Outskirts - Block Out

Before getting start to modeling, I have a good habit to create a block out of the scene [or the model]. Blocking out the scene allows me to set the sizes, proportions, the presence of details, and it's really useful to identify critical parts or parts not required [out of views].

First things first, I synchronized my camera view with Unity standard first person angle of view [Modo = 80°, Unity = 60°] just to view exactly what I will see into game view.

Then I build the scene using primitives with grid snapping. The main reason for the grid snapping usage is to cut the ground in "blocks" to easily discard from memory geometries not present in the frustum culling. If the ground were a single block, I mean a single mesh, it will entirely remain in memory every single frame. Same things for the buildings: every single floor will be a separated mesh [game object].

And this is the block out result:

For a good navigation in gameplay, I closed the path to prevent bad views and falling out of the scene. Then I have placed some houses outside of the scene to enhance the environment. I just hope they will not consume too much resources, but I will see later in the production.

At the end of the block out process, I exported the whole scene into Unity to test the navigation.

At the moment, vertex count is extremely inaccurate: no final optimized meshes, too much details missing, bad or empty UVs, and so on. I will try to drag this scene into 3GS, so my vertex budget per frame is around 35k/40k, but I think a can take in consideration a budget per scene around 60k/80k and use the Unity 3.5 "incremental game object quality" feature to stay in the vertex budget per frame.