Modular Environment modeling question.
I have a question for you master environment artists. How do you go about building an architectural structure to both look good inside and outside seamlessly in a modular fashion? I am really fascinated by Modular modeling I just can't seem to figure out a way that it could be used to make a building that you can move in and out of. Could one of you give me a possible breakdown of how it could be done?
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Another thing you will want to consider is depending on the complexity, how many textures will you need to tile consistenly without looking like its pasted together.
Also if you have a piece of concept art or reference. Take it into photoshop and on seperate layers painter over areas each with a different color to break the pieces apart.
If you organize things on paper or in a document before hand I find it much easier to follow and do.
Spend more time with the planning stage and things will go smoother than if you wing it.
as for the building process, I think ror explained it in detail in a post about the lack of environment artists, or something like that, but what I usualy do -and that reminds me that Brome is gonna kill me since I haven't started on that workflow paper he asked me- anyways, what I usually do is that I start by building the most representative chunk of the building, sometimes it's a simple wall panel, sometimes, it's a fancy entrance with loads of details, the important thing here is that you have to be able to derive all the other pieces from this one easily, of course you will have specific pieces with higher complexity, but I always use a common piece for a specific building to keep consistency. I also tend to have a test scene where I build the close to final building with modular pieces, this stage is really useful to you but also your team : by building a template/sample building/room using your pieces, you can figure out how to break the tiling, which pieces are missing, etc and it becomes a good example for your teammates (the layout/level building guy or level designer for instance so that they know : 1. that your pieces exist, 2. how to use them to get the result you had in mind while building them.
once again the way you do all this stuff is totally dependant on your ressources, engine and company workflow, ours makes very little use of BSP in the end so we tend to build full chunks of buildings, sometimes even full buildings to be able to populate a city faster using less ressources, again, it all depends.