Jason's BATs & Tutorials

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

Looking good and I'm glad to see a I HT building from you.

[tzotzil99 2]

Green roof, yeah!! So much of what we look at in game is rooftop, what an opportunity to model some of the new enviro-green-planted rooftops that are getting put up in the real world all over the place on residential commercial and civic buildings. Everything you do is pretty fantastic, I look forward to seeing how this turns out

[Renedius 25]

100% Good

[Jasoncw 11,840]

CREATING BRICKS IN PHOTOSHOP

Finding or creating brick textures that are large, have a lot of variation, and look good in SimCity can be a long and tedius ordeal. Here's a technique for creating good bricks quickly.

(Note from 2017: For making bricks I'd suggest skipping steps 5-12, because including mortar is usually not beneficial. If you're using this tutorial to make blocks or panels then go ahead. However, in general instead of using this tutorial you can use a Tiles Map in 3ds Max. Unless you have very large brick surfaces (where you need bigger textures to prevent tiling), the Tiles Map is easier and faster and gives you better control. You can use the Tiles Map in a Composite Map, with Bitmaps in the other Composite Map layers to add grime and variation that you would normally do in Photoshop.)

1: First, start a new file in Photoshop. This partially depends on how large the object your texturing is. In the example shown above, the image is 1000x1000 pixels large, spread across 128x128 meters. The example was rendered at zoom 5. Save the file as something like "Bricks-128x128-01.psd" (meaning that the intended generic size of this texture is 128x128 meters, and that this is variation 01, as in the future you may make different colors, etc.). I don't recommend such a large size for starting this tutorial. A 125x125 pixel image, which would make a 16x16 meter texture is better to start with.

2: Create a new layer, and fill it with medium grey. Duplicate this layer.

3: Go to Filter>Noise>Add Noise. Make sure that the "Monochromactic" check box is checked, as we want our noise to be in black and white, without color. Try using 200% noise. Apply this filter to both layers of grey.

4: Go to Filter>Pixelate>Mosaic. Change the Cell Size to 3. Apply this filter to both layers.

5: Go to Edit>Scale. Scale each layer horizontally by 200%.

6: Create a new file in Photoshop that is 1 pixel wide and 6 pixels tall. Zoom in really close, and make the top 3 pixels black, and the bottom 3 pixels white.

7: Go to Select>All, then go to Edit>Define Pattern. Create a pattern out of this selection.

8: Go back to your bricks, create a new layer, and fill it with white.

9: At the bottom of the Layers Pallette, click on the Layer Styles button (which is either a circle with an "f" in it, or an "fx" symbol). Choose Pattern Overlay. By default a pattern will already be selected for you. Next to the preview thumbnail of that pattern is an arrow. Click on it, and select your newly created pattern. Apply this pattern and you should now have a buch of horizontal lines. Go to Select>All, and Edit>Copy Merged to copy what you see as it appears to you now.

10: Select one of your layers of mosaiced noise. At the bottom of the Layers Pallette, click on the Add Vector Mask button (a grey square with a white circle inside of it). Hold Alt, and click on the layer's mask, which by default is solid white. This will allow you to see and directly edit that layer's mask.

11: Go to Edit>Paste to paste your horizontal lines into the layer mask. Leave the layer mask by selecting something other than that mask in the Layers Pallette.

12: Select that layer again, and select the move tool. Press the ? key on your keyboard 3 times to nudge the layer over 3 pixels. Your bricks are now properly coursed.

13: Go to Layers>Flatten Image. At this point, if you notice some patterns that didn't turn out very good (for example, a lot of consecutive dark bricks), you could manually go through and change the value of some of the bricks.

14: Go to Filter>Sharpen>Smart Sharpen. Try something like 75% and 1.5 pixels. The goal of this step is to make the bricks sharper, and to use what can be called "sharpening halos" as added texture.

