Vlad Trutniev - Ancient modular architecture

My original intention was to create a small island town environment. To populate the island with houses, I had to build a lot of houses. I didn't want every house to look the same. I wanted to be able to build houses of different shapes, colors and appearances and be flexible in the process. To achieve this, I invested in planing and creating a modular kit for the houses. The style of the modular houses is inspired by ancient Middle Eastern architecture. The houses must be enterable and have interior walls.

My insight with this project were that you can use specific techniques to achive high variation of houses. This way no two houses will look the same. One of my findings was the granularity of the modular kit, which allows you to be very flexible and creative in the building process. More details below. This project was partly my bachelor thesis back in 2020, where I delved deeper into modular environments.

Blockout of the island in Maya.

Initial sketch of the island for which the modular buildings were needed.

Planing of the modular kit for the buildings.

Reference board

How to make modular buildings look less repetitive?

To create many different and interesting looking houses, you need to be able to build many various shapes and add several textures and colors. Each of these techniques helps to acheave it add a level of variety to modular buildings:

1. Granular Kit, 2. Vertex Painting, 3. Deferred Decals, 4. Propping (Greeble)

Granular Kit

Two types of kit were created - a normal kit (chunky) and a granular kit. The difference is that in the granular kit the modules are half the length and allow building more complex shapes. The normal kit on the other hand helps to build houses faster, but only simple shaped houses are possible. The essential modules are presented below.

The animation shows the great variety of houses you can build with the kit. You also can swap individual modules like the windows and door.

Vertex Painting

Vertex painting is a common technique used to add variety to textures and break the repetitive pattern of tiled textures. The downside is that your module geometry must be dense to be painted precisely. You can swap textures and colors for more variety.

Deferred Decals

Deferred decals are great for adding small details like cracks, dirt and moss. In my case, I use them to add paint and patterns to the facades.

Propping (Greeble)

The final layer of variety you can add is by using set dressing and props.

Materials

Two tileable textures from Megescan Quixel were used to texture the buildings - plaster and brick. The rest is shader work - tinting, color adjustments, displacement, height blend,.

Vertex Paint Master Material