BAT4Max v.5

[Huston 5,798]

Recently got an error that makes no sense to me while exporting a BAT:

 

 

I've seen this error occur to a limited few, but they never came up with any remedies. After rebooting my laptop, the error hasn't gone away. Then I tried reinstalling BAT4Max, and got this:

 

 

If there's any light someone could shed on this matter, it'd be awesome since I wanna try rolling out some new BATs into my CJ and to the STEX

[mntoes 270]

Right click your desktop icon and select "run as administrator". This should solve the "no flush" problem. (Sorry can't remember if it will fix the other problem as well)

[Huston 5,798]

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[Huston 5,798]

Can't seem to get my bldgs to render properly. In PIM, they end up as red blocks of nothing:

 

 

When I installed and opened GMax, I set the driver settings to OpenGL out of DirectX and another setting. Am I supposed to use another setting in this case? I can't remember how I installed it last time. Testing it with a test cube, I'm pretty sure it hasn't got anything to do with BAT4Max, but it could. It might have something to do with my driver config on GMax, and I have had this happen before, but it wasn't persistent. So I'm quite curious and desparate to have this fixed.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Those graphics drivers are for the viewports and don't affect rendering, which is entirely done by your cpu. 

 

Check the BAT Mega FAQ for things to try for this problem.

[JakeMD 107]

 

I've seen this error occur to a limited few, but they never came up with any remedies. After rebooting my laptop, the error hasn't gone away. Then I tried reinstalling BAT4Max, and got this:

 

 

If there's any light someone could shed on this matter, it'd be awesome since I wanna try rolling out some new BATs into my CJ and to the STEX

 

 

PC just BSOD'd and I had to reinstall everything. including windows. Getting the same error, and came straight to this thread to sift through it. Has anyone seen it before? (Am going to look through after posting this). 

 

 

Looked back a few pages (page 4 or 5). The solution has to do with UAC and administrator privileges. I have my UAC at the "recommended" level on my new install (Can't remember what it was before). I was able to install bat4max by running 3ds max as an administrator. The question is whether or not i'll have to continue to use 3ds max as an admin in order to export, etc. 

[Huston 5,798]

@JakeMD -  Thanks for the tip, it's worked and I got reinstalled.

 

@Jasoncw - I've tried some of the stuff relevant to my situation. I thought that with the field of red in the PIMX display, it was another case of a conflicting ID. It's happening to every test BAT I make, so it seems I can't export properly at all. I checked to see if I had the ModelNames.ms file, and I did. I copied it from my old GMax on my previous laptop. So I'm not too sure if it is an ID conflict still, but nothing I've done seems to have worked on it. Getting a little more desparate now I'm not sure why this issue is so persistent cause I have had this before, but re-rendering normally does away with it. But I've several test BAT exports, and all of them have come out this same as the one in the pic -- a red field of nothing. Any other triggers for this particular issue? I've already tried re-installing, but that hasn't done much. Nor has reinstalling BAT4Max. So I'm dry out of ideas.

 

EDIT: Nevermind, found the problem. I hadn't installed the fix for BAT4Max. Seems I forgot about the extras I needed to get it to work

[Girafe 1,729]

what s the last version of 3dsmax compatible with bat4max?

[Toothless Stitch 2,901]

For me 2013 worked fine. Wanted to try with 2014 but was to stupid and lost my copy of 3ds -.-

[Girafe 1,729]

2015 is working with few bugs but working

[Jasoncw 11,840]

For anyone who has later versions of max (I don't) who wants to set up the render settings for the newer versions, the file to edit is SF_LtbL_functions.ms which is in gamepacks/BAT/scripts

 

Near the end you can find the functions that are done when you press the different buttons (for example "fn SF_SetDay = " is the function that happens when you press the the day button). Each of those functions chooses to do another function based on what version of 3ds max you're using. So for each of these sections you have to add in new functions for the versions of 3ds max that might require them. 

 

Then higher up in the file all of the various render settings are in their own functions. So in here you'd define the function that you added previously, and you'd look up online what the "names" of the different settings are. 

 

 

And if you really want to you can go into some other files to add buttons and connect them to different functions. Last year I did some editing and rearranged the buttons and added some new ones ("draft" rendering settings (not very useful) and automatic vertical scaling (which I couldn't get working...)).

