GameDev #4 : Modularity & Odd Angles on Blender’s Grid

Posted by Aidy Burrows on Sep 30, 2014

In game art where efficiency is important modularity is a topic that comes up quite a lot. A couple questions might come to mind:

What is modularity?
Should you use it in your project?
Why would anyone want to use it?
What are the limitations?

Here’s a quick glance at some key pros and cons…

Pros >

Build large environments quickly
Do we really need another?

Cons >

Extra planning time required at the start.
Can look repetitive, boxy or mechanically aligned.

If you’re new to modularity and I may have sold you on the idea then you’re going to need Blender’s grid. This isn’t a vast topic but it might be a little confusing so we have that covered here too.

I’ve been taking a modular approach to the construction of this game project i’m working on so I thought I’d use this particular game example to illustrate some aspects of what it’s all about.

Oh, one last thing!

While I have you here in text form, you’ll see me in the video estimating the scaling values of some of the parts once they are rotated say 45 degrees, if you really do want to get that value absolutely spot on, you can turn to Pythagorean Theorem.

Here’s an image from NASA to help….

Hey I’m using maths! There’s an old school teacher of mine out there somewhere in total disbelief.

modularity with pythagoras

That long diagonal edge shows as 2.24 in the edge info length display. However, we can work this out to 3 decimal places easily enough by using the formula.