Lover of Pixels

next, i spent a while getting a feel for the layout and what materials i might want for walls/floors/ceilings. my goal was to do as much of the earlier structural work as possible in blender where you can use the "snap-to" feature, script bulk updates, etc. so my early workflow involved trialing different floor, ceiling, and wall meshes inside the game, exporting to blender, and fucking around.

a vision formed! i decided i wanted to replace all the walls with a different mesh. replacing them via scripting in blender worked pretty well, but with the ceilings and floors there definitely were many times everything looked reasonable in blender but then was off by 1cm in the game

i finalized the layout during the mostly-blender stage:

the layout is nearly identical to regina's office (i even kept those cool wall grate things from wilson's in the hallways right where they were!). i did some tweaks like adding more windows in the bedroom, moving walls around by an inch here and there, but this was pretty much the final form

i had really hoped to do all the structural work in blender and never have to move a wall around in worldbuilder, but i probably ended up nudging every single mesh around in WB at some point - it's just way harder to see the little imperfections from blender.

overall i think this process worked out well, but world inspector now has a "clone" feature that will just yoink a mesh and its position + rotation right into your world builder project. depending on the build, that might be a better method for doing something like this.

once i began furnishing, i placed the major anchoring pieces first and commenced a very annoying one-way workflow of blender-worldbuilder-wolvenkit for a while. there were a bunch of little gotchas and inconveniences around the import/export process at each stage.

i stole that bookshelf + books wholesale from the peralezes place using blender

once the major pieces were nailed down, i switched to doing everything in worldbuilder. this was definitely "the fun part" even while my 5yo macbook was crashing every 70 seconds.

the cavernous main space was the biggest design challenge. i wanted it to feel open but cozy and inviting and pulled the usual tricks: breaking it up into zones, warm hues, filling the vertical space, lots of plants, and lighting.

finished shots of the living room:

using different wall colors was another way to break the room into zones and add some interest

i wanted to retain a DIY / improvised edge and avoid tipping all the way into like, ultra-sleek neokitsch luxury (the peralez's place is my go-to example for that). i also wanted it to feel lived-in and cozy but not cluttered (i'd actually love more clutter and might add a clutter amount setting one day) - so i used a combo of the more "luxury" / neokitsch and corpo furnishings as well as items from the kitsch, neomilitarism, and entropy aesthetics

the office space was a lot of fun, i like how that curved wooden wall/ceiling add-on creates a cubby hole effect. the glass windows are one of my favorite meshes in the game, memorably used in sandra dorsett's apartment

i kept the bedroom pretty spare and lo-fi. the bed frame from olath's posh props is doing a lot of work in here, i love it

one wishlist thing i never got around to was adding shutters; i fear V is never sleeping in past 6am with this natural light situation...

i'm really proud of the fillable bath!

the kitchen got its own skylight, a breakfast nook, and i also refurbished the morgue sink mesh bc it's the most kitchen-sink looking thing in the game.

the kitchen also suffered from Big Cavernous Space syndrome, and if i were starting over i might try to split it up more or make it smaller, but i'm happy enough with how it turned out and the baller view V can have while washing dishes and contemplating death

v1 of the roof had a scrappier vibe and was contained to a smaller area:

look at that literal shack. but i decided to take over almost the whole roof, and the shack got upgraded to an arasaka shipping container frame. tres luxe~

the bonsai garden is my favorite part :3

tips, gotchas, things i learned

lighting is very hard!! especially if you're doing it from scratch in an unused area of the game. finding the "right" prefab reflection probes, adding a light channel area around the yaiba sign that i'm not 100% is doing anything, testing under different time/weather conditions and graphics settings.. and then the whole thing looks profoundly different with ray tracing vs. without, mostly bc of the yaiba sign, and i'm still not sure i did the reflection probes right ;-;

hooking up lights to switches is easier than i expected, especially once i discovered sts_wbr_jpn_05_lightpoint_test.ent (a base game light device that's just a light controller + light node, ready to hook up to a switch) h/t to cutiepie on discord for this one, not sure what their tumblr is but this was so useful

brand-new builds that aren't just renovating an existing dwelling = you will need to learn a bunch of shit you may or may not have wanted to think about! the intimidating part of this when i first started was placing all the structural stuff like walls/floors/ceilings. but the shit i actually banged my head against was sound/ambient areas, interior trigger areas, reflection nodes, light channel areas, elevators..

building right next to a densely built-out sector (regina's hideout) will come with its own issues; there was a rogue node that played music that took priority over the radio i added and i had to comb through each one of the ~6 streamingsectors that comprise regina's apartment to find the thing that had an audio trigger and remove it

scripting! i really wanted a fillable bathtub and was able to hack one out with lua, i want to try converting it to a native device but i'm not sure if there's an existing controller that will work...

i learned how to add emails and shards to the game! i had an idea for a whole little backstory to the apartment and why it was vacant, but by the time i got around to figuring out shards i was ready to jump off the top of the tower so i just have a couple little easter eggs in there would love to explore possibilities with this

she said i best not hear you fuckin up there!!!

texture optimization with custom/ported meshes - i had a few 3d models i grabbed from sketchfab and for a world edit you really really gotta mind those texture sizes; the very first version i tried to give beta testers was like 600MB of normal maps that were in 4k for no damn reason! i shaved it down to 80mb by downscaling a bunch of stuff and there isn't really a difference in the game

some of the custom assets i added: flowers/vases, lots of posters, those leather chairs,, pocky...? pictured elsewhere: CARPETS the biggest MVPs by far, huge shouts to the 3d artists on sketchfab who made those available.

one thing i really like doing whenever possible is converting PBR textures to multilayer materials. the chairs i converted to be all multilayer, along with the hanging industrial lamp over the dining table; it really helps make ported items look more like they belong in the game. similarly, for the posters i used a series of existing game meshes, old_movie_posters or something to that effect, and added my own diffuse maps with the poster images sourced from public domain scans of interesting advertisements, botanical illustrations, ukiye-o prints etc. the normal maps from old_movie_posters give them a more realistic papery look. and i also made my own edits of some vanilla items like bedding, pillows, and sofas, tweaking the mlsetups to fit my theme (why are all the game's beddings looking like plastic....)

a huge struggle vector was RAIN. fuck me, rain... at first the whole apartment would just be drenched if it rained, and i realized through trial and error that meshes won't block out weather AT ALL until they're in the world as a native edit (i.e. exported from worldbuilder / imported into wkit as streamingsectors) - meshes loaded in through worldbuilder will not keep the rain out. but even after figuring out that part, the skylights were still not blocking out rain. i could NOT figure out what was going on!! it turns out the material used on a mesh affects whether it's weatherproof. i'm fuzzy on the specifics of this and couldn't find any documentation of it, but fully-transparent glass materials don't block out the weather. the skylights i was using already had an "opaque" appearance that was transparent from the inside and reflective from the outside, and once i switched to that (away from the default two-way transparent appearance), the rain stayed out. (i then tried to duplicate this material and use it in a different skylight mesh but i could never get it to block out rain, so there must be something with the mesh physics properties too?!)

and one tip that might be generally useful: it's really valuable to pop open World Inspector and go to different areas of the game and see how they're built. inspect ALL the nodes, stuff like ambient areas and reflection probes, but also how the scenes are visually designed; you'll discover useful patterns like how meshes get repurposed, the importance of things like particles and decals to make a space feel layered and detailed. you'll find meshes/entities you might not have found by just using worldbuilder's search. akiway's fork of worldbuilder has some big QOL improvements including cloning things directly from world inspector to world builder