Now you have your basic brick pattern, but it's not ready yet. From here you'll want to finish your texture by adding color, weathering, adjusting for brightness and contrast (you'll probably want to reduce the contrast a lot on this one), and whatever other tweaks that you'd normally do to make your textures better.

When you apply this texture, you'll want to make sure that you also apply a UVW Map, and that as a starting point, the dimensions of the UVW Map are the dimensions you originally made the texture for.

ORIGINALLY POSTED FEBRUARY 8, 2010

[Jasoncw 11,840]

TEXTURING SURFACE TOPOGRAPHY INSTEAD OF MODELING IT

This entry offers advice on texturing subtle surface topography, like that found in relief carvings, spandrels, and ornament.

1. Zoom 5 (South)
2. Zoom 5 (West)
3. Zoom 4 (South)
4. The bitmap
5. a & b Viewports (Smooth + Highlights, and Edged Faces)

 

• The top two spandrels are modeled, while the bottom two spandrels are textured, and they look more or less the same.
• The Silhouette of your fake geometry must fit within the silhouette of your real geometry. Remember that it's still just a box.
• It's up to you to make the most out of your textures, using methods that work best for you, but in this case, the Bevel & Emboss layer style, as well as the Drop Shadow layer style can be useful.
• Highlights should be a little yellow and shadows should be a little blue. Keep this in mind if your fake lighting looks too stark, or if it doesn't look like it was rendered with the BAT's lighting.
• This technique can only be used for subtle details, in areas of consistent lighting. A noticeably flat shadow over a surface with "topography" will ruin the illusion. Trying to fake too much depth will as well.
• If you already have a head on photograph of a relief carving (or other subject), you can exaggerate some shadows, and you can change the color of the highlights and shadows, to make the carving read more clearly from far away, and to help make it look like it was rendered in the BAT.
• This is intended for Gmax users. 3ds Max users could use this as well if they wanted to, but polygons aren't much of an issue, and there are more sophisticated ways of doing this in 3ds Max anyway. Since this is intended for Gmax users, the renders above are from Gmax.
• Like anything, this will take some tweaking and a lot of preview renders to get the best results.

(Note from 2017: For 3ds Max users the same thing can be done, except you can also use a Bump or a Normal map)

ORIGINALLY POSTED FEBRUARY 8, 2010

[Jasoncw 11,840]

SNAPS AND THE TRANSFORM TYPE-IN BOXES

Being able to work accurately is essential for making clean, easy-to-work-on models. This entry covers Snaps, and the Transform Type-In boxes.

Snaps is what it sounds like. When you hover your mouse over the grid with Grid Point snaps turned on, your cursor will "snap" to the grid. There are a lot of different things to snap to in your scene, and several ways of snapping to them.

A: This is the Snaps Toggle icon. Click it to turn snaps on, and click it again to turn them off. Typing the "s" key on your keyboard will automatically toggle snaps on and off. Next to the Snaps Toggle icon are icons for angle snaps, and percentage snaps. These are essentially snaps for the rotate and scale tools.

B: By holding down the Snap Toggle icon, circled A, this menu will appear. Experiment with these options to understand them better.

• 2D limits what you can snap to, and where you can draw to, to a 2D plane.
• 3D lets you snap to and draw to anything in 3D space.
• 2.5D lets you snap to anything, but limits your drawing to a 2D plane. The effect is sort of like tracing a distant object on a pane of glass. Your drawing is limited to the 2D plane of glass, but you can trace (snap to) objects in all dimensions of space. This is my personal favorite.

C: By right clicking the icon circled A, another menu will pop up which lets you choose what to snap to. I use the Grid Point and Vertex snaps the most often. If you hold Shift while Right Clicking in a viewport, a menu with similar options will pop up. This may be faster than right clicking on the Snaps Toggle icon.

If after right clicking the Snap Toggle icon, you go to the Home Grid tab in this window, you can adjust the scene's grids, but more importantly, you can uncheck the "Inhibit Grid Subdivision Below Grid Spacing" which will let the grids be subdivided into smaller grids as you zoom in.

