Using Gmax, advice, tips and feedback.

[mntoes 270]

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On 11/29/2003 8:02:39 AM tHe Dark_Child wrote:

What I would like to know is how can I make buildings in gmax?

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Follow the tutorials in the "BAT, gMax, WTC NYC & You" thread by Woulfe. They are very helpful. Gmax is a bit complicated but have a go. MaxisBrian has also done some tutorials search for his postings, they should help as well.
Good luck!

Edit... The tutorials are availabe under the "Mods" section (bottom right hand side)

[mcausland 1]

You can also find some beginner GMax tutorials at Freeland

 

http://couchspuds.homestead.com/Library4.html

 

 

[mntoes 270]

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On 11/29/2003 4:34:30 PM mcausland wrote:

You can also find some beginner GMax tutorials at Freeland

http://couchspuds.homestead.com/Library4.html

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Just checked out this site myself. Very helpful. You can also get some textures from here to apply to your new building.

[sleuth14 0]

What types of files will the BAT be capable of importing? I am an engineer and I am familiar with IDEAS and Pro-Engineer. Both of these programs are capable of exporting several different types of files, with the most common being IGES.

Will the BAT be capable of importing IGES files?

[pioupiou 0]

I've downloaded gmax and try to understand it with the tutorials.
everything was fine (except I'm not very skilled ) when I tried to do the materials tutorial.

I have one big problem : my material editor does not look like the one showed in the tutorial... so I cannot make the tutorial

 

here's what my material editor look like

 

 

and here's what it looks like in the tutorial....

 

 

 

I downloaded gmax 1.2 and it seems to work fine other than that.

If someone has an idea of what I might be doing wrong....

 

Please try to be as clear and simple as possible, as I'm french,  and english is one of the hardest part of the tutorials....

 

thanks in advance

Pioupiou

[mntoes 270]

Bonjour! Ok I'll try.

1)Enter the name of your texture where you have "1-Default" eg Stone,slate etc.

2)Click "New" and select "standard" from the two choices.
You will return to the picture you have.

3) click the small box next where it says "Diffuse:" (note it is the 2nd to the right the very small box, if you click the other one you will get a colour selector!)

4)Now double click the "Bitmap" choice and you can browse for your texture.
Select your texture Bitmap and click Open. (It should have appeared in the preview box) Click open and it should now appear as an example texture on the funny globe shape to the left of where it says new/pick/apply.

5)click Apply

6)I also have to click the "show map in viewport" option to get my textures to show up. (small blue and white checkered cube")

PS dont forget to apply a UVW Map to yout object.

I hope this helps as I am only new to Gmax Myself. But I will try and help you further if needed. That is if I have got any further than this, as this is where My Knowledge ends so far.


Bonjour ! L'ok I essayera. 1)Enter le nom de votre texture o

[pioupiou 0]

Thank you very much, it helps me a lot

still don't understand why the material editor is not the same as in the tutorial, but finally I can do what I want

 

thanks a lot, and it was very kind to provide a traduction

 

a bunny for you ?

 

Pioupiou

[mntoes 270]

No problem pioupiou,


Don't know why I did not think of this earlier but if you visit
http://babelfish.altavista.com/ you can copy and paste the text from the tutorials into the blank white box. Then select translate form english to french and you should have a rough guide in French.

You can then re-copy and paste the translation into notebook for printing out.

It's very usefull and should be just what you need.

Regards
mntoes

Thanks fo the bunny!

[+Guest]

hello everybody.

i have been out of the sc community for a while now. been busy with school and work. but i am going to try and pop in more often now.

this is one thing that i have been looking forward to since sc4 was announced. i cant wait until it comes out. now i can take all of my buildings and have them displayed in 3d and not just the isometric images of previous games.

i better get working on my first sc3u to sc4 building conversion, schloss sprewell.

[Larsz 7]

I am catching back up with GMax and the house I am making. The roof is giving me fits. I can draw the spline and align it correctly but the ends are wrong when I extrude it.

 

How do I plumb the roof? The bottom edge of the roof should be vertical.

[mikeyb66 30]

Select the roof go into editable mesh mode and then click on the vertex button on the right. The little dots. From the end on view select the two points that are out of place and then move them to the new location either using the move tool or typing in the new loaction.

~Please can someone help me with texturing and how to do it i really cant get it to work properly. I could do with a good guide in this area.

[rubik3 116]

Or if you want you can just add a slice modifier and cut off the excess.

 

Mikey....let me know what your having troubles with and i'll do what i can to help you through it. 

