BATs Currently in Progress

[Frankie_Grove 33]

I call this the "Jigsaw Puzzle" because I have all the models down, I just have to put them together in the right way.

In reality, it's a feed mil. Located in none other than Enterprise, Alabama. I have the RL photo that I took and am going by:

This is not my picture, but it is still useful reference:

[SimRabbit 48]

storms991: ditto

[DarkEldar 6]

A little something i made while i was bored on the weekend.Lacks detail and proper scale.....

[SimFox 802]

plz don't tell my mama...

[DarkEldar 6]

Crap! you're the god 3dsmax Is it modeled off something?

[mightygoose 92]

simfox jesus just release something

[SimFox 802]

DK1

You can also store the image off site - actually that is a preferred method as it taxes resources of Simtropolis.

you can use www.imageshack.us for instance. Upload picture there and use the link they provide to paste it into you messages here on simptopolis. For that you would need to enclose the link in to special code, or just use the full reply form and there is a icon to past the images

[KingTitan 6]

Great Stuff there evryone... Gosh I really hope somebody will do a "Freedom Tower" BAT.....

[fukuda 351]

Originally posted by: Yoshiisland

Originally posted by: BAT56 Excellent bixel...

I'm on a large boat! Still much of work!

quote>

 

That boat is absolutely amazing!  You must keep us updated, it'd be really cool if you could mod it to replace the original Maxis one but a static landmark would look awesome too!

-Yoshiislandquote>

It is also oddly similar to this other cruiseship, downloadable at the 3D Studio for 3 years

[mightygoose 92]

duuude, busted....

[SimFox 802]

oh my!! did that come as a surprise for you guyz?? I though it was very obvious given the quality of those models and the fact that NOTHING else of same quality has ever been shown and neither any WIP ever existed...

And... well one just can tell ;-)

I love "still much work!" though... what an entertainment...

[zero7 68]

I guess most people will have seen my current building over at SC4D, but for those that haven't, here's a modern industrial shed I'm working on ...

It's now a little further along than this and the loading bays (right front) have been angled in the opposite direction.

[storms991 0]

doesn't any1 read the last post of a page/??! please read te last post on page 7, i think it will help a lot of people.

SimFox, I must say, your creations are truly fantastic, if you were to create just one tutorial on creating realistic looking buildings, the whole of Simtropolis would be churning out these magnificent beasts very quickly!

jjust my input .

[Za 164]

Simfox, just amazing! Glenni, I seem to recall seeing (a page or two back) a few more of those Norwegian-style houses ( i believe you said one was modeled after your house) Were you planning on uploading them?

[autoVino 26]

Originally posted by: SimFox

plz don't tell my mama...quote>

 

show off..  j/k

But seriously, those reflections are something else.  I fear this will look much too good for simcity, it should be an architectural rendering.

[DarkEldar 6]

Lol ^^ jealous are we .....The reflections are very intense can't say i've seen anything like it before, they're pretty magnificent.However a high quality photo montage render would be very interesting with this model.

[plasticboy 36]

 

This sweetness is modeled off  of the 506m tall Federation Tower which is currently u/c in Moscow!

[SimFox 802]

ha ha ha, Plastic... well yep, it is. For a long time i couldn't get my mind around how to solve the surface of the towers. They look simple enough, but, in fact are VERY complex. For starters at almost any point the wall bends in all three dimensions X,Y, Z remaining smooth! For seconds the latticework doesn't follow the surface of the wall To be precise its verticals remain vertical, while those inthe wall lean toward the center of each tower!! It exist in it's own plane that again bends at any given point in all 3 dimensions. And they stay at the same spot all the time!!!

I've first tried my hand at it about 6-8 months ago and just couldn't replicate the shape. But last weekend it came to me. In fact I have "Mendeleevian" experience. That famous Russian chemist Mendeleev had invented periodic table of elements (in Russia it is called Mendeleev Periodic table). He said it came to him in a dream one night. Would you believe it I saw the way to make it work in a dream on the night from Saturaday to Sunday... so naturally I spend all Sunday afternoon making it - and voilá here it is - VERY accurate (withing say 10-15 cm for 506M structure) representation of Federation.