 

 

What would really be great is if someone who knew what they were doing was able to revamp the important code, all the image cropping and output naming and all that stuff. Ideally I'd like to have as much as possible in a stand alone program, so that there was as little as possible happening in max that could get broken with new versions of max.

[Girafe 1,729]

A next version of bat4max would be lovely for these running with the latest version of 3dsmax (2014 & 2015).

 

But priority would be to update the 1st post of this topic as many informations are missing.

 

What I learned for the installation of 3dsmax 2015:

- running 3dsmax with administrator rights is mandatory

- the gamma fix from Droric is needed ( be nice to drop the link in the 1st page).

 

Currently, I didn t check night exports

 

ps: Student version of max is still available and the licence is working 3 years

 

ps2: the quality of rendering seems to not be perfect with the fix of Droric

[Sabretooth78 808]

Question - does bat4max as it currently exists support 3dsmax 9?  While I could pursue the student version (and have), ultimately I'm a little more comfortable running something I already have where I know the license isn't going to expire (and I may have to end up falling back on anyway).  Is there any overriding reason (read: functionality) why I would have to upgrade to the newer version(s)?

 

Another factor to consider is that I'm running Windows XP in a virtual machine on a Mac (seeing as I can't get 3dsmax to run in Wine).  Therefore I don't have the ability to upgrade past 2013, and if that's just going to expire in 3 years I would prefer to just maintain continuity by legacy with 3dsmax 9.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Girafe: I've updated the first post. Let me know if there's anything else I should add or change.

 

Sabretooth78: imo max 9 is the first version of max that is acceptable. It's the first to include the arch & design material which I think is essential. Over the next few versions of max after yours some worthwhile improvements are made, but the last few versions (the ones that bat4max isn't working with) whatever improvements there are aren't relevant to BATing. So it would have been better for you to get stuck at 2012 or 2010, but considering your situation max 9 should be fine.

[Sabretooth78 808]

OK.  Yeah, it's not the best but what am I going to do.  Like I said I could upgrade to 2012/2013 but say I'm still going in 3 years, when the license ran out I'd be back at 9 again anyway, which I was able to acquire back in '06 and then promptly proceeded to never use   .  My main goal is really just to correct some deficiencies in my lots that have always bugged me - no intent to re-become a BAT heavyweight - and I'm sure just by running with some version of Max I'm running a little ahead of the pack anyway.  I figure I'll get my feet wet by physically copying those old gmax files over by manually recreating them in Max.

 

I've encountered the "Couldn't find camera" issue but I think I've fixed it using SimFox's solution back on page 8.  We'll see how that works going forward.  I got some kind of exception error trying to preview render one of my old projects but it's a gmax import and probably has something goofy going on - a plain box in a new file seems to work fine.  The link he posted on RapidShare is no longer available so hopefully I did it right.

 

Yes, I rendered a preview of a box.  I have awoken from a 10 year slumber!

[Girafe 1,729]

Thanks do you know what are the settings to increase the quality of the exports?

[Jasoncw 11,840]

sabretooth78: good!

 

girafe: The reason bat4max can't set up the rendering settings is because mental ray introduced a new "unified sampling" method, and in the render settings window you have to choose what type of rendering you want to do from a drop down box. 

 

 

To use the same settings as BAT4Max, you'd change "Unified / Raytraced (Recommended)" to "Classic / Raytraced", and change the minimum and maximum samples per pixel to 1 and 16, and change the filter type to Lanczos, and the spatial contrast to 0.02 for RGB and A.

 

You can also experiment with unified sampling. But idk if it's really good for BATing or not. Me personally, I check the FG + Highlights Only checkbox for every material that I can, which is most of my materials, which means most of my materials don't actually have glossiness samples in the first place. 

 

With the "classic" method, you choose the number of glossiness samples for each material based on how many samples you think it needs in order to look correct. And then when you render it does those samples and you have your result. With unified sampling, the glossiness samples could be anywhere from 1 to 128 (low to super high)(the "samples per pixel" settings essentially override the glossiness samples), and so instead of guessing at how many samples each material needs, you only need to change one setting, the overall quality of the image, and max will automatically sample every pixel as much as it needs to in order to achieve the spatial contrast setting. So if you have an area of flat simple easy pixels, it will use a low number of samples, and if it's an area that's hard to render, it will keep on taking samples (up to 128) until it achieves the quality you asked for.

