Xyloxadoria's BAT and Portfolio Work Thread

[Xyloxadoria 1,098]

Well i rendred what i had earlier up there for in game. It took 11.5 hours, and this was the result:

Ive been busy with RLS work stuff, and will be away starting Friday. Its going to be for a few days, so I want to have my final render going for day then.  

 

I have internal floors working, and was able to actually somewhat figure them out (I would need to modify them a bit but they work) I haven't been able to get the glass transparent enough to actually see the floors while still having it be reflective. If you know of any glass settings for that then I could use that. I am however worried about render times if i go that route, seeing how long this took when the windows werent really transparent. 

 

From seeing the building in game, I figured out i need to vertically scale a bit more, so Ive fixed that, and added a few more details. The glass is 100% transparent right now but I cant see through it to the floors and I don't know why:

 

Also I am working on a lower building section, its just not done yet. Im going to render a preview of it overnight, so it will (hopefully) be posted tommorw morning.

 

(Also The Shard would look totally awesome in Cleavland) << click the link for lolz

[Jasoncw 11,949]

The thin glass arch & design preset will give you pretty standard clear glass.  If the clear glass it gives you isn't reflective enough you can bump up the reflectivity by bumping up the BRDF curve.  The little chart shows how reflective your material actually is, the reflectivity parameter just scales it.  so a reflectivity of "1.0" means that the reflectivity is what the chart says, and .5 means it's half as much as what the chart says.

 

Remember to give you glass bump maps too.

 

But I'm still not sure what the benefit is to modeling the ground and people.  :/

[Xyloxadoria 1,098]

Okay so the building is rendering right now, but heres a preview of what i made up. 

 

 

Both "ends" of it are W2W and 2 tiles wide. That way you can still make it be W2W if you want (you can see the edge of the tile below it), but then there are angled sections behind the W2W section, to still maintain the aesthetic look of the "broken sections" the shard has.

 

Ill try just putting the plain thin glass preset on the glass, and post the render tomorrow morning but for now i need sleep.

 

Also I only modeled the ground/people because I don't have a working lot editor/plugin manger anymore. I used PIM-X on my last BAT and that didn't go as well as i had hoped. If i could get outside lotting/modding help from someone else, i could solve that problem. 

 

P.S. There will eventually be skylights on the roof, and I will make the ticket office too, i just need to try and get rid of RLS.

[gutterclub 2,729]

Looking at your ground pane, it appears that is what is making the building look bright and blue and isn't too busy. I'd try and get most of the colour from the glass and see if you can have a darker ground pane that is a bit busier?

[Xyloxadoria 1,098]

Well kellydale lied about array tapering/scaling to make the floors. It would work in a normal building where everything tapers evenly, but it doesn't work with The shard since each part tapers differently. I have figured out a method to get it to work though.

 

I made the bottom most floor and extruded it. to the top of the building. then i moved each vert to match the top floor. I then used connect to add segments between the top and bottom to add divisions for floors and used covert to spline to make each segment a floor.That worked, but the Shard doesn't taper evenly up its entire height. So now im going in and fixing the floors where it "missed" thats what the solid bule box is. Other than a few places where the floors are off, its working nicley.

 

EDIT: It still looks too short relative to the real building. Does this look more like what it should be:

[edwardjeria 503]

Great work

You qre flazh

[Jasoncw 11,949]

Yeah I agree with gutterclub about the ground plane.  imo what is actually best are sc4 screenshots.  Basically what I recommend is taking a bunch of sc4 screenshots and putting them on the ground plane and removing chunks of each screenshot layer so that it's a mix of different screenshots (otherwise individual buildings in the screenshot take up too much reflection-space).  The contrast in the screenshots and the different colors makes the glass look better, and best of all you don't have to deal with the ground plane anymore.  Like gutterclub said you want to affect the color of the glass by changing the glass material.  Increasing the Refraction Color's saturation will make the glass have more of that tint.

 

 

For PIMX, for some reason the built in lot editor doesn't really have a ui, but the pimx's documentation has a page in it that has all the hotkeys, so just keep that pdf open to that page so you can look back at it when you need to know what hotkey to use. 

[kellydale2003 2,276]

"Well kellydale lied about array tapering/scaling to make the floors."

Nice way to start off your post   

I already inboxed you about that, so I don't feel like repeating myself :b

As for the ground plane, I can donate a few. When I typically like making a blue glass building, I like using these any of these three.
I feel that Simcity 4's colors in-game are a bit too "cartoonish". So I prefer to use real life references. I edited these images in a very sloppy manner in Photoshop. With some good bump map they look pretty good.

 

 

 

Sometimes I tile the images a few times on a 1 km plane. Sometimes I don't. These 3 textures alone are responsible for almost half my uploads on STEX so far :b

Keep us updated, eh! 

 

, K

 

ps; the other half of my ground textures for the other uploads are color edited screenshots of Simcity 4 (the orange/yellow toned ones that I inboxed you about). (:
 

[Ion_Cannon 677]

After the rescale it's looking terrific My only concern would be the area of glass which seems to be a solid colour in between two sides of the shard, but I think (if I understood correctly) that's a result of the solid blue box so it shouldn't be an issue. In reality I believe the steel work also extends further up the glass shards at the top, but I think the additional overhang is pretty cool, adds to the "soar" factor.

[Xyloxadoria 1,098]

So heres where it is now. I have to leave after i post this for a few days, so i might as well start a full test render while im gone. I got all the interior floors working, and some curtains too. I was wanting to add furniture but couldnt figure out how to add stuff along the edges of polygons and get it to look right. If anyone knows how to do that, id really like to learn how.

