Sim Shady's BAT (s)

[Sim shady 12]

well i have been playing around with the BAT on and off for the past month or so, and i feel that i have developed a good enough skill to make some buildings.  I have been working mainly on chicago 1890s style buildings.  I really could use help with texturing these, but for now i am just making this midrise...no name for it yet.

If one would want to see it i could post a pic, but then everyone would have to promise not to laugh.

[Spike345 20]

Hey, when you mean Chicago buildings, you mean W2W-ers right?

[Sim shady 12]

well sort of, you know the style of skyscrapers from chicago 1890s style within the game, thats the look im going for. Oh yeah, and im also a big fan of COBB and those last buildings he released like central park west. my favorite bat of all time has got to be his 5th avenue one. so thats really the style im aiming for.

[SC4Noobie 5]

Well, good luck with this! BATting is hard, saying this from personal experience.

[tag_one 132]

no batting is not hard. after a few buildings it becomes routine work and you can make a lowrise in say 4 hours.

please show us a pic, we won't laugh

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Ooooooh, Chicago-style buildings! That sounds good! Post those pictures already, we wanna see what you're up to!

[jacqulina 162]

looking forward to seeing your work

[Shinnie02 17]

oo great i can't wait till you release it. For the mean time may i see this great building that you are going to create?

[Sim shady 12]

Hello again everyone. okay i have a rough rough draft of what i mad last night, but i am confused on how to get pictures of my content from within the BAT, i'll research, maybe one of you could help me? thanks!

[Jasoncw 11,840]

After you do a preview render, press the print screen (prnt scrn) key on your keyboard.  This will create a screenshot which you can paste into your favorite image editing software.  It's also nice if you crop out every except for the building, so that the image is smaller (remember it must be below 800x600 pixels, and the smaller the image in general, the better).

I'm looking foward to seeing them. 

[Sim shady 12]

Hey jasoncw, thanks!  appreciate that   okay so like i said earlier this is my really really rough first addition that i came up with last night.  Obviously no textures.i am largely modeling it like the famous Hotel Blackstone, although, in no way is this a replication of it.  I am working on adding revolving doors for the entrance, though its proving quite difficult to do. 

I have a question here, as you can see the building looks rather stumpy and squashed, when in the Gmax the building is much more elongated.  Is there some kind of distortion or perception change?  In fact now that i think about it, the whole scaling seems to slightly change...is this just me?

As i have a VERY busy life, i think this building will be an ongoing project that could last a few months.  (yes, i am a perfectionist)

Edit: lol what an idiot forgot to post the picture...

Edit-again-: ...well i accidentally messed something up in the view to where i dont have my sidebar thingy to the left of the screen...totally need it.  Been playin around trying to get it back up, nothing working.

[Sim shady 12]

ok...dont really want to double post but its been over a day since i last posted...anyways, i have made some progress in my building and i have designed two different windows for my building. The problem is that the windows look awefully small compared to the building. demensions are 1 meter by 2 meters and 1 meter by 3 meters. In reality wouldnt that be a little on the side of big for a window?

[ILL Tonkso 1,236]

Yeah the BAT camera rig distorts things a little, what i tend to do is resize at the end of moddelling. Anyway some tips, keep each floor hight to 4 meters for commercials and 3 meters for residentials, that way the building will tie in with the ingame scaling quite nicely.

[Sim shady 12]

thanks ILL Tonkso! i tried what you said and put my building in the game and it fit in much better, size and scale-wise. I have worked on the building the last few hours, and have made significant progress. i was wondering if there is a way to rotate objects without having to eyeball it with the "select and rotate" key. for instance on my revolving door, i want to set the door angles exactly at 45 degrees, any way to do that?

one more thing, is there someone out there who has really got the texturing techniques down that could show me a few pointers.  i can texture, but its really really not my best thing. in fact i could go ahead and say most of my texture look plain aweful and detract from the buildings overall look.

[T Wrecks 10,209]

First thing you need is gascooker's tutorial on gradients and photoshop calibration. Keep in mind that the BAT light rig causes textures on horizontal surfaces to be bleached out tremendously, which means you might have to darken them by approx. 30%.

Moreover, make sure that you visit page 12 of 6459978's Toronto BATs thread - this will teach you how to "skin" a building with tailored textures instead of just applying an endless (tiling) texture to a selected object.

Some of the experienced BATters here will be able to provide more feedback and help.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Do you have any specific texturing questions?  The only general thing that I can think of to say is to add pink to your textures.  Not very much, and probably not even enough to really notice, but it helps make it blend into the game, since the maxis buildings have pink in them too (sometimes blue or purple though).  If you don't have photoshop, and you don't want to buy it, you can download the GIMP for free, and it can do most of the same things as photoshop.  Do a google search of GIMP to find it.

To rotate the doors to exactly 45 degrees, look at the bottom of the screen, and you'll see X Y and Z with a little text box next to each of them.  You can either watch that area when you rotate something, and just make sure that it is 45 degrees, or you can click on the symbol directly to the left of the X Y Z area (it looks like a square with a circle in it) which allows you to type in the values for each direction.

To make your thing that dissapeared show up again, go to customize>show UI and then select the ones that aren't checked untill the one you want comes back.

