McDRye tries BAT again..

[toxicpiano 125]

Originally posted by: mcdrye

toxicpiano yes I remember you suggesting this a while back but I didn't answer for some reason.

I have had a look at this, I'd have to use a different method to render a one sided piece, an to get a shadow you'd have the LOD covering the whole thing, but that has caused funky inverse shadows and such for me in previous stuff. I need to see how people do highway walls and such before doing this, I like the idea though, because you could actually have trains passing through.

quote>

Ah I didn't realise that, sorry to ask again. It's been a long time since I've posted at Simtropolis.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

I think for the rails, you could gradually lower them underground until the tops of the rails merge into the rails in the game's rail texture. What you've done so far for the extra rails (the darker ones) is probably all there is that can be done. Something else you can do, is if you move the edge of your BAT/the transition to the maxis rails over a few meters from the edge of the lot, then the change will be less dramatic than if everything changed right at the edge of the lot.

It's too bad that you have to accommodate the maxis rail textures. Your rails are beautiful.

[mcdrye 104]

Wow have I been gone a while! Loads of RL stuff to deal with and boy has this year flown by! Well I haven't forgotten good ole BAT, and though I occasionally opened up BAT it wasn't very productive.

edit: Forgot to mention, my laptop failed back in Spring! Technology hates me! Thankfully I got a new Dell back in April.

This week I decided to get this SSR stuff sorted. Back at the beginning of the year SimFox was giving me some great advice but the prospect of radically altering the models which had already been altered several times before made me lose interest, but they seem so loved by you fab people that it's time I got them done and released.

The old wall textures had to go, oversaturated from multiple edits, barely tileable, and the bump map was flaky. They were still Standard Materials aswell so no ambient occlusion, and rounding corners, which is very useful with old brickwork. So I've retextured the walls and with A&D materials.

Below is the current result, what do you think? An improvement? I think the dirt at the column bases is a bit too dark whereas the top dirt is too light, but I'm fiddling with that still.

Also render time is huge for this 1x1 building, like 15mins, I was wondering if that is normal (I supposed it is HD)?

Also I've been working on a seperate project for months, of which a sneak peek is below...Don't worry! It's actually about 90% complete and this is a small portion of it. The Lucky Penny Casino Hotel. (The Swan hotel I posted a while back is taking a backseat for now.)

[DocRorlach 25]

Looking at these two, especially the sunken subway walls, I am certainly glad you returned. Must be the District Line in London, judging from the rails (and the lack of upkeep by the LTA). I am no use with the BAT, but from a users point of view the overall walls appear a tad too clean, while the dirty portions appear to repeat identially. Then again, if this was available for download as is, I would still use it; the tracks alone would be worth the download. Great work.

[mightygoose 92]

welcome back mcdrye, i do not think that there is enough aging on the sunken rail, considering the age of the bricks there should be more fading and crumbling, more moss etc, they look abit new atm (also somewhat dark perhaps?).

the lucky penny sign looks superb!

cannot wait for your next response.

[Cockatoo 2,256]

Great to see you back man! I really want to see this Casino you've been making... always thought we could do with more of those.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

It's hard for me to comment about the textures since I'm not used to looking at zoom 6, but the bricks could probably be smaller. Aside from the cool features like ambient occlusion, I'd also read the help or search online about the basic reflectivity and glossiness and roughness settings you'd want for the kind of brick that you're making, if you haven't already. You can also read about the various ways of optimizing your materials, because 15 minutes is too long.

So are you sort of reworking the rail stuff? I think it would be really cool if they weren't as deep. SimCity has this really exaggerated sense of depth, and I think this is a good opportunity to reign that in, since this set will be self contained. I also think it would be nice because then you could probably see the beautiful details of the lower part of the wall and the ground from more rotations.

The casino is looking snazzy.

Great to see you back!

[psander5 195]

Welcome back!  Just yesterday I was building a sunken rail network and I was craving this set  I'm pleased you've come back to it! 

Jason brings up a good point about the depth thing.  It hadn't occurred to me before, but I think a few metres shallower might make things look a bit better.  

The problem with dirt and stains is that they cause obvious repeating patterns on modular lots.  If you had half a dozen straight sections in a line you'd be able to spot the pattern repeating.  On single lots it would look great, but I think you have to find a balance between dirtiness and the modular functionality. 

