Feed back wanted for first time BAT

[carrot1984 9]

I have been reading up on the BAT forums for a couple months and have mostly finished a BAT project.  I would like some constructive criticism as to how I can improve my BATing and possibly improve this building before I upload it to the STEX, if I deem it worthy.  Thank you to Phillippbo for your excellent BAT tutorial.  Below are a couple in game photos of building.  It is a modern coal fired power plant with the latest in emissions control technology (selective catalytic reduction, electrostatic precipitator and sulfur dioxide scrubber) significantly reducing the hazardous emissions.  The parameters for it are as follows:

9000 MWH

$420 per month utilities budget

$18000 Plop cost

40 Air pollution (16 radius)

40 Water Pollution (10 radius)

150 Garbage

500 water consumption

Medium Wealth

> >

I have seen other power plants on the STEX that supply jobs but I have not figured out how to get the Plug-In Manager to allow me to assign job values to this building.  I tried using iLive Reader and it let me assign jobs to the building but they did not work in game (no cars driving to the plant when route queried).  Any assistance in this area would be appreciated.

Thank you in advance for the useful comments.

[T Wrecks 10,210]

Holy cow!

Here I was, expecting to see some shoebox-shaped blob, clumsily slapped together... and what do I see? A full-blown powerplant, loaded with details. So the first word is: Congratulations!

The lot design looks very convincing, too, especially considering that you didn't use any dependencies.

Ok, now for some suggestions:

• It shows that you are using gmax and not 3dsmax - gmax has the tendency to bleach out textures on horizontal considerably. If you look at your conveyor structures, they are almost white on top. The same applies to some roof surfaces. You'll have to make these a lot darker in gmax in order to have them look like slightly soiled roof surfaces in game. Most importantly, they are not supposed to be so shiny white that they look untextured or like polished plastics.
• In general, your textures could benefit enormously from some aftertreatment - the idea is that you take the basic texture, load into a photo editing software like Photoshop or GIMP, and apply some effects to it. For vertical and angled surfaces like walls or sloped roofs, this effect might be a slight gradient - from brighter on top to darker at the bottom.
• It's best to take a snapshot of any part you want to texture in viewport while looking straight at it - for example, a snapshot of a flat roof taken from vertically above. You can copy that snapshot into your photo editing software and use it as a template. Then you can make a texture that's customized to the shape of that exact roof, and this enables you to add darker smudges around all edges, which will increase the threedimensional effect a lot and help to blend all elements into another.
•  When you use colours, make sure that you keep colour saturation to modes levels. In this particular case, I'd say that the blue color might look more convincing if you desaturated it a bit.

Here, let me demonstrate what I meant - I took the topmost section of the main building (the blue part and its rooftop) and simulated the effects of different textures in GIMP:

It's a very crude and clumsy simulation, but it might help to show what I'm getting at. This is what I did:

• added grain/noise to the roof texture to give it some structure
• traced and highlighted all edges by darkening the roof texture arounf them
• bleached out open areas by brightening them slightly
• desaturated the blue texture slightly, just a bit
• added a slight gradient to the blue wall texture

I overdid the noise, and the JPEG compression makes it worse, but I hope the picture is still helpful.

The only other suggestion I have would be to model and position the substation in a way that it would visually connect with the in-game power poles. That would be so cool... 

Anyway, I hope you don't feel discouraged or anything. This would not be justified, because you did a SPLENDID job so far. If you don't get it all to look right on this one, don't feel bad - all this stuff takes practice, and lots of it. This is not helped by the fact that gmax suffers from a lot of deficiencies.  This is really a promising start, so keep up the great work! 

Did I mention that I love those metal vents?

[nihonkaranws 89]

As for the large pile, to make it more realistic, use the "displace" to attach a grayscale bitmap, which you can use by getting any aerial picture of a mountain or pile, changing to black and white, and apply it to your pile model. This will give it the rough edges you'd see in any tailings pile. I'd provide you with an example, but I myself don't have one anymore. I'll look around.

[carrot1984 9]

Thank you both for your input. As I get free time I will work on incorporating in you tips. When I compared the building in game to Maxis buildings the lower quality rendering is evident but I cannot justify $3500 for a hobby at the moment. Maybe someday.

[T Wrecks 10,210]

Can you get your hands on a student version? I don't know the exact terms and conditions, but I read that they give a pretty long trial version (12 months?) to students for free.

[SimFox 804]

Maxis building were in created in version of 3ds max that isn't really different in capabilities to those of GMAX BAT. So with some ingenuity, effort, attention to detail and some oimage editing skills (for making textures, you can with pull out stuff that will be on the level of Maxis buildings.

[x493x 446]

My opinion is upload now. Only con for me is the black piles look a bit odd but otherwise great!