I don't reccomend working in the perspective viewport.  It's just plain not how it's going to look in the game.  Do a preview render while the perspective viewport is selected, and the view will switch to the camera that was used to make the preview render.  That will give you the funny isometric view.  Now you can press "U" on your keyboard which will change the viewport to User, which will let you pan and zoom in.  You could also right click on where it says perspective in the upper left corner of the viewport, and you can go to views.  Then you can select one of the camera views (in the upper half of the list), and after that, you can right click and go to the list again, and you can select user.

Does all of that make sense?

[Sim shady 12]

wow.  this is some great indepth info.  just the kind of stuff i need to take my BATing skills up to the next level!  i really appreciate this guys, and Twrecks thanks soooooooo much for pointing that thread out.  that tutorial should be on the omnibus!  really helpful.

Jasoncw, thanks for comments too.  i'll definitely apply this all to my building this weekend, as i plan to work on it a lot.  well with that being said, i have finished the revolving door entrance except for textures, which i plan to try my hand at now, with all this great advice  i'll probably post a pic of the building later tonight.

edit: hmm the GIMP's offical website seems to be down.

[spa 968]

This is more than decent for a first BAT. The best thing you can do to learn to Bat is to read, read read. Batters coming along now have the advantage that the old timers figured out all the quirks for us and have published all sorts of great tutorials to share the knowledge. Besides the obvious ones, I would recommend checking out Darkmatter's tutorials as they cover a few more advanced modelling techniques that aren't generally explained in any of the basic ones available (his tutorials were invaluable to me when I was learning).

https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=49&threadid=45938&highlight_key=y&keyword1=tutorial

Might not be useful to you now, but it probably will be eventually.

One other texturing tutorial you might want to check out is actually by Jasoncw. It's near the end of his bat thread. In it he explains how he manages to make the best windows on STEX. Anyway, good luck.

[jacqulina 162]

hey thats a great start very nice work

[MarcosMX 216]

Looking good your your first BAT. The only thing I have to say, is that, the main building is too small to be a hotel.

Anyway, good luck with your BAT(s) and real life.

[Sim shady 12]

Alright guys, i have worked on my building a bit, and have made some progress. i tried my hand at making a large texture, but i clearly need more practice at it Spa, you are definitely right in the best thing i could do is read the tuorials. they are extremely helpful, and that tutorial link you provided helped me greatly. it had more than a few tricks that i had been trying to figure out that will make my life easier in BATing. Jacquilina, thanks MarcosMX, i think i agree with you on the building being too small for a hotel, do you think i should increase the height a little? if so, by how much?

Thanks for comments and feedback guys!

I'll try and bring a picture of my building tonight, but i can't make any promises.

[MarcosMX 216]

yes. In SC4 a floor height is about 5m-6m.

Hope that helps.

[Sim shady 12]

Here is a picture of the revovling door entrance i have been working on.

I have a few questions here... first off, i am having trouble welding the outline part of the brick arch to the outline columns at the bottom, hard to explain... i think i have a solution though and i'll try it tomorrow and see if it works.

Second is there a way to make the windows more transparent? but with better texturing?

it looks a little bland right now, i plan to add more details later, but for now i feel pretty happy with what i have done here.

[Sim shady 12]

I hate to double post, but i need your input on this before i procede.  I have decided to scrap the two column entrance way, and am thinking about replacing it with something more like this.





If you guys don't like the entrance style, or have a better idea/design PLEASE let me know!

Thanks!

EDIT:  looking at the picture i could swear its bigger than 800 by 600 but i know its not...went back and resized twice, but still looks bigger than 800 by 600...weird.

[spa 968]

One thing that I have found when welding shapes is that sometimes the two objects just won't connect because they're separate and very well defined shapes on their own. The solution is to make it so that they need to be connected to be whole. For example, say I have a rectangle and an arc and they just won't weld together. I can make them do so though by attaching an edit spline modifier to the rectangle and deleting the top segiment of the rectangle nearest the arc that isn't needed. After deleting the segiment the rectangle's two top vertexs will be orphans and will happily connect to the arc since they're no long a complete shape. I hope this helps.

[Sim shady 12]

Spa i tried out what you said and it worked perfectly! thanks!  Now for my latest problem...i am trying to creat windows, and obviously i need them to have see thru glass.  However, when i go to the Texture editor thing and change the opacity, it doesn't do anything...

Any solutions?  I'd really like to avoid using that ugly black see thru thing in the properties editor...Thanks!

[JBSimio 152]

Transparency usually doesn't show in the perspective view.  In the perspective view, it will still look like a solid texture.  Do a preview and check there... it gives a much better idea of how transparent your texture really is.  Also... make sure your UV map is facing the right way.  If you're not seeing any texture at all... it's probably facing away from you and needs to be rotated 180 degrees.

Hope that's what you were asking for and that it helps!  I'd vote for the non canopy, BTW... it will let your revolving door show, too!  Then again... the canopy is much more appropriate for a hotel entrance.  Tough call...

JB

[Sim shady 12]

Lol JBSimio, those were my exact thoughts on the entrance design I'll just work around it for now... Checked the thing out in perspective view, and it showed the transparency. Thanks!

Also i have begun adding floors to my building along with windows and whatnot. I am pretty sure i will be able to devote a good amount of time to the BAT this weekend so expect significant progress!

[theluckydice777 0]

this sounds cool! i like modern stuff more though. The spinny door thing is awesome! you shhould still have columns for entrance i think! looks good!

[jacqulina 162]

wow i love the revolving door excellent work and progress