 

The "unified" part of unified sampling is that before, the spatial contrast settings weren't connected to glossiness. A tree is hard to render and requires a lot of samples for a smooth render, even if the leaves are a simple material without difficult glossiness. Meanwhile a flat plane with a material with a really contrasty noisy glossiness map would need a lot of glossiness samples to render smoothly, but wouldn't require many samples from the other sampler. With unified sampling, everything is the same type of sample and it just keeps on taking samples until it looks good, "good" being however low you decide to set spatial contrast. 

 

However, if you, like me, check the Highlights + FG Only checkbox, then there aren't any real glossiness samples in the first place, and idk what happens in that case, but I'm guessing it makes unified sampling irrelevant. 

 

At least this is all my understanding of it. I think it's Mental Ray's answer to V-Ray's Universal Settings option, where spatial contrast and noise threshold are basically the same setting. And actually I just looked again at the screenshot and it looks like spatial contrast has been renamed to "contrast / noise threshold".

 

 

Something that might be cool for BAT4Max would be to use unified sampling, and then connect the noise threshold to the BAT4Max UI, with a suggested setting for final renders. That way it would be very easy for people to do draft renders by changing the noise threshold, or possibly adjust it on a scene-by-scene basis. 

[Girafe 1,729]

ty for the explanations, I need time to check that

[TCD 123]

Couldn't find a solution for this one in this thread.

 

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Try closing max and opening it again.

[TCD 123]

I can export in SD but I get this error when I try to export in HD. Always crashes after East view finishes rendering.

 

 

EDIT 

 

I exported all the objects in that scene and imported them into a new scene and that one successfully renders and inserts FSHs into my SC4Model. 

[MTYland 35]

Hi, I try to install this, and I hope to work properly. I'll be uploading information in the future about what I have planned to do.

[MTYland 35]

Hi, when i open my 3ds max 2012 with the hotfix 1 installed, and then i click on the max script and run script, run bat4max installation, and then it says "Night Windows are incompatible with your version of 3ds Max and were disable", but the normal installation works correctly, except for that "night windows" thing, what that means?

[Jasoncw 11,840]

A long long time ago it was a way of making nitelites. I don't even remember exactly but it had to do with making a special material library that had the lit up windows material in it, and iirc the day glass would be swapped out for the night glass for night renders. It's not a useful feature, and it wasn't updated for newer versions of max, and by "newer" I mean any version of max that anyone here might actually be using. tbh it should be removed or at least that warning should be removed because every other question in here is "what, night windows disabled!?!"

[MTYland 35]

omg my bad, thank you Jasoncw

[mntoes 270]

Ok I'm new to 3ds max (2012) so go gentle with me ...lol

 

I have a problem when rendering my building. I think it must be to do with the lighting rig. I tried to follow tutorials but end up getting lost.

 

As you can see from this preview image I have highlighted in yellow some areas of shadow that I do not think should be on there. These are created by shadows coming from the bay windows on the building.

 

Questions

 

1)Is this normal for SC4 lighting.

2 If not how do I amend the lighting.

 

Any help apreciated.

 

Mike

 

South view

 

 

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Yeah I think that looks normal. Sometimes when dealing with things like that there are shadows when we don't expect there to be, but those bay windows stick out a lot, and for them not to cast shadows on the facade (normally we don't think of bay windows as something that cast shadows like that) they'd have to be much shallower. 

[mntoes 270]

Thanks Jason for a prompt reply.

[Mista_Fuzz 13]

OK, so for some reason the normal BAT tool has decided that I don't have SimCity on my computer even though I have the normal dvd version and it's installed in the right location.  Does this mean that bat4max won't work?

[Jasoncw 11,840]

3ds Max and BAT4Max would work, but making a .SC4Model file from gmax/BAT is a part of the process you can't avoid. You can BAT in 3ds max, but when it's time to export for the game, if gmax/BAT still isn't working, you won't be able to export. 

 

Unfortunately I don't know anything about your BAT problem. Hopefully someone else does.