Some basic Questions about Modular building

Development Asset Creation
1

Hey fellas,
iam really really eager to build something along the lines of old japanese town style. And i already wrapped my head around the how to. I thought about creating bigger and smaller elements in fixed ratio to each other (assuming taking 1m x 1m elemts for the walls, some could be 1 wide, 3 high and so on. Plastering an instanced wooden post in between (thats how they do it). And creating a Material that can be changed in color, UV and so on through parameters, so basically you need a very limited amount of materials to create a lot of variations to each element (different color, wood, stone in whatever color). I just have some questions:

  1. if my Max is setup in meters, what is the conversion to UE4?
  2. Does the wa iam think about it right now make sense or am i totally off? I mean this way atleast in Max they can be easily aligned through Min / Max / Middle?
  3. Can i just delete the face on the sides, that won’t be visible or would that cause flickers, color bleeding or anything like that (since you are left with just 2 planes side by side)?

Yeah would be nice to hear some advice of people way way more knowledgeable.

2

I can answer the first question: 1uu = 1cm

3
  1. Don’t “ever” mess around with scale. UE4 world units is, as above, 1uu = 1cm so change the world units in Max to 1 unit = 1 cm. Keep things as close to 1-1 as possible.
  2. Now that UE4 uses real world measurements alignment is not as bad as it use to be.
  3. Yes you can/could but UE4 uses stuff like ray tracing and light bounce so if you have a wall with out a back face any lighting will leak through. Rule of thumb don’t put holes in the geometry. :wink:
4

Awesome thanks for your replies :slight_smile:

5

Question 3 is a little bit tricky though.
If you’re using Lightmass(And most likely you will) then you can get shadow bleeding from the “hidden” parts onto other parts if Lightmap resolution is not high enough.
For example if you have 2 stacking box then “dark” values from hidden walls could be “interpolated” into visible parts. So if similar problem occur then remember to play with object Lightmap resolution scale!

ps: For the future, if you encounter some problems with Lightmass - check out this post with collection of links to troubleshooting guides/tutorials

6

Thanks will check it out :slight_smile:
One little question: in all videos on lightmap i have seen, the object was UV mapped in a second channel (ofcourse) but with a different UV layout, eventhough you could save and load an existing one into the second channel (i think you can). is it necessary to have both sets to be seperated?

7

Lightmap always using different UV channel to store Lightmap UV, but UV itself could be generated by UE4 automatically after importing it so there is no need to save/load UV to second channel

8

I work in units of measure that makes sense for me, and is most comfortable to work in a modeling system. That is NOT cm.

I work in feet, and then subdivide my grid system to have inches that I can snap to when needed. (This is in Maya)

When I export, I simply turn my units to cm to match UE4, and my models come in just fine into UE4.

9

Regarding light mass & UVs: here is the single most helpful video I’ve ever watched regarding setting that up: "Baked Lighting" and "Lightmaps" (Maya & Unreal Engine) - YouTube

It’s specific to Maya, but the concept of grid aligning your UVs and such applies to all 3D creation software.