3D Modeling the Assets

The reason I’m writing this Devlog is to keep a log of the state of this game and the progress it’s going through, and to also share what I learn along the way and allow anyone who, like me, is interested in starting his first game, to learn from my mistakes and to see how I go about solving them.

So below I will show the workflow and process I settled on for modeling as of yet, texturing and importing the game assets.

The main software workflow I used is: 3Ds max > Substance Painter > Unreal engine. The reason I choose these software is because I’m most comfortable using them and have the most experience in them, and I choose Unreal engine for 2 reasons; to me personally I found it easier to use and, more importantly, for it’s Blueprint visual coding system, as it helps me greatly to code the game, as I don’t know any programming languages.

Without further ado, I first started by modeling the house, I’m not going to go into details of the modeling, but a few points I took into consideration are: I separated the walls from the ceiling and the floor, that way I can reduce poly count, as the walls and ceiling don’t have to care for the window and door openings, and I separated the exterior walls from the interior walls, mainly because I didn’t care much about the exterior walls, so I can give me lower resolution shadow textures in baking reducing resource usage, so I separated it into 4 main meshes, interior walls, exterior walls, floor, ceiling. And I UV mapped each mesh, saving UV space, didn’t really matter much, as instead of sending them into Substance painter and creating a material for them which will result in blurry textures when you apply it to large areas like this, so instead I opted to use a seamless material and tile it inside UE4, that way I retain all of the texture details.

With that I was able to import the first Asset into UE4, I added some basic cubes and shapes in UE4 to block out the places of the main furniture pieces and set up the general look of the environment with some basic lighting, here is a quick walk through of the house:

After this initial blocking I can work on each furniture piece individually, in the same process somewhat, but with the extra step of using substance painter to create the materials and textures. The most important thing I was paying attention for while I modeled the furniture pieces is the poly count, as there will be a lot of assets placed in the scene that are going to be loaded and unloaded quickly which will use more resources the more complex they are. so I tried to get rid of any unnecessary edge loops and any surfaces that the player won’t be able to view, as long as I keep a nice topology though of course.

Here is a preview of the assets I have modeled so far and will show more as I progress through it.