project setup for a complex city recreation

Development World Creation
1

greetings,

i am currently working on an environment that should be optimized for a recreation of a highly detailed city. this project will be part of a course at an university, where every student will be tasked to model and texture a building based on its real counterpart. so there will be some special challenges:

1. high poly count on many complex buildings (some parts will include fotoscans)
2. no interieurs, but additional models (i.e. roads, trees, boardwalk) for a realistic environment
3. a lot of unique materials (we will try to offer some basic materials to reduce the overall material count)
4. probably not heavily optimized models and materials
5. the area (1km² + ) and therefore amount of models and materials will be extended over the next years
6. landscape should be based on a DEM / height map, ideally expandable later on

with this in mind, i expect a particulary high number of draw calls. there already is an existing unity project, that is pushing its limits and struggles to be expanded - which is why we are looking for a better and modern solution. world partition and nanite seem to be essential tools for this cause. should both methods be used simultaneously or are they redundant?

i am pretty new to game engines in general and probably overlooking important aspects. do you have any suggestions for a proper project setup? would it make sense to wait for the 5.4 release?

thanks in advance!

2

Use 5.4, and the main question is: What hardware does the students use? For a high poly count I’d suggest using at least a 3060 Nvidia graphics card, and not everyone has that. I do game development for a living and still use the 1080 which would not allow me to create what you have in mind.

If the students supply their own laptops / hardware, basically all of the rich kids with good laptops will have a huge advantage when working on this project.

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thanks for the info, good point! we (the students) model and texture the buildings with 3dsmax and also have access to some decent PCs. but anything unity/unreal happens on a pretty beefy workstation in the lab, so hardware should not be a problem.

4

That sounds good then!

According to the list of criteria’s and challenges Unreal seems to be a good fit, perhaps the only good fit. Use Unreal Engine 5.4, and make sure to teach them about using material instances. Creating a versatile material and multiple material instances is the way to go to keep the draw call down. Also make sure to use Virtual Textures.

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didn’t know about virtual textures - will look into that, thanks!

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