BATs Currently in Progress

[SimHoTToDDy 2,938]

Glenni: those lights are really trippy... I love them! Glad its on its way to being done!

Odainsaker: Once again... O_O

I have to agree, although I kinda like the red, that the stepback lights need to be yellowed some. I think the characters for the congratulate ear look like they just have a white stroke, and aren't really doing any glowing (I guess it just seems too black next to them). other than that and the stuff you brought up, I think it looks amazing. Truly fantastic.

I do have one question for you... What texture are you using for your walls? I am in the process of texturing the Battersea power station model TheQuiltedLama made some time back, and the first thing I could think of that had similar color and texture is this glorious building. I might be able to figure something else out that will look good, but yours just looks sooo damn niiiiice.

Really great work guys,

-Todd

[Jasoncw 11,840]

It looks phenomenal.  While I expect the Penobscot Building to look good, I don't expect it to be as refined at such a small scale as yours.  I guess I have a goal to work towards. 

So, first, something I've kind of been thinking about for my BATs, is, what is the connection between your lighting fixtures and your lights?  Are the lights actually coming from the fixtures?  And also, what settings do you have your lights at?  They have the right amount of evenness, but it's still bright enough at the hot spot.

My only critique is that the window lights could be a little brighter.  Not necessarily across the board, but in some areas.  Or, maybe there should just be a little more contrast.

[Odainsaker 2,134]

@SimHoTToDDy:  omigosh, I was browsing 3ds models on the Stex a day ago, and was hoping that after all this time someone may have picked up the Battersea station, and it is now looking great in your thread.  I must confess, the brick textures I used are really defiled variations of the Maxis brick texture originally included with the BAT.  The overall colors or brightness have been changed via Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro in different projects, and when necessary I also roughly changed the color or brightness of the mortar.  Because the small Maxis brick image will make patterns when tiled over large areas, I created a fresh giant canvas image and pasted the brick image as well as its mirrors and flips in random places to try and avoid patterning, and then darkened, dirtied, or desaturated where needed.  With lots of openings or other articulation on a wall you can get away with smaller or thinner images, but broad expanses of brick wall will take a broad image.  This is a crude, heroic, heavy-handed way of doing things carried over from early learning on Gmax, but it still works.  However, the viewport does not always like showing textures at these sizes on objects and greatly reduces the resolution.

Here is a sample once ago long built from Maxis bricks for Gmax, though it is just as well if not better to reduce the size to something properly manageable:


@Jasoncw:  I must admit my lights are cheats.  The fixtures are merely boxes set at an angle on a pole and with thin boxes on face for the glass.  They will never work as real fixures with an internal light, a controlled aperture, parabolic light casting interior, or a lense shape, and buildings like this often have elaborate multi-clusters of such lights which would be too involving.  Just above and almost tangent with the center of the "glass" is a spotlight aimed to cast the light across the breadth of the wall, and its attenuation and hotspot/falloff cone gets tinkered to spread the light where I want it.  Of course, being solely a classic spotlight, my terraces have sharp light cones shooting out of the pitch darkness, and spreading the falloff tends to spread too much of the light away from how I want it to cast on the wall.  On top of the spot light is a small omni to flood some light around the light source.  It is as if the fixture lense were curved to spread light around the sides of the fixture to its surrounding sides, while still primarily casting it strongly forward.  There is also the sense that the light is much more intense at the source even though it is not obeying inverse-square decay, and you can push the parameters to deliberately control that effect and adjust the parameters of both the spot and omni so that they seem to blend nicely.  You can even change transition colors between them...in my building, the spot is casting the darker red, while the omni does a less saturated orange-gold.  This is convoluted and completely unrealistic light, with little relation to how light is actually cast or technically decays over a distance, but for this circumstance, it fakes the desired effect sufficiently.  I was a lot clumsier doing this with the Tower Life Building in the background...the green pyramidal roof came out okay, but the tiers were tougher with lots of overexposure-like whitening effects.

On the Broadway Mansions, test rendering showed that the actual glass lense of the light fixture was still too dark to look like a light source...doh!, I'm still learning self-illumination in Max, and so I put a self-illuminated material on the fixture lense.  If you look on the right hand side of the image at the angled wing in the back, you can see a small corner terrace with glowing light fixtures not casting the same red light across the entire wall as on the other wings.  That is simply the light created from self-illumination, and I will have to assume it is somewhat closer to acting like real light than the mish-mash I had made.

Yep, I'm embarrassed to admit some of the grossly inelegant things I do.

[SimHoTToDDy 2,938]

Ahhh excellent! You can never have too big a texture in my book. Its better to start giant and scale down then start small and scale up you know! Well, your method for making it was my exact solution to the power stations enormous, long, brick walls. Just make an uber texture ( I think the one I'm using now is 3200x 3000, so don't feel bad about how big yours is). I'll still see how this one looks, and I'll defiantly use it in the future (if not on the Battersea, then some other monstrosity).

