Best Practice/Method for Breaking up a scene Modularly...

Enlighter

I know it's been asked before, but we are finally making the call to not have an art team build an entire map based on a pre-set design. Instead we want to break the various pieces of the "city" down so we have more options customization wise as the game expands.

My question is, beyond certain features, it gets very hard to determine what the pieces should be.

The game takes place in a city like environment (like Skate for any familiar with it). How far should things be broken down?

Is it insane to try and break it down as far as possible? i.e. road tiles, walkway tiles, rail pieces, ledge pieces, env objects, buildings, etc etc?

Any advice would be greatly welcomed as I am used to using toolsets that are similar to NWN where u create a base terrain mesh, then places trees and buildings and not much more.

MoP

Philip Klevestav posted a decent tutorial that might be of interest to you:
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/modular_sets/modular_sets.htm

That's more for internals, but a lot of the principles are the same.
Stick to a grid, break stuff down as much as makes sense. Don't break it down to such a level that it becomes fiddly, but keep stuff very flexible. Use common sense

Ark

Heres a couple of tips, ill post more stuff when i finish at work.

-Keep your bounding geometry to the grid, No. 1 rule!
-The closer you can to the object, the more you should break it up
-Avoid text on the meshes so you can mirror the modular pieces
-Plan your pieces with simple geomtry and see how they can be reused as something/somewhere else

cryrid

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ProceduralBuildings.html most of it might not apply, but I think the pics do a good example showing how building can be broken up.

Enlighter

yeh, almost all of the pieces will be interacted with/be in close proximity to players.

Ark

Heres a couple more links:

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ModularLevelDesign.html
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=45470&highlight=environment

I have some other bookmarks somewhere, which i'll post if i can find them.

Enlighter

thanks all, looks like we have A LOT of work ahead of us :: )