D: If you have an object selected, the numbers in the X Y Z boxes show where the object is in absolute space within your scene. So if the object is centered in the scene except it's moved up 5 meters, the boxes would read 0,0,5. If you have the Move tool active, typing numbers into the box will move it to that location in the scene. If you click on the Absolute/Relative toggle icon, circled D, have an object selected, and the move tool active, when you type numbers into those boxes the object will shift around the scene relative to the object. So if you type in -5 in the X box, the object will be moved -5 meters along the X axis. This works with the Scale and Rotate tools too.

ORIGINALLY POSTED JUNE 6, 2010

[Jasoncw 11,840]

DERIVING DIMENSIONS (BRUTALIST FACADE PART 1)

How to use Google Earth and Adobe Photoshop to figure out the dimensions of the Central Scotland Police Headquarters' Brutalist facade will be explained. This method is applicable to all facades. Part 2 covers how to model it.

Google Earth has a handy measuring tool which allows you to measure things found in aerial view, however, the satellite imagery can be blurry, and you can only measure the horizontal (x and y) dimensions of the building. You can't directly measure the facade using it. The Street View found in Google Earth and Google Maps, or photos found on the internet or taken yourself, are very useful in figuring out the proportions of various elements of the building, but they would be more helpful if you could link the proportions with measurements, and have actual dimensions to work from while you model. In this tutorial, the photos will be linked to measurements from Google Earth.

First you'll need to locate your building in Google Earth. This building is a police station located in Stirling, Scotland, and can be found here in Google Maps. In the image above you can see a part of the building being measured. It turns out to be about 63.72 meters long. Looking at photos, that part of the building has 31 uniformly-sized concrete window units, plus a little corner piece. 63.72/31=2.05. It would be reasonable to assume that each window unit is 2 meters wide, and that the extra length (1.72 meters) can be attributed to the corner piece, and measurement error.

(Note from 2017: Remember that in photographs, things that are closer to you are bigger and things that are farther away from you are smaller. This means that the less flat the facade is, the less accurate the grids will be.)

Now take a head-on screenshot of the facade, to limit distortion due to perspective as much as possible. All of the horizontal and vertical parts should line up with the horizontal and vertical edges of your browser (although if the street view imagery was taken on sloped ground then that might affect this). Paste this screenshot in Photoshop. A good and simple way to get started is to overlay grids of various sizes onto the facade. Find a grid by searching google for one, copy and paste it into photoshop, and use the scale tool to scale the grid until the window unit edges fit nicely along the grid. The result is something like the left grid in the first image in this blog post. It's three boxes wide and 5 boxes tall. This doesn't tell us much, but since we know the window unit is 2 meters wide, we can establish that each of those boxes is 2/3 meters. Since the window unit is 5 boxes tall, we know that the unit is 3.33 meters tall, since 5x0.66=3.33. In the image, the grid to the right is a 1/2 meter grid.

Between the two grids you can start to figure out the dimensions of things. For example, the window itself is about 1 meter wide, and that the distance between the bottom of the unit and the bottom of the window is also about 1 meter. Grids tend to be very helpful, but square grids won't expose golden rectangles, Fibonacci Numbers, and other proportions, which are also commonly used in architecture, so try overlaying these as well. And sometimes the design of a building isn't based on commonly used proportions, so you'll just have to estimate, for example, if you have a 1 meter grid overlayed on a facade maybe you could eyeball that a certain element is .4 meters. It's also worth noting that American buildings are designed in feet and not meters. Also, depending on how many internal relationships you can find, and how accurate you were, you may find that after you model something your numbers were wrong. If this happens, try to figure out what went wrong, and adjust your model.

All in all this is a useful method, and a big step beyond eyeballing and guessing numbers, and you can avoid a lot of time consuming guess work. Part 2 of this tutorial will cover how to model the window unit.

