Urban Setting Map

So I want to use Unity to make a virtual version of a city campus of my school. I been learning Unity and starting to get a feel of it, though obviously still got alot more to learn.


Unlike the Island demo or the Sewer demo where it is a single area, this have a large combination of both indoor and outdoor areas. This leaves me a number of questions when facing the idea of doing this.

First is how Unity handles large open urban areas. How much can Unity engine handle before it start straining a computer running on a hypothetical browser? The campus is several square miles, if I make it a single scene, would unity draw the area as I approach, or the entire campus> Which might be too much with so many objects and textures.

Second is the creation of the buildings. So far, the examples I found are either large open areas with vegetation with a few small homes or indoor areas. Does anything have any example of an urban terrain? Drawing the buildings have alot of questions too, I plan to use Blender (I'm a student, so I'll go with what's free) and create the building there with all the ornaments and etc. I noticed in the sewer example, the detailing are separate from the very basic cement wall, should I approach each building in that fashion? Additionally, that bring up a questions about indoor areas, should I make it separate scenes so it will load when they enter or somehow make each building game object able to have an inside (likely, I am imagining a combination of both).

 

That depends on your computer. Fast new computer with a nice gfx card = a lot, slow old computer with integrated Intel graphics or something = not so much. Whether it's running in a browser isn't particularly relevant (it's still running natively; it's just launched from a browser, that's all).

I probably wouldn't bother with separate scenes, unless the inside and outside are so detailed that you might run into memory issues otherwise. You can turn off the renderers of things that you don't want to be visible by using triggers. Aside from that, Unity has view frustum culling, so anything outside that isn't rendered anyway.

--Eric

 

Make the buildings in Blender. Only add details that 'stick out' like ledges or lamps. Put as much detail as you can in the texture map. Modeling in Blender is for creating silhouette. Keep the model as simple as possible, putting detail in the texture map.

I would differ with Eric5h5, though he is a far more experienced user than I am, on the separation of scenes. I would make the exterior of the campus one scene, and make the interiors separate scenes, unless they are really simple. Alternately, you could make the first floor of each building part of the main campus scene, but change when you get in an elevator or a stairwell.