Heblem's BAT Workshop

[Larks2242 251]

Wow, very nice Target Iamccman!

[iamccman 2]

Oh my goodness I hope you guys realize I didn't do those, those are just pictures! The top one is of a new development somewhere (i forgot), and that was the artists rendering! Or am i misunderstanding you guys!

[IDK 12]

Is there Hess gas stations in NY?I wanted to know so by putting them in, they would be correct in realism.

BTW: How is gas station signs coming Heblem?

[Ryan B 35]

IDK, there are in fact Hess stations in New York. I frequent one every time I go to Batavia to play hockey.

[IDK 12]

Thanx!

[IDK 12]

How about Petro Canada, it has Canada in it so you'd think it was only there, is that in NY too?

BTW: Two things:

1. Heblem, could you make Irving, Crown, Total, and Arco/Ampm for gas station pack #4?

2. And, hows the highway signs coming?

[uga2k9 0]

http://www.picsearch.com/info.cgi?q=Winn-Dixie%20Stores&id=PVfkWO26rwuEg7vNEofzW2ofKVpAQjhOofPXas9ixK8&start=41

hey i would like to see a winn dixie be made sorry this image is kinda blurry i can take another picture of a different winn dixie if you'd like me to send it to you. it'd be greatly appreciated

[Evillions 552]

page flip bug? I find comments right here but no page leading to it.. Strange...

EDIT:  Nevermind, it works just fine.

[Heblem 600]

[Gn_leugim 853]

wow.. that nite effect looks very good

how you made it? =p

[Heblem 600]

Originally posted by: Gn_leugim

wow.. that nite effect looks very good

how you made it? =pquote>

Using tons of onmi light and direct (just at top floors), took me over 3 hours of testing...

[Gn_leugim 853]

I believe they are tons, cuz I tried one thing like that before and I was using Multipliers with 50.0 and wasn't good.. well.. this is not the case.. it looks awesome

[Bastet69008 1,102]

Very Nice textures! Is this a fictional building ?

[Heblem 600]

Originally posted by: Bastet69008

Very Nice textures! Is this a fictional building ?quote>

yes it is...

[Bastet69008 1,102]

Really like it!

[IDK 12]

Dang...love that night lighting efect!

[Bastet69008 1,102]

The nightlights are really awesome, so realistic!

BTW How about the outlet project? Are you still working on it?

Originally posted by: Heblem

Thanks to all, now I got internet (and comp supposedly fixed)... will get doing the strip outlet project...

i-ll be working on a gap store...

btw some store I have made some weeks ago...

expect soon a new prop pack...

quote>

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

Heblem your building is looking good so far. Keep it up.

[LivingInThePast 364]

How's the mall going?

[IDK 12]

It's quiet...too quiet...

[Heblem 600]

Hello, recently got into 3d studio max, and this is my first bat in this program...

Its a highrise, but the only issue its the reflections, any help to get some realistic reflections in 3DS?

Thanks!

[Crackdtoothgrin 0]

A lot of this comes from SimFox, so he may beat me to posting this, or he might correct me later.

Make a plane on the ground large enough to be reflected in the buildings highest levels. Put a suitable picture of a city (get Google Earth for free and copy/paste pictures [Ctrl+Alt+C to copy the current satellite shot] into it, correct it, whatever). Lower the plane to z = -5 or so, and right click on the plane. Go to 'Object Properties.' Uncheck (reread!!!! make sure it is unchecked) the 'Visible to Camera' box. (I also usually deselect the cast shadows and receive shadows boxes too.

For your glass, set the material from 'Standard' to 'Arch and Design" and pick the 'Glass- Thin Walled' template in the upper right. Set the color to whatever you want. The level for the diffuse color starts at 1.0, but I usually drop that down a bit. Now, take the level of refraction down to 0.0 (I personally don't want my computer to explode trying to render possibly thousands of transparent windows, and I'm sure you don't want to model the interior of the building for each one either, although it works fine on smaller buildings.)

In photoshop, make a grayscale image that is 50% gray to start, and burn the outside until it is evenly colored, but darker than the center, and the dodge tool to make highlights in the middle. Make a couple of these. Under the window material, scroll down to 'Special Purpose Maps' I think, and find the bump map. Apply the various bump maps to various windows or window groups, and kick the level of the bumping (default like, 0.1 or 0.2) to something rather pronounced. I messed around on my model and have it set at 7.5 for now. Seems to work. Basically, you'll have four to eight various window textures, depending on whether or not you will have complex nightlighting. I use a script to randomly select windows once I hide everything else, and assign them into at least eight groups to get a good variety. Plus, later, when you do the night scene, you can select each group of windows in the material editor and apply a different night map, and it keeps the organization easy. I personally don't want to hand-select through hundreds or thousands of windows.(The tower on my thread has about 4600 of them).

Under the BDRF, it, by default, sets itself to 'By IOR.' Unless you're actually rendering the refraction, go to the custom reflectivity and set the bottom level to about 0.15-0.2 or so, and the 90-degree stays the same at 1.0. For the reflection color, keep it at white unless you want to simulate metallic coatings on the windows. Some buildings have them, and some don't, so you have to mess around a bit to see what work's best. I'd honestly recommend starting a new scene and applying the steps to a couple of planes just to get the hang of it. That's what I did.