(Note from 2017: While overlaying grids over individual parts of a building may be helpful, in general it's better to overlay a grid over the entire facade. For example, if in Google Earth you measured that a building facade was 10 meters wide, you would overlay a grid with 10 boxes, and you would know that each box was 1 meter. Then you could scale the boxes down to 10% to have a 0.1 meter grid, or down to 25% to have a 0.25 meter grid. This is going to be more accurate than trying to use grids on individual elements, because there are less places where you need to estimate or make assumptions. It's also worth noting that it's more important for your model to be internally consistent than it is for it to be perfectly accurate. If it's internally consistent you can just scale the entire model to the correct horizontal (measured from Google Earth) or vertical (official building heights from Wikipedia or elsewhere) dimensions at the end.)

ORIGINALLY POSTED JUNE 6 2010

[Jasoncw 11,840]

BASIC POLY MODELING (BRUTALIST FACADE PART 2)

In Gmax, extruding splines is the most commonly used method to create walls and other objects, but many forms can't be made by extruding splines. This tutorial explains how to create the basic shape of brutalist facade shown above, using the Extrude and Outline tools.

In this tutorial, simple numbers will be given to help focus on the creation of general forms. After understanding the contents of this tutorial, you can use what you learned from Part 1 to model an accurate window unit.

Create a box that is 2 meters wide, 3.33 meters tall, and .4 meters thick. Select your box, and in the upper right hand corner of the screen, rename it from Box01 to "Concrete". You can rename your objects at any time.

Do a Zoom 5 preview render of your box. The viewport you were active in has changed to "Camera Z5" which is the view the zoom 5 camera has. Right click on where it says Camera Z5, and go to Views:>User (the hotkey for this is "u"). Right click on it again, and check "Edged Faces". This makes it easier to model. Pressing "w" will maximize the active viewport, or if it's already maximized it will restore all 4 viewports. 

Right click on Concrete, and go to Convert To>Convert To Editable Poly. In the menu to the right, there is a rollout called "Selection" and in it there are icons showing vertexes, edges, borders, polygons (also called faces), and elements. Experiment with the different selection types. Undo your changes when you're done.

Select the Polygons icon, and select the front polygon of Concrete. In the menu to the right, find "Extrusion:" and "Outline:". With the polygon selected, type 1 into Extrusion, and type -.5 into Outline. Afterwards, using knowledge from this tutorial, move the face back exactly 1 meter, so that it is flush with the rest of the front of Concrete. The result is labeled "1" in the image below.

Now put in -.2 for Extrusion, and .2 for Outline. After that, type in -.2 in Extrusion. Now Delete the selected polygon.

Select the back face of Concrete. Type in 1 for Extrusion and -.7 for Outline. Move the polygon back 1 meter so that it is flush with the rest of the back. Then press the Delete key on your keyboard to delete the selected polygon.

You now have what's labeled as "2" in the image above, a donut-esque shape which vaguely resembles the wall unit. Select the vertex icon, and then select what appear to be the 4 vertexes that form the opening in the back of the unit. While it looks like there are 4 vertexes there, there are actually 8! With all 8 selected, scroll down and find the "Weld" button and click it to weld the overlapping vertexes together, as shown in the section labeled "3" in the image above. The basic form of the concrete is complete!

The first image in this blog post shows an accurately modeled window unit, and beneath it are several of them next to each other and rendered in 3ds Max.

The white window frame inside the concrete would be easy to make by extruding a spline, but try modeling it using what you've learned in this tutorial.

3ds max Users:

• In 3ds Max this is a much simpler process, using the Inset and Bridge tools, which don't exist in gmax. Go to Help>Autodesk 3ds Max Help and search for those tools to learn more. This tutorial is oriented to Gmax users because polygon modeling is much harder in Gmax.