[mikeyb66 30]

I'm really stuck with texturing. I can add some textures but they come out all funny and sometimes they dont even show up, i have 3ds max 5. Can you help with UVW mapping as well please. I'll work on it some more and show you what i end up with. Cheers for any help.

[Larsz 7]

To fix my roof problem, I converted the mesh to an editable poly which gave me the vertices I needed.

 

I am starting to get the hang of textures with gmax but I don't know if it works the same with 3ds. If it does, having both material pop-up windows at the same time helps. Usually what I do is select the object I want to texture, open the Material Navigator window, find the texture I want, click and drag that texture onto the object.

 

Then I open the Material Editor window, use the "Pick" command and select the texture I just placed, give it a name.

 

Expand the "Maps" tab and select the "Diffuse" map.

 

This will open up the UVW coordinates tab where you can adjust the mapping.

 

Hope that helps.

[rubik3 116]

Well lets start off with an imaginary brick jpg for a material.  Open up your material editor "m is the shortcut" and select a blank material slot.  Scroll down to diffuse color and add your bitmap.  Once you have done this you will be looking at the first child (Max uses the parent child relationship, parent is the material in this case and the children are the individual maps that make up the material)  You will see a blue and white checked box....check this to display that image in the viewport and drag the material onto your object.  If you still can't see the image in the viewport that means you need to add a UVW modifier.  Once this is done you should now be able to see the material in your scene. 

 

For the UVW scaling you want to use a size that reflects the size of the bitmap.  For example if that brick image reflects and 8' x 8' area of brick then you want to use 8', 8', 8' box for your scaling.

 

Materials are the bread and butter or your scene and accurate materials will make or break your buildings.  Above I showed you how to add a diffuse color, but in reality materials are made up of much more...specular levels and color, ambient color, reflection, glossyness, bump etc.  So play around with each setting to see what they do and don't be afraid to click that render icon to see what it will really look like when rendered (for mikeyB as GMax doesn't have this capability).

 

 In the real world materials are NEVER 100% diffuse color.  If it were everything would be overly saturated.  So when making you materials never keep your diffuse color at 100...move it down to between 60-80 for realism.

 

That should be enough to get you going but you'll never learn all there is to know about materials.  After 5 years I'm still learning new things every day and you will too.  And keep asking questions (and specific ones because as you can see I tend to ramble off in separete directions)

 

www.3dlinks.com

www.3dcafe.com

Sites with materials and links to other sites...hours of browsing.

[Larsz 7]

Here is my 2Story Bungalow so far. Any tips on texturing the windows would be great! Also, how do I create "Named Selections"? I can do "Select by name" but it would be nice to be able to select all the walls or all the window frames.

[DuskTrooper 314]

How about some shutters for the windows, and a balustrade for the porch?  Also, you should add a dormer.  Nice start!

[rubik3 116]

Well Larsz the way i organize my drawings is by using layers.  You should see a button that looks like 3 sheets of paper on top of each other.  If you click it, it will bring up a dialog box. 

 

Most likely you will only have one layer "layer 0" which can't be deleted. You can add as many layers as you want and have each one have different render, display settings, as well as being selectable by using the 'select by layer' command.  When you get your layers set up, close the box, highlight the items you want on a specific layer, right click -> layers -> your desired layer.  Also when you are doing your initial drawing you can set up say walls to be your current layer, then everything you draw after that will appear on that layer.

 

Another way to organize yourself is to name every object as you create it.  This way is a little more tedious but is an option.  If you name all your walls "Wall-01, 02, etc" it's easy to go into 'select by name' and shift-click all the walls.

[mntoes 270]

Silly question but is Gmax supposeed to come with a "Texture" file?
I don't appear to have one!.

[Larsz 7]

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On 12/11/2003 12:33:49 AM rubik3 wrote:

Well Larsz the way i organize my drawings is by using layers.  You should see a button that looks like 3 sheets of paper on top of each other.  If you click it, it will bring up a dialog box. 

 

Most likely you will only have one layer 'layer 0' which can't be deleted. You can add as many layers as you want and have each one have different render, display settings, as well as being selectable by using the 'select by layer' command.  When you get your layers set up, close the box, highlight the items you want on a specific layer, right click -> layers -> your desired layer.  Also when you are doing your initial drawing you can set up say walls to be your current layer, then everything you draw after that will appear on that layer.

 

Another way to organize yourself is to name every object as you create it.  This way is a little more tedious but is an option.  If you name all your walls 'Wall-01, 02, etc' it's easy to go into 'select by name' and shift-click all the walls.

