nybt-forum-threads PBGV's BAT Thread

[SimFox 804]

looks good! about the ground plane, yeah it may be a problem, the are few ways to get around it but to say which one should be take it will be necessary to see a bit mote of a progress on the tower.

I see you're getting the whole from big to small "way"! great!

BTW how 'bout scaling?

[PBGV103 729]

I was going to ask about scaling. Has the team decided on 133%? What scale did you use for the Seagram? Also, I think I know why there are strange lights coming from the ground plane. I made a plane just below the building that is invisible to renders except for in reflections, that way I can quickly change out what is reflected in the windows. I may have turned on self-illumination for that material and forgot to turn it off. xD

By the way, when I get to the lower roof, what's the best way to do this?

It really looks like a complicated mess.

[PBGV103 729]

Should I make the window material slightly transparent and put shades behind it, or make different materials with the shades in them?

Zoom 4

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

WOW!! this looks perfect. I really have to see more. You are really improving.

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

WOW!! this looks perfect. I really have to see more. You are really improving.

[SimFox 804]

sorry I've missed things here on Simtropolis for last week or so.

Well the mess.. Just do it, I suppose. Because you're not limited to Google Earth views, but have Bird View shots as well you are in much better position as you can judge the relative hight of roof junk. By the looks of it there aren't really so many different things, just may be 3-4. And I don't think you would need to be so careful and accurate with it. Just deliver overall feeling of it and you'll be fine!

About ground plane... thre are some pitfalls with it. You see it generates not just reflections, or to put it more precise not just sharp reflection rays. By default it will also generate Final Gather ray. those are also, in effect reflection rays - defuse reflection rays. To be totally correct (in not distorting the lighting setup of the rig) one should exclude ground plane from FG calculations. This could be done in 3ds Max 2009 and newer:

1. select ground plane

2. rightclick and select object properties

3. select Mental Ray tab

4. set Final Gather to Pass (Invisible for FG) through option

However this is more important for lighter buildings that pick up more reflected (through FG) light from ground plane. for a darker it is less significant. It can also be important to have it as it may provide cheap and dirty reflection on a "non-reflectinve" materials (set for FG only reflections) saving you ton of render time. But that very much depends of your material setup. Metal shell of Seagram, for instance was heavily relying on this technique to avoid pitch black sidewalls most (virtually all) dark custom buildings have. Generally if your building skin is metal you could be much more relaxed about it. But it it is something like sandstone you better exclude ground plane from FG.

As for scaling -for Seagram I went with 133% it resulted in 4,85m regular floor height that seem to be the median floor height in game. I'm speaking vast majority of the original and better scaled custom buildings. But Seagram I've modeled in real sizes and scaled after that. In case of Barclay, for instance I simply recalculated the sizes prior to modeling. So technically there is no scaling there, but an adjusted size. I still can't decide which technique is better...

When you're looking for th texture for the ground plane (the stuff to be reflected) you could keep in mind few basic principles:

1. it is better to avoid easily recognizable large objects - like roads etc.

2. it is nice to have a splash of color here and there - it livens the reflection great deal. Just not too much, overall color should be, however, muted and close to 20 or so percent gray. But within this "average" it is important to have significant variations otherwise your reflections will be very boring.

5. with this variety, of both color and brightness fluctuations individual elements shouldn't be too large. That way they will not form anything recognizable in the reflection. You shouldn't be large "flat areas" on the image - eg big areas of same color without any variation.

Hope this helps.

[SimFox 804]

sorry I've missed things here on Simtropolis for last week or so.

Well the mess.. Just do it, I suppose. Because you're not limited to Google Earth views, but have Bird View shots as well you are in much better position as you can judge the relative hight of roof junk. By the looks of it there aren't really so many different things, just may be 3-4. And I don't think you would need to be so careful and accurate with it. Just deliver overall feeling of it and you'll be fine!

