nybt-forum-threads PBGV's BAT Thread

[nathanthemayor 1,263]

That looks great!

[nathanthemayor 1,263]

That looks great!

[Sgt Pepper 864]

ZOMG!!!!!!!!!!excitingly!excitement!!extravaganza!!!!!!!!!!!!1!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11!

Paul, I really don't know what to say, this is turning out amazingly. Very realistically awsome. Awesome to the max(pun obviously intended). Bursting at the seams, seamless, amazing.

I'm curious about the ground plane around it though. Reminds me of the Maxis glass a tad.

[Sgt Pepper 864]

ZOMG!!!!!!!!!!excitingly!excitement!!extravaganza!!!!!!!!!!!!1!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11!

Paul, I really don't know what to say, this is turning out amazingly. Very realistically awsome. Awesome to the max(pun obviously intended). Bursting at the seams, seamless, amazing.

I'm curious about the ground plane around it though. Reminds me of the Maxis glass a tad.

[Sgt Pepper 864]

ZOMG!!!!!!!!!!excitingly!excitement!!extravaganza!!!!!!!!!!!!1!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11!

Paul, I really don't know what to say, this is turning out amazingly. Very realistically awsome. Awesome to the max(pun obviously intended). Bursting at the seams, seamless, amazing.

I'm curious about the ground plane around it though. Reminds me of the Maxis glass a tad.

[TowerDude 2,187]

Wow! wow! wow! That is divine!

[TowerDude 2,187]

Wow! wow! wow! That is divine!

[TowerDude 2,187]

Wow! wow! wow! That is divine!

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

WOW!!! OMG!!!! I have to say it you are now a 3ds MAx master, you really knocked it out of the ball park. I had to look at the picture three times because I was so surprised. Keep it up and you can win an award for the beautiful work.

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

WOW!!! OMG!!!! I have to say it you are now a 3ds MAx master, you really knocked it out of the ball park. I had to look at the picture three times because I was so surprised. Keep it up and you can win an award for the beautiful work.

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

WOW!!! OMG!!!! I have to say it you are now a 3ds MAx master, you really knocked it out of the ball park. I had to look at the picture three times because I was so surprised. Keep it up and you can win an award for the beautiful work.

[gio10469 24]

You are definitely in the big leagues my friend...This looks absolutely amazing!

[gio10469 24]

You are definitely in the big leagues my friend...This looks absolutely amazing!

[gio10469 24]

You are definitely in the big leagues my friend...This looks absolutely amazing!

[mben92 9]

This is AMAZING!! When i saw the current photo, it literally took my breath away. this building is nothing short of incredible. The night views are already making me anxious to seem them.

[SimHoTToDDy 2,939]

Lovely work. The chrome piping and the other colony of jumbled details on the back came out very nicely. I do have a few comments on texturing though. The roof bitmap for your mini penthouse on the back should probably be desaturated (anywhere from 30 to 50 in potoshop's scale) and the same can be said about the orange-ish stained wall texture you have at the top of the tower. The other thing I thought was odd was the HVAC looking devices on the back part of the building. They look like they are made of concrete or heavily oxidized metal but they have the reflectivity of a highly polished or new unit. Either one would be fine, but the mix of the two creates an odd effect.

Anyway, I popped this in to a SC4 image and thought is fit in relatively well. You are doing a good job finishing this up.

[PBGV103 729]

I'm using GIMP, since I don't have photoshop, and the only desaturation option is 100%, which just turns everything to 8 bit grey scale. I'll see if a friend of mine who has photoshop can do it but no promises on that one. As far as the HVAC stuff goes, the sides are too reflective now so I'll tone that down, but I think I'll leave the tops the as is because in RL the tops of the units are a different material that's much more reflective than the sides.

[lucky7 73]

I am speechless... !

[PBGV103 729]

Thanks everyone!   Here's RL height vs. 4/3 original height.  As you can see I need to make the ground plane larger or the 4/3 version, but otherwise it looks ok.

I also tried adding people to the model but it doubled the file size and made my computer lag so I got rid of them.

[PBGV103 729]

PS. I'm using 4/3 original height because I believe it's the scale we've decide on as a team. I know it's the scale SimFox used for his two NYBT BAT's, so mine should look proportional to his models.

