Using Gmax, advice, tips and feedback.

[mikeyb44 0]

I want to use SC scale.  I guess what I'm trying to ask is this.

 

If the unit spacing is set to 1, then does each block on the grid represent 1 meter? When I am looking at the status bar in gmax, there is a box that says Grid=16, it would normally say Grid=10 according to the specs. Anyway, when I begin to build, that box should say Grid=1 correct.  I think I am accidentially creating monster size one family houses because I think I have been building on the major grid lines so what I thought was a meter was actually 16 meters becuase of my zoom level.  I hope this is making sense, because I am starting to confuse myself.

 

Also, what are the XY coordinates of the camera angles used in SC?  I want to view my buildings using the User View and the Perspective View but I always keep rotating them until they become distorted. 

The view coordinates of polomito's last screen shot look in line with SC

Thanks for your help.

[couchpotato 8]

BAT will come with the correct setup...  Using the zoom extents all (button at bottom right) will correctly place the buildings.   If you're trying to just look at your stuff now, try 22.5 or 67.5 and 45 degree rotation.    Yes, one square = 1 meter so if your wall measures 144 - you have a monster building.   Zoom in to the second level of grids.   Select everything and scale down if this is the case.   That works sometimes.  https://community.simtropolis.com/assets/emoticons/4.gif>

[mikeyb44 0]

Thanks couchpotato that works!

So while in the F,K,R,L views, the two very black lines, horizontal and vertical are some kind of guide? If you begin your building and drag below the horizontal line, does that mean that portion of the building would be underground? Because it looks like the Z axis is pointing vertically (up and down)?

[mikeyb66 30]

Mikey, the dark lines represent the axis. Think of it like a graph, depending on the view it will show which direction is posistive and which is negative. As far as i know it doesn't matter about the posistioning of the building when you render it. They are just there as part of the grid system and represent the co-ordinates 0.

[sleuth14 0]

I'd like to pose my question again as it doesn't seem that anybody answered (or maybe no one knows).

Is the BAT or GMAX capable of importing files from other CAD programs (esp. IGES files, STEP files, etc.?)

[couchpotato 8]

BAT/GMax can import the following:

3D Studio Mesh     3DS & PRJ format

AutoCad                DXF

3D Studio Shape    SHP

That's it.  If you import your creations in a outside program, you will need to do all the texturing in BAT.   Also, some shapes and normals are apt to get switched around. 

[paupsers 0]

Ok, kinda stuck here. I used the basic spline technique to make the walls. However, I didnt include the windows at the time because I didnt know what size the building would end up being. (House, apartments, etc)

So is there any way that I can cut a hole in the extruded splines that I have right now?

[MaxisBrian 6]

paupsers,

You can pretty easily cut out window and door openings in your walls at any time by going back in and editing the spline. There are a couple of ways you could do it.

One is to draw out a rectangle at the window size you want, center it inside the wall (with the wall extrude modifier turned off) then select the wall, go into edit spline mode and attach the window rect you just made. Then pop the extrude modifier back on and you should see the window cutout in the wall. Once you have one such opening, you can just go back into edit spline mode and selecting the window splines and shift-moving the selection. As long as all segments of the spline comprising the wall are in-line and planar, it should look right when you go back up to the extrude level in the modifier stack.

Another way to get openings in a solid wall, assuming the wall is a rectangle, is to go into edit spline mode, select all four segments comprising the wall in sub-object mode, and shift-scaling the selection down to a window opening inside the wall. Then you can adjust the size and shape of the opening, copy and arrange more of the same, and/or make door openings by just lowering the botton segment of one of the window openings.

Good luck!