About ground plane... thre are some pitfalls with it. You see it generates not just reflections, or to put it more precise not just sharp reflection rays. By default it will also generate Final Gather ray. those are also, in effect reflection rays - defuse reflection rays. To be totally correct (in not distorting the lighting setup of the rig) one should exclude ground plane from FG calculations. This could be done in 3ds Max 2009 and newer:

1. select ground plane

2. rightclick and select object properties

3. select Mental Ray tab

4. set Final Gather to Pass (Invisible for FG) through option

However this is more important for lighter buildings that pick up more reflected (through FG) light from ground plane. for a darker it is less significant. It can also be important to have it as it may provide cheap and dirty reflection on a "non-reflectinve" materials (set for FG only reflections) saving you ton of render time. But that very much depends of your material setup. Metal shell of Seagram, for instance was heavily relying on this technique to avoid pitch black sidewalls most (virtually all) dark custom buildings have. Generally if your building skin is metal you could be much more relaxed about it. But it it is something like sandstone you better exclude ground plane from FG.

As for scaling -for Seagram I went with 133% it resulted in 4,85m regular floor height that seem to be the median floor height in game. I'm speaking vast majority of the original and better scaled custom buildings. But Seagram I've modeled in real sizes and scaled after that. In case of Barclay, for instance I simply recalculated the sizes prior to modeling. So technically there is no scaling there, but an adjusted size. I still can't decide which technique is better...

When you're looking for th texture for the ground plane (the stuff to be reflected) you could keep in mind few basic principles:

1. it is better to avoid easily recognizable large objects - like roads etc.

2. it is nice to have a splash of color here and there - it livens the reflection great deal. Just not too much, overall color should be, however, muted and close to 20 or so percent gray. But within this "average" it is important to have significant variations otherwise your reflections will be very boring.

5. with this variety, of both color and brightness fluctuations individual elements shouldn't be too large. That way they will not form anything recognizable in the reflection. You shouldn't be large "flat areas" on the image - eg big areas of same color without any variation.

Hope this helps.

[PBGV103 729]

Thanks SimFox I'll have to play around with that stuff.

I was thinking about BATing the Jacob Javits Convention Center at some point to I did a quick LOD test today and it failed. Gmax came up with error=6. According to the SC4 website that means:

Error #6 - Error rendering/saving zoom 5 rotation 1 view. Possible causes:

1. File sharing violation. This typically happens when the Lot Editor or the game is running.

2. Output file is write-protected (read-only).

3. Running out of memory.

4. OS error.

As far as I can tell the real error is none of the above. I think Gmax just can't deal with the size. It would after all end up being about a 16x24 lot. I wonder if theres any way around this.

I played around with the reflections and set the ground plane to Pass.

Zoom 4

Hmmm...  I'm not sure if it's better or worse now.

[PBGV103 729]

Thanks SimFox I'll have to play around with that stuff.

I was thinking about BATing the Jacob Javits Convention Center at some point to I did a quick LOD test today and it failed. Gmax came up with error=6. According to the SC4 website that means:

Error #6 - Error rendering/saving zoom 5 rotation 1 view. Possible causes:

1. File sharing violation. This typically happens when the Lot Editor or the game is running.

2. Output file is write-protected (read-only).

3. Running out of memory.

4. OS error.

As far as I can tell the real error is none of the above. I think Gmax just can't deal with the size. It would after all end up being about a 16x24 lot. I wonder if theres any way around this.

I played around with the reflections and set the ground plane to Pass.

Zoom 4

Hmmm...  I'm not sure if it's better or worse now.

[T Wrecks 10,210]

Better! A lot better, in fact. Now it looks like a massive building with hundreds of individual glass panes instead of one giant glass cube covered with a thin mesh of horizontal and vertical elements.

[T Wrecks 10,210]

Better! A lot better, in fact. Now it looks like a massive building with hundreds of individual glass panes instead of one giant glass cube covered with a thin mesh of horizontal and vertical elements.

[PBGV103 729]

Or this?  (Please ignore the ground floor windows and the second floor windows for the front of the building.  They aren't finished yet.)

I just don't know.  lol

Edit:  I just started messing with the lower floor windows.  What do you guys think?

[PBGV103 729]

Or this?  (Please ignore the ground floor windows and the second floor windows for the front of the building.  They aren't finished yet.)

I just don't know.  lol

Edit:  I just started messing with the lower floor windows.  What do you guys think?

[PBGV103 729]

Just got started on window shades.

Here's RL:

And here's what I have so far:

As you can imagine this is VERY tedious. 

