Hi there.
Before I start I would just like to thank you for being interested enough to click the link for this post. Hope you will leave a comment with your personal input on the subject.
So what is the subject… Scaling. I have recently stumbled upon a problem in designing a level / scene.
For a frame of reference it is a static scene that should be viewed in vr or on screen the scene is a simple 10 by 10 km nature scene with a village in the middle. vary simple stuff with a cartoonish low poly design.
now i said a 10 by 10 km scene but here is the crux of the matter. it’s only 10 by 10 if you are walking down at the ground. most of the time you will be viewing the whole thing from above in a god like view where you can manipulate the scene by rotating it and so on.
So what scale should i build this scene in?
The actual scale 1:1 and then scale it down in the engine when i want the overview or do i make the scene smaller and scale it up?
Before you start on creating separate assets for close up view and distant view to save system resources.
This will not be necessary as every asset is low poly heavily stylized. Basically its made entirely of cubes of different sizes and shapes with a small bevel on them.
Well… I found the answer to the question myself by playing around a bit.
creating a smal scale model was my first choice as that was the easiest in blender…
I quickly noticed that all shadows cast on the mesh after baking, both dynamic and static, where vary low quality. after that i tried re scaling the mesh in blender and then importing the now 500 by 500 meter mesh into unreal. did not scale up to 10km by 10km as i’m just testing. sure enough the shadows and lightmap quality where awesome compared to the small mesh.
Well I just stared on my jurny and have only taken the first few steps.
I have many things that need be done and figured out.
Like if it’s possible to paint directly on a mesh with different materials and how i’m supposed to go from first person view to godmode using static meshes with baked lightmaps.
Maybe instead of scaling the world i move the camera and change the lensing / fow?
The effect i’m looking for is like growing into a giant…
If you haven’t guessed it i’m working with vr
Thankfully the UE communety is awesome and i have been able to find solutions for many problems without asking a single question.
in unreal 1 cm is 1 unit. There is no real limit on how big your scene can be. You should be able to make it 10 km big.
Depending on how high you can fly I would try to make something like a skybox. That is an image of an environment mapped onto the inside of a sphere that covers the whole space. It is a bit tricky to merge the sky box and the real scene but with a bit of fog and some low poly mountains it should be fine. Just look at some examples in the games world. Uncharted 4 comes into my mind. That’s not a unreal game but they all do it more or less the same way.
