modular building blocks

right so the 1st set of modular building blocks are complete i have another sheet like this to make that has the likes of doors and more variants of the wall pieces that i will get done tomorrow then i can start building the actual houses and work out the roofs which will be a bit harder as theres going to be some weird angles to work out but hey i'll figure it out pretty quickly.


heres how i got to this point

1./ i spent a day working out what pieces i would need, things footings, lower wall section, dividers, upper wall sections, roof wall sections.

2./ i then drew on a piece of paper and plotted a basic idea of where each piece would live on the texture sheet, which i followed when creating the image below. (the black area on the image will eventually house something i just dont know what yet) when creating the texture i set my grid in photoshop to 32 pixels so that everything in 3ds will align on a 32 unit grid and again will align in udk.


3./ once the texture was finished i applied it to a plane in 3ds and started to cut the plane up into each individual piece.

4./ i made each individual piece 32 units wide (which i know is way too thick for a wall in a game engine but once i have everything how i want it i will start to resize for udk) to make thepiece 32 units i just extruded the piece and capped the hole in the back.

5./ i then started to cut in details and extruded then out (or in depending on what needed to be done) i then had to uvw map the extrusions to clear up the stretching from the new polys i had created.


6./ i now have to reset the pivot points so that every pieces pivot was on the bottom left rear vertex and then center the piece to the world origin in max so that each piece will snap together snuggly. (i havent done this bit yet the next image i just aligned everything by eye but i dont want to do that for the actual scene)


and thats the final modular facade, it works quite nicely and given there are no normal or specular maps in the scene at the moment the details i cut in are doing the job quite nicely so i will only have to create normals for the smaller details such as the bricks and bars on the windows.