UDK Buildings Question
I am starting a portfolio and work on a game design document ive been making and have some questions.
My game uses a lot of buildings and will require many many of them to be entered.
When making a building in 3DS do I:
A) Make the building shell in 3ds with outside UVed, import to UDK and BSP the inside and texture it that way
Make modular parts like walls, corners, ceilings, doorways etc, import those into UDK and assemble enterable buildings that way?
C) Model and UV the entire building as a static mesh and import it into UDK
Any good tutorial links to buildings (modern preferred) would be fantastic.
My game uses a lot of buildings and will require many many of them to be entered.
When making a building in 3DS do I:
A) Make the building shell in 3ds with outside UVed, import to UDK and BSP the inside and texture it that way
Make modular parts like walls, corners, ceilings, doorways etc, import those into UDK and assemble enterable buildings that way?C) Model and UV the entire building as a static mesh and import it into UDK
Any good tutorial links to buildings (modern preferred) would be fantastic.
Replies
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ProceduralBuildings.html
1 - a repeat of the texture, is very notable;
2 - the number of triangles increases in relation to the other method of importing the entire building.
Is this even the best method?
What are the advantages besides saving memory?
Thanks!
I could create multiple floor plans, walls, ceilings etc based on a set grid and connect them all that way, create multiple materials for same pieces so they dont repeat and build them in UDK.
Is that the correct way?
1 mesh that has an outside wall on 1 side, and an inside wall on the other side.
1 mesh that has an inside wall on both sides.
that way you can just build your exterior and interior. same with floors/cielings. so long as you keep your spacing between them at a decent amount u should be ok.
and to take care of tiling just make your material really configurable add some vertex painting on some masks that can be adjusted in the material instances and you can also use decals and smaller props to break up tiling.
These aren't too different things. You can use either techniques wherever they're appropriate.
while you could make the entire building one static mesh this is unrealistic workflow for a proper game. This is because if you're using Unreal the design team will probably be creating the spaces in BSP first. And it is much easier to change, and fine tune, an environment later if your structure is not one giant mesh.
This is what kevin johnstone means by "flexibility" in the document he wrote about modularity.
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I do not see why make it modular. I think it would be better to use a different ID for each material (three at most) and import the entire UDK, as well as the buildings are made of Mirro's edge.
Or am I wrong?
In the case of that building I would use the building technology...
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ProceduralBuildingsTutorial.html
unless you want to be able to go inside.
Why not just make the outside and inside out of the same modules? Making a big box that everything else has to fit inside is very inflexible.
i would still go modular for outdoors, would allow more variation at a cheaper cost than 1 mesh exterior.
just give the meshes no back-face and make your equivalent indoor pieces to the same dimensions so it all fits together nice.
1. UDK occludes all nonseen geometry, therefore if you are inside a building, in a room, nothing else is being rendered on the outside of that room until you walk out of it. an object behind another object gets occluded.. thus saving memory.
2. of all of the features of UDK, geometry is in my opinion, the least memory intensive. lights, materials, effects, etc are what really determine a good framerate anyway.
notice, if you're going to be mesh painting at all, you need a significant amount of geometry. so what is the advantage of having 1 building mesh made up of (just tossing a number here) 500 triangles, for mesh painting.... OR having a building made up of modular pieces, each piece 8 triangles maximum, that uses world space normals to break up tiling. you can combine so many methods to make modular pieces NEVER look the same unless you're a really far distance away.
also. if you plan on going inside a building, that means you need to set up custom collision for it. it would be a hell of a lot easier to set up collision for modular pieces (it could all be done in udk) than it is to set up collision for 1 giant building with interior and exterior.
id say use a combination of both modular pieces and BSP. if you dont plan on having too different of a floor/ceiling texture, just use a bsp for that.. it would also make it easier for you to cut in holes for stairs n whatnot.
ALSO ANOTHER NOTE! (sry im getting carried away). lightmapping modular pieces is MUCH EASIER than lightmapping an entire building.. especially if that building is made entirely in max FROM modular pieces (sharing same UVs). lightmapped meshes produce great shadow quality, and the bigger the lightmap, the easier it will be to mess up.
What would giving them no back face do?
I like the idea of modular walls with BSP floor all inside a proc building or modular outside. Building the inside would be simple.
Would it be good to start with an enormous BSP block of the building, place the modular faces on the outsides of it for exterior and use bps floors with carpet/wood textures and ceiling textures to do top/bottom?