I think I have looked at every YouTube video, all the posts on here / reddit and google but I’m still seeing lots of conflicting / confusing information regarding building modular interiors. I was hoping I could get some pointers from here RE specific questions:
Firstly my understanding is that walls should be 10uu thick due to light bleed?
Say I build a wall component that is 250x250x10uu. I can place the front and back face UVs to be 100% width and height so that they can tile vertically and horizontally but what do I do with the other 4 faces that are the sides?
How should I handle two walls coming together to form a right angle (corners basically)? Should the ends of the wall tile be 45degs or does it make more sense to just have them meet like this?
How should two separate interiors meet? Should I have two 10uu thick walls meet like this and I should try and hide the 20uu thick wall with an oversized door frame?
Is there a standard set of wall / ceiling / floor components? I’m thinking square and then narrow tiles + door frame / double door frame + window frame and then rounded corners for variation.
For the tile-able textures, should I be designing textures that are square and will fit the 250x250 tile or should I be using some sort of smarter world? texture (I’m very new to UE materials)
I think for our project I will be using Lumen, will I need to care about lightmaps still?
Where is best to set my pivot point for wall / floor / ceiling components? I’m thinking about the bottom far left corner. Ideally everything will snap to 10uu.
If you wanted to do this, then yes, you need UVs on the edges. But, often people will use a different mesh to cover the corners. Two reasons
Laziness
Quite often, it looks more real. Because in real life, they have to cover wall joins, and often use things like those metal wall corners ( that also stop the wall getting dented ).
Don’t really have a comment here.
Technically, you could do something like this, but I don’t think anybody ever does.
You can have a lot of tiles. You can use instancing, if there’s a huge amount.
No.
Your textures will need to be 4 or 8k. That might or might not fit on wall tile. You might also want to look at ‘world aligned’ materials. That way, the engine ignores UVs and uses world position to decide which part of the texture to put on a wall. Upside, your textures ALWAYS line up.
You don’t need to make lightmaps.
It’s really up to you, but doors definitely need the pivot point on the corner, otherwise they’re a mare to move.
A technique I like to use I call edit in place. More or less I model the building out in full as a facade in 3ds Max referenced to world origin 000. When imported into Unreal the building will be located based on the 3ds Max reference. No cracks or leaks as they are single mesh objects.
Once in place I can the dress up the surfaces a bit so they don’t stick out then add the deco as instanced and then use the facade as a collision mesh and sun block.
Trying to align them like that could lead to gaps on more complex buildings.
Usually better to center the mesh on the thin axis (using the edge or center for the wide axis is personal preference really) and keep it on the grid. Sort of like this:
The “notches” at the corner can either be hidden by L-shaped trim pieces, or by extending and tapering the wall a bit.
Such a taper is hidden when the walls are placed end-to-end, and is hard to notice on corners unless you really look.
This trick requires some normal editing to make the bevel appear flat though. Setting up the LODs can be a bit fiddly as well. It could also add some Nanite overhead (if you’re using it) due to the near-coplanar faces. Unless you’re planning a building system for players, using trim pieces might be the best option.