But the very size of the structure presents serious challenges to MAX. To speed up process I decided to model the entire lattice at once. Problem larger tower lattice is made of 100 000+ faces. manipulating them in viewport still works fine, at least on my machine in Direc3D mode, but once i try to select more then say 1/3 of the faces of the lattice it goes into freeze. I guess 512Mb of video memory on my graphic adapter are full and viewport get frozen. It only happens in Direc3D mode and notably when caching turned on, but without it or in OpenGl it is painfully slow and the tower is barely interactive in the viewport in shaded mode.

here is the site of the tower:

www.federationtower.ru

with beautiful renderings of building and others constructed next to it in "city" in Moscow.

move little helicopter/flying thing along time line. also try it several times as later years pictures change randomly  - some of the most beautiful architectural rendering I've ever seen!!

[plasticboy 36]

Thanks for this insightful background, Fox. Do you by any chance have plans to model other buildings from the Moscow City set?? City of Capitals, 12 IBC, or perhaps even Russia Tower?

[AndisArt 2,066]

Hey awesome SimFox, that will go just next to the Russia Tower which I wanna BAT. So how did you end up realizing the shape then?

[SimFox 802]

well I have some of the Eurasia tower done... :-)

and some sketches of Russia tower (Foster's design). I can certainly do City of Capitals, but one I'm really interested is Terminal and Gov of Moscow buildings.

As for the right for Russia Tower , he he he, Andisart, ok let's see how it will play out... anyway my plate now is full ;-)

btw (as a part of showing off) my rendition is more acccurate then this one:

as tower on it doesn't seem to bend.

As for the base, until now no-one really knows how will it look in the end.

I think this is due to very flamboyant nature of the owner of developer  - Mirax Sergei Polonsky who's keen to change his mind and loves to play media!

[mightygoose 92]

if you do do the set can they be rendered at the appropriate angles to each other like pacific place???

[storms991 0]

SimFox, i think you should make us an expert BAT tutorial, We have all probably done the basic one, and me especially would love to make it to that next step.

Texturing is a hard thing, could you enlighten us on how you created yours?

[Glenni 1,444]

uh, storms, Simfox uses 3dsmax, he doesn't necesarily need much textures, he uses render effects...

ZA: Yeah, i will get to releasing those aswell eventually.

[SimFox 802]

About tutorials... the difficulty of making one is the fact that it would be one for MAX9 + Mental Ray 3,5 (if you thinking of materials) Although some of the effect could be also recreated with standard ones and even with Scanline, it would be prohibitively expensive in terms of render times. even older versions of Mental Ray would have difficulty at some points as version 3,5 got some quite heavy optimization under the hood. Plus at any rate it will take very powerful computer with 64 bit operational system, as for instance now federation takes 1,5 Gb of memory to render. plus some 300Mb for photon maps, Final Gather maps and Caustics so total 1,8 Gb. This gets quite close to the 2Gb limit per application on 32bit system which when reached will simply close MAX. and tower is far from finished. i expert it to top 2,5Gb memory usage when ready.

I understand that one doesn't necessarily want to go so big, (but many actually do) but apart for that there isn't too much special there. One thing I keep saying - be very accurate in your modeling - use snaps ALWAYS!!

Anyway. so if someone have idea for particular tutorial - let me know I'll see what I can do!

[bixel 1,223]

This is actually not a BAT, but its the interior of the Hong Kong HSBC building, you may recall Paulvmontfort had already made an excellent model. I've been asked to do an interior. The file is way to big to post here so here's the link.

http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/7448/interior3au5.jpg

I am still working on it, so there is more details to do. BTW this is just a quick render with most of the eyecandy turned off. No lighting in this sample - just the skylight.

[storms991 0]

what would be cool is a texturing tutorial from Glenni, and a modeling one from you SimFox, you are both masters in your own right, and it would be excellent for you guys to share your skill.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Thanks for pointing that out Fukada. 

I'll look into this.

[DarkEldar 6]

Thats all.........for now

[bixel 1,223]

WHOA!!!!!!! more residential towers AWESOME!!!!!!