And two minor notes:

One: Remember that if you change the size of the model, etc., after you make the plane, if you automatically refit the LOD's, it will take the width and length of your plane, and the height of the model, which is bad, since your plane should be far larger than the extents of the model. So, you can either make your own LOD's, or you can simply remember the dimensions and location of the plane, delete it, refit the LOD's, remake the plane and apply the image again, and render it. That should keep the LOD's tight while still allowing you to have that plane.

Two: If you're using Max 2009, you may have a problem with the ground plane causing random faces of your geometry to cut off or render invisible. IF that happens, group your model, but not the plane, and save the selection. Close Max completely. Reopen it. Go to File>Merge, and select whatever you saved the model as. Now, select the group that comprises your model. Right click and go to object properties. Go through all the tabs and turn off motion blur for each one. Recreate the plane. Do the same thing (and, turn off the visible to camera and anything else you need to do). Render it. That should solve that problem if you run into it. And if you have to do that, your material editor will be empty, but you can select on of the 'balls' and go to 'Pick Material from Object' at the top left of the material editor under Files or something, and select it from your model if you need to edit it. As an additional note, having to do this means you will either repopulate your material editor, or start anew for the rest of the model. So, name your materials to avoid material name conflicts, which also help cause the random disappearing geometry problem in 2009.

Hope this saves you like, thirty hours. That's about how long it took me combined to figure this all out.

EDIT: Spelling, etc.

Also, make sure that 'MR Physical Sky' is set on your background under the environment. (Press '8' on the keyboard to bring up the window).

Like I said, this is all gathered information. I've only been using this program for about a month tops, but I'm a fast learner, and I read a lot. So, before you thank me, thank Simfox, PaulVMonfort, Jasoncw, and others I may have missed whose threads I read. I went through (in their entirety) about fifty threads in almost every relevant forum to piece this together, as well as hours of tutorials. Literally, hours and hours and hours. So far, about 250 hours of my time this last month, on the real tip.

[Heblem 600]

Crackdtoothgrin: thanks! i actually followed some suggestions which turn out my model great, i didnt followed the suggest of making a single piece, because i use to do buildings by piece by pice, still have my doubts, but here's the final result...

Soon at stex for download... if i can export it

[Roger51 381]

Thats great, hope to see it soon

[Amthaak 1,501]

Very good progress! With time, you will see that 3ds max is really fantastic! There are quite a lot of SimFox's informations in my Bat thread , concerning the use of  max, in particular how to make reflection on the windows (page 8 to be precise), as it was already said you use a plane with the pic you want to be reflected on the windows,  z  must be positive!

[CarmineHilton 6]

*OOOOH* I'm loving that tower

[T Wrecks 10,209]

The tower reminds me of 1 IFC in Hong Kong, except for the base and the dark top instead of the white spires. It really looks great, but I think the window colour is a bit monotonous. There's something strange about it, too... there seem to be some artifacts starting from the 12th floor more or less... dark spots and short dark lines. Is that my monitor, the JPEG compression, or could something be wrong there?

Either way, it looks like a great start with the new software, and I like how you added a base to the tower - many highrises are rather lacking in that respect. Good work!

EDIT:

I totally forgot to mention that I love what you did with the roof. That detailed support structure is a superb touch!

[Crackdtoothgrin 0]

Wow. I only saw a slight base this morning, and now I see a full-sze tower in the time it took me to go to work, come home, and sleep... It looks good, and I'm with T Wrecks on praising both the base and the support structure. I've worked in a fair amount of highrises as a security guard, and the bottom-most floors seem to get ignored a lot in BAT's, even though a lot of stuff happens there.

The windows are monotonous, slightly, and there are artifacts from 12 on up, although that may be due to the compression. In either case, it looks well.

I wasn't suggesting making the window a single piece, only a horizontal plane below the model with an image to be reflected.

Here's a crappy example I made in mspaint:

1: The plane below.

2: The tower.

If you follow the steps for the glass, and tinker it to your liking, you can get some nice reflections. Now, before someone corrects what I put a few posts ago, you normally aren't supposed to change the diffuse color of the glass from black, because glass itself has no color. However, my computer melts trying to do proper refraction, so I turn it off and change the color to my liking. It works well enough. As for the image on the plane below, composite satellite photography works well. However, I'm sure you can find something you like.

And, to Amthaak: I have my plane below the z-axis, and it works fine on the reflections. If I have it above the z-axis, it causes problems. Although, that may be from having Max 2009.

[io_bg 249]

Wow! I want it

[SimFox 801]

great tower! I bet it is not the 1 IFC in HK but rather similar looking tower in New Jersey, Glodman Sach's if I remember it correct, right?

As for artifacts those are most likely caused by coplanar surfaces. And those in turn are result of having to many objects and messing the whole clone/instance things etc. clean and precise modeling is WAY more important with MR, as it will not forgive such sloppiness to you that Scanline did. The reason for this is that MR takes in account bounced light. And when you have two point occupying the same exact coordinates MR can't make it's mind which one to display and how to display it - light or in shadow. And then it generates bounce from that point. should it carry light or not? so it causes cascade of misinterpretations.

In Max 2010 there is a toll that let you quickly look for such mistakes in geometry it is called xView. (read about it in Max Help). It could be usedul at times and messy in others.