BATs Currently in Progress

[Jasoncw 11,841]

Scipio, I wonder if you could use a displacement map to do the rest?

[SimFox 802]

OK, I'll be starting batting again...

I have several ongoing projects in various stages of readiness.

Here is one:

Federation Tower from Moscow:

This is somewhat smaller than Zoom5 view adjusted to fit 800 pix limit. To see Zoom5 pixel per pixel click on the image.

When I stared it I didn't realize how huge this building actually is. As of now it is in accurate world sizes. I wonder is it worth while to apply 1.33 stretch to it, or is too tall as is?

[ilikehotdogsalot 308]

Just insane. Why can't all buildings be like this?

[Godzillaman 21]

I remember there was a less detailed version of that...

[autoVino 26]

Wow... that just insane.

[ianpaschal 77]

Jason: Nailed the sucker with a normal map

Simfox: Holy s h i t! That is stunning. Screw the censor, a bat as impressive as that deserves strong language.

[jayo 44]

Simfox-Freakin jesus!!

Scipio:Thats looking amazing-When are you going to upload your other BAT?

Well i just uploaded my prop pack

[SimFox 802]

but how about height?

Scipio:

You say normal map? But where did that come?

Have you made it yourself? If so would you care to elaborate how?

[st louis dude 6]

nice they are all good

[____----____ 37]

autovino!!! WOW!

[SimRabbit 48]

like jayo holy jesus Simfox, how long did it took you to make that render?

[WeekendCityPlanner 19]

Man Simfox, that building is amazing. I bet the finished product is gonna be phenomonal.(did I spell that right)

[SimFox 802]

SimRabbgit:

Actually not long.

Such a zoom 5 view takes about 12-15 min on Q6600 (@normal speed). It is flashy and shape of the towers is very complex, but it is one continuous surface, smooth one, no great big "dead end" recesses. Plus nature of the materials and overall effect lends itself very well for optimization.

Here is current stage of OSS One SilverSea:

this one for instance takes twice as long to render, render needs to distribute light in all the recesses of the builidng. In order to get good clean picture there settings have to be significantly higher. Also all the individual frames etc. because of all the blurred reflections and some refractions.

But this would be a good example how polygon count doesn't affect render times at all: Federation Tower is about 1 900 000 polygons in its current state (btw all the blinds are geometry)

And OSS is about 500 000 polygons.

[SimRabbit 48]

Nemesis666: is it spelled phenomenal.

edit: simfox, then you must have a really good machine. Mine takes aprox 20 minutes to render a building that tall.

[ianpaschal 77]

Jayo: I will, but right now my buildings are real size so I'm slowly working this lot out so it fits the grid.  eventually it will be a 4x2:

Once I get a few more buildings made this week (I'm on break, whohooo) then I will make like 3 different arrangements that fit that layout so that they're usable.  Right now however they have sizes like 5.6 and 5.4 and 3.7 meters wide so I need to combine some to fit a tile properly.

I'm also working on a prop back as well though.  Includes some things like pedestrian only street markers.  They're like little 1 meter poles across the entrance to pedestrian mall tiles so only people can go on them and no cars, as well as terrace cafe props and french fry stands.

Simfox: Of course!  There's several ways.  You can do it within 3ds Max by using render to texture.  I cannot remember the exact steps but I figured it out, it wasn't too difficult.  You have to do something along with selecting the object, setting an envelope size for what detail to include in the normal maps then rendering the normal maps to fit a low poly version.  I also found the niftiest tools from nVidia.  Here are the links to them.  They're free and legal, so no worries, but the download links were a pain to find on nVidia's site so I'm saving you some trouble:

Melody:

Download

Melody is a something that you can import a high poly model and a low poly model and it will create normal maps for it.  This isn't very useful for simcity though.  It was useless for me for this project because not having to make a high detail version of that ornamentation was the whole point.  I can be very nifty for some game design projects if you're into that though.

Photoshop Plugins:

Download

This is the good stuff.  You install this thing and then in photoshop you have your texture and you then click Filter > nVidia Tools > Normal Map Filter and you can generate normal maps out of your texture based on the lighting in the texture.  In this way I used the lighting in my photo of the ornamentation to get a normal map of those swirls and things that I used on the model since Mental Ray doesn't like Bump maps.  I'm thinking now I will have to go make normal maps of all my brick walls!

Hope these help.

[autoVino 26]

simfox: you have to tell me how you get those stone walls at the base, they just look amazing.

[patriots_1228 51]

Simfox: Could you give me a quick two sentences or so on how you make your glass? is it an arch and design? what bump map (if any) do you use? Ive been trying to get somthing like that all day. It looks incredible.

not looking for a tutorial, just what kind of material and any important settings.

[josefmayor 8]

Simfox you make me feel like I suck at BATing lol You're way too good!

[brodequin666 2]

Simfox, just make them BATs already so I can put them in my city, geez

[bigskelding 12]

yaaaaaa im not even gonna post my building in progress because... well look up lol. Great job guys

[autoVino 26]

I think I needed to up the max refract/reflect settings on this, it begins to default to black in the background.

eidt: @Scipio "In this way I used the lighting in my photo of the ornamentation to get a normal map of those swirls and things that I used on the model since Mental Ray doesn't like Bump maps. "

why doesn't mental ray like Bump mapping?

[ianpaschal 77]

I don't know. You ask it! It didn't appear and I suspected that was because like the Skylight, mr Sky ignored things like Bump maps and Reflection maps (not reflections from material, just reflection maps). Besides, normal mapping is vastly superior to bump mapping

[autoVino 26]

hmmm... maybe.  But normal mapping is better.

[WeekendCityPlanner 19]

You guys with the flashy 3ds max put me to shame. I should upgrade to 3ds max. Gmax is starting to feel constricted.

