Twinkle, twinkle, little BAT...

[mattb325 28,880]

Another charming little mid-rise. Even if the crestings are hence-forth known as doodly-dos 

[T Wrecks 10,209]

That fits right in with @nofunk's Carew Tower and its 'badonkadonk'.

[madhatter106 3,905]

Yeah, a little more searching and the term "cresting" sounds right.  Though I think "dooly-dos" is more modern...

I am on a cresting doodly-do kick it seems.  This BAT was started ages ago and then abandoned; I found it, messed with it for a few minutes, and was able to salvage some semblance of something.  It still needs some on the ground details - light fixtures, etc. to finish it out.

I forced myself to nightlight the deco building with the rooftop restaurant.  That was a lot of trial and error - my poor laptop practically had smoke coming out of it by the end....and on a whim, I was messing around and started this little guy...

I really like this end result - though much needs to be done, like the front and side entrances.  It's based off a building in my swipe file, and this is probably the closest I have ever come to copying something from "real life" in that there haven't been too many derivations from the source.  It's not 100% recreation, but it's higher than my normal recreation percentage.  Maybe I will do a bunch of 1x2 midrise offices, I don't think there are that many floating around...

[madhatter106 3,905]

Messing around with another one - this was based off a building in Detroit, though I added another floor as it was looking too short.  At least the front elevation is similar/derived from the source pic in the swipe file, but that's probably where it ends.

Even with the extra floor added, this guy has ended up being substantially shorter than most offerings in the last couple of packs.  It feels more like a BAT from an earlier volume of my offices, rather than part of what I have been doing lately, which have been much taller and grander.  Still I like this little fellow...

[Jasoncw 11,933]

Yeah you've got a lot of 1920s neoclassical and art deco office buildings going on, an 1800s factory building stands out. 

Also I looked around for the building in Detroit and I found it, but I have to inform you that the building is red and not lime green in real life.  

[mattb325 28,880]

Stunning additions to the set. I especially like the nite lighting (or should that read: slow torture for the batter) on the rooftop restaurant 

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Beautiful models once again, all of them! If I had to choose one that I like particularly, I'd go for the narrow (1x2?) building. It's somehow very pleasantly proportioned and seems to look light and elegant despite the heavy horizontal ornaments and the thick columns at the ground floor.

[madhatter106 3,905]

@Jasoncw - wait, it's not lime green?  Ugh.  I need to recalibrate my monitor...

@mattb325 - yeah, nightlighting in gmax - "death by a thousand cuts" feels more like it.  Especially with the news that these Intel chips are going to make all of our computers slower...

@T Wrecks - I like this one, too; it's not a size (1x2 multistory) that is frequently BATted, and I do like the proportions as you have mentioned.  I think this turned out so well because it was a near recreation, rather than derived from source images.  There's a delicacy to it that I managed to not mangle entirely, especially in gmax.

Forcing myself to texture what I have modeled, rather than modeling anything else.  Here's one of the ones from earlier last month...

My retinas are burned out, I need to look at it in different light on a different day.  Plus I need to tweak the little Omni light in the front entrance in the night scene...

[madhatter106 3,905]

Moar texturing.  I recycled some old textures - I think I need to tweak the colors as they are too similar to other buildings in my canon, because of this...

My, have the doodly-doos turned out rather nicely.

On a texturing roll...

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

I love the buildings, I would love to see some water towers on at least one of them.

[MillionSeven 47]

I love and need this kind of buildings!!

[madhatter106 3,905]

On ‎1‎/‎6‎/‎2018 at 10:17 AM, Aaron Graham said:

I love the buildings, I would love to see some water towers on at least one of them.

Yeah  love me some BATs with water towers (I think you had done some a while back, right?)
But not sure - it seems like more of a residential midrise thing.  Do commercial buildings also have them in the big cities?

[mattb325 28,880]

The new textures are looking great! They do use water towers on commercials, or wherever additional water pressure is needed to have the bathroom taps function on the top floors, but they are quite often hidden from view behind the mechanical penthouse 

[madhatter106 3,905]

I spent a chunk of time today reading and watching videos about urban water towers.  It makes me only want to drink bottled water when I leave the house now.  I decided to throw a few into the BATs for this set - here's the first one.

It needs a few more struts in the support structure.  I confess I had a devil of a time trying to get the "create shape from edges" function to work in gmax - it likes to skew a couple of the vertices and I can't figure out how to fix it.  What seems like an easy function is a bit wonky - and my 700 page gmax tome only had a few short sentences about the feature...

Here's another one from the swipe file - I stumbled across it and gave it a good shot, and it turned out rather nice.  Needs textures aside from all the roof stuff.  I didn't realize I was looking at a picture of the side of the building, which explains why the entrance is not in the center of the elevation - but it helps overcome the tyranny of symmetry that a lot of my BATs have. 

[T Wrecks 10,209]

You know what, I think the water tower actually did it for that roof. When I try to imagine it without now, it seems unfinished somehow. The building itself, I dunno... somehow the windows look like pasted-on stickers on this one. Maybe it's the strong contrast between the thick and dark frames and the relatively bright window panes that makes them look somewhat cartoonish, but in any case something is wrong here that works a lot better on all the other buildings you've shown so far.

