IDS's (mostly) Minnesota BATs

[IDS2 3,346]

Art- I brightened up the warning lights a bit, hopefully they're more visible now The jpeg compression kind of kills their brightness on the previews, but they look bright enough on the output window. I'm also tweaking the lobby.

Jason- I wasn't able to find the bump map, but I increased the glossiness samples and decreased the shadow samples and it seemed to help with render time and appearance. I brightened the lobby, do you think it's far enough or possibly too far?

Yeah, this preview's quality got cut a little somehow...sorry, I'm not sure what happened. It really dims the bright red warning lights on the antennae and smudges the Wells Fargo sign way more than it actually is. I apologize - I saved a .bmp version too if anyone wants to see a higher-quality preview.

Does anyone else think some of the windows look like their mullions are slanted? It's just the preview, but if that's how it's gonna look in game, I may have to look more closely...

[Akilles 17]

It does look like some of them are slanted. If you look close you can tell they are not but the background to the windows gives them that illusion. BATS like this definitely inspire me to continue work on my own. Nice Works!!

[Girafe 1,729]

IMHO you have an incoherence.

If you choose a lighting on the ceiling for the floor 0 you have to do it for all the floors. Moreover you glass is not so reflexive, thus I will switch to a lighting of ceilings and grounds more than self illuminated glass.

Otherwise the project is nice

[Jasoncw 11,840]

I think what you're doing (self illuminated material for the office windows and lights for the lobby) is the right way to go about it. But you need to roughly match how both of those areas compare to each other. So the lobby needs to be brighter and more yellow to bring it closer to the office windows. For an example of this you can look at my US Bank BAT, or a few of my other BATs. The lobbies are lit up with lights but they're at about the same brightness and color as the other windows which are supposed to represent similar spaces.

For the red sign to be more legible you need to only illuminate the front part of the letters, not the sides or the backs.

I'm pretty sure you have a bump map there, you have to scroll down and find it.

[Toothless Stitch 2,901]

Looks great, but I think that area between the main building and the entrance looks too much empty.

[IDS2 3,346]

I made sure only the front face of the sign was lit, so it should be more legible now (except in preview renders because they're all .jpg format). I still need to adjust the brightness and hue by quite a bit, but I removed the bump map - the preview on top is what I currently have, the one on the bottom is more or less what I'm aiming for.

So, does it look better without the bump map?

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Now take what was being used for the bump map and try putting it in the Glossiness slot instead.

[IDS2 3,346]

Aha! Thanks, Jason! Well, I've been hard pressed to find the time to do a render lately, but I've tweaked the lobby and all that I could do to it is maybe brighten it up a bit more. Otherwise, I'm gonna light up the rotunda and release this thing!

  Edited January 28, 2012 by IDS2  

[spa 968]

Looks pretty much done to me. The Wells Fargo sign and lobby really look great at night.

[IDS2 3,346]

Thanks spa! I think I'm getting close...

...although I'm stuck on lighting the round top. I tried taking a stab at it yesterday and I really think the result is a step backward:

For some reason the maps are really saturated on this part...it just looks bad. Any suggestions? I can't light up the whole thing, but I can't light it up like the rest of the building either.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Instead of having different bits of texture for each window pane, have one big 1 to 1 texture that get's applied to the glass as a whole (or in this case just the cylinder part since you've already textured the rest). This lets you have what's going on in each window follow through to the window next to it, as if there were a single room back there.

Also, the brightness and saturation and stuff are the same as it is everywhere else.

[Odainsaker 2,134]

Another alternative, which no doubt will throw in yet more modelling work, is perhaps to treat the round penthouse similar to the lobby, and to model and populate the interior. Apparently, it did once have a revolving restaurant at the top, which was a great fad in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, but many of these costly and complicated revolving restaurants were later discontinued and converted into additional office space. You might go the resurrectionist route following the spirit of the building's original design, and recreate a revolving restaurant here, whose lighting we might imagine would be significantly dimmed so that diners can enjoy the nighttime view without brightly lit interiors mirroring back in on the glass. It might even be possible to use not only dimmer lights, but also different colors that complement the building's yellows, as this is a special location that deserves special treatment and, like the lobby, can be allowed to deviate from the rest of the building in a complementary way.

Of course, you have to have the round penthouse's crown of accent lighting! Even if the restaurant lighting is dimmer and even of a different color, these bright lights could be used to tie it all back together with the yellow-tinged lighting of the rest of the building.

  Edited February 3, 2012 by Odainsaker  

[IDS2 3,346]

Thanks guys Man, I really haven't been able to do much on WFP lately.

So, I did the crown lighting...while I wait 5 hours for a real preview, here's a 3 second MSpaint mockup (sorry for the terrible quality, I'm having trouble with my image hosts):

I tried to model an interior restaurant a couple weeks back, and I just couldn't get what I had in mind modeled correctly. I'm really hoping the crown lighting will add just enough of an accent to allow me to not bother lighting the actual rotunda. Maybe I can add some more accent lighting around the roofline.

This rotunda lighting is the last thing I need to do before I can finally do the night export and release this stupid thing I have 12 days until I go back to school, so hopefully I can get ready to export by then.

[IDS2 3,346]

Wasn't able to do the final preview for WFP overnight, but here's a teaser of something to come that I've been working on. You may have seen it before, it's featured somewhere on the sorely outdated filmstrip on the first page of this thread. The best part - I made it with poly modeling, baby! Currently sitting at about 580k polys because of the trees, otherwise it's around 150k.

