did the bottom 33 tris one, it will still be 1716 tris altogether for that middle area which is quite alot for such a small part of the building... and I havent even finished making the whole shape of the building yet.




EDIT: Just looked at some wireframe images of Stefan Morell's work and I get it now.... I am doing everything wrongly, I should be using tileable textures going up/across the length of the texture sheet for a big building... this is how I should approach that middle bit as well as all those walls and other repeated geometry in 1 direction;



Sooo time to remake the whole thing

Reich

Well that all really depends on what you are doing. In the case of that window it was on the 2nd floor so that part of it was just normaled and then the frame was made from the chipped wood above it.



Now if you are modeling the whole window you can do it in a few ways. If it is wood you can sometimes get away with just the planer map and let the UVs stretch a bit on the sides, it will just look like wood grain. sometimes works sometimes doesn't.

the way i like to handle something like that is that i would have a base glass and then have a spot where the frame can be unwrapped and overlapped on top of each other.

*Edit*
So for a real rough block out i did this


some changes would need to be done to make sure you can fit it all on there with good resolution. But that should give you a good idea.

SHEPEIRO

ok the sillohette thing, 33 tris isnt much, but its to do with more than that, game engines dont AA very well, generally 2x on a 360 is as much as you can hope for. lots of tiny parrellel lines will fizz like a bastard. and the silohete it gives you may be a couple of pixels difference at the corners, is it worth it. if you normal map those trims, you will get free AA (mip-mapping) the viewers eye will also be tricked into thinking (or not realising) the detail is there.

with the middle section you can split it up a bit more, make the top section run the length of the building (adding a bit of silohette wont cost much then) make the arch like the 51 tri version, but the bottom shapes could be seperate cubes mapped to the middle of the arch, this would save you a hell of alot.

also remove the vertical edge loops out of all the trims and tle the mapping.