Wiecher's BAT thread.

[Wiecher 192]

Hello, this is my very first BAT thread, and I have started it because I have some questions and some problems.

First I want to thank the people who made the great BAT-toturials, they really helped me.

Now, my building:

I have been working on this building:

It's the church of my hometown.

You can find the real building here on google maps, and there is streetview in my town.

http://www.google.com/maps?q=52.697333,6.189814&num=1&t=h&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=23.875,57.630033&ie=UTF8&ll=52.697229,6.19027&spn=0.001521,0.005262&z=18

The Problem:

A few days ago something happened which caused the BAT to crash every time I load this building,

it will give an error message and then it closes.

This happens before I edit anything and even before I do something like zooming out or rotating.

Does anyone know what to do about this?

The only way to edit the building is by opening another BAT first, then edit something, and then opening ths one.

That way I can edit it for a short time, but when I zoom out too fast or do something big like array or a lot of nightlighting, it crashes again. It gives almost the same message, except the second sentence then says something like 'Do you want to try to save the changes?'

But that never works, only half of the model will be saved, without textures.

And that brings me to my second question: Is it worth continuing with this building? Is it good enough to upload when it's finished? Or will everyone just make fun of me, like you see once a week or so when someone uploads something bad...?

As you can probably see, it's not finished yet, so this is what I want to do and what I have:

My first tries on nightlighting. Under the tower are spots in the ground, like you see at monuments in real life too.

Maybe it's a bit overdone?

And of course the windows in the nave of the church have to be lighted.

From another side:

These are some things I have to change:

I have to finish the front and change some textures.

And there is this small building next to the tower which I still have to make.

And now my last question:

When you look at the difference between the pictures from the South and the East view, you may see the building looks a lot smaller in the South view...

How is this possible, as they are both on the 5th zoom level?

And would it affect a succesfull export of the building?

[psander5 198]

Welcome to BAT Open Discussion!

That looks like a nice building and you've started the BAT well. 

I have no idea what your application error is.  Perhaps someone else does, but one thing I'd try is to make a brand new file and merge just the geometry from your 'corrupt' file into that.   Sometimes it can help to do this, but it won't tell you anything about what caused the error in the first place.   Since you have a problem when you do complicated stuff, it might be a memory problem.  In that case, merging into a new file won't do anything to help!  I'm not a technical person, so I wouldn't know how to help you with that. 

Your second question... No-one will make fun of you!  It's true that some uploads generate some negative comments borne of frustration, but your BAT is easily going to be good enough to avoid most of those.  You've already done a lot to avoid negative comments by opening your BAT thread before uploading!  It's always good to get the input of a few others before you upload.  BATing isn't easy.  There's a lot to learn, and a BAT thread is the best place to do that learning! 

You seem to have highlighted the main problems already.  If you're good with Photoshop/Gimp, it would be an advantage if you made 1 to 1 textures for your walls and roofs.  That way you avoid the repeating patterns and you can add all the grime and detail that would make the walls look as old as the real building.  

The lighting doesn't look right to me just yet.  My advice is to complete all the daytime stuff first.  It's easier to do lighting once you have the full picture to work with.  I'm not an expert on lighting, especially in Gmax, so I struggle to offer better advice than that at this stage  

That wierd glitch above the window looks like it might be due to some flipped normals.  Have a look at the polygons up close and see if they are facing the wrong way.  If so then you should be able to flip the polygons individually to correct the problem.

As for your last question, I hope that it is just because the render window is scaled differently... try zooming in on the south render (by rolling the scroll wheel on your mouse).  If, when zoomed in it looks like a nice, normal zoom 5 then everything is fine and there shouldn't be any problem with the export.  If not, then it's a more complicated problem that I have no idea how to deal with! 

The key to getting positive comments and ratings is patience and dilligence!  So long as you have both those qualities I have no doubt you can make this into a very nice BAT.  Don't worry about speed.  Most of the negative comments you've witnessed are brought on by the unnecessary urgency of new BATers to upload their first file.  It took me about a year I think, from opening a BAT thread to uploading my first file!  I'm exceptionally slow though, and this church of yours is already way better than my early attempts at BATing  

[Alex_Bervoets 91]

First of all: I love the building... you won't make a fool out of yourself... This is a very good first BAT. There will always be some comments but it's important to learn from it...

- I have no idea why the program crashes, I've never had the same problem but somebody here will...

- I don't really like the nightlights... they are too bright, especially from the other side... don't place the light on the ground (as in real life) but try to imitate it (place it higher or further away). Sim city doesn't have a reallistic night, so you have to adapt...

