Modular Asset Creation Questions

[Tim_Hobson]

Hi,

1. Can there be too much modularity?

The answer here for me would be “depends.” Modularity wouldn’t necessarily be the issue but how often these assets are repeating. You don’t want the worlds illusion to off put the user by seeing the same thing over and over again. Let’s use the wall as a base example. This could be a generic wall that you could use over and over again. If you use the same texture on it and it has the same marking, scuffs, scratches, etc then someone might notice.

BUT if you vary the texture or have a completely different material set up for it you can hide the fact that you’re using the same geometry over and over again!

2. Best practice to texture modular assets.

If I approach model making as mentioned above this leaves me (I think) with two texturing options, at least for the base panels. (Assume that I want four looks to the base panels: brick, wood, plaster, concrete). One, I could create a material with four tiling textures and paint each panel as needed. Or, two, I could create a single texture map and uv map the same panel four times, thus creating four meshes. The first way increases the complexity of the material, the second increases the number of meshes. Is there any drawbacks to either method? If I go the tiling route for painting should I up my poly count on my base panels?

In this instance I would create four textures with their own setups. If you want variations of the four different types to keep from creating whole new textures you can use Material Instancing to affect the color parameters and get slightly different materials.

So in this setup. If you were to create everything here and 1 instance for each material this would be what you are rendering.

1 mesh - the wall
4 materials - (if all these are in the scene)
The instances do not cause a additional draw call.

Take a look at our Material Instancing to get a better understanding of how this will work and for your levels.

3. Decals.

Is it beneficial to utilize decals to break up the uniform look of the scene and to add detail (i.e. grime in alleyways, on walls, graffiti, paper, leaves, etc.)? I have never really explored decals so my understanding is very limited. So in practice I do not know if it is practical to use potentially a large number of decals

This is taken from the documentation page for Decal Actors:

Performance

The mesh complexity of the objects affected by the decal is not affecting the performance. The decal performance depends on the shader complexity and the shader box size on the screen.

We can further improve the per decal performance. Ideally the bounding box of the decal is small to get better per pixel performance. This can be done manually. An automated method is possible but a good designer can also adjust the placement to improve performance further.

The more complex the material the more of a performance hit you’ll take. This is true of any material! Something to be aware of.

You can see how much of a performance hit your shaders are giving by using the viewport view mode and selecting “Shader Complexity.” You can see the documentation here to make sense of what you’re seeing on screen and how it reflects with your performance.

If you have any other questions feel free to ask!

Tim