[baco 159]

Maxisbrian, i was wondering if you have anymore roof textures like the one you posted before (the one with the blue tshirt laying on top), i don't think i can ever get close to making such a quality texture and since it's the only one floating around i'm afraid many many user created buildings (including some of mine) will have the same roof, or if you have tips on how to make a credible roof without being a superb artist i would appreciate it. I am fairly good at photoshop but i lack the painting abilities.

thanks

[MaxisBrian 6]

Baco,

Here's what I usually do to get a good flat roof texture, like an asphalt type roof:

In Photoshop, start with a bottom layer that is a flat gray (could be warm or cool gray), then copy the layer and apply noise (Filter/Noise/Add Noise)to the copy. Make the noise amount something like 6 to 8. You just want to keep the original layer in case you mess up...

This already makes for a decent flat roof base texture, but then you can make additional layers to overlay all sorts of other details, like tar patching, cracks, lines, rope, wires, shadows, etc. Just draw these things out and experiment. This is a fun and fast way to get all sorts of details without the need for geometry. The roofs are mostly what you see of buildings in the game, given the camera POV, so they are comparatively important.

For the details like wires and such, it is very nice to have a pen tablet, as the mouse is difficult to draw with, but it can be done without of course. Just a very handy tool for this sort of thing.

When layering on all the details, try varying degrees of opacity for details like shadows, stains and tar patches, etc. You can set the layer's opacity at the top of the layer window.

Mess around with this and show me what you come up with. I sent out one or two roof textures like this in addition to the one with the shirt worked into it, way back in this thread. Have another look and see what you can grab.

[mikeyb44 0]

I know it has been said that window frames need to have an edit mesh applied to them and then select polygons and clear all. This is so it will render in BAT according to MaxisBrian.  I guess my question is, should everything have an edit mesh modifer applied to it, i.e. window glass brick work etc.?  I have been using a rectangle for glass and I have been applying a UVW modifer to it. The material is just a color with it's opacity set at 70%.  It's been looking like the affect that I want to achieve but should I go ahead and add an edit mesh modifer to the glass also and clear the poly's?

If transparency doesn't render in BAT, then can I see what kind of window glass material you are using?

Thanks

Mike

 

[MaxisBrian 6]

Mikeyb44,

Actually, I meant for an Edit Mesh modifier to be applied only to splines that you would like to have show up as renderable splines. In gmax, this additional step is necessary for some reason, otherwise these don't show up in the render. And as for the clear all step, this is only if you want a 4-sided rendered spline not to be smoothed out in the render. So if you want to make the window frames using the renderable spline technique I talked about, you would draw out a rectangle, set the spline properties to render, make sure you enter in 4 sides (instead of the default 12) then apply the Edit Mesh modifier to the spline (rectangle in this case) after you draw it out. The clear all step just makes the frame look rectilinear on all of its sides.

As for glass, then, no you don't need to apply an Edit Mesh modifier. What you want to do there is just draw out the rectangle, like you said, then apply a UVW map to it.

And hey, it looks like we got transparency working in gmax/BAT! Well... not so much we bu more like our talented tools engineer. So this will help a great deal with coming up with decent looking glass. Barring any complications from here on out, it should work fine.

-Brian

[ApathyNinja 17]

Hey Brian, want to clear things up on the necessary vertical distortion? Exactly how much is it? Also, how do you guys do windows? Is it just a reflection map? And how about roof junk like HVAC units and such, is there any way to accurately place those, short of looking at aerial photos?

[MaxisBrian 6]

ApathyNinja,

For windows we mostly used a standard glass material which was a multi-sub-object blending of a reflection map (photo of a cityscape) with a brick faceting effect to suggest that different things were going on in each window opening. The trick to make this work was to select all the glass in the building at the same time, and apply a box UVW map modifier to the selection, then size it to around 60x60x60 meters. I actually posted a flattened version of the material earlier in this thread if you want to see what it looks like.

With roof junk, pretty much anything goes. You just fake it basically, but if you want good references for this, we often used the Over New York, Over Paris, and over whatever other city book series. Lots of rooftops, basically, and very good aerial photos. Roof junk galore!

