Blender Building and House Models

Unity Engine
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1

I am making buildings in Blender for a possible city builder type of game, and I would like to know a few things:

  • How big should I make an average size building? Too big and it could slow down the engine, too small and it will be hard to create smaller buildings/houses.
  • Should most of the building detail be done in a 3d model or in a texture?
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Physical dimensions of the rendered asset do not matter as much as the number of vertices, number of materials, etc.

I tend to treat the dimensionless units in Unity as meters and roughly make my assets that size. That way the capsule collider Unity commonlyl uses for characters is about human height. A house might be 4 to 6 meters tall total, and doors perhaps 2.5m tall. Depends more on your architectural style.

I’d recommend making a simple house (roof, door, chimney, window) and then sprinkle how ever many of them you expect to be in your final product into a single scene, put some lights into it and look at it in-game in Unity, see how it runs as you move the camera around.

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For 1:

Unity’s default units is meters. Blender’s default cube imports as 2m X 2m in unity (same as the capsule collider height @Kurt-Dekker mentioned). I’d use this as your reference for player height while modeling your meshes.

As @Kurt-Dekker said vertex count and material count are the main performance hogs. I’d add that material count is worse (on every platform). Try to keep every building as low on materials as possible instead by using texture atlasing to combine your different textures into 1(or as few as possible) for the least amount of materials.

Ex:

This is a pretty nice tutorial for making a city(with texture atlasing) although the fog part doesn’t apply to unity:

For 2:

It really depends on quite a few factors, mainly your choice and device capability. If the player can only see the city from far away then you don’t really need more detail then how much the player can actual see.

It also depends on what platform you’re targeting. If you’re aiming for mobile you should limit as much as possible detail in geometry, keep meshes simple and aim at overall shapes instead of detail and limit to just using the textures to fake detail.

If you’re aiming for PC and console you have much more freedom in how much 3d detail you want to add. Since PC/Consoles of the average user today can handle quite high vertex counts.

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4

Okay cool! Thanks for the info, 2m x 2m is good to know. I am planing to make this for PC btw

5

Don’t forget to use a few texture atlases and share materials too. :smile:
That helps alot!