Thiago Klafke: Creating Modular Environments

Thiago Klafke is a senior environment artist at Blizzard Entertainment and has worked on some of my favourite games in terms of environment design such as Overwatch (2016). He has posted tutorials on his modular environment workflow which I have been studying as this is an area that I always feel I need to improve in.

The tutorial I looked at was posted for a game project he created in 2010. Despite its age Thiago contends he has employed lots of important concepts and techniques that are still utilised in the industry today. Thiago has provided a wealth of information for me to research further. My main takeaway is how important good texture workflow is when designing modular environments. UV mapping in an efficient way can literally save you hundreds of hours and prevent redundant work. This is something I have struggled with in the past, as I have often created too many unique textures for objects that most likely could have used the same texture set.

In 3DS max I have always created objects using a grid with increments of 5cm. To my surprise one of the first things Thiago said was to use the power of two for the dimensions of the grid spacing. He says this makes it easier to keep rounded values which actually makes a lot of sense texture-wise, as all texture resolutions use the power of two: 512, 1024, 2048, etc.

A new technique that I have been introduced to is a method of tileable texturing known as trim sheets. One aspect of this is that it allows different models with sharp edges to use a common texture to simulate a beveled edge without increasing the poly count of the models in question. The real trick with this technique, is that multiple different assets can use the same texture set to achieve smooth edges, meaning you don't have to create individual texture bakes and streamlining the process. I was completely blown away when I learned about this, and it is a technique that I will be looking into further within a seperate post.

KLAFKE, T. (2010) Creating Modular Environments in UDK. [Online] Available from: http://www.thiagoklafke.com/modularenvironments.html [Accessed: 18th April
2018]