Development of Buildings

The buildings within the world were designed to be constructed within the game editor itself. Unity acts very much like UDK in that it can class multiple duplicate meshes as a single mesh (providing they share the same mesh), the same also applies for materials and textures when rendering at run time.

My theory was to create each building by hand using a limited amount of pieces, this would benefit mobile platforms with the savings on mesh and material loading. I made a variety of objects based on old wooden structures. I researched two books that looked in to the construction of wooden buildings, and why and how they are built to withstand multiple stories. It was interesting to see how they are created, and I believe it made my resulting buildings much more 'believable' than they original appeared in my tests.

Here is the basic structure of how I create the buildings, this hierachy is taken directly from Unity3D. I have kept all of the buildings construction pieces as prefabs so if I change anything the changes will take place to all of the buildings. If I had made each building a prefab this would not have worked, and to make each unique building a prefab seemed to have no benefits.

Here are the individual pieces I used to create the town hall model, as you can see it is only made of 8 different assets but by using a combination of different materials, a couple of unique meshes (rooftop, structure shape) and adjusting the scale of the assets I was able to create something that looks handcrafted and more so believable.

Here is the end result of the building, flag poles were later added (with animation) to give a sense of royalty to the town hall itself. The structure was based of a series of sketches that I will upload later in this blog post (and hopefully compare with the final 3D images).

Before I post the final buildings, I want to post an amalgamation of sketches (that didn't make the cut) to show that I did try an assortment of different designs before settling with what I am using now. Some of the structures were influenced by there situation within the environment and some were based of pre-existing designs and photo references.

Just before I show you all of the sketches after I had researched in to wooden structures (Medieval and Tudor) I had attempted to create what I believed was an old wooden building, I'm very glad I bought those books...