nybt-forum-threads Sgt Pepper's NYBT Projects

[Sgt Pepper 864]

So now I need to post my NYBT Projects now.  So far I'm sure ya'll have seen Wall Street Plaza, here it is currently in 2 HQ Renders, Modeling and texturing done, just needs night lights.




Now I did start on the night lighting, but these are Draft renders so it will look a little choppy-

There will be more floors lit with more variety on the windows where it won't look like the entire floor is lit(maybe I'll leave some floors like that). If you see that's messed up on the night maps, it was because another row of windows was overlapping that part(at the top) I fixed it.


So this is the area that's a garage thing but the lighting is being weird for it. The floor is illuminated, the walls aren't when they should be. What's going on? It's a Target Spot light by the way...

[bixel 1,224]

Looks fabulous... but you need to learn how to do trunight - it will look so much better - gte my Tutorial on the STEX if you need to

[PBGV103 729]

Yep, I think it's time to move up from gmax to 3ds max Don't you think it would be amazing to have the whole of downtown lit with trunite? Until then try varying the intensity of each lit window i'd say use .5, .4, and .3. Other intesities tend to be way too bright or dark imo. The modeling looks great!

[SimFox 804]

pepeper, would you go for truNite, it could also be done in GMAX, (but with a bit more effort), or stay with current setup you would need to check the 4th lit up row of windows. You have there coplanar surfaces - that's why windows "break up". Most likelly you haven't  second set of day windows there.

[Evillions 552]

If you're going for trunite, then I can't use this BAT without it looking out of place with me using Darknight. Nevertheless, it's still a good BAT!

[PBGV103 729]

Evillions, I think he could use darknight. If I'm not mistaken, the term trunite refers to window textures alone, while darknight refers to darker lighting. Thus both can be used and are used by BATers all the time. The safe thing to do when it comes to darknight, imo, is make two versions, one for regular night and one for darknight. I think most people have moved to dark night, but there may still be some the prefer the maxis night settings.

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

Looks really good. I wish you can get better night lights.

[Sgt Pepper 864]

Thanks for the comments everyone!

However, I'm not sure if I will be able to get 3ds.max at this time for myself, however I would want to try using TruNite in Gmax(I had no Idea it could be done!).

Bixel- Thanks! Does the tutorial apply for Gmax users?

PBGV103-Ah, Downtown in TruNite...that would be so beautiful!

SimFox- Yes, I want to try TruNite in Gmax. But how could it be done? I'm very unfamilar with it so I'll need your help trying. About the 4th row of lit windows, your talking about the area at the top with the black spots right? I fixed that last night, it was a copy of the day glass overlapping with the lit glass. By the way, you should be added to the NYBT Roster now, I PMed one of the Mods to edit that. Again, I apologize for accidentally leaving you out.

Evillions- Darknight? I can't really render in Darknight without 3ds.MAX so would it be okay for your Darknight then?

Aaron- Thanks and I wish I can too.

Okay, no new pics yet, I'm currently waiting to figure out TruNite in Gmax before showing another pic of Wall Street Plaza. In the mean time, here's another pic of 250 Broadway-

Low quality render just for a quick preview... I think I need to just redo the mullions since I believe I made them too wide and too spaced out. Also how's the proportions of the model height wise? By the way, nothing has really happened to it since I started on Wall Street Plaza. If you are wondering why one of the spandrels on the bottom widest part of the building is taller than the rest, for some reason in RL it is like that.

[bixel 1,224]

Trunight is about manipulating what fsh files that get packaged into the model > it will be harder to do with gmax - If I were you I'd move to 3ds max asap

[SimFox 804]

Bixel is about right. More precise definition would be is that truNite is a night view FULLY generated at render time. As opposed of layered system produced by game. This layered system works this way:

Bluish overlay is placed over the normal day view,

Nightwindows or masked areas of effect of nitlites are than plastered on top of that sandwich.

We can't change these mechanics. That's how the game work. But once we understand it we can twist it into our advantage.

The key element here are those masks that delimit areas, parts of actually rendered night view that is superimposed on top of game modified day view. If the mask is the size of the entifer day view that you'll see in game will be that what you see during the night render.

So that is mechanics. And that is what truNite is. Not particular type of lights, or self illuminated maps etc. That is, already, artistic expression of a creator. Just like motors on a little Vespa and huge diesel locomotive are both internal combustion engines but are quite different in how they look and how much they can pull. Yet the underlaying principle is exactly same.

This entire masking on truNite gives created huge expressive freedom, within outline of eh building you can not simply turn on and off lights, you can change geometry if you want.

Initially the force that drove me on an artistic/creative side to fine this solution was poor quality of those 8 bit masks leading to bad banding of falling of nitelites, and that fact that night looked "wrong" it has way to strong shadows for overall night sky illumination, or, if that was a moon, then the shadows were way to bright (this is all for normal human perception). In other words it just didn't look right. I wanted it to look better.There were also some specific problems of implementation of night render with nitlites how it was done in original BAat4Max v2 that lead to ugly colored lights. Also same very scheme didn't work with some type of lights I started to use in day rig, etc, etc... So it just screamed to me - something has to be done!

In a new night view I could set things "right", well the way I saw them being right. As always this is a process, meaning that it took some times to get it right - there where I think right now both maxis truNite, as well as Dark truNite are in terms of both illumination level, shape definition by lighting and so on.

Difficulty of implementing truNite for GMAX is in the fact that GMAX BAT creates the SC4model file itself. Creates, and naturally names it. And the names here are key. For game any view is either day or night because of middle digit in instance ID. If it is 0 game treats it as day, if it is 8 game treats it as night view. So in Max it would be enough just to change that single digit to get the whole thing to work. In GMAX it would be necessary to change (depending on the version of ModelNames.ms) either typeID and that specific digit, or entire Instance ID for each and every FSH file. And of course it would be necessary to do 2 day renders instead of one day/night combo as well as create night lighting rig and manually switch it between renders.