The one thing I worry about is that the trees hang over the edge of the lot, which is exactly 5x6 - will it be OK if the model is bigger than the actual lot on which I place it? Like, will the tree branches hang over the edge ingame without being cut off?

I really have the hots for clay models lately

[Jasoncw 11,840]

It's looking really good.

Overhanging is just fine. Just make sure the silhouette of your building is within the silhouette of your LODs. When you export the BAT and have a .SC4Model, open it in the Reader. One of the files in there has the dimensions that the lot editor uses as the footprint. If you edit those numbers you can trick the lot editor into thinking that the building is within the bounds of the lot, even though it's overhanging.

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

Looks great the file is the XML file to edit the foot print of the model.

[IDS2 3,346]

Thanks guys! I've come pretty far on the modeling for that building, so I should be able to post a texture update soon. As far as WFP goes, here's what I hope will be one of the last previews I have to do:

Why do all image hosts seem to maim my image quality like this?

As you can see, I ditched lighting the individual windows and decided to do the crown lighting like the real one. I drove past the real one at night not long ago and there weren't really enough lights up in the rotunda to bother trying to recreate them unless I decide to go for recreating the original.

  Edited March 25, 2012 by IDS2  

[T Wrecks 10,209]

I really have the hots for clay models lately

And I have the hots for (clay) models that look as great as this one! It's a very interesting size, and I also like the building shapes, the trees, and the landscaping on the lot.

[IDS2 3,346]

Well thank ya very much I'm really excited to work on it some more. I think I decided on it being residential, so hopefully I can make everything work out with all the special considerations I'll have to take. For now, though, I wanna just finish WFP so I can finally be done with it. I have a lot of projects that are being held back due to my laziness

So, here's a final render of WFP. So, everyone out there! See anything I should change? If not, I'm gonna export.

[Cockatoo 2,256]

I'm not sure that the intense lighting reflections you can see on the lobby floor are quite right. I'd play with the falloff/ hotspot parameters or whatever else you need to do to make the lighting spread more evenly. What you were 'aiming' for in your post from the 16th is what you really should be aiming for.

The night window textures are quite nice. I'd probably go for more rows and less individual rooms.

The neon and glare is all looking nice. Have you thought about doing any environmental reflections?

[IDS2 3,346]

Thanks cockatoo I played with the lobby a bit more (I think the lights are mr sky portals) and I unchecked "visible to camera," which seemed to make a big difference. Also, I played with the windows a bit more to try to go for more rows and less individual rooms...I wasn't able to do a whole lot, but I think it looks a bit better at least. Now, I need to try environmental reflections again. I've tried them before using a self-illuminated ground plane, but the illumination always causes the dark areas to get washed out, which looks really funny in the window reflections. Should I maybe consider making some random geometry and putting a self-illuminated material on it? I'm not exactly sure what to do.

Now, I finally have another preview render...this first one I'm just wondering why it's so washed out. I saved it as a .png so that the quality wouldn't be absolutely massacred by photobucket, but it seems something went wrong in the process...could I have maybe saved the preview with some different gamma settings or something?

Anyway, I have a low-quality .jpg that will have to do:

  Edited March 29, 2012 by IDS2  

[IDS2 3,346]

A bit of an update while I try to figure out environmental reflections for WFP. No luck so far, but I'll keep trying! At least I have everything else done, so this is all that's left. In the meantime...

I revisited all my oldddd (like, last May) Metropoint models. They were all really poorly modeled (using stacked primitives and a LOT of groups to sort out ) so I consolidated where I could, just enough so that they were at least tolerable to work with A lot of the modeling is still pretty shabby, but it's at least good enough to finish and not bother remodeling the entire thing.

Metropoint South:

Metropoint North:

Metropoint West:

Metropoint Tower:

Also, I took a stab at roof equipment for this random residential building I'm making. Texturing the complex will come after some more roof modeling and landscaping around the grounds.

Finally, I was curious about what modeling a taller building would be like, so I decided to try my hand at the 44-story CNA Center in Chicago. I've only spent about 10 minutes on it so far, but here's what I have:

[MTT9 187]

Very interesting projects. I especially like Metropoint North and that residential building. Wonder how they'll look when textured...

[Terring 6,473]

Some of those buildings can fit nicely in my cities

[IDS2 3,346]

Thanks guys hopefully I'll be able to release some of them pretty soon, too...

So, here's another little preview. There's one problem though...I'm having no luck with environmental reflections. Would it be okay if I released this as-is? I'm gonna be on lockdown until mid May, so I figure the sooner I can release this, the better.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

You've got a nice collection of BATs going there.

Yeah I think you could release this as is.

[scotty222 549]

I agree with jason you could release it

i also really like the residential building

[Ion_Cannon 677]

I think you're fine to release it as it is, few people will pick up on all the little nuances that get noticed on the BAT forums.

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

Yes, you should release this bat i do not see anything else to do. Your new projects are looking great, keep it up.

[IDS2 3,346]

Thank you so much everyone! Hopefully that means I can export it this weekend. I'm looking at what will most likely be about 22 or so hours for each version of night export, so it may be a while before I can provide any updates, what with this being crunch time for AP exams and everything. With that, I leave you with a Maxisnite render for those who don't have Darknite:

Don't worry about the lack of antenna lights - they're there, the pic is just low quality