Hatchet's BAT's

[Hatchet999 0]

 Hi guys, recently got back into SC4 after playing CXL and being disappointed. Since I last played SC4 the custom comment has made the game completely different and I have got back into it and started a new region and best of all, i think, discovered how to BAT.

I have made one so far, based on tutorials on here and some trial and error and would like advice on this first attempt so I can put it on the STEX and get a reasonable response!

I am thirty odd years old and I can take the advice and not kept upset or take any comments personally, I'm finding this good fun and would like to get to the standard of some of you guys and the only way is by listening to all of you!

So my first question, I have taken my BAT and used the plugin manager to set it up and then put it on a lot with the LE. How do I get it to grow in my city so I can take a picture of it!?!

[Jasoncw 12,021]

Hello 

When I'm designing lots or I want to see how the lots look in the game, in the plugin manager I make it a landmark and I reduce the plop cost to zero so that I can freely plop it around and see how it looks in different situations.  After I do the lot design on the landmark, there's an easy way to use ilive reader (a program, which I think you can find if you search for it on the STEX) to copy the lot design, although nofunk does that for me so I don't know how. 

To make things grow you have to zone for the right lot size, and make the conditions right for the wealth and type and density and all of that kind of stuff, and then you just have to hope it grows.  But you can also plop growables by using the extra cheats .dll (which you can search the forum for to find where to download it).

After you have your building in the game, you can press the Print Screen (sometimes prnt scrn, or some other letters) key on your keyboard.  It's ussually across to the right of the F# keys.  This will make a copy of what your monitor is displaying, which you can then paste in your image editing program.

In order to BAT you need an image editing program.  Adobe Photoshop is the best, but it costs money.  The GIMP is a free program which can do just about everything that Photoshop can do.  Search google for GIMP and you'll find a place to download it.

If you plan on uploading your BAT to the STEX after you get a screenshot of it, I'd consider delaying its release, and posting the picture here so that we can comment on it and you can improve it.  It's probably not actually "done" yet.

[Hatchet999 0]

Cheers Jasoncw, I have no intentions of putting anything on the STEX for quite a while, but at least now I can put up a picture of my work.

Landmarks, why didn't I think of that!

[joshriddle 29]

Remember me? Sure you do... Im the one who made the horrible looking Gruttles Industries building... If you want to, you could go to my forum on the official simcity 4 site...the topic is under help... go to simcity.ea.com/bbs/start.php. Any help is appreciated... ANY!!!

[joshriddle 29]

And to help you out... if you made a BAT and used plug in manager and then dragged it over to a commercial , residental, or industrial lot, then it has to grow, and only then can you get a picture of it. And since the uploader can only accept JPEG images, and these come up as PNGs, you will need to right click on it, click edit, and it will send it to paint. Then go to file, save as, and in the file type, choose JPEG, and create a name and click save.

[Hatchet999 0]

 Ok fingers crossed if i have done this right you shall see pictures.....

I was going for a fairly brutal 60-70s office block, of the type popular in the UK. I made each window block individually just like pre cast concrete blocks would be, except I had the array tool, which made life much easier.

 

I decided to 'brand' this one as a Vodafone office and put some advertising on it, however the logo over the door has been lost in the rendering process and the roof mounted one has lost definition, may need to work on that.

The lighting is minimal. When an office is only occupied at night by the security guard seems daft having all the lights on, just the front entrance, main stairwell and one emergency exit is lit.

The LOT needs a bit of work, I deleted my plugins to make this with no dependencies, but feel that I may need some of the parking lots and paths from somewhere other than Maxis.

I would say something like, "first BAT, be nice" but thats not the objective, all comments on how to improve will be appreciated...

My first observation, now i've looked at it ingame is that it is too short by about 50%, how I managed that I don't know!

[Slashback 136]

The Vodafone sign doesn't look good when nightlighted. I like the building.

[Hatchet999 0]

Thanks ImVhOzzi, I agree with you. I think when I resize for added height it will make the sign clearer. If not back to the drawing board!

[Slashback 136]

Good luck

[joshriddle 29]

Looks better than mine!

[joshriddle 29]

Looks better than mine!

[Hatchet999 0]

Here are my updated shots...

I have doubled the height of the building, which seems to have worked out OK 

This has led to the vodafone roof sign actually looking in proportion. I also decided to night light both fire exit stairwells, could be helpful if the fire was at the other end of the building!

Josh, this has taken three weeks so far and i'm still learning to do new things every time i switch GMAX on. Plenty of things to improve and then I've got to work out how to use the Lot Editor! You'll be much better with practice too.

[Slashback 136]

Looks way better than before. Good work!

[Hatchet999 0]

I think the scale is better height wise, need to work on the base and practice with the LE. Should I have some dependancies and use others props or stick to Maxis only?