That latest addition is totally beautiful!  The side entrance is a nice touch as well - might also be good for a corner lot. 

[raynev1 1,886]

It looks like the next pack will be a whopper . Your work with Gmax is superb , keep it up . 

[madhatter106 3,905]

@T Wrecks - yes, indeed, I agree - the model looked pretty blah and naked.  Adding the water tower gave it the life it needed, and it is totally believable on there.  This BAT went from "ho-hum" to "two thumbs up" for me just with that little addition.  As for the windows, I know what the situation is here - they're pretty wide, so you get a lot more window glass that isn't held in shadow from the window frames, and this is one of the first times I've used an opaque version of a simplified Maxis glass texture; in the majority of my other BATs, the opacity was lowered on the glass, so they looked a bit darker and "vague," but I didn't do it on this one.  I think I need to tweak the texture a bunch.  I've been trying to avoid transparent glass, due to the pixel singe and burn that gmax sometimes does; this was discussed a while back in my thread here, sometime around October of 2011 if I recall correctly.  As for the last BAT, yeah, this little fellow would work great on a corner!

@raynev1 - thanks!  I know that every know and then a real stinker escapes from my gmax vault, but I hope I release more whoppers than stinkers!

Okay, folks, this has been driving me nuts.  I've been trying to get the "create shape from edges" function to work (what I think is) correctly in good old gmax, and I've reached my wit's end.  I've followed the lesson on lattice in the Omnibus here, as well as searched some threads both here and online, and I seem to be either missing something or no one has addressed this problem.  See below picture to illustrate...I was going to put this in the BAT Troubleshooting thread, but not sure if it would be seen there...

I created a yellow box standing 5 by 5 by 5, with two segments for length and width, and one for the height.  I've applied the Edit Mesh modifier, then selected all the edges, then pressed the Create Shape from Edges button in the Edit Geometry menu.  It gives me the option of the shape type being smooth or linear, and I select the linear option, and make sure that the Ignore Hidden Edges box is ticked.  It creates the new shape as a spline (which I changed to white in the picture, to better see and differentiate it), and I then can go in and change the mesh thickness, etc.  My thickness is 0.3 (I think?) in this example, with the number of sides input as 4 and the angle at 45 degrees.  And what I get is the above result.

Something is up with this - as you can see, I have a lot of edges of the spline which are twisted and tweaked, while some are perfectly normal looking.  It's visible in all the viewports, as well as in the preview render (once you've added a UVW map so you can see the spline.)  I've tried adding an Edit Mesh modifier to the new spline, and moved vertices around but it only changes things (warps things where it fixes others), it doesn't correct the problem. 

If the mesh were rounded (let's say the smooth option was selected when you create the shape from the edges) or if the mesh settings were 12 sides at whatever angle (more tube-like than beam-like), it probably wouldn't matter.  But this is driving me nuts, and I'm sure I am missing something.  Or if there's a modifier to add that will "fix" the vertices or the mesh, I can't figure it out...

Ultimately, the same effect could be achieved with several different objects stacked together (akin to something that you might find in the BAT Essentials tutorial, in that you stack a bunch of standard primitives together, like building blocks or Tinker Toys), but I want/need this to work properly, and it stymies me that it doesn't.  One should be able to create an object from the edges without it giving you a very messy mesh as a result.  So if anyone has any insights, I'd love to hear 'em...

[mattb325 28,880]

For that first model, try recessing the window frames a little further back to avoid the pasted on look that's occured with the combo of gmax blurry shadows and a window frame texture of a similar tonal value. Also, the glass texture could use some more gray in place of the cream areas and some darker areas within each frame to simulate blinds being drawn/opened and reflections of the outside world...

 

Now for a cube, I wouldn't necessarily go about it this way...maybe a  spherical object would be OK. (Also, btw, this isn't the usual case of gmax vs 3dsMax...following your technique, I got exactly the same results in 3dsMax). In this instance, I would just use the plain old lattice modifier, but it doesn't appear to work in GMax (or it's been soooo long since I've used gmax that I've forgotten how!)

So, for your issue, this is how I would go about it:

1) Create Box as described

2) Use the create shape (but set to smooth rather than linear)

3) Your Spline will look like the first picture with thickness at .3 sides = 4. It's pretty, but maybe for another day 

4) Highlight all the vertices, right click and make them a corner

5) Add a cap holes modifier (with smooth new faces)

 

There are probably other ways, but this seems to work (there are still some small odd angles, even though they are greatly reduced) but like everything I do, is super quick....it will also work on the linear, but I wanted to get a feel for what it was doing (hence the smooth)

[Jasoncw 11,933]

The underlying problem is that even though splines seem like one dimensional objects, the vertexes actually have a direction. When you "create shape from edges" it doesn't know how to align the directions correctly, and so it twists around. 

[DavidDHetzel 1,816]

On 1/9/2018 at 4:53 AM, madhatter106 said:

I spent a chunk of time today reading and watching videos about urban water towers.  It makes me only want to drink bottled water when I leave the house now.  I decided to throw a few into the BATs for this set - here's the first one.