That neon work looks really good to me!  I look forward to seeing what building it relates to! 

[mntoes 270]

Welcome back. I wondered where you had gone. The lucky penny looks great.

[mightygoose 92]

actually jason has a phenomenal point there, a 7.5m deep trench to tie in with the NAM half height stuff could look the bomb.

[mcdrye 104]

Thanks for all the great comments guys! More to be revealed of the Lucky Penny soon...

Meanwhile as per some suggestions, I thought I'd try a less deep SSR.

This is how it looks with the rail bed at 7.5m as opposed to 16m. I'm not sure what I think of it, the default rail texture I used looked crap so I now use a seperate ballast texture with 3d sleepers, also the small gap between tracks in SimCity looks strange here, I could try a deeper level maybe?

[mightygoose 92]

i think that looks excellent... maybe some moss or grass on the floor of the trench, perhaps you could render a 2/3/4/5 tile section with some less subtle weathering and moss... thus having the single tile variant as a repeat unit avoiding the tiling issue others describe. i really think this now looks like a winner.

[SimFox 802]

great to see you're back to your old project... However I feel the urge to mention that it looks way way too dark and "not sun lit". You really have to go back to the drawing board with you material properties. But I do like the whole 7,5m depth thing. This said the all other aspects and dimensions should be scaled appropriately. Simply reducing the depth will and is making the whole thing look squashed/XY stretched

[DocRorlach 25]

The cables along the wall, the gravel, the walls themselves, they all look splendidly realistic. What I find odd-looking is the upper rail set. While I presume this to be bacause of the shadow, the purple tint does look out of place. Then there is the depth of 7.5m. Realistic, yes, but how would that apply in the game where all depths are starting at 8m - it would requie a special hole digger I presume? Or am I looking at the wrong things here?

[SimFox 802]

^^

at the moment you do... As they are now it is purely visual effect that has no actual depth. So no hole digging of any kind is needed. That said it could be an interesting idea to turn this into actually working set - one that would allow automata to pass along...

PS

here is what I sort of suggest color/brightness wise:

[DocRorlach 25]

Sorry, my obviously erroneous assumption had always been that this would be a fully pathed and "automata-applicable" part of a sunken light-rail/tram/subway system. Would be neat, especially since stations that could be used with it already exist. That aside, your corrections/suggestions look splendid, now that the sleepers are visible even in the shadows.

[Slashback 136]

I would delete 1 or 2 power lines, since I think they're taking up way too much space with that depth of the tracks.

Good work, though!

[mightygoose 92]

to address docrorlach, the NAM team are currently working on 7.5m networks for at least the MIS, so it would be future proof.

[DocRorlach 25]

Actually, come to think of it (and seeing the cables near High St. Kensington) the number of cables is fine, but in relation to the rest they would need to be smaller (thinner).

[mcdrye 104]

This is how it looks now, I squashed X axis and adjusted materials and exposure, cables made thinner and squashed along Y axis, dirt needs a sorting at the bottom.

[DocRorlach 25]

Blimey, that does look good. Will there be alternates when it comes to the dirt/debris. And how will it end either way? You did release some stations that will work great with this, but it will need transition pieces at either end. My suggestion would be a bridge, like the one just before West Kensington on the District Line.

Can't wait to DL this..

[mcdrye 104]

Thank you! Check out the previous pages too see other pieces I'm working on, though they will all have to be reworked to the new depth and scaling. mightygoose has a great idea in that you could have 1/2/3 tile sections with differing dirt etc

[DocRorlach 25]

Had not seen those. What I now realise is that one will need to be real careful about using the full set because it can quickly overwhelm. But I do like the surface to sunken transition and the bridge ends. What I am wondering about is the 90` curve - it seems massive, but that really is merely a layman's impression. It would be fantastic if you could convert one of your earlier stations (am thinking of Church Street) as an alternative transition to subway. And since I am a greedy old sod: once at surface a transition to elevated would be nifty. All existing transitions will look out of place. It would really need a kind of viaduct ramp over at least four tiles (the NAM viaducts are all too steep).

MightyGoose's solutions seems the best, really.

Wonder how long it will take, once your set is released, until someone starts fiddling with it to add it to NAM and show automata on it. I will actually delay my upcoming CJ until I can download this set and use it.

Thanks, McDrye.