[thingfishs 417]

I recommend getting some other prop packs... but also that it's too early to really be thinking about the LOT yet. There are various things that could still be improved, it just depends on how far you want to take it (there's no point getting TOO bogged down by your first BAT, although I did;-) )

The maxis night lights would probably me on the top of my list of things to change. Although using other methods is more complicated it really is worth it. Next would be the vodafone sign, it's much too white for in game, (you need to make the white a bit more of a cream). Then there's the scale of the door (compared to that guy walking on the pavement in front of the building) The door seems stretched... Then you've got your main facades, they are a bit too bland (texture & detail wise).

Is this based on a RL building? If so it would help to post it here, or even just a photo of a similar building, so people can see what you're trying to achieve.

I hope I don't sound like I'm being overly picky. ;-)

[His Divine Hand 244]

On the scaling of buildings, most people scale the buildings height up by 33% due to the tendency of buildings to looked "squashed" once rendered. I would say that your building looks too large in scale. Second, your night lighting isn't very logical, and detracts from the building. Your roof needs more equipment up there; various ventilation things and stuff. There are other things I noticed, such as the signs texture being too bright; too saturated with color. The rest of the issues may be solved by re-scaling the building.

[harishna 847]

The doors look to narrow, and is it me or is there something weird with the windows like if they weren't properly align and/or had different sizes...the vodafone looks in a weird place (I don't think it would be readable from the street level..and as pointed before now looks oversacaled...

[Hatchet999 0]

Hi guys, thanks for all the feedback, really appreciate you taking the time to view and comment.

I definitely think now I overdid the height when I doubled it, it looked better height wise i thought when i compared it to the houses around it, like a proper 4 story building, but then the doors at the back especially look massively out of proportion.

I'm going to pull the height back down a bit and hopefully that'll reduce the stretched effect!

I need to add something to the roofsign, as everyone has pointed out it looks way to bright. I'll photoshop it and dull it down a bit, and maybe add some grime as it looks a little too perfect. I see your point with the sign on the roof not really being visible Harishna, but i kinda like it now and i think if vodafone did have a regional office like this and a bare expanse of wall on the roof they probable would stick a sign on it! There may be an elevated railway or freeway running next to it, possibly!

There are comments about the front being bland, boring, repetitive etc. Thats exactly the look i'm going for pre-cast concrete block all stuck together forming a really dull, but functional office building. The only thing that worries me is that it looks too repetitive and as each block is textured separately and then arrayed i think i may add some varying shades and grime etc to the blocks just to break it up a bit.

I'll update with pictures once i'm done.

Please keep the helpful suggestions coming.

[Hatchet999 0]

Time for version 3 of the Vodafone office. I have corrected the height issue, hopefully. Tweaked those nightlights making them look better I feel and added toned down the Vodafone sign a touch.

Firstly some pictures of what I was basing the building on, precast concrete, brutalist low rise office buildings:

 

And here now is v3.0

As usual guys all comments appreciated.....

[Jasoncw 12,021]

Posting those pictures and your intentions is actually very helpful.

My advice would be to actually recreate a specific building.  Any of theose buildings look like they would be good subjects, except for the first one, because even if you did it right, it would still feel pretty underwhelming in the game.  The third one would work ok, although the tightly spaced and deep facade could possibly be hard to replicate with good results in gmax.  Out of the second and fourth one, whichever one you have the best reference photos for would be best.  The second one already has an elevation photo which is very very useful in recreating things.

[SimFox 804]

I'd side with Jason in urging you not to do "your" building, but rather re-create on on those photos. It is a very good exercise to get the feel what is architecture, logic and harmony of it. Cause what you have now is not a building, it is a box. Given that this is you first foray into 3d (am I right?) I'm sure you can do better.

about some details. I also think that placement of the Vodaphone logo isn't right. It wouldn't be see in most situation. I'm sure Vodaphone would not place there their only identification.... Their may color the mech penthouse in their colors, stylize something about the thingie they use, but the "poster" would be in some location where it would be seen by most. Little things like that is what make the whole thing believable.

Also you should never texture individual blocks, unless you're prepared to go and do EACH of them in unique way. Cause otherwise once you array them the repetitiveness will ALWAYS be very obvious. You rather should array them (or in fact just make entire wall) and then slap UVW map on the whole lot

[Hatchet999 0]

Jasoncw , Simfox thanks for the words of wisdom.

I could have flooded the STEX with my brown concrete box, but that wasn't the plan, it was to learn and develop my skills, so this box will only grow in my cities!

@Jasoncw I have photographs of a building very similar with corners and angles so i'll start on that using the skills I have learnt so far. Its still going to be ugly and concrete though!

@Simfox yes this was my first ever attempt modeling and I don't think i've let myself down too badly. I learn new skills every-time I use it and listen to what is being said.

I really appreciate that you make time to comment , thank you

[Jasoncw 12,021]

Can you post the pictures you have?  It's likely that the building can't be modeled by extruding splines, and if that's the case then I can explain how you would model it.

Here's a tutorial/explanation I wrote a few years ago, and it shows how you can go about figuring out the dimensions of things.  The building I did this for happened to be very convenient, and many building won't have such simple and tidy relationships.  The jist is that you figure out the proportions of the facade, and then you measure the building in google earth, and then based on that measurement you derive the rest of the dimensions from the proportions.  If you have any questions just ask.

