modular chunks

nubnub

Questions about modular design for environment artist working with unrealED 3.

So I cut up my buildings into modular chunks, for the level designer.


I assume those modular chunks will act like

Joshua Stubbles

The benefit of modular design isn't just performance, it's time and variety. More importantly, lots of time and variety with little work.

Lets say you want to create a nice brick apartment building. You model it as one piece and texture as needed. Then the next day, you have to make another brick building, similar but with different windows and trim. Now what? You have to waste time modeling an entirely new building.

With modularity, you'd build multiple kinds of trim, window frames, doors and wall sections. Like lego pieces, you simply pull these chunks from a library and mix/match to get the design and variety you're looking for. From there you start slapping decals on the geometry and those same assets look completely different from each other, even side by side.

frubes

The principle you are talking about is integral to the majority of games produced on the market today whether that be AAA stuff or right down to DS games. Its really important to reuse as many assetts as you can, thats both textures and models and you will find pretty much every studio does it in some form or another.

Because a module, say a window, has already been loaded into memory, if you have lots of instances of that object it doesn't need to load that model again and again. Also you can make lots and lots of variations on buildings with just a few modular pieces all of which might only use 1 texture sheet. Theres more to it than that from a technical point but as an artist i dont think you need to know more.

So in reality you might have 10 buildings in your scene only made up of 4 modules and 1 texture. Thats better than 10 unique buildings, with 10 unique textures as you can imagine.

Ultimately the answer to your question is if you can make it modularly then do so as its harder to go back and reconstruct an environment when you find it wont run smoothly because you have hundreds of unique models in there, than it is to spend time at the start doing it properly.

If its a small environment you might get away with making it all unique but essentially thats not the way to do it. You will also find your overall qaulity will probably be better with modular pieces because you can spend more time making fewer modules than lots of time making lots of buildings.

renderhjs

performance only as long as the engine propper implemented it,- for example virtools has a feature that saves compution when using multiple instances instead of individual objects. The same practice is done in modern render engines such as mentalRay or modo's render that support so called proxies.
I advise to read up the technical details from the engine you are using- because not every engine takes advantage of it.

The design side is another one,- because we are living in a time where companies try to save each penny quantity in less amount of time is a requirement in many game companies. Modular elements (or prefabs in UE) can speed up the whole process of making rich looking levels without creating every detail since most of it is instanced all over the place. SO think of it as a time saver when you need to create high detailed levels.

Mark Dygert

Yea its a basic tenant of the industry. Do more with less, maximize your time and resources.

If all you're doing is breaking up buildings and reassembling them, you're approach is off. You want to make a few tiles and turn that into a whole building or a city block full of semi-unique buildings. Think of it this way you have 3 lego blocks (red blue green) to make a building with. Now that's not going to get you very far but here's the trick, you can copy each brick a bunch of times (at some point the cost outweighs the benefits but thats a really specific issue) you just can't change the copies.

There are a bunch of ways to approach it and none of them are really wrong. Your modules could be an entire story of a building, or as small as a few tiles that make up a story. It is all to easy to pick the wrong approach for what you're doing, so it takes some planning up front and possibly some rework when the dust settles.