Oh, vertical distortion? Remind me, what are we talking about here?

-Brian

[mikeyb66 30]

MaxisMike, the 'vertical distotion' refers to some comments you made a while ago about having to stretch the buildings in the z-axis to prevent them looking squashed from certain camera angles.

Please can you confirm how much the building should be scaled up by in the z-axis.

[sandrasim1 2]

Hi!
I have been away from SC4 for some months and just returned to the game and found about gmax/BAT which is really exciting. I can see that I'm far behind all you guys but I have downloaded gmax, completed most of the gmax tutorials and I'm working hard to catch up. I have started to make buildings, well at least boxes with holes in them, and here is a question that somebody already might have answered or explained but as I'm still a beginner...

When making windows MaxisBrian talks about renderable splines in this thread and in his tutorial of making windows he mentions collapsing the rectangle to a renderable spline.

Am I correct to assume that a renderable spline is an editable spline with an Edit Mesh modifier applied to it?
How do I collapse the rectangle to a renderable spline? Do I convert it to an editable spline and apply an Edit Mesh modifier or I'm totally lost?

I would appreciate some clarification as I'm eager to continue experimenting further with gmax.

[polomito 0]

About the windows: What the heck is a brick faceting effect? Can it be done with gmax?

[GDP 0]

What about bump mapping. Is it rendered with the BAT plugin?

I am in the process of making a brick style building and bump mapping might be good to use. However I don't know if it is even worth applying. It might not even be visible at the closest zoom level anyway. Have any of the beta testers any knowlegde and experience with bump mapping in the BAT?

[johnpratt 0]

I appreciate all the info that you've have given us here, but not being a programmer or having any previous experience with CAD type programs, I do hope that the BAT program in combination with GMAX will be able to be used by someone like me, or will I be wasting my time even thinking about trying it. I would love to be able to make my own custom buildings etc. for a game that I find both interesting, versatile, and challenging.

I imagine though, that to make it usable by someone with no real experience or knowledge in the area of designing, you would have to have an extensive library available where we may be able to pick and choose various components that we wish to use.

Again, Thank you Maxisbrian for your valuable time.

[rob_2616 13]

----------------

On 1/27/2004 9:31:57 AM johnpratt wrote:

I do hope that the

BAT

program in combination with GMAX will be able to be used by someone like me, or will I be wasting my time even thinking about trying it. I would love to be able to make my own custom buildings etc. for a game that I find both interesting, versatile, and challenging.

I imagine though, that to make it usable by someone with no real experience or knowledge in the area of designing, you would have to have an extensive library available where we may be able to pick and choose various components that we wish to use.

----------------

John, Gmax is BAT. So if you can't use gmax you can't use BAT. Secondly, Gmax really isnt nearly as hard as people make it out to be. It's actually very easy, I'd say if you spent a full 4-6 hours reading and following tutorials you should be able to construct a very decent building. And every building you make after that is going to look better, and you'll finish it a lot quicker.

[MaxisBrian 6]

Hey guys, sorry I haven't been checking the thread as often as I'd like, so forgive me if I take way too long to respond lately.

1. Vertical distortion
Ah yes, I did talk about this awhile back. With the camera rig POV/angle in BAT, which is of course the same as we used for SC4, we found that the building renders appeared too short and squat, so we simply exaggerated the heights of all buildings until they looked right in the game. The general rule is, make what would be an 8' ceiling in the real world actually 4 meters high in gmax/BAT.

2. Renderable and editable splines
Sorry for any confusion here. If I suggested, way back, for you to collapse rectangles to renderable splines I meant to say collapse them to editable splines instead. All this does is make let you go into sub-objets (editing) mode in order to move vertices/edges around. Or you could add an Edit Spline modifier on top of the rectangle, same idea.