It all doable, but big question if the effort worth it, given all other limitation of GMAX.

Anyway long story short. If someone will create convincing night rig for GMAX, and will convince iLive, who is active again, to wrignt utility extracting FSHs from Sc4Modle. i could write scripts dealing with rig switching, FSH renaming and insertion into proper Sc4Model.

Given all this, i think switching to MAX (given Autodesk offer) is quite an attractive option...

[T Wrecks 10,210]

I like Wall Street Plaza so far, but I think the roof textures are somewhat flat. You could try adding some more contrast and variation up there, I think.

[Sgt Pepper 864]

T Wrecks, I changed the roof textures a bit, hopefully this will look less flat. I'm Quite satisfied with it now.

And here's the model at Zoom4-

And I did some major editing to the lighting and figured out why I wasn't able to change the intensity earlier-

SimFox&Bixel-

That sounds highly confusing to me to change around fsh files which I have never done before.

When it comes to MAX, I would love to get it, however....I can't afford to get it(being only a teenager in highschool, my parents wouldn't really approve of it for some reason because of the cost mainly), I don't have an email ending in edu to get it, and my HighSchool email address(if my school even has one, I think all the staff uses their own email) doesn't end in that, and if it did, I doubt my teachers would approve me using it for anything... I want to use it yes, but I just can't get it at this time, and no I'm not trying to make excuses. I wish there was another free way to get it(without doing anything illegal of course ).

[Sgt Pepper 864]

Seeing there is no other posts, should I go ahead and render this BAT? I thought I would have had it done yesterday, but Driver's Ed kinda screwed that. So is it good?

[halo1dragon 11]

sgt are going to release wall street plaza today?

[GuerrilaWarfare 39]

Brandon, do you still have the textures you use for 22 cortlandt street. Those textures look extremely similar to the textures needed for my building.

[Sgt Pepper 864]

halo1dragon-Well If I'm finished today I can't release it today. The rendering is an all night thing.

GuerrillaWarfare- Yep, I sure do. Want me to post them here?

[GuerrilaWarfare 39]

Yes please .

[halo1dragon 11]

so its tomorrow then sgt am i right? are going to release as ploppable?

[Sgt Pepper 864]

Ok, if you just mean the wall texture, here is a link to it

http://i27.tinypic.com/2e3zzhx.jpg The Actual image I think is taller than 800 pixels...

halo1dragon- Possibly tomorrow, but no ploppable.

[halo1dragon 11]

oh man im begging the next must be ploppable u just can grow buildings lol

[Triforceseek 2]

Originally posted by: halo1dragon

oh man im begging the next must be ploppable u just can grow buildings lolquote>

Just use Extra Cheats plugin, and plop buildings wherever 

[halo1dragon 11]

any progress on 250 broadway?

[Sgt Pepper 864]

Should I be concerned if rendering Wall Street Plaza took about 13 hours? 47738.2 seconds, according to Gmax... and 22 Cortlandt Street only took 6 hours...

[Sgt Pepper 864]

Hate to double post but I have a conflict in BAT now....What should I do if all the tabs to the side are gone, and my main tool bar looks like this-

I can't BAT for awhile now...until this is fixed...

[PBGV103 729]

That doesn't look good. You'll probably have to reinstall gmax.

[Sgt Pepper 864]

Okay so when uninstalling Gmax to reinstall it, should I uninstall BAT first? Or just uninstall Gmax then once I get it back BAT will just be there? I'm confused I haven't encounted this conflict before...

[PBGV103 729]

I'd say move BAT out of your plugins folder first and then reinstall gmax and put BAT back in the plugins folder. That way you don't have to reinstall BAT. I don't even know if maxis offers BAT on the site anymore, so don't delete it

Edit: NOT the plugins folder, I meant the gamepacks folder in the gmax root folder

[SimFox 804]

Although BAT is just a collection of scripts and hece could be simply moved in or out without any need for installation process or registration of any kind I would still caution against the solution suggested by PBGV103. Here are the reasons why.

1. first of all the location, It might be just a "typo" but I think it is still important to note that BAT should not be in Plugins folder. It may be verey obvious when you be moving it out, but once you star to move things back you don't have reference no more. and moving things back to Plugins folder would lead to absolutely nothing - it wouldn't work. On the other hand there is no need really even to move anything - Uninstally GMAX wouldn't remove any files not installed by it anyway. So your gamepacks folder, as well as Scrtips\stratUp should remain in place and once you'll install GMAX again should be there too.

2. UI - you are having problems with corrupted UI file, you usually see in BAT is, in fact, BAT UI. Meaning if you start GMAX on it's own you'll see that colors are different, that some UI options will be missing , while, what is more important present - those that you wouldn't normally see when you start program through BAT.

So this may be corruption that occur somewhere within BAT folder. In this case re-installing GMAX may not fix situation.

PS.

here is CUI - custom User Interface file that should restore your BAT to original look.

Download it and extract to GMAX\UI.

After that open BAT, go to Customize -> Load Custom UI Scheme

Navigate to GMAX\UI and select GMAX_Bat.cui

[Sgt Pepper 864]

SimFox, thank you so much you fixed my problem! I'm glad you took the time to help me. So I'm back in BATing business. I'll post some progress later on of 250 Broadway.

However, in the meantime perhaps from that last pic of it several posts above(8th post to be exact)-

1. Should I edit the current mullions to make them smaller and more spaced together?

2. The glass, I'm assuming it is infact to dark. Correct?

3. Scale wise, is it to tall?

[halo1dragon 11]

progress on the skyscraper sgt?