Chapter 8. First-person Shooter Part 2 – Creating Interior Environments

Because nature is very chaotic, it makes sense to use tools that you learned in the previous chapter such as terrain and placing objects with randomness to create a natural-looking environment. However, not all things are constructed like that. Man-made structures, such as office buildings, stone pillars, and floor tiles, are all made up of pieces that look similar to one another. Rather than modeling out every single wall in your building, can't you use one you made before?

As you might remember in Chapter 6, Side-scrolling Platformer, you learned how we can use tiles to build a level using only a couple of different objects, duplicating them as needed to create our environment. In this chapter, we will use the same line of thinking in a 3D environment using a method named modular level design.

Modular level design is a tool that AAA (pronounced triple A) developers (those working with the highest development budgets and promotion) have been using to create great-looking levels in the minimum amount of time possible. Breaking apart buildings into modules creates building blocks that can be placed next to one another, such as LEGO pieces, to create an entire structure. This makes it much easier to create levels than just trying to model everything from scratch and is a staple of large open-world games such as Bethesda's Fallout 4.

Project overview

Unlike the preceding chapter, where we worked as an environmental artist, here we take on the role of a level designer who has been tasked to create an interior environment using assets already provided to us by the environment artist. We will use already-provided assets as well as assets that are provided to us by Unity for mesh placement.

Your objectives

This project will be split into a number of tasks. It will be a simple step-by-step process from beginning to end. Here is the outline of our tasks:

  • Importing assets
  • Creating tiles
  • Placing tiles with grid snapping
  • Creating and placing props
  • Light mapping quick start prerequisites

Prerequisites

In this chapter, we will continue from where the preceding chapter was left off using the same project. You can continue with your previous project or pick up a copy along with the assets for this chapter from the example code provided for this book on Packt Publishing's website.

https://www.packtpub.com/books/content/supportIn addition, the completed project and source files are located there for you to check whether you have any questions or need clarification.

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