[Sgt Pepper 864]

The height is fine, and I will say again, how amazing this is. BAT of the Year!

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

Thats one thing that makes me mad about the game that if the buildings are not scaled they will look squashed down. In the Sim City 4 dat. files the buildings are not even scale and they look perfect in the game. I wonder how they did it and I wonder if some on can even modd it were it will looks normal like the renders and the pictures we take it the game.

The original image looks great, but to make the building look good in the game you can scale it like Sim Fox have done, they both look great. Can't wait to see the night images.

[T Wrecks 10,210]

Wow, what an impressive BAT! You've really outdone yourself with this one so far. (I hope you keep regular backups, eh? Wouldn't want to see this beauty vanish in the digital underworld.)

A question about the modeled base: Will it cover the entire lot? What will the lot size of this monster be, anyway?

[PBGV103 729]

Thanks for all the comments, I'm glad you like it! It will cover an entire 4x8 lot, and yes, I have a few backups. I wouldn't want to lose this after putting so much time into it.

Here's a question for any computer savvy people out there: Render's were taking forever, eg., 2 hours for one zoom5 render, so when nvidia updated the driver and control panel on my computer to include a performance option I started playing around with overclocking. The stock cpu on my macbook pro (the computer I'm using to render) is a core 2 duo @2.8GHz. I took the bottom cover off of the computer and set it on a duel fan laptop cooling pad. Then I overclocked the processor up to 3.34GHz without any problems whatsoever, but when I took it up to around 3.4GHz it started freezing 50% of the time, any higher and it would always freeze. The thing is, the temp during renders used to get up to around 105 degrees C (the max temp) with the fans on high, but now with the cooling pad and the cover off, even overclocked, the max temp it reaches during a render is 88 degrees C, and that's without the laptop's own fans on at all! Since it's running so cool and the renders still take forever, I'd like to push it a little more. I've been told the reason it's freezing past 3.34GHz is because the memory (8Gb DDR3 @ 1067MHz) isn't getting enough voltage to keep up; however, the clock speed of the memory does increase proportionally to the cpu frequency. Since macs use efi instead of bios, I have no idea how to change the memory voltage, and the nvidia performance panel doesn't give me that option. If I had full control, I'd probably be able to up the cpu frequency to 3.5-3.6GHz without any issues. Anyone out there familiar with this stuff? If I can get it running at 3.65GHz, I could save around 15 minutes on every hour, which is very significant when I'm looking at 8+hr exports vs. 6+ hr exports.

Anyway, thanks for all of the support! I promise not to quit on this one until it fits in perfectly with all of the highest quality BATs out there!

[lucky7 73]

PERFECT work!

As for your question: sorry, I have no clue.

Keep rockin' !

lucky7

[PBGV103 729]

Took 8 hours to get through the 4 zoom5 renders and about 10 minutes into zoom4 south my computer blue screened guess i'm starting all over. maybe i'll try rendering without overclocking the computer, but then zoom5 would take at least 10 hours. ughhhh i used to love my computer, now i HATE it

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

It's going to be ok. I don't know a lot about computers, all I can say is keep your finger cross and hope nothing else bad happen. I have posted on my thread about my computer cutting off and no one helped me, I had to google the problem that I was having. The guys here I think only know a lot about bating than knowing about computer problems.

[PBGV103 729]

Well I decreased the gpu frequencies to normal and the cpu from 3.34 to 3.31GHz and after just over 11 hours it finished rendering.

[PBGV103 729]

Here are some in-game pics of the roof.  I figure thats the area that's most difficult to get to blend in with the rest of the game.

This last one is the only error I noticed.  It's a small black rectangle on one of the walls on zoom3 north.  It really sucks cause I really don't want to re-export it for another 11 hours and just hope it doesn't show up again.  I think there may be an object intersecting the wall, so 3ds max doesn't know how to deal with rendering it.  It seems as though I always get similar errors when there are large planar objects in a scene that has an area with clusters of smaller objects.  Something about having to render a ton of tiny details and then switching to a large object throws it off.  It's even worse if anything is overlapping the large planar object.

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

Wonderful job!!! You have put so much work on this, this is a winner. what about the night lights you going to work on them soon, I can't wait to see them.