I’m new here to the forums, but I’ve been using blender for years. I do a lot of low(er) poly organics.
Anyway, I was hoping someone could share some hints with me.
I recently decided to try some buildings for use in a game engine, and ran into a few puzzling snags.
If the buildings were simply meant to be looked at from the outside, I’d be golden. but the problem arises when I try to give it an interior. There needs to be a doorway, windows, and two floors with a staircase.
does anyone have experience doing this? I don’t really know where to start. I thought about building each wall from a cube primitive and then joining them after, but then it becomes difficult to add a roof and windows/doors.
It almost seems to me that the details (doors, windows, roof, floors) need to be added first, and then the walls after. But that seems bothersome.
And to make it more complicated, the buildings can’t be “perfect”. The style is somewhat whimsical, so the roof should be sagging, the trim warped, etc.
If anyone’s got any advice, I’ll gladly take it.
Thanks, Justin
Never having designed game levels I can only relay advise I have seen others give on the forums. That is, to design each floor of the house and its outside shell as a completely separate scenes. This way you have the outside Shell model to use when outside the house. Then when the character walks through the doorway (which you can simply map a render of the interior to the inside of the doorway), the Game would start using the new scene of the interior. This way you do not need to have the walls and roof of the outside shell linked to the interior walls in anyway.
Yeah, I’ve seen that technique mentioned (and used) a lot, and I’m beginning to wonder if thats the way to do it. It would be nice though if you could look out from a window and actually see whats out there, or even jump from the window.
Look for Information on architectural modeling. As long as your Game engine can handle the poly count, you can model an entire house inside and out. To get doors and windows, you can with use loop cuts and then delete the faces that would represent the doors or windows, or you can try using Booleens to Cut doors and windows into your walls.
Well as far as modeling the inside its very possible todo in the same model/models in one scene. usuall for a building that needs to be hollow, i get the basic shape modeled out to start with (a cube extruded to get the basic birds eye view shape) then I take the bottom faces, extrude BUT DONT MOVE just click, scale it down, then extrude into the building so that the building is hollow. Then as matt said, loop cuts are the way to go, just make sure after you cut the loop that you modify the rest of the model so the cuts dont add uneeded polys on the other sides of the models.
Without knowing something about the gameengine the models are meant for we can’t really give any meaningfull advice.
You should ask one of the programmers for advice what the bottlenecks and requirements are for the engine.
The remark about having the inside of the building separate of the outside for example, is only true for renderers that support portals.
Btw triangle count is no longer a bottleneck with modern videocards, they can handle several million tris per second without breaking a sweat.
Things that kill framerates are textures, lighting and having too many materials.
Materials for videocards work a bit different than you might expect.
To a videocard every change in shading (smoothgroups), shader-material, texture and uv-islands are seen as separate entities. And each one of those will be sent separately through the pipeline, which can increase processing time enormously.
In short a lowpoly object with loads of smoothgroups, large textures, many uv-islands, multiple different materials and shaders can be a framerate killer.
On the other hand if you manage to cramp everything into a single large texture, using a minimal amount of shaders and go easy on the smoothgroups, you don’t have to worry about polycounts.
That’s the tutorial I have used to learn how to model houses from blue prints. It’s great but it does not try to save on polycount, so depending on what you want you may need to cleanup:
Also one thing that is either not mentioned or not clear in the tut is you should try to set a standard thickness for your walls, it will make it a lot easier to keep a certain symmetry and much easier too when you start adding window and door frame.
I’d also suggest trying to make all windows/door a standard size (or the window a multiple of a standard size). I did not follow my advice in the above picture as it was my first house, but it would have made it easier.
Wow, thanks for that! even 419 faces before cleanup is tiny. I could easily get away with 3k+ faces in my engine. It’s more the technique I’m looking for, and I think that after watching this and studying some games I should be fine. Thanks everyone
The tutorial you pointed out is great, I just thought it was worth mentioning that there will be a lot of faces you can get rid off easily once the basic design is finished.
Also, what will hurt is not the basic design, but the window frame, door design, interior and other frills you may want to add, so saving 300 faces on a 1 bedroom house may seem little but if you are building for a game engine, it may count. Here’s a render of the small house, it stands at 1160 faces with some interior done, but I am not working on it anymore… I could post the blend if you think you may have a use for it. The design is not mine, cant remember where I got the blueprint.
I am working on a mansion, but I think I swallowed a fish that is too big, it’s sitting at almost 30,000 faces, but the doors (and mostly door handles) and window frames are very expensive in term of polycounts. It’s not cleaned up, as I am not sure of the final interior wall design. It’s far from finished!
