Modularity – Building a city
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Back to the writing! It’s been a crazy journey so far. Our game takes place in parts of a bombed city, which means that a lot of buildings are necessary. But how do you start there? If you make every building by hand it might take a long time, and if you decide to do changes to the map you might have to redo the building you’ve done entirely to make it fit in the new setting.
We made four types of ”building sets”, each either consisting of 300×300 cm pieces and 150×300 cm pieces with 2-5 different material IDs. Something we learned here is that measurements are pretty important (at least in Unreal engine) because of the snapping functions. Usually you want it to snap every 10th, or 5th centimeter when you move it around, and if your measurements fits the pieces they will easily snap to one another when you move them around in the engine. If your measurements are off, you might end up having snapping on 1cm at a time which can be a tedious pain. Each building sets always consisted of the following; long/short wall pieces, pieces with one window, pieces with two windows, and an opened/closed door pieces. To support these pieces we also made some pillars to cover corners and sometimes decorative objects like stairs or basement windows. What about the roof? Well there were pieces for that too, but generally it’s only something that is going to be seen if the building is broken, which is why it only had to be placed where the player could see it. Speaking of broken things takes us to one of the greater challenges of this project. Usually when making a modular city you only have to make your pieces and then get to work, but since our city needed to be broken a lot more planning was needed. What we quickly noticed was that making modular ”broken things” was not easy, mainly because so many pieces has to be made in order to not make it look repetitive. With the 8 weeks we had, this was something dangerously time consuming.
To solve this we firstly looked at exactly what parts of the map we wanted to be broken, and then made pieces that could be used to make ”hole” in those buildings. By building a part of a building in 3ds max with my already existing building pieces I could easily make broken pieces from my already existing ones while also making sure they will fit with the whole pieces.
And that’s pretty much it. When you have your pieces all you need is supporting props and textures. If you want to read more about how textures can be used in a modular fashion than you can read about on Kadar Ali’s blogpost.
Until next time, Malin  |
