nybt-forum-threads NYBT BAT Thread

[SimFox 801]

As I've said at the moment iLive's DATCMD that is used to insert rendered FSHs into the Sc4Model file fails to work with paths with empty spaces in them. Generally this issue (empty spaces in path names) has been regular onion - you peel one layer (solve one problem) and there is another under it. I have solved two just to get to the third one. I bet if you open your SC4Model file in Reader you'll see that it has original (black) FSHs that has been there since GMAX LOD export. Black, total black is treated by the game and LotEditor as transparency - so naturally you see nothing.

Yet it all has been resolved but it will be available only in a new release of BAT4Max . It is ready, but I need to polish it a bit and write/edit ReadME and Installation instructions. For now you can manually insert your rendered FSHs. First delete those currently in SC4Model file, and them right click and in the main pane and select "Insert & Compress File". Then navigate to the location of your FSHs - subfolder in output folder named after current model.

[Sgt Pepper 864]

Okay, I brightened the glass some on this one(haven't risen the base heights yet). Is it still too dark? Should I go back to the Maxis Glass and edit that?

[cmdp123789 710]

The angle is kinda correct... If you see it in real life.. Well it's not orthogonal neither 45' diagonal soooo.. fix it and keep it that way

[PBGV103 729]

Hahaha ok well it tried manually inserting them and I really have no idea what I'm doing and I still see a black box in iLive. So, I think I'll just wait for the update.

[GuerrilaWarfare 39]

Should I make my Window 3x2 or 2x2

my building is short and I don't know how to re-scale. Can some one show me how or do I have to make a new front wall ?

[Sgt Pepper 864]

I'll show you how my friend its easy!

Once in Gmax, you will need to click and hold down the mouse button on one of the tools at the top(high lighted in red in my photo)-

When holding down the mouse button, a mini menu appears-

Select the middle one(red arrow pointing at it) and your cursor becomes that tool that you can use on your model. However, you should selct the entire model first. Then you will be able to scale the model with those X, Y, and Z things to scale the model.

Or you could type the 133%(with out the %)in on the Z(it should be Z, sometimes it changes for me). Usually though, there will be a 100 there all ready so just replaces the 0's with 33.

EDIT: A side note, I finally have an avatar that makes more sense/applies to my user name.

[PBGV103 729]

The real question is, why were you awake at 3:25 AM? hahaha

[gio10469 24]

@Sgt Pepper; Thats quite a flashy avatar.  So who exactly is Sgt Pepper? Is that the name of the guy in the avatar?

[PBGV103 729]

Gio? Really?! Sgt. Pepper??!! hahaha has no one here heard of a little known banded called the Beatles?

[SimFox 801]

Originally posted by: GuerrilaWarfare

Should I make my Window 3x2 or 2x2

my building is short and I don't know how to re-scale. Can some one show me how or do I have to make a new front wall ?

quote>

Hm... I think this pictures tells it all. I mean the source of most your troubles.

Let me, before I get back to that picture, ask you one question. How big is your building. Or, most importantly what are dimensions of main tower? The one you've shown here

Originally posted by: GuerrilaWarfare

quote>

[GuerrilaWarfare 39]

what do you mean? sorry I'm not familiar with what you're saying

[SimFox 801]

sorry; it was a typo... I meant dimensions eg size of the main tower, its width, hight and depth...

[Sgt Pepper 864]

Originally posted by: PBGV103

The real question is, why were you awake at 3:25 AM? hahahaquote>

Well.........it happens when I don't have to go to school during the summer. But It was 2:35 in Louisiana, but I ended up staying up almost to 5:00am....I just love it when I lose track of time! But caffiene revives me...so I'm good. By the way, I completely forgot, Didn't you ask me if you could have the wall texture I used for 22 Cortlandt Street a few pages ago? I can post if you still need it.

gio10469- WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!??!?!?!?! HOW COULD YOU NOT KNOW!?!?!?!...........kidding with my reaction, it's The Beatles man! Their album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band? You must look it up, listen, and be enlightened. Of course, another person didn't really get the Sgt Pepper reference and made a joke about a Col. Salt........ 

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

Sgt Pepper- I ended up doing the same thing, staying up so late, I went to bed around 4:30 am to you it should be 3:30am.

