autoVino's bat projects

[kellydale2003 2,276]

It looks more like a coal processing plant - there are no chimneys burning it or anything. But this is going to look soo good in the waterfront high tech areas.

[autoVino 26]

@grbac80 - Coal can be very clean, it just takes the correct technology to do so! After some processing and special fractional separation (a technology known as coal gasification) the coal becomes mostly pure carbon oxides and hydrogen gas without any heavy metal impurities. Any impurities can be collected and are often marketable.

The new mixture, called a syngas (for synthesis gas because it is often used to synthesize other carbon based materials), can be either very cleanly burned at very high efficiencies or used on the market... for efficient fuels cells and hydrogen fuel cells. If burned, a double turbine system can allow for high efficiency (for a heat engine) and causes a strong concentration of carbon oxide gas which can be either stored or marketed. Of course there exist metal complex catalysts (and this is a popular cutting-edge research among organometallic chemists) that can convert the carbon oxides to other materials too.

[grbac80 5]

Oooops, you slapped me good. *sits down*.   Seems like I didn't inform myself before going into discussion. Thanks for the clarification.

[autoVino 26]

It's okay and no problem.  Small update for the oxygen processing for the syngas synthesis:

 

[kellydale2003 2,276]

WOW!! I love the texture on those...And there so round and such great eye candy lol (but seriously though).

Your a smart guy aren't you autovino! You should help me with some precal sometime

Keep it up - I love it.

[grbac80 5]

Woooooo, man that is damn good. Beautiful. Spiffin'.

[kellydale2003 2,276]

Autovino, idk if it's your kind of building. But I saw it in Toronto and managed to grab a photo of it off the net, I don't know what its called but it's visible from the CN tower. It's a nice building, just showing incase your interested.

Also, how would you do this kind of lighting?

[autoVino 26]

Royal Bank Plaza, I had that building photographed extensively, but I'm missing a few gigs of Toronto pictures that I took (Probably accidental deleted when I was switching hard drives).

I do have a couple pictures, but I feel that there are many more internet pictures that would be better since I took a lot of these pictures at night and on the run without a tripod... not a good mix.

For that lighting, you would use a camera with a medium film speed (~800 iso) and set the exposure to about 1 sec with the corresponding aperture width.

If you mean in 3ds max, then you would give the material a self illumination and increase the number of diffuse bounces to around 10. Self illumination can be given to a material by either applying a illumination (lume) shader or if you have a 2k version of 3ds max then turn on physical lighting in the mi arch & design material. The mr exposure EV should be fairly low, around 8 to 9.

Although that is an interesting building (and Toronto is full of interesting modern architecture, especially the UT pharmacy building at night!.. The art museums go without mention), I'm more interested in lower large scale buildings, something that covers a large area, but doesn't go to hight... like the FutureGen complex, or a lot of my other earlier bats.

[kellydale2003 2,276]

haha - I don't need a photography lesson And I can see your someone with a little bit more realism eh, Everyone just makes skyscrapers when they Bat, but I can tell you love architecture if height doesn't matter.

Yeah okay, I'll try your solution in the near future, just need to do some travelling. Also do you think it's possible to get a reflection like this?



Because on the New WTC 7 - There are silver poles with blue interior lighting. And when I recently took this photo in this lovely highrise hotel (oh yeah!), I noticed this reflection almost exactly similiar to the wtc 7.
Notice how the rays of light go in a parallel to the view  of the camera. (and yes I know my shutter wasnt brilliant and I treated my canon like a point and shoot, this is in an elevator).

But yeah, any idea how to simulate those kind of reflections? Would it be the light on something that's not in the material editor?

Thanks AutoVino, You've been helping me so much! I think I might give a lil credit to you for the NWTC.

[autoVino 26]

There is a way! There is a setting just for this in the mi Arch&Design Materials called anisotropy. It simulates materials that have many small "divisions" of sorts and scratches - or brushed metal. I do believe there is an excellent mental ray tutorial in the help file on this that also explains it fairly will.

Essentially, just turn the value down for it away from 1.0 and the angle. 1.0 is isotropic, values grater than one stretch the reflection horizontally, values that approach zero stretch it vertically.

This article explains the functionality of the Arch&Design materials (part of MIA shader): http://www.mentalimages.com/fileadmin/user_upload/PDF/arch_and_design.pdf

edit: I do believe this is post #1000 (including the thread origin post)  I have an update about night lighting, but there seems to be a memory related issue that needs to be adjusted.

edit again: https://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x62/autoVino/z4night-1.jpg  sample night lighting, there are a few errors (made by me, not mr) and this is fairly memory intensive rendering as well.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

congratulations!!