- The textures need to be larger, use photoshop etc to enlarge it. It needs to be darker on the bottom and lighter on the top (don't overdo it)

- The size of the view depends on how much space it needs to show the building... the building is larger at the side-view and smaller on the front-view. It doesn't affect your export

You've made a very good start... good luck on finishing it!

Alex

[Wiecher 192]

Thank you for your positive comments.

I will work on the points you mentioned and maybe it will be finished before 2011

[Amthaak 1,501]

I had the pb you mentioned many times when I was using Gmax. The solution given by Psander is the same I was using and it is quite efficient! 

For your bat , you already did the most complicated i.e; the bat itself with the good proportions, now you have to make the most difficult, ie; the "texturing" job! It is what makes the difference between agood bat and a fantastic bat!  Follow Psander recommandation ( make a 1 to 1 textures to avoid repetition).

Anyway, it's a very good start! Welcome to the batters world

[Faded Glory 13]

Wow, welcome! This a fine peice of work you've got started, and I'm glad to see that you've done the most benefitial thing for yourself by opening a thread. Now, without looking at the building in real life, the wall on the left looks like its on an diagonal. This wouldn't be a problem, but it seems the roof is not over part of the building in the back left corner? Overall though, that's the only thing I've noticed that you haven't yourself (at least from what you said in the first post). I really do wish you all the luck I can; BATting is hard, but you've made an awesome start. Of course, I must end by saying what i say to every BATter... Don't rush it!

Keep up the good work!

Faded Glory

[Wiecher 192]

Hello again.

It has been a while since I posted the first pictures, and I said it was maybe finished before 2011.

Well, I had some other stuff to do (school), and afterwards I kind of forgot to post about the proress of this BAT. In the meantime, I've been experimenting with some other buildings and with the Lot Editor.

So here is my second update to my BAT thread:

First, I have updated the building I started this thread with, the church.

@ Faded Glory: Yes, the wall is supposed to be a little diagonal and the corner without a roof you mentioned, is actually a little room attached to the main building. These new pictures will  make it clear:

And now some updated nightlighting. I think it's better, but nightlighting is still incredibly difficult and a lot of trial and error.

I think I should light the tower on this side too...

Ok, that's all about the church, and you can see I put it on a lot and added some trees and street-stuff. I haven't found a better, less repetitive texture for the tower yet, so I covered it up with a tree

And now on to the other 'experiments'.

First, a sign I made for my airport:

Just really simple, a framework and extruded text.

I also tried to make a highway sign:

I used https://www.simtropolis.com/stex/details.cfm?id=25248 for the model.

I also made another building, it's not based on a real-life building, just an experiment with some different building styles and imagination.

The last thing I show is my first BAT ever, which I made by following the custom flag toturial step by step:

That's it for today, I'm going to finish the church and i'll try to make a nice building out of the  'experiment'. I'll make some new buildings too and maybe, some day, something nice might react in the experiment test-tubes and a new building will be born.

[NitzWalsh 0]

Nice flags, I'm gonna have to check out that tutorial.

[harishna 847]

The church is looking good, great for first BAT, I think it would be worth if you can make better textures for the main body and the roof and are the columns going to stay like that ?

[T Wrecks 10,210]

I agree with harishna. There is also quite a mismatch between your textures because the roof texture is really oversaturated. It's a nice building, though, and you're certainly up to a good start!

[nathanthemayor 1,263]

I must ask something:

Where did you get the flags?I have never seen them before.

[Wiecher 192]

Hi,

it's 4 days later now and i've tried to make some textures myself.

I read a tutorial on gradient colors on roofs and walls in the omnibus and with the help of http://www.bricksntiles.com/ I created my own texture for the church.

I ended up with a 5000x15000 jpeg file, and my little laptop refused to work with that, but after several crashes I finally got it working. 

I hope it's better than the original one:

But the roof texture still seems to be a little repetitive...

Say what you think!

_{(Oops, forgot the small building next to the tower)}

[T Wrecks 10,210]

Well, the angle of this picture might not be the ideal choice concerning an evaluation of the roof texture... may I suggest choosing a different camera angle?

The brick texture on the tower does look a lot better, though. If your computer has trouble handling large graphics, remember that you might as well texture each tower segment separately. As long as you tweak the textures with the final configuration in mind, everything should be fine.

[Wiecher 192]

Ok, here's a picture from a different angle.

The roof is more visible now.

And that glitch from the first post is still there.

I think I'm going to Delete the whole nave of the building, and remake it. It's a single object with some (stupid) boolean holes in it, and I think that messed up the vertices and edges.

Luckily the rest of the building is made of splines which aren't adjusted after they were extruded, so they are allright.