3. Brick faceting
The way we did the texture for most glass was to map a single, faceted cityscape image onto all the panes of glass (as a single selection) then applied a box map to the grouping of glass. By virtue of the faceted effect in the material, each window had a slightly different look. We roughly lined up the UVW map so that one facet fell along one window.

4. Bump maps
Though we were able to get transparency working, BAT won't let you work with bump maps, unfortunately!

5. GMax/BAT complexity
Well, I myself remember having struggled to get my brain around 3DS Max way back when. In my opinion it is a very complex app, and my hat goes off to anyone who can be up and running with it after 4-6 hours of tutorials, etc. I guess some of you will take to it quickly and others will need more time to get comfortable with it. But once you get there, you'll have lots of fun, and it shouldn't take too long to start making basic buildings. So hang in there. You could build up a library of building parts/props and start passing them around. If some of you have a collection of windows and doors, and someone has a good castle turret or whatever, there's no reason you can't zip up the model and any accompanying textures and email them to others. We ripped off each others building parts all the time to for SC4.

-MaxisBrian

[ApathyNinja 17]

8 feet = 4 meters on the vertical. Got it. As for faceting, I'll bet a quick pass through Photoshop will help with that, right?

Woah woah, back up the truck. No bump mapping?

This is a figurative stab in the chest. Are you sure you guys can't ditch transparency in favor of bump-mapping? Transparency seems to be just a crutch, while bump-mapping is becoming an essential tool for creating lifelike, interesting textures.

[rob_2616 13]

I wasn't trying to suggest you could *master* gmax in 4-6 hours.. I just meant that you could learn the basics to constructing a building in that time.

[Screwballl 196]

ok i have a question about textures...

if i have a box/rectangle that is 1 meter (one square in gmax) squared, what is the ideal pixel size for a texture to fit properly and look right once rendered?

i found that most of the textures ive been using are 512x512 pixels in size which is fine for skinned/tiled items such as a shingled roof or brick side of a house but for say a specific item such as a door that i want to make my own texture for, a 1 meter wide by 3 meter high door would look better with a properly sized texture. All the ones ive tried dont work starting with 1050Wx1950H or so and scaling down and it never really works well...

[GreatDane 32]

----------------

Woah woah, back up the truck. No bump mapping?

This is a figurative stab in the chest. Are you sure you guys can't ditch transparency in favor of bump-mapping? Transparency seems to be just a crutch, while bump-mapping is becoming an essential tool for creating lifelike, interesting textures.----------------

I don't really mind this. I have studied the maxis brick buildings in Sc4 and even at the closest zoom you can't really see the bricks clearly anyway. They are simply too small. I don't know if bump mapping would be usefull anywhere else in a building. I would rather have transparency instead, but I am sure the two things don't rule out each other.

[ApathyNinja 17]

Yeah, I've gone ahead and talked to one person with the BAT, turns out they were never in at all.

[MaxisBrian 6]

As for the bump mapping, we have to keep in mind that gmax is given out for free by Discreet as an only slightly dumbed down version of Max, their bread and butter. So gmax is just Max with certain features turned off, right? They carefully determined which features they were willing to leave intact and what they ought to leave out, and bump mapping was deemed too potentially useful to pros I guess. We have to honor that, and we've been working with them to see what sensitive features we can re-enable or work around, that don't make them uncomfortable.

[MaxisBrian 6]

Screwball,

For mapping something 1:1 without distortion, try the Bitmap Fit option under the Alignment field of the UVW map modifier. It should be pretty straight forward.

Very useful.

[polomito 0]

MaxisBrian,

 

Will the BAT render reflection maps. What about noise and blur effects?

 

ApathyNinja,

 

So, facet is a Photosop filter. https://community.simtropolis.com/assets/emoticons/22.gif> Thanks for the information. It really helps me a lot. I was so confused, trying to understand MaxisBrian's explonation without knowing that. 

[ApathyNinja 17]

I think facet is a Photoshop filter. I can't find anything similar in gMax