Modular workflow

[Darth Sihtric]

I am working within a team on a project and I'm just looking for advice on building modular walls. Firstly I have been making lots of tiny pieces of walls which can fit together to make unique full walls. For instance 25cm X 25cm pieces, 25cm X 50cm pieces and so on but this is long and repetitive and I don't think it's the right way. Also if I was to make wall pieces instead would it make sense to stick to one size such as 1 metre wide. Or have others too such as 50cm wide and 25cm wide

Ant help is useful thank you

[GeeksGoneBad]

I think if you are going to want to eventually generate walls using Code or Blueprints - then you'd want to stick to some standard size - but if you plan on just dragging and dropping and moving things manually then any size that's on the snapping tool would do - still I think a standard size would even be easier there too rather then having to change that stepping setting

[ZacD]

Generally, I think it's best to design modular pieces in at least 250-300cm chunks. Sure, use small pieces in your 3d package or for construction blueprints, but otherwise smaller pieces are too tedious.

[darthviper107]

Avoid using too many objects because it impacts performance. Also, as far as UE4 goes, the way lighting is processed will create lighting variations between meshes which will be visible if you use multiple objects to create a flat surface. The real purpose of modular workflow is so that you save memory and make it easier to construct a level, if it's not really saving much memory then it's not worth it.

[Darth Sihtric]

Thank you darthviper107. I will start over with walls instead. I was thinking of making all the rooms so the fit into metres. So maybe a 12m X 9m or 30 X to 12m. If I did this should I just make 1m wide walls. Should walls be plains or box's as when I use boxes I have issues with gaps in corners

[Darth Sihtric]

Thanks everyone else too BTW. So if I made 1m wide wall pieces in ue4 I should merge them or just create 2.5m wide walls. My current workflow uses 1m, 3m, 50cm and 25cm wide walls and it's not good. Patterns\tiling doesn't flow well and I'm seeing that lighting issue too

[SE_JonF]

This breakdown might give you an idea of how to break up pieces/size. https://polycount.com/discussion/144...-set-breakdown If you can, check out some of the example content that deals with modular environments, or if it's within your budget something on the marketplace. =)

[Amelia_P]

Okay, I found out something testing different lightmap sizes. I tried a single wall with two windows and a door on it. I had to increase my lightmap to 1024, otherwise the shadow quality would be poor. So I decided to break my modular wall in one wall, one window and one door, separately. I decrease lightmap to 64 for each piece and downsize the texture from 2048 to 1024 (each mesh). Adding the meshes in the level, I checked the status and actually all the numbers went down (lightmap and texture RAM usage). Not always many objects mean a performance drop. It depends on the poly complexity, texture size. My doors and windows were simple because the level was inspired on a small Venice city (everything is a rectangle basically XD). I don't know if the same logic applies to complex meshes.

[darthviper107]

That sounds like something was wrong with your lightmap UV's. If the combined object required a large lightmap to look good, then splitting them up and using an total of less lightmap pixels wouldn't produce a better result.

Usually the reason to make things modular is to save memory (by reusing objects) and to make your library easier to use so that you don't have to try and manage many more unique objects. There has to be a balance though of how much memory you're using and how many draw calls there are. The majority of the time the draw calls are more of a concern than the amount of memory being used.