Week 3: Modularity construction

Module: GAR106 environment art 2

Brief: “Model, texture and present in UE5 a Victorian three-storey terraced building with a shop on the ground floor facing the street.”

House: Gryffindor

Plot number: 16 (corner)

Week three: Mon 6th Feb to Sun 12th Feb 2023

Bonus: Reading week (Mon 13th Feb to Sun19th Feb)

During our workshop we were introduced to the idea of modular construction through building a dungeon space.

Modularity in games is often used in large environments to cut down on time spent modelling and to speed up the processing and rendering times of engines. It involves creating various small assets such as a wall and then snapping them together in engine to create the final, larger asset such as a house (much like lego bricks).

For the dungeon, we were instructed on how to create a wall and floor asset, as well as a pillar and doorway. Then, we were shown how to move the pivots and snap the assets together to allow us to build a space without having to spend time creating multiple versions of the same asset; we only needed one pillar, for example, and then it could be duplicated and moved around to fill out the space.

To begin with, I took my block out into Unreal Engine 5 to check that the proportions were correct and as a way to remind myself to integrate this into my workflow later on; regularly checking proportions in engine is a key part of the workflow as it allows you to ensure that your modular assets all fit together without issue, which in turn allows you to catch problems as they appear, rather than trying to deal with all of them at the very end.

Then, after breaking down which modular pieces I needed to create, it was on to the modular construction of my shop.

In my first attempt, I ended up making the modular assets too big (for example, having one asset for all of the walls on the first floor instead of duplicating and resizing one wall) or making too many (for example, having separate assets for each wall if those walls were different sizes, when in actuality I only needed one wall which I could then duplicate and resize in engine during construction). Because of this, I ended up restarting, making more of an attempt to break the shop down into smaller parts instead of only seeing the larger forms.

I believe that restarting not only reassured me that sometimes restarting is better than trying to make something work when it doesn’t, but it also forced me to take another look at my shop’s design and break it down properly, which improved my overall workflow and problem solving skills.

When all modular assets were finished to a suitable degree, it was then time to import them into Unreal 5 and begin building my shop. A key part of making this process work is to ensure that each assets pivot point is in the correct place, usually the bottom right or left corner, to more easily allow each asset to snap together in the correct place.

Overall, the building process was slightly more fiddly than I expected, so the next time I approach something like this I will likely spend more time considering where exactly the best place to put the pivot is on each object.

The last thing to complete before moving on is to ensure that all of the UVs are accurate and ready for texturing and then the modularity stage is complete!