3D Modular Building Concepts

hello and welcome my name is Matthew Marc Whitten in this video I want to talk to you guys about modular building and just the ideas behind creating modular geometry so I scoured the internet for some images I have some on my own content I want to give you guys a couple examples of exactly what is modular building and why you would want to do it so I'm not going to get too much into actually building the assets themselves those will be other videos but this video will show us that so let me start off with some of these images that I have here this is a simple image that I found on the internet literally the most basic idea when it comes to modular building so in this particular case you see that this individual has created several assets but you could literally just create this one wall piece and one pillar piece and create any kind of set of objects that you want out of them in fact we look at this other image here you can see all of the different things that you can create out of that so we can create all these different shapes just using a pillar that is set every so often right in between with walls all right and we can go any direction we want and you can see all the different things so that's the OPP's absolute easiest simplest form now modular geometry can get a lot more complex but like I said this is these images are just to help you see the simplest idea so in this image this is something you'll see a lot in racing games or driving games they'll start creating panels right in this case you have sidewalks and you have all these different setups right depending on what kind of intersection they are if it's a curved road and how all these things line up with each other so doesn't always have to be full-on 3d it could be things like you know your 2d planes your in this case the road and so on right but here's another example that we kind of see right here where they're just three pieces okay so we have this piece this one without a without event with events and then they curved piece and you can see that as they rotate the curved piece and they move the different pieces around you can get a fairly unique look in fact you can do an entire building of ventilation systems just using these three pieces you just have to be smart about how you were objects line up and whatever but remember these are all easy ones I'm starting to get more complex as I show it really kind of when you guys have a better understanding of what it means to be a modular piece and then we'll start seeing some more complex ones so this one takes it up a notch right as we can see that we have a ton of different pipes now this might take a while of course to create but the amount of different things you can do with these pipes and whatever directions you want to go with them is just insane all right so we can even see that there's slight variations between say this one has four different angles coming out of it same thing as this one this one's just a little bit longer right so depending on which angle you want your pipes to move you can rotate them place them in there you've got different gauges things like that this can take you know a ton of it doesn't take I should say it doesn't take a ton of time to make these assets you can literally populate an entire scene with these and it will just feel natural and unique right so it's all about the lego idea right understand modular building more of like a Lego piece concept now this one shows in this image that you don't always have to have like simple ways of connecting in this case they made it so that the texture was done in such a way they came to line it up so it comes into a little bit more of a complex lineup it's obviously easier to make sure that your pieces are perfectly straight when they line of each other but this is a unique take on that helping you guys understand that it's not always as simple as just lining two things up side by side in this case this particular artist thought that they would take their texture and create it in such a way that it could just be kind of interchanged as the bricks slid into the different facets of each of the different modular pieces now this is where things get a little bit more complex and a little bit more realistic when it comes to larger games there really are no games nowadays that don't use modular building you just do not have the time to build everything as an individual separate object it just can never happen so you can see here that these are some modular pieces that build a building and these are the different types of windows that you can swap out you have two different types of trim so you can see this is kind of a more of a brick trim more of a concrete trim and then we have these pieces that separate the windows so right here the windows themselves don't really have anything in between them they look weird when you link them directly but if you were to put something like this in between and we'll see that in the next image right now we can create the entire building so here are those long pieces right here are those concrete trim here is the brick trim another concrete trim up here in the different windows and you can see that they're separated by those long pieces in the trim so this entire building is nothing but modular pieces you need to see how this particular artist in this image kind of points those things out right so we can go back to this and see the different types of trim the pieces and so on and how they just all snap together and create all these different pieces right so this is an entire building and you can create multiple buildings and having them look completely different right maybe you take the whole thing and just make the whole thing out of concrete instead of the brick or put this concrete part towards the top and the brick on the bottom and so on right just out of these pieces okay so there's a lot of different options now this is starting to get even more complex you can see that in some cases when modular building they get very very kind of granular on how the changes they may know this course could be done if you know about texturing and decals a lot of these things can be done in decals and overlays but you can see that they do have slight changes between some of the geometry and then you just literally swap out each one of these pieces to fit into the larger scene and create this very unique look of a building even though it really is just a bunch of modular pieces now this last part I just want to quickly mention and I'm going to get into some other modular building here but this is an image where a particular artist shows that in some cases if you have painted metal all you have to do to make something modular right is you can do in the texture just change the color so sometimes you got to understand how the texturing can also affect modular things you have modular geometry and modular texturing so in this case of course you're going to swap out the paint to be any color you want and just have a bevy of different looks for whatever object it's going to be on now this shows this same artist right and they were showing that they lined up all of their grout lines between different types of textures why well this way they can just swap out a texture and have a completely different look without having to adjust the UVs at all this way they can make things just exactly in the corners so we don't have any part of a brick showing are part of a tile showing or something just looks real nice so the textures unwrapped perfectly but then when they swap it out because it lines up the grout lines line up it's going to look perfect when it gets swapped out so these are things that you can think ahead if you understand these ideas and you use these concepts you can really create art fast with the least amount of work possible now this is more or less the idea behind creating kind of trim or even strip texturing which is something you learn in the game texturing class but as we can see here they even line up all the other different pieces and so in this case if you have a building that's made out of metal and if you read this part up here artists basically says well you can swap out the metal for the concrete and get a completely different look with the building because all the things line up the trim lines up with the trim on this side right some part of the wall lines up over here so on and so forth and the decorations that are unique to the different textures are just on the top here so that's another way that they do it and you can see right here in this image this is the same building three times but with some texture swaps so you can see that this is an example of