I know good topology is important for animation and hard surface modeling that needs to be subdivided with good edge loops making quads but say for something like a building that isn’t going to move or be subdivided does it matter at all? I am making some housing projects and don’t know if I should keep everything as one object and just make cuts where I need or separate certain parts like the roofing and gutters. What practices would a game ready static building have? Is it usually made up of multiple objects or would that be too high poly?
As long as it doesn’t affect visuals, topology doesn’t matter for a static building. Splitting meshes is most of the time a good idea.
Dealing with modular buildings can also be very flexible because you can create a huge number of game assets using very little artwork. Imagine you have 10 different house models and 10 roofs, if you combine them you can make and entire town with 100 unique buildings.
Also keep in mind that, depending on the game engine, huge meshes can be hard to handle, causing lags. For example you don’t want a very long tunnel made from one single mesh because everything will be send to renderer. Instead you should split it into smaller segments so that far away segments can be disabled by the engine.
This is exactly what I wanted to know. Thank you.