Noob question about connecting the seam on interiors

Zotter

My classes are starting to get more into environments than just props which is good because that's where I want to go. I'll kick off my first question on this forum with a noobish one.

When making a room with certain rooms or geometry jutting in and out of it, is it better to start with one cube and extrude and chamfer until I get the shape I want and have it all be connected? Or is it better to use floating geometry, if using floating geometry how to get it aligned like they do in games?

I've included two shots of the room layout so far and the floor plan, just a simple tavern done in Max.

Tumerboy

So, if by floating geometry, you just mean disconnected geometry, then yes. It's fine to have a room be made out of separate pieces (walls, floors, ceilings, pillars, etc.) In fact, it's often preferable in games because you can achieve modularity (being able to reuse a wall piece over and over, and hook it up to various floors, ceilings or other walls).

Your particular room is going to be a little difficult to build modularly, simply because of all of the unique shapes it has. That doesn't mean it's impossible, just that you might not get as much reuse out of your assets as you might if it were a little more uniform.

As for how to make sure everything lines up, you can do that a couple of ways. You can, as you stated, build it all out of one piece. You can build a bunch of parts, and weld, or snap the edge verts together. Or if you're building modularly, you'll want to do some planning, and then build pieces that will naturally fit together on some easy grid (5' 10' 25' whatever, depending on scale and such.)

ETA:
Here's a quick modular mock up I did in max. It's roughly the shape you have laid out. It's using 2 modular pieces (curve, and straight) which are 10' long (or 10' radius for the curve.)

Zotter

Awesome! Thank you, that will be a great help.

Zotter

Just one question on this though, when you were putting the wall pieces together were you eyeballing it, or using snap or is there a better way to align the pieces. I figure it's something under my nose, just don't know where to look for it.

Tumerboy wrote: »

So, if by floating geometry, you just mean disconnected geometry, then yes. It's fine to have a room be made out of separate pieces (walls, floors, ceilings, pillars, etc.) In fact, it's often preferable in games because you can achieve modularity (being able to reuse a wall piece over and over, and hook it up to various floors, ceilings or other walls).

Your particular room is going to be a little difficult to build modularly, simply because of all of the unique shapes it has. That doesn't mean it's impossible, just that you might not get as much reuse out of your assets as you might if it were a little more uniform.

As for how to make sure everything lines up, you can do that a couple of ways. You can, as you stated, build it all out of one piece. You can build a bunch of parts, and weld, or snap the edge verts together. Or if you're building modularly, you'll want to do some planning, and then build pieces that will naturally fit together on some easy grid (5' 10' 25' whatever, depending on scale and such.)

ETA:
Here's a quick modular mock up I did in max. It's roughly the shape you have laid out. It's using 2 modular pieces (curve, and straight) which are 10' long (or 10' radius for the curve.)

Yozora

you can enable vertex snap and just snap the corners of one piece to the corner of the next

Eric Chadwick

It might help to check out the Environment Planning & Workflow section here.
http://wiki.polycount.net/CategoryEnvironment

Tumerboy

you can use snap in max. We export all our models to the game, and do most assembly there, using our editor's grid system. Though since I had just made these pieces, and knew they were 10' long/wide, I just put the first at 0,0,0, then duplicated, offset 10' and repeated.

Zotter

Awesome! This board is indeed helpful. I'll post WIP pics as I work at it to get some more feedback. Thanks again!