[Wiecher 192]

Ok, it has been 10 days since my last post.

There have ben no replies yet, so I'll just start with the pictures:

I think the church is almost ready for upload:

What do you think? Is it time to upload this?

Maybe I should change the lot a little, so it fits exactly on the lot.

And maybe I can scale it up a little, to compensate for the squashing in the game.

And now on to something small I accidentally made.

When doing some array with cilinders, I accidentally also changed the values in the rotate section of the array-screen.

What came out was somekind of abstract object, in the shape of a modern bridge.

So I used it to give my bridges over sunken highways (or maybe small rivers) a special look:

It only needs a central pillar between the two highways.

How do you put something below groundlevel, in a way it doesn't shine through the road or the terrain?

That's it for today.

[zahrul3 472]

That bridge is pretty solid, you may want to have it shipped to NAM or do something to make it not glitchy as it would be better if I would say, 'NAM Approved'. The church, so far, is only good in complexity. You may want to tone down the saturation so it blends in seamlessly with Maxis and high quality custom content. The nightlights and the brick texture is lacking massively though. You may want to use omni lights at around 3-5 intensity with around 3-4 Inverse Square decay and place them inside the church. Take note that, there is no such thing as a spotlight which shoots 90 degrees straight up.

[Wiecher 192]

@ zahrul3

About the lights, I actually have omni lights inside the church and none of the spotlights shoot 90 degrees straight up. But apparently ther is still something wrong, so could you tell me some other ways to make the lights better?

If there is no other way, I will try to redo all the lights.

And about the saturation, do you mean I should just lower the saturation of all the textures in photoshop and then re-apply them to the building?

I've also taken a look at your bat thread, and you seem to have had the same problems in the beginning.

Could you explain to me how you fixed those?

[zahrul3 472]

You do not need to do a retexture, it happens by itself whenever you edit the texture image. Decreasing saturation too much will cause color loss, so you might want to alter around with other color settings(brightness, vibrance, exposure) to make the perfect result. For the spotlights, reduce the target distance in 'Spotlight Parameters' the whole way from 240m(unrealistic) to 3-6m(realistic), then give an Inverse Square decay. Be sure when using spotlights, use free spotlights and never position them facing up without using the settings I mentioned. You can use the default settings if your spolight faces down as it won't have much effect anyway.

[Utvaw 45]

I like that bridge, it is really neat.

[Wiecher 192]

Ok, it has been a while since my last post, but I'm back. I had a lot to do for school, so there was not much time for BATting.

I have been working on the church again, but I still can't get the textures right, does someone have tips for that? Zahrul said something about saturation and stuff, I tried and it looks different know, but I don't know if it's better.

_{I hope the pictures work, because the new Simtropolis has a rocket science eleventh dimension quantum-mechanical way of new post editing...}

And I've not only looked at the textures, but also at the scale of the model. To see what it would look like in game, I placed it in it's 'natural habitat', a Dutch town square. So with help of Haarlemmergolds Dutch buildings, I tested it.

The building is not very big compared to the houses... Maybe even too small.

Because these problems are sometimes frustrating, I also made some other buildings and things.

I worked on this one, I showed one small picture of it a few posts ago:

And, when I was working on some tiles of my region, I was making a large river of ploppable water. For realism, I added some groins. In real life they have a beacon on them, but I couldn't find one anywhere.

So I made one myself:

I've also experimented with the reader to make some props as Mayor Mode Ploppables.

The small jetty are some Maxis pallet props converted to mayor mode ploppables with the reader, and the beacons are my own little BAT as a MMP.

And, just for fun, I also made some kind of commie concrete block:

This one is far from finished, it needs roof junk and some stairs at the sides, and other esthetically pleasing details.

This was it for today!

[harishna 847]

Hi nice to see you back into bating about your latest creation, the commie block, umn i think looks more like a prison rather than a residential building, even for commie standards, I think the dimensions are unrealistic, the windows are ridiculously small and the whole is too thick and too repetitive it looks as you just cloned the same facade in all the faces...have you looked a RL examples of what you trying to archive? maybe RL ones does look like this and I am not aware, as I am not European.

it kinda reminds me to this

[Ceafus 88 1,843]

Hi nice to see you back into bating about your latest creation, the commie block, umn i think looks more like a prison rather than a residential building, even for commie standards, I think the dimensions are unrealistic, the windows are ridiculously small and the whole is too thick and too repetitive it looks as you just cloned the same facade in all the faces...have you looked a RL examples of what you trying to archive? maybe RL ones does look like this and I am not aware, as I am not European.

it kinda reminds me to this

It Does.