Hey guys,
I’m hoping I can get some opinions on putting together a enter-able home in UE4 using modular pieces.
I can easily imagine making an exterior or interior, but combining the two together is feeling more complicated. If you’ve done it, any strategies?
One thing I’m wondering: would you make single-sided geometry and and place it back to back (so that inner and outer walls can be combined in different ways)?
Any advice would be a big help.
Thanks!
It definitely takes a little more thought when integrating both exterior and interior assets. The best advice I can give is to model them alongside each other, which is sort of a given but sometimes people model the interior first and then the exterior afterwards. I found it to be easier to do them at the same time, so you can see what works and what doesn’t as you go along rather than after one is finished.
Sometimes depending on the style of the building you are creating it may be best to just do two sided geometry. Others, you would have one for the inside and outside. But this depends on what you’re making. If you’re making a home, you can pull it off with two sided meshes to craft the exterior/interior bounds and then go from there. Good luck!
It depends on how complicated it is, if the geometry is really simple then it’s better not to do it modular because you can improve performance by reducing the number of objects.
I found the images on this site to inspirational for modular building design –> http://lookslikegooddesign.com/modular-building-kaeding/
I would agree with SE_JonF. Do double sided geometry. I am doing something similar to your project. I have made my modular components double sided and then just started to build the base layout of the perimeter of my scene once you have the perimeter done and built you can then start on your interior walls and reuse those wall pieces you used to build the perimeter. Reuse as much as possible it will help you get you’re scene done faster and that’s the main benefit of working in a modular fashion.
Here is an album of what I am currently working on. Hopefully this will give you an idea of where to start.
Another thing to consider when you get to the building stage in UE4 is to make prefabs of your modular components and use vertex snapping by holding down V before manipulating your prefabs.
Based on the Epic examples (and most games) this shouldn’t be an issue at all. Most games load (or rather stream) a different level when you enter a building. In other words there’s the outside level and then there are ‘mini-levels’ that represent building interiors. In this case your building interiors don’t have to match the exteriors at all and can be larger! LOL The reason being is that you will eventually have way to much junk in your level if you have interiors AND exteriors loaded all at once. Assuming you have furniture for both inside and outside this could add up to a ton of stuff the user’s computer has to load just to get the level ready for play(do not assume that everybody’s computer is as fast as yours, assume that the general public uses slow devices and you’ll always be good to go for playability). If you really insist on doing both at the same time then your wall can be a UV mapped cube and that would allow you to have an interior and exterior texture. You can then place the different sides on different material slots so you can change them in the editor. In other words you can make 20 different external textures and 20 different internal textures and apply the any combination of textures to the appropriate UV slot.