[PBGV103 729]

Had another crazy idea today. SC4 was designed for Windows XP back when people had 512 MB of memory on their computers, horrible graphics cards, and uber slow CPUs. Thus even a "large" city is tiny compared to real life cities (for NYC you can't really fit Midtown alone in one). So I was thinking since the program reads config files to creat city size and the values are assigned as follows, red 255 = small city, green 255 = medium city, and blue 255 = large city, couldn't a person edit the way SC4 reads the config files and add in something like red, green, and blue all equal 255 makes a city that is 4x4 large cities? Idk just an idea that might make SC4 more life-like; although I can see people on super old computers downloading and getting upset when SC4 continually crashes. I guess that would call for a 4GB memory minimum disclaimer or something. The sad thing is, I wouldn't know where to begin in editing the SC4 scripts for something like this. Anyone have any words of wisdom?

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

PBGV103- Its a good idea you have came up with that.

[GuerrilaWarfare 39]

Sgt Pepper, I would really appreciate your glass textures or show me how you made it

[PBGV103 729]

Oh, and as far as the textures go, Brandon, I don't need it right now because I still haven't been able to get 3ds max to insert the FSHs. I'm going to wait on the bat4max update before I try to mess with it anymore. I'll send you a PM if I want to steal any of your textures. xD

[Sgt Pepper 864]

GuerrilaWarfare- I've been using the Maxis Glass Texture recently(the one that comes with BAT). But I edit it some to the way it looks. I'll show ya some pics showing basically what I did, though I'm not too "awake" to say the least for a full proper description.

This is the glass from 22 Cortlandt Street. Don't mind the GlassTex thing with glossiness, it had nothing to do with the result and I was just experimeting with it. But the Self-Illumination thing is important, Simfox told me about that.

I edited the OutPut for the Diffuse Color on the Color map(with RGB not mono). I edited the hues and darkness by moving around the R, G, and B points around. You click the boxes of the letters to move specific points.

I hope this helps!

PBGV103- Words of wisdom...Let it Be... I had to mention Beatles' lyrics there. haha But the idea sounds very intresting, too bad I have no idea about modding. And okay about the textures, you texture theif. xD

Anyway, I have an update, oh yes! An update, on Wall Street Plaza-

Excuse the Low Quality renders, I'm giving my computer a short break on those since it was on for the majority of the night. I edited teh Glasss Texture once again and added some more detail on the base and facade. And I raised the heights at the base too.

A close up at the base. I have some questions though.

1. The glass, how is it?

2. The white texture, I added some blue to it before, but should I give it some more blue or is it good?

3.The base, I'm thinking about just changing the glass texture at the base to some see through texture and model out some interior details(for the base only). What do ya'll think about that? Or should I keep it as is(excluding the fact that I'm not really done with some details I may add)?

[herenthere 0]

anyone know why most of my dl NYBT plops don't have nightlights? Yes, I do have the Update installed...are these rendered under TruNite?

ISSUE RESOLVED, see T Wrecks tutorial:

https://www.simtropolis.com/omnibus/index.cfm/Main.SimCity_4.Night_Lighting_for_BAT%27s

[gio10469 24]

 @Sgt Pepper: Ah but of course, who doesn't know the Beatles  ??? You would have to be living under a rock to have never heard about them. Well I'm sorry for my ignorance but I have never really explored their music so I wasn't aware that Sgt Pepper referred to the name of their album but it all makes sense now.  You learn something new every day.

I loved your reaction by the way . Don't worry I wasn't completely lost...at least I knew who the Beatles are so that counts for something.

[herenthere 0]

Originally posted by: herenthere

anyone know why most of my dl NYBT plops don't have nightlights? Yes, I do have the Update installed...are these rendered under TruNite?quote>

take for instance, 320 Park Avenue, in the picture provided it is lit up but ingame it doesn't...

ISSUE RESOLVED, see T Wrecks tutorial:

https://www.simtropolis.com/omnibus/index.cfm/Main.SimCity_4.Night_Lighting_for_BAT%27s

[gio10469 24]

@herenthere; The problem lies within your own game files. Their downloads are properly night-lighted and show up in game for me.

[GuerrilaWarfare 39]

The base of my building is 4x4, the height of it is 9 tiles i believe.

[PBGV103 729]

GuerrilaWarfare, to my eye that looks like the correct scale; however, the view in SC4 tends to make things look shorter than they are. To really tell I think it would take a test render.

