Modular Building

MODULAR ASSETS

Modularity is a topic that has been explained extensively over the years. i am going to give my variation and adaptation on a method widely used in the gaming industry. Due to the fact that you are using the maximum amount of texture space leaving little waste. You are also building to the grid of the engine you are working in so it makes it easy for level designers to pick up your pieces and construct levels. I will be displaying my piece using the unreal development kit provided to you by EPIC GAMES.

Short explanation

1. The idea of this process is to create a high poly texture sheet and model directly from the sheet.

2. Bake your high poly detail to generate your normal map, ambient occlusion, diffuse, opacity. Using a normal map baking software (xnormal,max,maya)

3 Using the pieces you baked out make different objects and structures with the sheet. All while making sure it snaps properly.

NOW YOU ARE READY TO PORT IT INTO AND ENGINE OF YOUR CHOOSING.

My variation was taught to me by a friend and a few videos.

A. SNAPS AND PIVOTS

1. Depending on the engine that you are porting your game into, modeling to the grid so your modular assets snap properly for the engine is essential. I am going to be importing my assets into udk which has the units that are multiples of two. ex( 2, 4, 6, 8……32) etc..

2. making sure that you snap to the home grid is quite easy.

3. in order to get to your grid setting you must right click on the snaps toolbar. The grid and snap settings dialog box will appear.

4. in the grid dimensions i would change the default setting s of Grid Spacing-16 Major Lines every nth Grid line-10 Perspective View Gris Extent-7. Change those to Grid Spacing-16 Major Lines every nth Grid line-8. Perspective View Gris Extent-8. With these settings you can build to snaps inside UDK

B. CONSTRUCTION

1. The first step is to identify what part of the structure you need using the concept art. In order to do this i color code the areas that would be modular and the parts that would have to be constructed using hard surface. (photoshop)

keep in mind that pieces that flow into each other are better next to one another on your texture sheet.

2 on a plane snapped and centered to the grid. I make an 8 by 8 sheet to get dividers for section. I color code my divides so I have a visual reference of my texture space. This makes it quite flexible because, depending on the texture size you need you can divide up your grid to match your modeling needs.

3. i then proceed to model my high poly directly on my sheet. Using the concept art and the reference I gathered.

keeping the borders in mind.

C. BAKING

1. I export out my high poly and lo poly obj. from 3ds max.

keep in mind to check no preference in the dialog box

2. Import and Bake my normal maps and ambient occlusion using x-normal. For the high resolution I render out 4096 by 4096 with a bucket size of 4. Then convert it into a 1024 or 2048 depending on your budget.

keep in mind you are sacrificing render time for the ambient occlusion when using xnormal