Clutter and Sparseness
In environment design, a modular environment kit consists of three elements:
Details:
Details are the small details in a scene that make the environment feel lived in, for example bottles, trash, cables.
Breaks:
Breaks make environments look less repetitive. Breaks are designed as medium sized assets that can be used to cover up seams and duplicated areas to make them feel unique for example larger furniture or screens.
Modules:
Modules are the main elements that form the majority of the geometry for the environment, for example; Walls and Ceilings.
Less Can Be More:
Environments are not always required to have hundreds of assets cluttering up the space, depending on the context of your environments, less can do so much more.
Sparse and empty environments can also evoke a feeling depending on the context of the world, for example eerie or clinical.
Feeling Lived In:
Sparse environments can make users feel intimidated; therefore, imperfections make it feel lived in and more approachable.
Ideally, you want to immerse your users into your worlds, by establishing a history and a future. Using details in your environments makes it feel truly lived in and can give a user a sense of realism and Immersion.
For example; a back-alley environment would not feel realistic and immersive if it were pristine. Scattering trash, bins, rubble or even rain puddles can allow a user to feel fully grounded and immersed in the scene.
Repetition
Modular level design assets and worlds can often feel repetitive, because they are. The idea of modular design is to have a building set created from as minimal assets as possible, this will create a constant repetitive design.
The aim is to try to repeat modules as much as possible to do the least amount of work, whilst still creating ‘different’ sections.
Using Breaks and details will allow you to achieve this. Breaks are medium sizes assets, such as décor and furniture, that will change the look of a room, without changing too much of the scene. And making too much work for yourself.
Breaking the rules
Rules are only a guide; sometimes you need to push against what’s usually done to create something good. Don’t see them as rules, but as guidance that can be broken.
Games like The Stanley Parable use repetition as part of its comedic style as well as a narrative story point.
Repetition can be one of the hardest things to create, but is worth it to create meaningful and easily developed environments.
Kit-Bashing
The term kit-bashing comes from the Miniature modelling world. It’s the process of taking multiple assets and "bashing" them together to create modular or segmented assets or models. You can purchase kit-bash packs to use, it is about expressing ideas without the planning beforehand.
This is often utilised in Hard-surface or Sci-Fi modelling. For example, the Star Wars Death Star.
Alignment & Modules
Modules (Main Environmental Geometry) are the main elements that form the silhouette or bulk of your environment. Looking at the practical side of modular asset design, a systematic approach must be taken.
All assets must slot into place with each other to reach the desired effect. So, they must be planned out beforehand. This means that you will need to think of sizes, orientation and scale before even touching a modelling software.
Locking your modules to a certain grid size is essential to get a perfect interlocking set of assets that work coherently.
Trim Sheets
What are tiles and trims?
A tile map is a uniform texture that can be repeated N times both horizontally and vertically without any visible seams. Tile maps can go in any direction.
A trim sheet is the same as tile, but repeated in one direction only; either horizontally or vertically.
Why Trim-sheets and not Traditional Texturing?
The main thing which makes trim sheets valuable is their reusability. If you have a scene with lots of recurring elements those are ideal candidates for a trim sheet. Some other benefits of the Trim-Sheet workflow are the textures can be used across a project to texture and detail many assets consistently and quickly.
One of the main differences with trim sheets are that your asset UVs are likely to overlap and extend further than the 0-1 UV space using a trim-sheet workflow, this is because the texture is tiling in either the U or V direction meaning your texture is perfectly fine if it exceeds the UV bounds in the tiling direction.
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