BAT - Troubleshooting & General Discussion

[awake_78 0]

I' m trying to create a prop in BAT which whwn I put it in the lot editor will apear in the other block.
To be more specific I want to make a highway divider which I put it on the rear grass lot of the divider but appears in the middle of the highway....

[awake_78 0]

For examlpe take a look at this. I m putting the prop in the edge of my lot (1)

and the prop appears in the middle of the road...

I would like to do sth like that. 

Block Maxis Orange Point Suites.zip

[Glenni 1,444]

render it a few metres offset from the centre.

[awake_78 0]

That is the way? 
Thanx man.

And what if I sould like to have a prop covering 4 tiles but the blue foundation was just one tile. I think JENX Gare du nord has props like that or jeronj highway walls...

[I9113N 4]

Ok I have this question thats been bugging me for awhile. When I apply textures to objects, my textures repeat. I need the textures to "stick" to the object, and not repeat or change when I move the camera. Is there anyway I can do this?

[trailofcrumbs 0]

Perhaps, someone already asked this before, but here it goes. How do you let self-illuminated windows only light up at nighttime?

[SinnerX 0]

I'm creating my first my first bigge building and until now everything was fine (thanks to the nice guys who wrote all the tutorials here). But now i got a problem by applying an UVW Mapto a frame. Learned in the tutorials that thats the best way getting realistic glass. But on my kind of frames it won't work. The walls of my building are lil curved and so also the frames. Everytime i try to get a UVW map on the frames nothing happens and i get the following picture:

^^ My Frame

^^ What happens when i apply the UVW Map.

Any ideas how i get glass into the frame?

[Jasoncw 11,840]

SinnerX: Where it says "Mesh Settings" you want to check the "Display Mesh" check box.

trailofcrumbs: Unfortunately you can't.

I9113N: Whatever happens in the viewports doesn't matter. All that matters is what it looks like in the preview render. Are those looking ok?

[SinnerX 0]

Well, tried everything. Nothing happens, he always shows me that orange box without any Map or anything thats similar to my frame, equal if display mesch is on or off :-( Tried it for 2 hours, think i have to find another way for getting windows on the frames. I Have no idea why it doesnt work.

[SinnerX 0]

After great 3 hours i find a way to solve the problem.I Just took the lower arc of the frame,extruded it, cnverted it to mesh and flipped the normal sides. Now the windows fit on the wall and it looks nice. But it took me all thinkable clicks to reach this :-) The good one on this is now i'm familiar with mesh-editing

Looks great on the walls now:

[SimFox 802]

right...

You are putting one invisible thing (UVW map - virtual set of coordinates) on another invisible thing - spline (objec with NO surface) and then complain that you don't see anything?

Where "it doesnt work" comes in here??

[SinnerX 0]

Well, that was what i realized after hours of searching the net and testing. Then came a moment where i checked what my fault was and that it doesn't work that easy as in the simply windows in the tutorial. Well, i'm on the 4th day on BAT and slowly i realize what UVWs, Meshs and all the other things are good for. Didn't knew this yesterday, sorry for the question.

[SimFox 802]

That's a best way to learn! I mean not randomly clicking on the buttons for x numbers of hours, but analyze what you see and why...

[mancoolman 3]

this question has probably been asked so... sue me.

i want to make a W2W lots what is the length of a square in sc4 compared to gmax.

i know it's not the same because i made a building with a 64 meter base which should have been 4 squares but it wasn't.

So PM me or post it here please

[Jasoncw 11,840]

A tile in SC4 is 16x16 meters. The grids in Gmax by default are one meter. But if you zoom out, a larger grid will show instead of the normal one. In the lower right hand corner of the screen it says "Grid = XX" so make sure that the grid is what you think it is.

[mancoolman 3]

ok thanks jason

[SinnerX 0]

Is it possible to change the background in the BAT-Preview or it is always black? My building has some very dark walls and so i don't see them in the BAT-Preview.

[SimFox 802]

yes, but only through the scripts

[jayo 44]

I am aware of the BAT Essentials tutorial by phillippbo.I am also aware that this does cover nightlights.I'm sure you know theres three types of nightlight:

• All night lighting

• Mixed lights and window textures

• and the crappy default ones.

Now,the phillippbo tutorial only covers one type of lighting:The mixed lights type.

I want to know if there are any tutorials out there that cover the all night lighting type.

Now i'm pretty sure all of you agree on the fact that is the SC4devotion tutorial section is pretty bad(in terms of BATting).They have a fair few MODing tutorials which is exellent as i don't think simtrop has any(but thats just me).I understand that there quite alot of tutorials in the BAT open discussion thread waaaay back,but can any of you reccomend some.

---

The above picture is one of my BATs(this is also the BAT i want to nightlight) I want to iron out the yellow brick texture a bit more and was told to do it on the UVW map.What measurements should i put in-I'm totally clu-less.

Thanks for the help

I've attached the texture at the bottom

[EDIT] being slow(i'll try later)

I'm sorry i have a bad pic

I'll try find another

[EDIT]Heres one:

[Jasoncw 11,840]

There's nothing to really write about, you just put lights inside of your building. And you change the parameters described in the BAT Essentials tutorial to change how the lights look.