 

Im also trying to figure out how to do partial curtains on the angled walls. Right now all i could figure out was a full curtain or none at all. Kellydales curitan script he mentioned doesnt play well with edit poly.

 

Also ive removed the plaza and people so its not there anymore for the test render. Ive added some skylights to the empty roof area too.

[kellydale2003 2,276]

I already posted this on your status... but it feel like the blinds are in front of the glass. imo putting the blinds behind the glass will continue the flow of reflectivity and consistency while still having the effect of blinds looking like real blinds. 

As for the script, I don't know what you're having trouble with. If you specify I can gladly help (:
But I'm going to attempt your question. Under blinds opening rollout under "type" have you tried any of the other settings? There is "random-open", "clouded", "sunny side", and "sliding" (mainly for patio doors). If that doesn't work make sure "threshold" under the blinds opening rollout is at 0%.

 

Btw I forgot to tell you that you can put the blinds script into "C:\...\Autodesk\3ds Max ####\Scripts\Startup" so every time you fire up 3dsmax the blinds script will automatically be loaded and put under the AEC Extended rollout tab.

, K

 

ps; GORGEOUS BUILDING! 

[Bipin 3,403]

It is so damn close to being perfect! You did a better job than I could of ever imagined for this building; it looks better than a verbatim recreation of the structure. My only suggestion would be to make the glass on the roof nearest the ground transition a little more smoothly into the roof tiles. A simple piece of metal separating those tiles from that glass would do the trick.

 

You've outdone yourself. Great work!

[Ion_Cannon 677]

The blinds contrast much to heavily with the glass IMO, and as kelly noted they also appear to be outside the facade. The model and the glass look amazing though

[GeometryMath Algebra 614]

WOWOWOWOWOWOW!!!

[sencillo1 47]

wow looks great.

[spa 970]

That's a really impressive and very unique model. It looks great! The only thing that doesn't work for me is the glass. The blinds don't look quite right and as totally transparent, it becomes quite noticeable that there is nothing on any of the floors. Maybe make it a bit more opaque?

[gutterclub 2,729]

I think the glass looks perfect, and would respectably disagree with Spa by saying with either some furniture or fake floors and with the blinds being on the inside and fixed this will be perfect..but as I say, the glass itself is spot on! Could potentially lower the transparancy by .1 or so as Spa did mention but its pretty good now..

[Xyloxadoria 1,098]

I think the glass looks perfect, and would respectably disagree with Spa by saying with either some furniture or fake floors and with the blinds being on the inside and fixed this will be perfect..but as I say, the glass itself is spot on! Could potentially lower the transparancy by .1 or so as Spa did mention but its pretty good now..

The transparency is already at 100%

 

I did a final render of The Place, with furniture inside it. I realized i forgot to add curtians, but I don't really know if it would need them. (I could add them but it would take a entire other night of rendering again) 

Im going to be adding similar funiture to the Shard. (And a lot for the place)

[Jasoncw 11,949]

idk what it is but the image quality of your render doesn't look very good.  did you get all the mental ray settings back in order when you switched it away from v-ray?

[Xyloxadoria 1,098]

idk what it is but the image quality of your render doesn't look very good.  did you get all the mental ray settings back in order when you switched it away from v-ray?

I was hoping i was not the only one that saw that.

 

It seems like I'll have to re-render anyway so I might as well add curtains. I am using 3dsmax 2014 since there was a fix for it on the STEX with comments mentioning me in it. It works fine gammawise since my building is not radtioactive this time, but it seems like the new Unified/Raytrace Mode doesnt play well with SC4. Ill re-render in 2013 and it should fix that.

[gutterclub 2,729]

 

I think the glass looks perfect, and would respectably disagree with Spa by saying with either some furniture or fake floors and with the blinds being on the inside and fixed this will be perfect..but as I say, the glass itself is spot on! Could potentially lower the transparancy by .1 or so as Spa did mention but its pretty good now..

The transparency is already at 100%

 

 

 

 

sorry, I was agreeing, that at 100% transparancy it looks great, whereas Spa was saying for you to lower the transparancy to make the glass more opaque..I suggested that you could possibly lower the transparacy by .1 (i.e to 90%) but that it looks great as is

[edwardjeria 503]

Kool

Is rock and roll jeerea

[GeometryMath Algebra 614]

Perfect. Lovin' the glass!

[Delecto 941]

For The Place, it seems that your "Sampling Filter" in the renderer tab isn't set correctly. He need to be Lanczos. But maybe I'm wrong.

[Darknono35 3,138]

Gorgeous, I like your glass maybe you need to use blinds like the Shard.

[kellydale2003 2,276]

Keep the transparency at 100%, and make the color in the refraction settings darker. Try that (:

[Xyloxadoria 1,098]

Heres the final version of the Shard In game. The render took 23 Hours.   It has the same amount of transparency as the render above. I tried lowering the transparency/refraction color and seeing what that looked like but just didnt like it as much. (And yes its going to evetually get a lot)

[Xander Dax 310]

Nice! can't wait for it to be uploaded

[Girafe 1,729]

There is a problem with a black floor.

 

Transparency should be lower around 0.95.

 

For giving the feeling of full spaces, you could put a map on the ground, check what Simfox did for his lighting it's the same method without lights.

[Darknono35 3,138]

Gorgeous Building ! Congrats for your BAT sir