Apartment workflow

What’s the best workflow for creating the internal rooms of an apartment?

Is it best to create internal walls from a series of simple rectangular blocks like Lego, or as custom made individual single sided rooms, or as a complete floor level? I’m thinking about the UV’s for textures and lightmaps, and being able to recycle the simple block method for further levels. The same applies to skirting trims, cornices etc.

Thanks

If you want to go modular you have to make sure single continuous walls are made from a single geo, else you are going to have problems with lightmaps. Make sure the walls are wide enough to prevent light leaks. Imo quality wise it’s best if you use custom geometry for the apartments, with custom unwrapping. And if you already have it unwrapped you can bake the wall textures so you won’t have a problem with textures tiling differently on different meshes. It’s more work to set it up this way but it saves you a lot of headaches down the line.

Thanks Gergely.

I’m now doing each floor level as a one off asset. Internal wall thickness is 10cm and have no light leaks so far.

Is there any advantage deleting polys where hidden and coplanar with the floor and ceiling? Would make for simpler and more efficient use of UV space. Similarly should I delete the hidden faces of the skirting trims, cornices and door frames? Would this lead to problems with lightmaps?

In the UV lightmap channel, should adjacent wall be stitched together to form a long continuous strip per room? Or should each planer wall surface be treated as an individual UV island?

Thanks again.

10 cm thickness is fine.
I wouldn’t worry too much about those hidden faces on the walls. It takes up only a small percentage of the UV space if you place them right, and you have to up the lightmap resolution on them pretty high anyway to get nice shadows. So just leave them there. Scale them down if you want to. On the mouldings and stuff like that you can delete them safely.
You should stitch together planar surfaces only. From one corner to the other. So in a typical room you are going to have 8 big islands + smaller ones for the top and bottom. If you can’t see the outer wall in the level, you can scale down the outer islands.

Thanks again Gergely

Substituted complex ogee profile skirtings for basic box, and the results were awful. Results were blotchy, and rendered grey when they were given the default white wall material. Took quite some time to model and layout UV’s. Wondering if lightmaps from walls are bleeding on to the skirtings or perhaps the long narrow strips of polys forming the continuous curves and rebates of the moulding are the problem.

Going to look at simple skirting profile stacked in UV space with a normal map for the profile (easily changed for different profiles) with separate UV channel for lightmap.

Also I’ll lift the lower edge of the walls from floor level to top of skirting, with a solid double sided skirting full width of the walls to see if it fixes the skirting problems. Need to get a quick and efficient workflow to make this all worthwhile.