[T Wrecks 10,210]

Yeah, I can imagine that. However, the building looks better and better with every update. So far, everything is coming along really great. I'm already looking forward to seeing what you'll do with the roof junk.

[AlexandrosB13 184]

wow! looks great with window shades! the only thing is that the building doesn' t seem to have so many reflections, like the photo you showed us, but still it is excellent.

[Vlasky 1,803]

Excellent job PBGV103! You seem to be making a top notch quality BAT! I'll be following your thread more closely from now on. Keep up the good job!

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

Great work, on your BAT. I love the windows.

[SimHoTToDDy 2,939]

I love to see people differentiating materials in MAX, that is one of the great things about it. Most people just jump into it and don't realize that they can make a make their bricks look like they are made from a different substance than their metal (aside from bitmaps).

Anyway, you are progressing well. I'm looking forward to more from you

[SimFox 804]

It does come along nicely!

However glass has some issues. At the moment it looks like you have same very sheet of glass cloned over and over and over:

the reason for this is because you, I believe, did. Did assigned your UVWs on per polygon basis. So the very same noise pattern, and hence exactly same reflection distortion occur over and over and over. You should remove any UVWs you may have on your glass - you don't need it for procedural 3 d maps like noise. Also make suer you tick the option to NOT affect defuse channel in bump options. It may not be necessary if your glass absolutelly black in there (as it should) but still it is a good practice for such materials.

Another issue with it is the size of noise. Also you should make size of your noise much larger. Right now you're probably using default values of ,635. It is way to small for the smooth glass. you should rise it to about 2,5 -3,5 meters (these values are always in System units). Also make sure that it (the noise) exists in World Coordinates and not in System ones.

And the last thing you need to attend to make you glass look more realistic is to make sure that distortion pattern (eg your noise) doesn't flow from one panel to another. To prevent it you need at least two (two would be totally sufficient for this model) identical in every respect glass materials that differ from each other only by Phase of the noise you use as bump. Assign these materials in check pattern.

Another thing that sort of jumps at you is the repetition of the pattern on the roofs - same very spot is repeated 3 times. It will probably be covered with some junk, but may be you wanna take a look at it later when roofs are done.

PS

The blinds don't need to be such a tedious business!

Here is a script automating their creation. Look for "Blinds object" on the page. There are some basic instructions.

[PBGV103 729]

As far as uvw mapping goes, the only thing I've done to any object is assign materials. I haven't really messed with uvw maps at all on this model. I've been meaning to do something about the repetitiveness of the glass but have so far been unsure of the best way to fix it. As it is now, and in the picture seen above, the blinds are actually part of the material of the seperate windows and each pane is a seperate object. I think the easiest way to fix the bump map issue is to use a few different bump maps and randomize them. Unless there is a way randomize bump maps within an individual material, over several objects. I'll have to look into that before putting a ton of work into anything.

[Francis90b 748]

I really like this building and the Bat is coming out very nicely!

Hope you will get the problems with the glass sorted out soon.

[PBGV103 729]

I significantly reduced the bump map.  It seems that not only did it reduce the repetitiveness, it also brought out much more color in the reflections.  Beside having more blue and purple in the reflections than I'd like, I'm happy with it as is.  The color issue should be an easy fix in GIMP. 

Now I need to figure out my HVAC aluminum materials.

[AlexandrosB13 184]

it looks very good! and good luck with roof, it has so many details.. i wonder if you can give me the texture of the roof cause i think i will need something like this for my 1065 avenue of americas, if you want of course, thanks

[Sgt Pepper 864]

Awsomely awsome. The shades remind me of the ones I did for 22 Cortlandt. To bad I messed up on one side with them though. Amazingly done so far Paul!

[PBGV103 729]

No real update here, just a little bored.  hahaha

[Sgt Pepper 864]

At least it's somethin' amazing.

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

Looks good.

[Seraf 1,239]

OMG you're doing a really good job with the glass, looks very realistic, I like it

[PBGV103 729]

I've been super busy with classes so I haven't had time to do much of anything.  I've played around with materials, but thats about it.  Here's a zoom5 preview of the other side of the building.

I'm still not happy with the materials, but I guess I should finish the modelling before I continue with that. 

Basically I'm just trying to keep this thread alive now.  hahaha

Any suggestions?  Anyone wanna make a reflection map for me?