Thanks Darth! I’ve seen so many conflicting answers to the modularity build style. I’m trying to do realistic Archviz stuff. My biggest concern with creating my walls as a few large pieces, rather than 100 small pieces, is that I am designing a 2 story office building with all sorts of wall shapes AND I’m worried about tiling being to the same scale on all walls, and lining up properly. I believe that topic refers to “texels.”
I managed to solve my problem for the moment, but not in a happy feel-good sort of way. The issue was that I had it looking perfect…then, all of the sudden, it rebuilt and there were these large (3inx3in) triangular shadows where each modular piece met up. No amount of adjusting any setting would fix it. I finally gave up for the night (3am), closed the program and put comp to sleep. In the morning, I re-launched Epic Game Launcher, Launched the game engine, and BAM! everything was good again…So, it’s working, but in that uneasy sort of way.
Some other interesting learnings in my quest for modularity:
UE4 has modular architectural resources in their sample content, which caused me to assume 2 things: The first, is that they encourage modular building. The second, was that it must represent a “best practice” form of modeling modular walls, so I should dissect it! I looked at 4 things:
Q1: Did it also have shadow problems on my level when things were broken looking?
A1: Yes, and those triangle corner shadows were bigger.
Q2: What are its dimensions?
A2: 4m x 4m x 20cm. The same as mine, and there are other sizes, too.
Q3: What are its 2 UV maps like?
A3.1: The Texture map is huge, goes off the screen, and is red instead of white, which makes me feel like UE4 is even saying “this is bad.” Perhaps these walls weren’t Quality inspected? When I look at the tile material I use on it, it is 4x smaller than on my walls, where I let one 4m x 4m wall face take up the whole 0 to 1 UV texture space. It appears that the designer let the texture UV map size represent 1m^2. Put another way, if I were to bring their model into Blender and look at the UV lightmap, just the front face alone for the wall in the UV map would be 4 times bigger than the whole 0 to 1 UV space. I hope that makes sense.
A3.2: Their lightmap UV looks better than their texture one. It is at least fully contained within the UV space BUT the spacing between the UV islands is not significant looking. As in, if the UV space represented 128x128 pixels, which is what they have it set to by default for the light map resolution, then the margin, or spacing, between the islands is about 1-2 pixels. Sounds small compared to other sources.
Summary: Sometimes, just closing UE4 and restarting it will solve issues that seem to have happened for no good reason. UE4 provides modular assets that seem to be designed in a way that breaks the rules…so, for me at least, the jury is still out for the hope of finding a “best practices” for archviz building.
