What’s best practice for indoor level design? Should I construct the whole thing in blender, or make “pieces” that I can put together in Unity? I can think of advantages for both options, but I’d love to know what others have found.
It really depends on what you want to achieve, but you can end up using both methods. Surely if you want to make each “room” unique, you better handcraft each part on their own, is not a problem of polygons you can still use same materials on these parts but you would have more freedom on the shape.
But modular pieces are usefull too, not talking only about entire section but also small objects that you may reuse a lot, like door frames or pillars. Or take Amnesia as example it works basicly on modular pieces for the 90%, but in some cases they made unique pieces to variate the environment that are only used in one place.
so in the end non modular = more objects to manage and organize but more variety and unique geometry.
Modular = faster building of levels but less variety and you are bound to use only the pieces you have.
I say go for both where you think would apply better.
Yeah, it’s really a matter of preference and how you design your levels. I always end up doing both at some point.
Although remember to have each “rooms” as separate submeshes when constructing everything in Blender. This will really help optimize performance as you don’t need to render everything you don’t see and if you are using occlusion culling. This really helped us out when making a giant cave level for our game.
I would model it all objects in each room are one or a few meshes. And texture them like that too, with one texture or maybe a few. Don’t combine the actual walls with those objects though. This is a good way to do it for performance. If your not going to be making a crazy detailed project though, you could probably get away with having the objects separate. If you need some objects to be responsive to physics(you can move them around, they can fall, etc) then they need to be separate objects from the bigger mesh. Another thing to think about is occlusion culling and batching.