taking some of the same textures that are used up here putting them down here so you have like stone you have this brown wood and kind of like you know normal wood but more of a plaster in between and you can just mix and match them so you can see how these are three completely different looking buildings because the textures were swapped and then lastly this is awesome image this is that same artist I was showing you before and how he swapped his different textures out and you can see how it changes so it changed the color of them you can see it's like the green metal and then there's a white tile there or whatever it's the same exact texture just change the color but look how much of a different look you can get just by swapping textures right and that's really the idea behind modular building so let me show you some more actual pieces and we'll show some in-game content so let me minimize all this and this is something that I created quite a while ago actually based off of the original dead space game there's a particular scene in the game and I wanted to see if I can create that same effect and just do these modular pieces you can basically create any size room you want or any shape room for that as long as it has 90-degree angles with outer corners as you can see here and have each of these pieces of geometry is a separate color but your inner corner here and then to kind of lengthwise pieces so your wall pieces which is kind of a generic wall and then this one has a window so this allows you to kind of see into and then you can put stuff inside here or whatever you can even see on this particular piece of geometry I have these hidden walls so just in case you ever line it up with the windows it doesn't look out into nothingness right so whenever you have windows lined up against the edge of one of these non windowed ones it will automatically have that piece so I to think about that as I was creating but they all snap in the same way so you kind of see that this light would in the game these were lights these shapes that we can see right here these were lights and you can see it repeating in every one of my shapes and so I used that as the transition piece so that was actually the first thing I modeled and then I built everything from there so you see how everything will snap to those corners so this new piece will snap there and so on if I take a look at this other corner piece you can see the same thing right the ends of every one of the pieces are the same because they always snap into one of these light fixtures now of course we have to think about how it wraps around right the inner piece you can see is a lot smaller while the outer piece is a lot bigger including part of the roofing right so I had to think about it like that you can also see here that this is an easy modular piece to we're like a catwalk right just two objects you can literally take these and put them in any direction of the object and if we were to say turn on our snap tool here right and make sure that we're on vertex and I can snap if I wanted to snap say from here just holding down shift and snap there and then go up a couple of you know pieces number of copies boom you can create this long catwalk and of course I can then grab this mirror on the other side and so on so that's really saving me a ton of time now of course you model it then you unwrap it then you texture it and then you build your scene so usually doesn't make a lot of sense to build a Tyner scene of unfinished geometry but you get the idea right and so these pieces as I said before create an entire room I'll give you an example I actually built it over here so I built an entire room with these kind of shapes you can see how all these different shapes are in here I'm actually just going to delete some of these N ones here so we can see into it a little bit right so let me click on this and we'll just zoom out just a bit and get a better look you can kind of see how we have the whoops logo we have the outer corner and then inner corner and then it goes back into another inner corner it really be any shape you want and you can see right here that I have a blank wall with a whole bunch of windowed walls side by side by side whoops sorry I keep zooming out there on you guys we're seeing the back faces okay but there you go right so we're just kind of getting a nice idea of how these things can snap together and look that as I said before you know as long as you have your snap tool on you're snapping your vertices making sure the edges line up of course it takes a little bit of thought right I mean this is not you don't just throw the stuff together it does take a little bit of thought of lining things up and so on but once you got it down oh my goodness you save yourself someone's time you can create so much geometry and that's the thing about architecture is it repeats over and over again so it's great especially when it comes to man-made things of course you can modular build with wood with forests and other things of course that will just be the same object rotated in different ways scaled slightly and so on so organic stuff kind of has an effect like that but architecture can be repeated over and over again so lastly I wanted to show you in this videos this is actually a Unreal Tournament 4 so with the new Unreal Engine you can actually download Unreal Tournament and this is a level within the editor as we can see here and the great thing is it has pretty cool look but the really great thing about this is it's so modularly built which basically if I start clicking on objects and kind of see how that same pipe is you know this pipe that's over here and so on but it's built out of all these tiny little pieces like you know like Legos I mean look at this every time I select something you can see that it's not just even though it gives you this appearance of this giant building with all this crazy stuff going on it they just built it out of a bunch of modular pieces and they use it throughout the entire level so it's you know in some cases it serves as the outside of this really cool looking building then you can fly into here and see the same kind of things going on right we can see little pieces of pipe that are being used over and over again so this artist came up with so many pieces of geometry and then just repurpose them over and over again for different things I've even seen things that will be like a whole doorway right so this entire kind of archway could be the same piece of geometry that's like a hand on a door somewhere if you're really smart with how you're doing your modular building you can really just build the least amount of geometry possible and have it rotate and move in such a way that we can really get all of these different modular pieces that look unique now some objects are bigger than others this one looks like it's a group so it is a bunch of thing but it could easily have been single objects and so on but you can kind of see this is probably the same object we'd see outside but scaled ten times bigger when we look up on the building it's just really smart so this shape right here is the same shape or scene looks not on that but here right these are the same shapes okay they don't give the same effect when you're looking at them but you do kind of see how this is real simple so instead of creating all this super unique geometry we're just creating these same pieces over and over again once again architecture repeats right we see the same panel over and over and over again and it makes sense all right so hopefully this helps you guys understand a little bit about modular building only guys to think hard about how you want to create this stuff what is the the the least amount of geometry you can create but with the greatest effect and that doesn't mean you make the objects simple a lot of times your modular pieces can be fairly complex this is not saying do a couple of boxes and make it fit you can see here that even though in some cases Jhansi looks simple there's so much variety in here right so there is a lot of modular pieces they weren't lazy here they do have a ton of different pieces but they are to create this very beautiful environment based off of a certain look a certain theme so once again as I said before hopefully this helps you guys understand a bit about modular building so start creating your own content start looking into that planning it out and it'll save you guys a lot of time so thanks for watching and I'll see you guys in the next one

Channel: Matthew Marquit

Views: 65,727

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Id: 5bY3mmBunpo

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 24 2017