[SimFox 802]

Scipio:

I think MR likes Bump just fine...

I'm just a bit confused over the normal maps.

As far as i understand their value is to "bake in" the geometry information for interaction with lights without getting the mode heavy with actual polygons. It is used mostly in games for that reason. And it is normally made from hi-poly model. Doing so in case of BAT or for that matter any still/fixed imagery is a bit conterprouctive - you can always default to you original Hi Poly and get better results.

Deriving them from photo is,however a sort of hack, isn't it? If I understand the process correct too many assumptions have to be made about location of light source, isn't it so? But that just a thoughs. For reason mentioned above I, personally never used Normal maps...

I'll certainly try that plugin and things like brick walls at close range may be quite a good application for a Normal maps. But there is a limitation to that. The process just as bump is in fact a Post process. Meaning that it is calculated on the basis of ready pixels of the image. So in in effect any result would have to be at least 2pixels big. In terms of BAT that would amount to about 20-30cm - a bit to much for a groove, I think. Where are real things (like geometry and even bitmaped textures) can go to sub pixel level.

Also I suspect that there may be some issues with using Normal maps (as a perspective derived technology with orthographic projections. Even Bump maps which are in effect a 2d elevations maps do work significantly better with perspective renders.

You've mentioned reflection maps. I think the issue with them isn't that Sky ignores them, but the fact hat them being virtual, not real geometry they are not illuminated by lights in the scene. They brightness is derived from image own RGB values. Meaning that brightest spot on the image could not go beyond value of 1 of normal NON photometric light. Now, try to put such a light in a "day" scene and you notice that you don't notice ANYTHING. The light sources in your scene - Sun and Sky - are about thousands times brighter. They are HDR lights. So the White spot (that denotes Sun) int he "sky" has values on 1 but rather 32 xxx something. Or in terms of RGB not 255,255,255 but 65xxx,65xxx,65xxx.

Also such virtual environments will not work with orthographic cameras. They function on the principal of normals. With regular perspective projection no single spot of a perfectly flat plain will have same normal. They all be unique - eg pointing to different spot on your virtual environment. So that very spot will be reflected. In orthographic projections ALL the points on a flat surface have SAME normal - eg pointing at the very same spot in virtual environment. Because of that such a flat reflective surface will me of any flat color derived from that virtual spot

Would you mind to show that normal mapped detail a bit closer and also at BAT (Zoom5) resolution??

Auto:

Yep you probably should.

I always keep it somewhere around 50. If you don't need it it doesn bother, if you need there it is. Defaults are pretty much anachronisms from the days gone.

I think you also need to change you FG settings - those nasty black spots are caused by wrong interpolation. I've found that old settings from time before "presets" work better if longer. Although when compined with Photo GI solutions sometimes even a bit faster then new model.

Patriot:

yep it is slightly modified Arch&Design material. It is a thin walled glass - meaning it is just a plain. With some refraction color. I've upped reflectivity at 0 from virtually nothing to about 15% to compensate fro the fact that in actually windows there is not one but at least 3 layers of that glass and it is coated. Although not a tacky mirror so popular in late 80s- mid 90s (and even currently in some parts of the worls) it still has greater reflectivity then regular

[ianpaschal 77]

Originally posted by: SimFox Scipio:

I think MR likes Bump just fine...quote>

Oh well, it doesn't matter.  I was not achieving the results I was looking for with them, so I tried something else.

Originally posted by: SimFox I'm just a bit confused over the normal maps.

As far as i understand their value is to "bake in" the geometry information for interaction with lights without getting the mode heavy with actual polygons. It is used mostly in games for that reason. And it is normally made from hi-poly model. Doing so in case of BAT or for that matter any still/fixed imagery is a bit conterprouctive - you can always default to you original Hi Poly and get better results.quote>

Of course and I felt for the longest time like my model was sort of a half-ass job because I didn't actually model that stuff, but to be really honest, it was like modeling individual bricks.  Somewhere you have to draw the line and I really was not going to spend hours modeling that ornamentation.

Originally posted by: SimFox Deriving them from photo is,however a sort of hack, isn't it? If I understand the process correct too many assumptions have to be made about location of light source, isn't it so? But that just a thoughs. For reason mentioned above I, personally never used Normal maps.quote>

If you make them from a model (3ds max or Melody) than NO assumptions are made about light since they're generating 3d data from a 3d object.  You can see this if you use a normal map on an object in a scene then move around an omni light.  The idea is that it still reacts accurately to light.  In my case the normal map responds to the sunlight.

Generating them from a photo is somewhat cheating however if you think about it, its an impressive technology.  If there is enough sunlight in the photo you can actually see how light should behave; exactly what a normal map is designed to do.  The normal map I created for my ornaments is by no means an exact replica of the ornamentation in the photo however I think it's close enough that it doesn't matter, at least for SC4.

[SimFox 802]

Scipio, could you just post here one of those normal maps?? just want to play with it. And I'm afraid I wouldn't get my own done right from get go...

[ianpaschal 77]

I tried a few different versions:

Biased Normal:

This one worked, but had way too much detail that it just looked like a pile of white... paper-mache is the closest I can think of.

Colorspace Normal:

This one worked, but the lines were too thin. They sort of were lost.

Biased Normal with far less detail:

This is the one I'm using. I made the effect pretty strong in nVidia photoshop plugin, then 900x in the material editor so I had the shapes there, and strong, it looked the best.

[Jasoncw 11,841]

Looks great scipio!

SimFox, both buildings are looking great.  I still think you should scale it up.

[bixel 1,223]

"Simfox, just make them BATs already so I can put them in my city, geez"

Yes gogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogo!!!!!

ONE SILVER SEA ALREDDDDY comon gogogogogo!!!

Bixel es muy impatient!