My advice would be to use as few lights as possible, and to pay attention to the color (their color and intensity should be similar to the Maxis buildings).

For texturing adding a UVW map and fiddling with that will make it look better, but in the end it won't really make it look all that good. I think you need to make custom textures, and I think this is a good building to do it on, since as a whole it's pretty simple, but at the same time you can't hide any bad texturing. I can identify 3 major textures you would need to make, and possibly several smaller ones.

1: A completely new roof texture. There's a roof texturing tutorial in my signature.

2: A larger version of your brick texture. You would start this texture off the same as the roof, and most other textures, by taking a screenshot of the wall in Gmax But make sure its the longest wall. You would then open the brick texture, paste it into your new wall texture file, and then copy and paste the brick texture around, filling the screen with the brick (but make sure that all of the mortar still lines up). After that, you would have to go in and manually manipulate the larger brick texture, to edit out the repetition. Once you do this, you'll have a brick texture that's big enough for the size walls you have. Afterwards, you can add some slight weathering, a subtle vertical gradient, and you can alter the color. Once you're done with that, select all of the objects which need this texture, group them, apply a UVW Map, and make the length width and height the same as the wall you took the screenshot of.

3: A glass texture. Even though it is not opaque glass, it should still really have its own texture as well. This is still basically the same as the window texturing tutorial in my signature, except you'd make the contrast even stronger to make up for the transparency. But you should also model an interior if you're going to have that kind of glass.

The smaller textures would be for the panels. You could make two or three slightly different panel textures, and then you could randomly apply them to the blue panels. You might think that kind of thing is too tedious, but that's the kind of thing that really make BATs good.

This is just a condensed version of the texturing tutorials in my signature.

[jayo 44]

Ok,i'll try it out

[therealcdg 0]

I apologize if this has been asked before, but what exactly is a Code 6 error in the BAT? I got to the end of the first render and then it gave me the error.

If anyone knows how to fix this or how to prevent it would be much appreciated. Thanks.

[trailofcrumbs 0]

therealcdg: Code 6 basically means that your comp lacks the RAM/CPU scope to render your specific model. To work around this problem, you can scale your model down or export it in sections and merge them back together.

Edit: Assigning more virtual memory may also work.

In the mean time, does anyone know how to export a model in sections and merge them back together for the lot? I've been wondering that myself for a long time. Any help would be appreciated.

[SimFox 802]

Well, RAM is a tricky thing and I don't think it has anything to do with CPU, as not enough of that means simply longer render times nothing more dramatic then that.

Not enough RAM could be not a cause but a symptom. Symptom of some bad geometry for instance. I assume we are talking GMAX here, right?

Problem is that to hunt for such a thing is very difficult. Sometimes it is easier and quicker to redo the damn thing...

As for export in parts... Haven't done it myself but I imagine that you would need to slice you model in blocks with "airtight" LODs at seams. Then you could either leave each piece where they are and render them in turns - I think I heard about that approach, or to center them - it should work just as fine and might be more practical - especially if you are making something modular.

Real issue will come with the shadows. You wouldn't be able to control them in GMAX. It can't hight objects from camera, or at least I haven't found a tool to do so in it. So you would have to remove excess parts from the scene for rendering. Not only it is annoying but naturally if there is nothing there there will not be a shadow from that nothing. In some cases it would be no problem, but in other it will be one.

In 3ds Max, on the other hand you can do such a hiding - that means you can have just a shadow, reflection or refraction without camera seeing actual object.

[jayo 44]

Hi

I've had a problem with my textures;Some of them don't actually show up in the renders(and thats just the renders[the areas were they don't show up are the white bits of the model)I've had this problem before but it usually just goes away after i retexture it or select it.

thanks.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Make sure the objects have UVW Maps. Also make sure that there is only one of the object there (if there are many clones of the object in one place, and only one of the clones is textured, then a non-textured clone might be what's getting rendered).

On the side though, your objects don't seem to be casting shadows. Near the area where you do preview renders from, there is a button about resetting the lights and cameras. Try that out to get shadows back.

[jayo 44]

Thanks jasoncw-I hope helps because i was just about to export

[delija21 295]

can someone help me with code 6 error.....the bat is 320mx420m,it's 110m high and have 628 000 polys...i have tryed merge,refitt lods but nothing works.....how can i fix it?? i have a packard bell...1,83 GHz...2 gb ram

[SimFox 802]

delija21:

OK, now I see where you have problem... This is simply too large of an object for BAT to handle. I'm not sure exactly what is a limiting factor here, but it is NOT a memory(system) issue as such. I never saw Gmax Bat utilizing more then 342Mb of system memory while rendering LODs. AutoVino had a theory that it may have to do something with the maximum number of 256x256pix slubs BAT is capable to generate and ID. It sound very logical.

At any rate, you wouldn't be able to get something of that size out in one go. You should either reduce the footprint of LODs or do what JaWood did with his Mall - slice it in pieces.

[delija21 295]

how do i reduce the footprint of the LODs? and what exacly does that mean??? and how do i slice a BAT in pieces??? i tryed to find a tutorial on that but didn't had any luck....thanks