Xyloxadoria's BAT and Portfolio Work Thread

[Xyloxadoria 1,098]

Well i have been working on the Shard a bit heres my progress.

 

Its on hold for now, as I am working on 3d stuff to apply for a job doing 3d animations for an outdoor store. Here is what i have been doing in the past few days. I'm going to make some underwater stuff today. Here is a boat I made

 

[elavery 1,013]

Shard is looking great!

[Bipin 3,403]

Both the boat and The Shard are excellent. A job well-done on both accounts!

[Ace3 1,209]

Good luck with the application. Both models are looking awesome!

[Darknono35 3,138]

Great job here, I like the glass textures of your Shard. And the boat is cool.

Keep up the good work Xylo

[nycsc4 5,250]

Glad to see you're back!

 

Just curious, any update on that awesome LRT/Subway roundabout station?

[T Wrecks 10,210]

Dang, that boat render is good. At the first glance, I thought you were showing us an 'actual' (= physical) model boat you had built in the meantime!

[darn42 1,268]

That boat looks fantastic! The details and modelling are really top notch. Great job. I also love how the shard is going

 

Just some high level critique on the boat cause I know that at this point you want it; I don't see anything modelling wise that could be improved, but the render could be much improved.

 

I think I found something similar enough to look at materials

 

Almost everything looks good. The seats aren't as shiny on yours but that looks much better imo. The two main things are the floor of the boat and the siding of the boat. They aren't translating too well.

 

On you boat the reflection looks much grainier and diffuse than it should. It looks very glossy in this reference. Maybe rethink the glossiness and sampling of the reflections.

 

The floor of the boat I honestly don't know what you could do. I'd look up fuzzy materials cause it looks like it's supposed to be fuzzy. Right now I can tell what you were trying to do, which is good, but it still doesn't look like the short carpet it should be. I honestly think a big part of that is the hardness of the edges you have. Maybe add an advanced rendering effects fillet on it. I think that might help translate it a bit better without changing other parts of the shader. Anything else to change would have to be maybe a bit with falloff or maybe a bit with bump/displacement. The reflectivity and stuff right now fit very well.

 

Quick thing, the bottom of the boat looks like it should be brushed metal. Maybe bump down the anisotropy on that part of the material.

 

Seriously awesome job though. It looks really, really, really good.

[flatron 83]

All the motorboats that I've been on up to now had a floor that was not really fussy(because carpeting would make it very hard to clean) but instead it was usually some kind of plastic with little nipples... The Boat looks great, even with the floor you have now.

[Xyloxadoria 1,098]

Well the outdoor store job didnt work out but i did get another animation related job which will eventually lead me to graduate school and such. For now, im just going to keep working on 3D stuff, hopefully i can get a 3D job one day (the market for it is kind of dead around here), but if not i have a backup now. Anyway heres an update on the Place:

 

I figured the tiles were too light so i made a quick change and rendred the other side:

 

But theres a slight SC4 related problem. That large empty space in the back is supposed to be occupied by London Bridge Station, It has a curved platform and really wouldn't work well in sc4, so Im left with a empty space where the rail should be. What could I put there?

 

Also when i get to the actual shard (Im about to start it!) there will be two sides of the new London Bridge Station entrance that is part of it I will have to make up. Should I just copy the glass walls from the other side over to fill up the space? Or is there a station similar to London Bridge BAted somewhere that i could put there? Its this part of the Shard I'm talking about. Since i dont want to force people to have to use a station with this BAT, how could i deal with it not being there from a sc4 perspective for the Place and Shard?

[dubaidude303 1,126]

Looking great so far! 

[Ion_Cannon 677]

I think for practicality purposes I wouldn't render the Place with such a large base, or at least provide one with a smaller base too. Thing is below the Place itself you have a large bus station (Which I can see you've started work on) and the rest of it is empty space, excluding the bus station. I'm just not sure how well that would translate into SC4 and how usable it would be.

 

As for the Shard itself, leave the station out of it and just make that part look architecturally pleasing, you've designed some stunning custom buildings so I'm sure you'll manage

[weixc812 509]

In my opinion, the main building can be rendered seperately with the base, while all these parts can be made into props. This does make sense for us to choose freely which part to use. Hope it can also solve the problem you're facing.

[Delecto 941]

Looking good. I'm curious if you've done these render with Vray and if the export process works?

[Xyloxadoria 1,098]

Looking good. I'm curious if you've done these render with Vray and if the export process works?