[kellydale2003 2,276]

Damn!! I'll try that though, If it's worth the texture I will render it like that. If it's too heavy on memory I'll just use bump>noise or something.

Oh btw, Jasoncw got your 1,000th post in your thread

Congratz!!

[autoVino 26]

1000th reply to my thread... I do believe, my first post is the 0th reply. Therefore the 999th reply (which is mine) would be the 1000th post on the thread.

Using the bump-noise will be many many times heavier on memory and render time than this effect. This shader is specifically designed and optimized for the anisotropic effect! Of course bump will also work, but to get the same results, the rendering time would increase significantly.

It seems I've reached this laptop's memory limit with the night lighting! Unfortunately, Mental Ray has implemented new bitmap handling methods that make it's memory usage extremely marginal compared to the rest of the renderer, so rendering the image in parts may not necessarily fix anything as the FG calculations are what causes the memory error (which need to be calculated in order for a render in parts to occur).

[autoVino 26]

Here's a thought: how to convert a perspective camera into ortho projection?

It may sound easy, just check the ortho box on the camera, but this will also turn off all perspective dependant effects, such as volumetrics and other physical effects.

I've read a couple of solutions on the Internet, such as place the camera far away and give it a very narrow field of view.  This did not work because the smaller the angle, the more the scene began to behave like an ortho projection and certain effects would stop working properly.  I also noticed that as the camera angle approached zero, the render time seemed to get longer.

Another idea was to use a mirror that was placed far away and to just let the scene reflect off of that and have a camera with small field of view.  Results are, of course, the same.  Fortunately, this is a better solution, even though it does not work.

What needs to be done is the mirror must be converted into a parabolic lens that will reflect the scene into a camera.  This way, the camera can have a large field of view, but still display orthographic properties.  Here is an example (script generated)

Ortho top:

Perspective bottom into a lens:

When the vertex density of the lens gets high, then the renders are pretty much the same.  The quality of the second is a little bit lower and some adjustments in photo-shop need to be done -- mainly flipping it.  Otherwise the images are the same.  The lens can be made wider than is shown above, that is merely to show that the image is lens generated.

Theoretically, perspective-dependant effects can be enabled with this method, but that part still needs to be tested.

And it worked!

Camera set up:

and the render (the camera position was modified because the first set up did not yield convincing results):

And there you have it -- volumetric effects in an orthographic projection.  I'm sure the same can be applied to DOF and other effects, but I don't see why it would be needed.

This can be especially useful at showing the beam from very bright lights... often you see a halo around them and such an effect can be applied to a night render (of course, one would have to get very creative with the exporting process!).

I'm going to try to polish up the script that makes this effect possible and I'll attach it to this post.

[autoVino 26]

I've been really busy (working on character modeling and video compositing using some of the new production shaders introduced in 3ds max 2008... but not officially supported until 3ds max 2009).

This brings up an interesting idea of how to include ray traced (and HDRI lighting) surroundings in simcity. I don't know if the method will work, but essentially it is using the method described above to simulate ortho perspective with normal perspective (for HDRI maps to work well) and using the production shaders to simulate a render designed for compositing. I will post some examples on this later if I can get this to work, it is merely an idea right now.

[Evillions 552]

Will any of these great BATs be released or just needed some lotting and modding?

[autoVino 26]

Yes they will be released! :-)

I'm working on some memory saving techniques right now for some of the larger models. The coal plant is more or less ready for final render with the exception of a couple lights and memory problems when calculating FG. I think I've found a way around this, though, but the calculations are only 81% done so there's still 19% left to mess up on in FG calculations!

As for lotting and modding (probably mostly modding), I do believe the ITC team at sc4 devotion is responsible for this (and other models) after export. I will probably do all the modding that is necessary for the s3d files. The centrepoint model will be next after I get this done (and it should be far easier to export as well since each render averages 40 min instead of 3 or 4 hours)!

edit: here is a very basic example of image compositing:

Both are the same image.  The first is the render output (on a white background) the second is the raw alpha output.  If these are mapped on an cleverly created LOD, then reflections cam appear in simcity!  of course this will require transparency in the s3d file mapping.

[kellydale2003 2,276]

Dear, Autovino

We miss you! 

Sincerely, yours truly.

[doodlea21 31]

On ‎31‎/‎10‎/‎2009 at 4:29 PM, autoVino said:

Yes they will be released! :-)