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If gmax had layers and a real object snap like Autocad, I would be in heaven. An "Offset" command would be great too. It is a lot easier for me to be precise in Autocad but I have never done any 3d in Autocad and I am not sure how to import anyway. Anyway, one of the first things I looked for in gmax was Layers. I still have never found them, are you thinking of Autocad? Layers would be extremely helpful, looking at cross sections of walls would be a lot easier if I could turn off the layers I don't want to use.

[baco 159]

Lars, to make a window transparent you need to adjust the opacity tab in the material editor before applying the material, the lower the number the more transparent it will become, then you select the material and then you apply. As for windows textures you could try making a frame and then applying the window

[rubik3 116]

Sorry about that Larsz, I made an assumption I shouldn't have.  I use a combo of ADT and 3D Studio Viz, both of which have layers.  If I remember correctly Max has layers as well so I just assumed Gmax had this feature.  I just need to go d'l GMax so i stop talking out of my butt .

 

There are plugins for GMax that allows for import of 3DS files as well as dxf for Autocad if you want to go that route.

[ApathyNinja 17]

I was just curious if anyone sets their Major Gridlines to 16 instead of the defualt 10. I remember hearing somewhere that each tile in SC4 16mx16m. This might be handy for keeping track of how big a building is. Especially for those of us who're not familiar with the general size of metric units.

[mntoes 270]

Good Idea ApathyNinja, think I'll be trying that.

[MaxisBrian 6]

ApathyNinja,

The tiles are indeed 16x16 meters in the game, and it is a good idea to set the major grid lines to 16, with the minor lines at 1 of course.

[jbbry232 87]

ok, the material editor is giving me a headache... so i'll just ask

 

How do you get a bump image to work?  Its just not working for me.

 

 

[rubik3 116]

Well you really won't notice the bumb maps until you render the scene.  If you set the bump intensity up to 999 you'll see what it will look like in the material editor but nothing will change in the viewport.

 

Even though you can't really tell it's there right now I can still give you a basic rundown on how they work.  If you've messed around with importing custom height maps into sc4 you'll understand in no time.  Bump maps pretty much work the same way, white areas protrude further then black areas.  Take a look at the brick bump below.

 

 

The inset areas such as the grout should be black or close to black while the bricks should be white.

 

That's pretty much all there is to bump maps.

 

If you want to see what kind of effect the bump map will have without rendering here's something for you to do.  Create a plane with about 50 faces in both the x and y axis.  Then add a displace modifier to the plane and add in your desired bump map as the displacement image.  You can then adjust the strength of the displacement to see what the bump map will do.

 

You may ask yourself why don't you do that for everything.  Well bump maps in a material does basically the same thing without adding in all the extra faces.  In essence bump maps are a way to give the look of a displacement modifier without the extra strain on your computer.

[mrshupm 0]

Just a test building. This is my first building. I made it in gmax but I used 3dsmax to render it to see how it looks. Suggestions/comments welcome

[ApathyNinja 17]

Oooh nice. Good shape to it and well-chosen textures. I'd love to see it with some bump mapping to bring out some definition to the wall materials.

I wonder if we could wring some more information out of MaxisBrian. I'd like to know a few things relating to windows and lighting:

First off: How does Maxis do the glass textures? I'm yet to see anyone get the proper technique that conveys the existence of "stuff" inside buildings. Earlier in the thread it was stated that the furniture inside buildings and such isn't really modelled, but implied with textures in some way. How does that happen?

Second: Night lighting. We've gotten some hints about how the BAT handles that, so how do we go about making the properly luminescent materials? Or, do we just not worry about it since it's probably being changed as we speak?

Finally, there was some mention of using localized lighting in the tutorials thread. I assume this would counteract the major problem I've seen with Buggi's example building, namely it doesn't seem like it casts shadows on itself. Can you uh...pardon the pun. shed some light on that?

[mrshupm 0]

In regards to interior of the buildings, I have accomplished something but I dont think thats how they do it. Basically, I clone window itself and move it inside so its touching the window. Then I apply defuse map to window , say for example sky bitmap, I set transparency to some reasonable value. After that I find some picture of interior, like for example chairs, tables, curtains and stuff like that, and map it on cloned window. That way original window is see-through, and it shows the cloned window with mapped interior stuff on it. Its not as efficient I know and they probably do it some other way but it can yield pretty good results. Honestly, Id like to see MaxisBrian give us some more tips and tutorials. Namely, Id like to know how they accomplish contrast on textures and stuff. I mean, I use bump map and texture for example bricks, that come with 3D studio max, but when rendered , most of the detail gets lost due to antialiasing. :-x