[Sgt Pepper 864]

I have some pics-

South


East

And a close up at the base detail on the West Side-

I need to darked that white wall area. That spot is leads to some underground parking garage I guess...
Sorry for the quality of the renders. I also realized there is actually vertical mullions on the upper floor's glass(on the outside) that I didn't notice in any other pic. They are so thin and flat that they just reflected with the glass. So I added those and will show them in another post in a HQ Preview Render.

[PBGV103 729]

Looks good sgt. What happened to 250 Broadway?

[SimFox 801]

Guerilla:
Measuring size in tiles is same like measuring distance in hours, although possible yet highly inefficient. Especially when some of the input, like the height of 9 tile, is arbitrary.  No wonder that things turn out odd. And once they have it is very difficult to do anything about it, as there is no real point of reference.
 

Another serious issue is what, or to be precisely how you propose to do to remedy what you think is wrong looking building -  changing window from 2 ”squares” to 3 “squares will not just get building taller, but will screw it relative proportions whatever they were. Notice, you didn't propose any change to the height of the interwidnow space, or to all the other sizes.  One may say  "well they were not good", but doing randomly things will highly unlikely to improve anything ever.
 

First thing to remember when you model a building is to make everything by the numbers. Window is NOT 2 or whatever “squares” tall; it has size in unambiguous units, be them meters, inches, etc. Plus, it’s not just the height. Window size and shape is a strong expressive element and as such it is one of the most important anchor in your model. You shouldn't just randomly change it. And when you do (I didn’t say you can ‘t change, just not randomly) you have to understand the consequences eg that you would need to re-do everything. So you better spend some times determining size of such crucial element right from the start and build everything around it.  
 

This said, I have urged few times in this thread to work from big to small from general to particular. So this most definitely applies to the window size. You first determine the overall size of the building, or it’s most important, largest part - say, like the main tower, in case of InterChem building you’re making. There are few ways to get your info, so that you wouldn’t need to operate in “tiles”. One is Google Earth – you can measure things there - width and depth , but not height. Luckily height of the skyscraper (and in NYC) is easy to come by. One place with huge database is www.emporis.com.

Based on the data from these two here is my study of this building that I believe to be pretty accurate:

 

here are the other 3 elevations:

click on picture to see proper Zoom5 view.
 

One thing, I have to mention here, is the need to always treat any data you get critically, as mistakes, faulty info are not unheard of. Measurements in Google Earth are also sometimes not consistent. And that is where looking into expressive language/rhythm of the building could help great deal.

In the case of this building there are some oddities in measurements done in Google Earth. According to them, the width of the window on the main facade (south one for the purpose of SC4) and on Side facades would have to be different. This difference is too small to be of any expressive value, yet too large to be simple mistake resulting from me measuring it wrong.  Making some other measurements and comparing them to the building proportions and layout of the various parts proves beyond any doubt (in my mind) that it is Google Earth that is wrong. This is, no doubt, the consequence of extreme processing of both images and date associated with them, including optical distortions, perspective correction, or removal  and some such. So, I strongly believe that window width is uniformed throughout the facades.
 

That model is of true to life dimensions and particularly height – 168m. IMHO it doesn’t look squashed at all. However, there are more than just the squashing effect to be concerned with . Another thing is the interaction with the street scene. Living true height may make lower levels look puny next to the giant sims, particularly when these will be seen right next to the structure, for instance when you place building on the lot right next to the street. On the other hand vertically scaling very tall building may make them unrealistically huge. In the end I think it is case by case issue.

Here is how Interchem look with Z axis scaling of 133% that remove completely squashing effect of the camera point of view:
 

 

To finish with this here is a “beauty” shot of the model – how would it appear to the human eye (about 50mm lens field of view) from the eye level of the person on the ground – this could be a good toll to evaluate proportions. We are far more sensitive to them from the familiar perspective:

 

... pocking the InterChem and looking around the neighborhood proved too much of a temptation… so…
 

[Sgt Pepper 864]

I have some HQ pics of Wall Street Plaza now. The roof texture went solid grey but I'll fix it later.

^ Fuzzy Compression on this one....

Simfox- I didn't know you were part of NYBT now.... So you are just showing GuerrilaWarfare that model to help him get his proportions right or are you taking over his project? Oh and nice start on 500 Fith Avenue.  You are going to finish it...right? Or are you teasing us?

[GuerrilaWarfare 39]

I feel discouraged but at the same time enthusiastic ... i'm really ******* confused -.-