I’m planning a project where modularity in the environment is going to be key. The levels themselves will be moderately large, repetitive, and I plan to build the basic geometry (that is to say walls, floors, ceilings, etc - not more detailed pieces like columns or beams) on the fly in the engine using flat planes to quickly create many levels out of relatively few parts. This means I’m not willing to go back into Maya and combine a bunch of meshes into one big mesh for each level, as that would drastically slow down my process.
That being the case, I’m trying to decide between two approaches to doing this. The first way is to model out a whole bunch of uniquely shaped wall pieces and assemble them individually in-editor. However, as I understand it (and please correct me if I’m misunderstanding something, as I’m definitely still learning the technical details of the engine), that would lead to a lot of draw calls and could impact performance at runtime. It also requires many unique meshes for my differently-sized walls, and would require more effort up front.
I discovered an alternative in the form of creating walls, floors, ceilings, etc procedurally using Blueprint by simply duplicating a small plane an appropriate number of times in each axis. At first this seemed ideal since it would cut down on draw calls (or so I understand it, again please correct me if I’m wrong here) and be far more flexible, however further reading has turned up the claim that this can also be very demanding of the hardware in other ways.
I was hoping someone could shed some light on the details here, clear up any misconceptions I might have, offer some advice or point me in the right direction, and maybe turn me onto any other leads that might be useful. I’ve created the image below to illustrate what I’m talking about by comparing the creation of an irregularly-shaped wall using these two approaches.
