I am pretty new to the 3d modeling and I have watched hours upon hours of how to use Blender. As of now I am creating a apartment building as one solid object. I am using a technique I found on a Youtube tutorial which the building looks good in Blender. However, I am having issue after issue putting it in UE4. From UV Mapping overlay to texture not showing up correctly to lighting going through my roof.
Is there a special technique to use when creating a building? Or am I missing something. Anything would help. Also, I read some where to break the model down into pieces and build the apartment/building in UE4, is this something that works better for video game development? Thanks!
Hi,
This can a question that’s not necessarily always straight forward to answer.
There are several considerations you need to take into effect when building a large asset like this:
How will you handle the UVs for your textures?
Light map considerations and quality for the second UV.
Will this be a modular or single piece?
For your building there are different techniques that may be used depending on if it’s a building meant to be explored or used by the character or if it’s a background piece.
If your building is to be used for exploration and able to be entered by the character I would suggest a modular approach.
By using a modular approach to the walls, exterior, and other structure elements you retain a better use of Lightmap Uv 2 space along with better control over your Texture UV 1.
Another reason modular design is great is that you have the ability to rapidly prototype much more easily if you find something isn’t working right in game play whereas doing the entire model you’d have to go back and tweak in your modeling software.
By having everything as a single model you will lose quality if you’re packing everything into a single UV space. You will not be able to cull any objects that are a single asset. By having the walls as separate pieces you can cull those as you get further away or they are out of sight. This will help keep FPS optimal vs having the entire mesh rendered at all times if you can see it or not.
Here is a tutorial from 3Dmotive that goes over modular design and maximizing texture space.
Here is another that may be helpful as well.
This site has a walk-through for thinking about modular design and working it into your process.
I hope this helps! 
Tim
Here’s an updated tutorial on Blender to UE4 modular static mesh prep overview for UE4 version 4.18.1
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