Many thanks Odainsaker,

-Todd

[Glenni 1,444]

Originally posted by: Odainsaker Wow Glenni, if architect Shin Takamatsu were somehow working perhaps in Scandinavia, I can imagine him producing something like that.

quote>

Heh, we have a lot of architecture like this in scanidnavia too... this building was actually inspired by a lot of recently built buildings in my town, Haugesund. XD

[SimFox 802]

Odainsaker:

Your mish-mash worked perfectly. 3D ain't real. And it dosen't necessarily needs to be. It is an art form and it would be same as demanding expressionist paintings be 100% photorealistic!

As for the light fixtures and self-illumination. there are few things to keep in mind. Although self-illuminated materials may be used to created "light" in the scene with FG this method is anything but accurate. This, however is a least of problems (see the noting above). Real issue comes with the string possibility of pesky artifacts such a scheme may produce in case of too bright and too small (area wise) at the same time surface/geometry with such a material. FG simply would have hard time "even-ing" out the samples. Plus the light distribution of such a lighting could only be used to simulate extremely defused flood lighting, like, for instance, in office space... The good parts of such a system is that it is a virtually FREE (in terms of calculation time) lighting. And it works great when you need to create defuse light typical for most interior situations (well, at least when looked at from outside and at tinny scale)

Things you do are obscenely elegant!

[ianpaschal 77]

Quick MR Question:

I'm trying to add lights inside a building scene that's supposed to be lit on the inside. This project isn't a Simcity BAT, it's a project for school. Most large buildings have very dark interiors since their centers are so far from the walls where windows might be and as a result are in shadow and as result of that usually have their lights on even during the day.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to light up my buildings with omni's or whatever. I remember reading that even when you increase their multiplier to something ridiculous like 1000 they still don't make themselves visible because they're still negligible in terms of light output compared to the sky.

Is there anyway to fix this without making them all have multipliers of 10,000,000? (A cleaner, more artful solution?)

[Jasoncw 11,840]

You might be able to do two renders with different exposures, and then edit them together in Photoshop.

[ianpaschal 77]

Oh god, that sounds like a pain in the ass.

[kellydale2003 2,276]

I think I'm going to start this building: even get a monorail and make a 2nd version with a canal there Click image for higher resolution.

[patriots_1228 51]

where else but the Capital of Compensation...i assume thats a dubai thing [dubai=capital of compensation]

[kellydale2003 2,276]

yesh it is dubai

[mcarch 15]

Trump Tower and Hotel none-the-less

[kellydale2003 2,276]

great building though; looks interesting. Great arcitechture!

[mcarch 15]

Kellydale: How is the New WTC coming along?

[kellydale2003 2,276]

coming along great; barely working on it lately. But I started Freedom Tower. Hopefully next week I'll have a render. Its taking longer and longer to render.

[ianpaschal 77]

Some more cathedral has materialized:

[SimHoTToDDy 2,938]

Great improvement since the last blue stages we have seen. Flying buttresses for the win!!!

[kellydale2003 2,276]

wow i like that scipio

[nihonkaranws 88]

Alkaline Northwest Works Pulp Mill (not done yet):

[kellydale2003 2,276]

New Under Construction Skyscraper.

I dont think I will keep the textures this pure.

Decided to have a little fun and render from inside. Something went retarded with the rendering.

I'm not adding blinds to the Shinjuku Centre because u dont see blinds in a building when its under construction.

[One City Plaza] This one I'm adding blinds too. Its a mix between WTC 7 and The First Canadian Place.

[mcarch 15]

kellydale: Any release dates? Anything ready soon?

[GizmoCity 16]

Originally posted by: Scipio nice stuff tonks, not really my style but looking good. my only complaint though with some of your stuff is that it's not dirty enough. SC4 is disgustingly clean imo, and a few dirty buildings here and there wouldn't hurt in the least. With that in mind:

MODULAR TRAIN PLATFORMS!!111

These are 2 tile long sections, which are slightly more than a tile wide to meet the tracks nicely. They come in 4 flavors right now; Normal, Simplified Normal, Stairs, and Kiosk Building. I still have to make some additions and stuff but they're nearly done. Also coming up are the end pieces that taper down.

And more progress on the main building:

I swear I will finish this one soon, but I'm going to need Simfox to render it for me. Not sure if he's down with that.quote>

 

This looks really wonderfull!! It is the central station that im looking for in my city!!  I hope you will release it soon! Is this station platforms and building based on a dutch station? because it has some tipical dutch style elements.

[kellydale2003 2,276]

No I didn't make release dates for them. This took me like a week to get where I am. Usually I can do that within 1 - 2 hours. But I'm very busy and try fit room for these skyscrapers.

[nihonkaranws 88]

[mfulton 0]

Kellydale2003: I really can't wait to see these projects. I've waited for the new World Trade Center for a while and these other projects look great. Hurry up!

[patriots_1228 51]

nihon, excellent mix of 3ds and photoshop!

great pic!

and kellydale, wow.

[JakeMD 107]

[patriots_1228 51]

made a quickie chicago spire in 30 minutes.

All it was was array, twist, taper. Not intended to be 100%, maybe like 70-90%. The Top and the Base aren't going to be exact, although they will have the general idea. The tower parts are about 100%, although im not sure if the first floor is a pentagon, hexagon, or what, i did a pentagon cause it looked nicest imo.

All i have left really is the base and nightlights. O, and then the battle that is exporting.

[kellydale2003 2,276]

Wow I love that patriot.