Vray didnt work out that well, so i went back to Mental Ray

 

Also excuse my horrible Photoshop skills (i spent like 2 mins on this) but do you think this would be a more sc4 friendly lot size/desgin? that random rectange by itself is a subway entrance, and ill probably just add trees and some art thing to the rest of the plaza. The tile size is the grid squares in the non badly photoshopped part.

 

[Darknono35 3,138]

Great work Xylo . I like all the details on this building

[Alex_1210 189]

wait wait wait, you MADE THAT BOAT?!
And also AMAZING work so far on the shard, it looks very very nice to far.

[Xyloxadoria 1,098]

I was going to start on the Shard, but because of where it is in London, I kind of have a predicament that I am trying to solve. Diggs was nice enough to take some pictures of the Shard for me, and they do a good job of showing everything around the base. Here is one of his pictures of the front side:

 

That escalator leads up to London Bridge Street, which is where The Place is built, up at a higher level. All the entrances except for the one on the front side are up at a higher level.  This site plan shows it alot better than i can explain it the escalator is on the lower left:

I could just not make the lower section and make everything at the higher street level, but that would make the lower two sets of sun shades at the bottom of the building be very low to the ground.

 

Another option would be to extend that tall lower floor around the entire rest of the building's bottom with the exception of the station entrance section (everything in grey in the above image). If i did that then i wouldn't have to deal with the higher section of street at all, and the lot would be entirely flat. I think this is the best option SC4 wise, because all I would really loose would be the escalator which you wouldn't see in a top down view anyway because of how wide the tower is.

 

The third option would be to make the building on slope and still have the escalator  and everything as it is. 

 

Right now im going to go with the second option unless someone else can figure out something better.

[urielgarcia 344]

Really great updates you have Xyloxadoria! Love the Place.

[edwardjeria 503]

nice good

[Xyloxadoria 1,098]

 

Here is the Shard minus the stuff on top and on bottom.

Its not vertically scaled yet, so It looks a bit squashed for now.  I did some testing for fixing the vertical distortion to see which one would look better.  I think around 120% looks more like the real thing, maybe a bit taller. What do you guys think?

[SimCoug 5,976]

Yep, 120% seems like the happy medium.  Nice work.

[edwardjeria 503]

brilliant

is very futuristic you

[Ion_Cannon 677]

Yup 120% is the sweet spot.

[Xyloxadoria 1,098]

Well, It seems the way I'm currently making The Shard is too much for 3dsMax to handle I was able to get most of the way through a render before max threw this error and just quit:

 

LIB 0.10 530 MB fatal 291109: runtime exception 0xc0000005: access violation

 

I've googled it and have not been able to find anything as to what the error is, but it is probably something to do with my glass material. I am trying to find a way to make glass that is transparent so you can see through it where it doesn't have "floorspace" behind it, but at the same time, I don't want to go through the work of having to make every single internal floor because they are all shaped differently and i would not have splines for them anywhere since the glass goes past the edge of the floor on its fins.

 

Are there any suggestions on what I should do to get a working glass material that would look good for this type of building (Or is there a easy way to make internal floors) Right now i only have one floor at the very bottom of the tower with the same material as the glass, just solid. 

 

Here is what I manged to render before 3dsmax gave up on me.

[Jasoncw 11,949]

I didn't have any better luck on google than you.

 

But I think you'll have to bite the bullet and model the floors.  I think you'll also need to model window blinds as well.  It's just sort of part of how glassy buildings like that are BATed.

 

All the difficulty about even doing things like adding floors (or worse, window blinds) is why no one has made this BAT.    But the results will be worth it. 

[Darknono35 3,138]

Looks amazing ! Yep, good luck with the blinds

[Xyloxadoria 1,098]

All the difficulty about even doing things like adding floors (or worse, window blinds) is why no one has made this BAT.    But the results will be worth it. 

 

The window blinds i actually figured out a plan for. I used the shell modifier on my glass so it would have actual thickness (it would look weird as a single face otherwise)  The shell modifier has a option to make the inner material ID be different than the outer material id. Im going to try using that option to make all the polygons facing inwards have a different material ID  so that i can isolate them by selecting by material ID. Then i can use random select with it isolated to select some of the inner faces and make them a new blinds material. ill post it if it works later, in the meantime ive managed to get the shard to render, but it no longer looks transparent even though my material has 75% transparency:

[edwardjeria 503]

good

is many realist

[Bipin 3,403]

This looks astounding! I anticipate seeing both the night view and perhaps also slightly stronger reflections of the surroundings. Regardless, I can't wait to download this.