Here is is:

As you know the building is demolished, and it looks like Google Earth has been updated since it's demolition, so the measure tool can't be used to measure the building.  However, local live has not been updated.  So I took a screenshot of the building, scaled and overlayed it in photoshop with a screenshot from google earth of the same area, plus a measured line.  With that I found that the building is about 31x27 meters.  Using skyscraperpage/emporis, I found that the building is 51.8 meters tall in real life.  To correct this for the game, we're going to mulitply the height by 133%, resulting in a height of about 69 meters.  This number includes the mechanical penthouses.  You don't want to model the main part of the building based off the total height, and then add the penthouses afterwards becuase then you've made the building taller than it should be.  So we'll just take off 4 meters to account for the penthouse before modeling the main section of the building.  So we'll just say the main part of the building is 65 meters tall.  Alternatively, you can skip the vertical scaling for now, and model things exactly as they are, and then you can scale at the end.  The only problem with this, is that you need to have a lot of confidence in what you're modeling, since you won't really know what the building looks like until the very end.

So then we search flickr.com for photos of this building (also known as the people's outfitter building) and we find this one which is a straight on elevation of the facade.  We'll derive proportions from this image.  So take a screenshot of it, and paste it in photoshop.  For finding out proportions, I usually inscribe squares onto the image using the rectangular selection tool and holding down shift to get a square.  Then I can move this around and see how many squares big something is.

http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/3219/proportionsuo8.jpg

^Here's an illustration of what I'm going to explain below.  Reference back to it when needed.

Looking at this screenshot, we can see that there are three main parts of the facade, the windows, the terra cotta spandrels, and the columns (which I think are terra cotta bricks).  The windows are cut in half in one direction, but there is also that horizontal window mullion at the top.  The bottom half of the windows (the bottom two tall windows) form a square (red).  The top part of the windows, plus the spandrel also forms a square (except for a little bit of window ledge, which can easily be accounted for) (also red).  Within the box that has the spandrel and top of the window in it, the spandrel and the rectangles in the window have the same proportions (green).  But that's not all.  The top box is actually divided into thirds (yellow).  And finally, we can select a box to measure the width of the columns, and then moving it over the windows, it turns out that the columns are the same width as one of those vertical windows (blue).

So those are the proportions of that.  Now we just need to know the actual dimension of one of those pieces, and we'll know the rest of the dimensions, and we'll be ready to model.  The only dimensions we know are the height, width, and depth of the total building.  The height isn't useful because floor heights may be different from floor to floor (you can't take the height and divide by the number of floors to get the floor heights).  But we do have approximate widths, and by looking at the facade we can see that each bay is a standard size.  Now, you'd need to be careful when deciding that, because sometimes there will be subtle differences between each bay, but in this case there aren't any (as far as I know anyway).

So there are 8 bays on the front of the building.  I think the width is 27 meters.  Normally, I'd take 27/3 to get the width of each bay.  The problem with this, is each wall "unit" would include the windows, and one of the columns (you'd either include one whole column, or you'd include one half of a column on each side), and if you take this and array it across to make your entire wall, you're going to be missing one of the columns at the end, or half of a column on each end of the facade.  But our smallest horizontal "unit" is actually the blue width.  So we have 25 blues across the front facade.  I think it is 27 meters wide, but my measurement was pretty loose, so I'll assume that there are 25 blues across, and that the width is actually 25 meters, making each "blue" unit 1 meter wide. 

This means that the red boxes are 2x2 meters, and that the yellow lines are 2/3 meters, and that the blue.  Since each red square is 2x2, and since there are two red squares per floor, the height of each floor is 4 meters (but remember that this doesn't take into account the 133% verical scaling yet).  The other side of the building is 28 blues, and so it is 28 meters.

So that should be enough information to accurately model the majority of the facade.  Getting specific though, make sure to pay close attention to the specific shapes, for example, the columns aren't rectangles, they're more complicated than that.

[Hatchet999 0]

I couldn't find enough pictures of the building I wanted to BAT so I have decided to do this one instead.

Dimensions are 96 metres by 12 metres and it has a nice mix of concrete and brick and I have front elevation and ariel shots from Google Earth.

and here is the start of the BAT

[Jasoncw 12,021]

So, today I started writing what to do, and then I decided that I should make a proper tutorial out of it, to post on my blog (which I've been neglecting). Then as I was writing it, it exploded into 3 blog posts worth of tutorials. Anyway, I'll finish and post them tomorrow.

Edit:  ok, the three of them are up.  There's a link to my blog in my signature.  If you have any questions just ask.

[edmonton_stinks 5]

I find street view to be a great resource as well, as it allows you to see buildings from multiple angles as well.

[Hatchet999 0]

@Jasoncw

Thank you so much for the excellent Blog, it is really helpful and straight forward.

Unfortunately I am working all week, but fingers crossed i'll have some pictures of work so far by the weekend, even if it is just the first block!

@Ed thanks for dropping in, street-view makes live so much easier if you can't visit the actual place. Unfortunately this one I visit most days!