Hi all.
I am beginning modular level design using Maya and Unity. I’ve been researching and see many mentions of grids but I am having a hard time understanding this. I see a lot of mention of 16 32 128 etc as far as setting up the grids but not sure what it all means especially when it comes to Unity.
How should I setup grid when it comes to Maya and Unity. Without really understanding I would think a more natural way would be to setup by meters. Maye a 4x4 meter grid in maya that lets me match the pieces in Unity.
Also any recommended kits for use in Unity. They don’t need to be fancy. Just something that might allow me to understand a simple setup to do my own, Once I understand grids of course 
Thanks
A quick and easy way is to export a 1x1x1 cube from Maya into unity. Compare this to a 1x1x1 cube in unity- when you scale the Maya cube to match the unity cube, you will see the difference between the two.
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Work in whatever geometry you want. Unity has a nifty import scaling feature that will nicely scale things to match.
The numbers you have mentioned are all powers of two (POT). Computers tend to store POT data better, as it fits nicely into the physical architecture of 1s and 0s
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Thanks but I am not sure why that matters when it comes to grid setup. This GDC talk is what helped me but confused me at the same time. http://blog.joelburgess.com/2013/04/skyrims-modular-level-design-gdc-2013.html
Because at the end of the day, all those little bits and pieces which are assembled into a whole need to be textured, and those textures are going to be sized by some power of two because that’s what graphics processors require. Imagine you have a large supply of 32x32 stickers and you want to build a wall from a bunch of boxes decorated with those stickers: it makes sense to plan your wall to be some multiple of 32, right? Same basic concept.
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Except graphics processors, at the very least those on the desktop platforms, have not required POT textures for a very long time now. I’m not aware of when DirectX started supporting it, but OpenGL gained it as a core feature with the release of 2.0 (September 2004).
Performance may be another matter, as they used to be considerably slower, but that’s likely less of a problem now.
I always figured these modern dev tools were auto-resizing upon load. Like bring in a 480x480 image and it is stored as a 512x512 image. But maybe not. My head has been working with binary for so long now I always think in pot for this stuff. I suppose it may not actually be needed anymore. Just never considered it other than a potential waste from the aforementioned auto-scaling scenario.
As I understand it Unity still gets better compression performance out of POT textures. Never tested it myself, just reading from the docs.
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