Behind the Walls

Let's take a look behind the scenes at what planning went into building our modular wall pieces! 

First! What are modular walls and why do we use them? Modular pieces and specifically in our case, modular walls, are a collection of modelled assets that are designed to connect with each other. This allows our environment artists to easily create a wide range of unique configurations to suit our needs with only a hand full of models, saving us a great deal of time!

Now let's take a look at when and where they were used and how we designed them

Kitchen Level
The first place that you might spot our modular walls in action is the very begining level. We were inspired by retro 1980s kitchen styles, and keeping this in mind, we knew we wanted to evoke the nostalgic feeling of being inside a grandparent's house. We looked into the designs and structures of older houses and modelled them accordingly. The basic sets of assets we made were:

1. Main basic wall
2. Shortened version of the basic wall
3. Corner piece
4. Top portion of the basic wall
5. Bottom  portion of the basic wall

To top it off, we slapped an old-school warm floral design to truly encapsulate the retro vibe. Here's what it looks like on its own in Unreal!

With the base set-up, we were now able to build our scene in any shape we wanted. We settled on an irregular kitchen layout, one with protruding walls, as well as an extended hallway to create the illusion of a full house.

Before: 

After:

Final results!

Backyard Level
Next up we used this trusty system to build the exterior of our house. Once again with retro/old-school inspiration in mind, we modelled 4 basic pieces:

1. Main basic wall
2. Pillar
3. Top of window 
4. Bottom of window

Final Results:

You also might be able to spot other modular elements in this scene! While we've been talking about walls a lot, modular systems are not exclusive to only walls. In this level, we have 3 different kinds of fence and to save time with modelling the exact scaled length, we design 3 different sets of modular fences.

1. White Picket Fence

2. Tall Fence Walls 

3. Patio Fencing

Sewage Level
And finally, for our latest updated level, we have the long sewage sliding adventure. Of all levels, this was the most important when it came to modular wall pieces, it would be near impossible or at least extremely time-consuming to manually model every single part of this level.

Because there will be a continuous linear motion, we had to ensure the level didn't feel too repetitive or boring visually. Let's take a look at what we came up with!



We came up with the following models:

1. Separating pillar 
2. Basic brick wall
3. Arched tunnel
4. Sewer pipe tunnel
5. Extended basic wall with pillar (to save additional labour)

Final Results:

This concludes the behind-the-scenes process of our modular walls.  We hope that this was insightful to one of the many design elements that go into creating our levels. We wish to further show you more of our thought processes in the future but for now, this is the end!