I'm trying to decide how to manage my 3D assets, and even how I should construct a world for my game.
I should maybe explain, my game is basically a single explorable world set in a school. It's quite large. Every room and building enterable (possibly transitionless), and a large outdoor area (sports field, playground, etc.) I plan to make much of it modular (walls, floors, etc.) The world is somewhat tiled. I've create several different blocks for walls (Straight, cornered, T shaped, cross shaped, door, etc.) which I can place sequentially to create rooms and buildings. I have some blocks lined up in a row in Blender. Now I'm wondering what to do with these pieces...
Issue 1)
Should I use Unity to place my assets to create my world, or do I create another blender file with all my assets linked? I'm tending towards the latter because I feel I can do a lot more within Blender, but it doesn't appear very easy. However in order for the game to function I'd imagine I'd have to cut up my world into pieces. Problematically I'd also like to use Unity's terrain tool, so if I'm creating a single world object in Blender I'm not sure how I'd do this.
Issue 2)
I'm not very experienced in 3D game development, I've mainly worked with Flash up until recently. In Flash, you can create movieclips which nest other movieclips. Preferablly I'd like a system as close to this as possible within Blender or Unity.
So for instance, I'd like to have a 3D asset of a table. Without affecting the original asset, I want to place objects on the table like books and whatnot, and then control this as a single instance called 'Table with books', maybe duplicate it elsewhere, if I change the position of the books on one it should update all other instances.
In Blender, I use alt+D to duplicate an object and link it to the original, however it's very easy to duplicate an object without selecting it's children and creating a variety of differently childrened duplicates, which in a vast world which is hard to keep track of, would become a massive headache to deal with. I can just imagine spending hours upon hours correcting a single silly mistake I produced and repeated without noticing for several days.
Within Blender I've tried making each wall object it's own group, however they're all in one file and have different xyz positions. I don't want to separate them into dfferent files, in order to create seamless walls I need to have them all in one place. When I create a group instance with shift+A, the origin is of the original group object's xyz position:
I know there's an offset option in the groups panel where I could set it to -2,4,0 to counteract this but I don't like this at all. If I move 10 original grouped objects I have to update each of their offsets! I suppose I could create an empty axis for each wall object, but this also seems an odd way of doing things.
Issue 3)
Walls are 2 sided objects, the design of one could be different on either side, one could be pink on one side with a skirting board, the other side could be exposed brick work. How would I do this? Lets say I use Unity to position all my assets (which I'm now assuming is probably the right way), ideally I'd like to select a load of walls faces and change their design with a combo box of styles and a color picker in the inspector (a script would be necessary obviously).
Sorry, that's a lot of questions for a single post, I hope someone can point me in the right direction.