 

I really like this as is, are these the textures that are going on the building? If not I think you should go for similar textures to what this has now. something bright cheery and looks freshly painted. (Maybe tone down the read a lil bit)

[madhatter106 3,905]

@mattb325 - thanks for the insights, I will be playing around with that glass texture on that building.  Working in gmax doesn't help, and I must confess that I have little patience when it comes to figuring out window glass.  Though I expect if I delve into it, I will manage to come up with something. 

Thanks also for the info on the creating objects from edges - I played around with it a bunch just now, and it seems that with gmax, getting a "pretty" mesh is probably impossible as you mentioned; one can cheat and have the mesh thickness a certain amount and multiple sides (say 8 or 12), but anything less than that is going to expose the shortcomings of the program, and look horrible in the render.  I did do a lot of tests with selecting certain edges in a certain order, and found the results differed every time.

I suspect the proper way to do it would be poly-modeling a shape, but I wanted the "down and dirty" quick way - though in the long run, the trial and error and troubleshooting greatly added to my time.  Over the past few years, I have been greatly concerned with getting the number of objects in a BAT model as low as possible, to allow for more precise modeling, as well as the ability to do some trial and error (ie. pushing this wall one way and lowering this row of windows that way, etc.) that doesn't involve making the same change in multiple objects.  For example, using one object for all the window frames of a wall, or one object split into different faces, for glass for an entire wall's worth of windows.  I think (one of) the greatest "sins" of the BAT Essentials tutorial in the omnibus is the reliance on splines for a lot of things - individual walls, individual panes of window glass, etc.  They're fine when you just start out and are learning, but once you're up and running, there are more efficient methods in terms of time, object count, etc.  Someone should write a BAT 2.0 Essentials tutorial.  (Not volunteering here, LOL). 

@Jasoncw - ahhh I had no idea.  Never knew that.  But it does make sense, given the results I've been seeing with playing around the with lattice work in gmax.

@DavidDHetzel - oh no no no, those are dummy gmax place-holder colors.  I only textured the roof and the HVACs/details because I find that the BAT doesn't have much life until you have done that.  Kind of like when I used to do costume renderings - I had to do the face/head/hands and fleshy details before I did any painting or detail work on the clothes.  The red will definitely be toned down, though still red - this building (somewhere in North Carolina) had deep red window casings, something which I was drawn to and which gave it life.

@Aaron Graham - hey Aaron, here's some water towers for ya!

I looked at the tallest buildings I had been BATting lately, and figured some might need a little help with their water pressure.  The Deco one and the pink/peachy one I thought should be ritzy enough to hide their water towers within structures, but the one on the right I couldn't resist leaving exposed to the elements...

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Left water tower: D... don't tell them I'm here, okay?

Middle water tower: If I stick close to my big brother, I'm gonna be fine.

Right water tower: YEAH, LOOK AT ME. YOU BETCHA I AIN'T GOING AWAY. GOT A PROBLEM WITH THAT, BRO?

[edwardjeria 503]

I loved the detail, especially the first one with the chairs and tables on the roof, it's beautiful, great job

[madhatter106 3,905]

Pushing this one around in gmax for about three or four hours, and I don't know if I like it or hate it...

Lots to be done if I do end up finishing it.  I don't know if the water tower is too much (though it fits right into that spot perfectly).  I'm going to be tempted to add water towers to all my BATs now, I love 'em.  Maybe I should height restrict them?  But then it would make me want to BAT taller buildings....

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

OMG!!!!! Water towers!!! 

[mattb325 28,880]

It's looking good so far. I like the 'addition' tacked on at the top. It's nice to see something a little different 

[T Wrecks 10,209]

I like the water tower itself, but I think it might be too high. Shaving off a few metres of the support structure may be worth a try. Otherwise, I actually like the building. Like Matt, I also think the addition on top is a nice change of pace.

[Jasoncw 11,933]

On 1/6/2018 at 12:25 AM, madhatter106 said:

On a texturing roll...

This one I think could have brighter spandrels on the top floors. And I think the notched corners on the lower parts of the building can make sense but imo the top cornice would be better if it was "complete".

(and normally I don't have to quote a preview render to distinguish which BAT I'm talking about because normally there aren't 8+ BATs being worked on at once )

[madhatter106 3,905]

@T Wrecks - the height of the water tower was bugging me, but I think even with a shortened version of it, it still dominates the BAT.  So I nixed it, and I think the result is much better without the tower overpowering it.

@mattb325 - yeah I like the little added "penthouse," I saw something like it in my research and thought, why not...?

@Jasoncw - yeah the notching in the cornice is weird, and is partly a result of my horrible eyesight and misreading a research photograph.  It felt weird BATting it that way, and I should have tried to find a corroborating source photo to doublecheck it.  Ah well - but curiously enough, I did see a building in downtown LA a couple of months ago that did that with the cornice, for some weird reason.  I wish I could remember where it was...

Refining the last one, still needs bunches of details...

[benvoliothefirst 36]

Signed on for the first time in... years maybe? I have a three year old now, so... glad to see you're still at it, MHB!