Modular assets: a simple time-saving technique for game developers

[@CrushingJosch]

Amazing overview, thanks a lot for that! One general question that keeps me awake at night... Breaking down everything in modular pieces gives the great flexibility, but also results in a larger number of objects, resulting in more draw calls. With the small pieces you have, it can be easily 10x more draw-calls than when working with larger pieces. Any intuition on that? Do you sometimes use batching of meshes? Or are draw-calls overrated nowadays?

[@BoarsInRome]

Hi, thank you so much! As far as I understand the draw calls you can afford depend on the project and the target platform. Draw calls can vary in complexity as well; for example if a complex VS a simple material is being called. So the number of calls itself is more of an indication and not the full picture. Generally speaking what you are looking for is that your CPU doesn't get overwhelmed and becomes the bottleneck in your game. With modern CPUs the amount of models you can stream is quite a lot and engines tend to take care of the batching for you. And within performance as a whole you should consider draw calls as a slice of the cake; there is also overdraw, shader complexity, particles..... It could be that a game has a lot of calls but doesn't necessarily run badly kzbin.info/www/bejne/i16WdaqomK6hbpIsi=2XRIQ-dPhWj0_BAe&t=1643 27:20 30:00 If you check out this talk about how Spiderman PS4's world was created, at the timestamps there are hints regarding modular assets in a modern game. They used 47'000 unique models. At 12:17 he mentions that buildings are prefabs composed by several instances of the modular assets; they batch the whole prefab for LODs but I don't think the base mesh is batched. The prefabs are instanced as well. I think the reason is this: with modular assets you pay the price of the draw calls up front, but it allows you to create a lot of variations. But if you were to merge all of these variations you would end up with more calls in the long run. I also suggest looking at some talks given by Bethesda on their kits for fallout 3 and 4. It's like their bread and butter kzbin.info/www/bejne/h3OkfmVtjsd-kMk To be completely transparent, I don't know the full reasoning on why they did this, but if you are an Indie/solo developer you likely don't have to worry about it so much because reaching this quantity of assets and making such a big game is really hard. My advice is to - Make the modular assets use the same material - Trim sheets, triplanar etc... for texturing - Use material variations where possible And most importantly, use the engine's profiler to see what is taking the most amount of resources. In our game performance issues were coming from shader complexity and lighting, draw calls weren't a problem at all. This was tested on a variety of computers ranging from total potato to RTX3060 My next video will be a dev-log and it will contain a bit of a follow-up to the modular assets, showcasing how I am using them in a real project. I want to talk about performance, optimizations, draw calls etc... so I will be sure to answer your question in more detail if I find more info. kzbin.info/www/bejne/g3W0dXuZoMpkmM0&lc=Ugw_C0dnUl9uuxnITdZ4AaABAg This is the project + a dowload link if you want see how the assets perform on your machine. I know this wasn't a straightforward answer but I hope it helps! My intuition is to keep an eye on the draw call amount but not stress over it

[@byte-me-666]

I was always fascinated about modular assets. For the relative simplicity to create the assets, you can do a lot of them.

[@strawberryblender]

Really great tutorial

[@BoarsInRome]

Thank you, I hope it was useful!

[@aaaaaa-rd4bv]

Very insightful as always. Keep it up. This is exactly what I needed to increase my Blender productivity

[@BoarsInRome]

Happy to help!

[@martin_mikulic]

great video, I really appreciate effort to visualize the process

[@BoarsInRome]

Thank you, I really wanted to experiment with this style, I'm glad it turned out well

[@spacemicroscope]

spooky moment @8:40

[@user-bo3qe2co9t]

Thank you for the great tutorial! It was very beneficial

[@BoarsInRome]

Glad it could help! I plan on expanding on parts of this tutorial eventually, if that is useful

[@kharmachaos667]

This is an incredible tut. Thank you so much! +1 subscriber :3

[@BoarsInRome]

Thank you so much! Glad you enjoyed the video

[@AugerHybrid]

Wow, 3D model equivalent for Atomic Design!

[@GonzaloDev-ww9un]

more content of this, it's great!

[@BoarsInRome]

Thank you! I plan on making more videos related to game dev in the future. Is there anything specific you would be interested in seeing?

[@GonzaloDev-ww9un]

@@BoarsInRome environment and creation modular assets

[@BoarsInRome]

@@GonzaloDev-ww9un Thanks for the feedback. When I'll find new ways to expand the technique I will make a video about it