A modular kit is a small set of pieces designed to combine — wall sections, floors, corners, trims — from which whole environments are assembled.
Why kits win
- Reuse. Twenty pieces build a building; two hundred bespoke meshes build the same building once.
- Memory. The same mesh instanced many times costs one mesh.
- Iteration. Changing a wall changes every wall.
- Batching. Repeated meshes sharing a material are what let a renderer draw them together.
The rules
- Grid discipline. Every piece snaps to a consistent grid. Pick one early — a power-of-two metre grid is conventional — and never author off it.
- Pivots on the grid. A piece whose origin is not on a grid intersection cannot be snapped reliably.
- Consistent edges. Where two pieces meet, the profile must match exactly, or every join shows a seam.
- Shared materials. A kit sharing one texture atlas batches; a kit with twenty materials does not.
- Plan the corners. Inner corners, outer corners and terminations are what people forget, and they are what a kit lives or dies on.
Where generation helps and hurts
It helps with the variation layer: rubble, clutter, decorative pieces that break up repetition without needing to tile. It is poor at the structural layer, because tiling demands exact dimensions and matched edges, which is precisely what an approximating process cannot guarantee.
A practical split is to author the kit by hand and generate the dressing.
Avoiding the modular look
Repetition reads as repetition. The usual counters are: vary rotation and placement, break up long runs with unique pieces, use decals and vertex painting to differentiate surfaces, and vary lighting more than geometry.