[mcdrye 104]

I'm glad to hear you like the SSR alot, I've got tons of ideas for pieces, and I like your idea about the my existing station. I was planning to re-render it what with the new textures and such. What I plan to do is release a starter set to get things going. This would include a straight bit (maybe various lengths), the curve, the 2 end pieces, and finally the transition. There are so many possible add-ons such as junctions, more station variety, diagonal etc.

And yes I think I'll put an open invitation to mod my set in the STEX release as I'm not capable of getting trains showing but would love to see it!

[DocRorlach 25]

It is rather refreshing to see someone hard at work who is open to ideas from the lay folk. Since your models are extremely accurate (I used to travel regularily on the District & Circle lines) methinks the source for add-ons could really come from there. I'd love to see Gloucester Road or Sloan Square (my old hunting grounds) to appear here. One thing I would suggest, though, is to populate the stations where the perron is visible. Too many rail & subway stops forget this and hence the stations look dead. Especially London Underground stations are always full of people.

The car mod for London Underground exists. The problem with making your set fully TE would probably mean that it would "sink" to an actual depth of 7.5m. Which in turn would require a hole digger (NAM is apparently preparing this). But then comes the added problematic of parallel and crossing networks. My suggestion would be to switch to timed props; since the stations are working TE lots, one simply draws the subway along the trajectory of your set. Path & query would thus show it correctly. Pity only that timed lots are restricted to certain time-slots, else one could almost simulate traffic.

[DocRorlach 25]

Afraid you lost me at "LOD". My take on all this - and on quite a few comments I've read across various BAT threads - is that the strive for realism can really be taken too far. This is, for all intents and purposes, still a game. And unless you play it constantly at the highest zoom level, most of these "super" details will be lost to the viewer. Far more important is the all too often ignored scale.

BTW: If you need someone to test it all, I am just around the corner (that's my greed talking, ignore it).

However, I have just been reminded that NOB has already done a sunken LR: https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2510. I wonder what his approach to the matter was.

[mcdrye 104]

I had a look at how NOB's set did it, and they have indeed used LODs below ground level but in the .lot file there is an option to disable building shadows! I did not know this was possible. The walls above ground are a seperate prop that still generates shadows. Maybe I could indeed use a more complex LOD and some nice person could path it for me

[DocRorlach 25]

I maybe overly simplistic here, but would it not make sense to finish the "eye candy" set first, release it, and then experiment with the complexity of what appears to be a misspelled "LOL"? What are LODs at any rate? And why do they need to be complex (which is anathema to someone who is a firm beliver in K.I.S.S.)?

Edit: as for pathing, you might want to contact Rivit (Ron) down under; he's an expert at this sort of thing.

[mightygoose 92]

well there have been experiments with the NAM half height 7.5m networks and shadow assassins 8m lower/raiser compatible with buddybuds elusive onslope subway converters is more than adequate, i cant show but have seen pictorial evidence that suggests the .05m makes no significant noticeable slope, and thus all is good as far as compatibility goes.

[mcdrye 104]

DocRorlach it's hard to explain so I'll quote the Simtropolis Omnibus:

"SimCity is not a 3d game, and all the models in SimCity are only "semi-3d." A LOD is a box shape that your model is "projected" onto. that is what shows up in the game, not your full polygon 3d model.

Anything inside the LOD will not show up in the game. "

So if I have a square building and want it to show in SimCity I must enclosed it inside a box shape called an 'LOD', I render the building and the game takes the rendered images and places them onto the 3d LOD, this gives the impression of a 3d building with things disappearing behind it etc.

The problem is, say I have a station and I want trains to pass through it, if I just cover the whole station with a box shaped LOD the trains will disappear into the LOD and you won't see them. So I have to make an LODshape that takes into account the platform, the canopies etc so that the train will be seen but also hidden by canopies, basically copying the shape of the building in more detail as opposed to a box. Have a read of the full Omnibus article.

Here is a picture of the model in 3dsmax, firstly with LODs hidden, second with the LOD I currently use, and the third being a more detailed LOD that I'm gonna test to see if I should that instead.

It's not much more effort and at least then the set would could be pathed in the future without re-rendering.

EDIT:

And here is the result of the test, I was a bit naughty and used NOB's lot but it was the quickest way to test this out, the render was intentionally quick and dirty.