Notes:

• The model in the first image of this post has been scaled vertically by 133%, which is what I recommend.
• The corner and bottom pieces of the facade were also modeled in the render in the first image. Also, each piece of concrete was given slightly different grey colors to help differentiate the pieces.

ORIGINALLY POSTED JUNE 6, 2010

[Jasoncw 11,840]

NIGHT WINDOWS WITH SELF ILLUMINATION

This tutorial explains how to make nitelites using the self illumination feature of the Arch & Design material in 3ds Max 9 and newer.

First, create the day version of your BAT. The BAT above is a simple office building. In this case the glass is a reflective but opaque material with a glass texture, and a textured ground plane to reflect. But this method can be used for any glass making method.

At the moment all of the glass is one object named "Glass". From here, the glass is selected, and a bunch of window panes are selected and detached as "Glass (Night)". So now we have two objects, Glass, and Glass (Night) which we can very simply apply two materials to. However you create your glass, it's important to do it in such a way that you can apply two different materials to it.

Next, in the material editor, drag and drop the sphere for the day's glass material (called "Glass Day" here) into an empty sample slot. This will make a copy of it. Rename the material to "Glass Night" and apply it to the object called "Glass (Night)".

In the material called "Glass Night" scroll down and find the "Self Illumination (Glow)" rollout. Open it up and check the "Self Illumination (Glow)" check box.

There are three sections. The color can be controlled either by defining the color temperature in Kelvin degrees, or by selecting from predefined list of standard light types. Google Kelvin temperature to find out what colors correspond with what degrees. To the right of that is a slot for a Filter map. This is where your night texture goes. Click on the empty box, and put your Bitmap in it.

The next section covers luminance, which can either be specified as a real life unit, or as a unitless multiplier.

Finally, there's a section for other glow options. "Illuminates the Scene (When using FG)" is for when you want this material to, well, illuminate the scene around it. (Note from 2017: Sometimes really fine vertical parts of your facade will have lighting problems with this setting on, so if you're having problems try turning this off to see if it fixes it)

Go to Help>Autodesk 3ds Max Help to learn more about the settings.

Making the night glass texture itself is the hardest part and will take some practice. Making it is a lot like making a day glass texture, and once you get the hang of it they're not hard to make. Go to a site like flickr or cgtextures to find photos of buildings at night, and edit them together in Photoshop.

(Note from 2017: There are different ways of managing your materials. Sometimes I don't detach the separate panes, and I put both the day and night glass in a Multi/Sub-Object material. Sometimes I still detach the glass into two separate objects if the Material IDs are too complicated. But either way, I copy the day glass's UVW Map to the night glass, and then I give the night glass texture and the night glass texture's UVW Map a Map Channel of 2 (look up Map Channels to see what they do). This way I can switch between day and night by just turning the self illumination on and off)

ORIGINALLY POSTED SEPTEMBER 28, 2010

[Jasoncw 11,840]

GARDENER CENTER GLASS

This entry explains the reflective metal coated glass material I created for Gardener Center.

This tutorial touches on some aspects of 3ds Max which might not be common knowledge in the BATing community, and explaining everything from the ground up would need a really long blog entry. So instead of thinking of this as a tutorial, think of it as a springboard for your own investigations. The "Help" feature in 3ds Max explains everything you see in the program, and there's google for what Help doesn't cover. Also, I can't guarantee that everything in this tutorial is theoretically correct, but it got me the results that I wanted. When I made the material I wasn't thinking about making it perfect for a tutorial later on. Anyway, enough disclaimer! (Note from 2017: I emphasize this disclaimer even more-so today) Onto the material!

Above is the material in its entirety. It's based on the following three points about glass and that's how I'll organize the tutorial.

(Note from 2017: Instead of using an RGB Multiply map, use a Composite map instead. It basically duplicate the layer system (layers, opacitys, blending modes, alpha masks) of Photoshop)

Glass is reflective.

Glass isn't a perfectly flat surface--it has imperfections, and these imperfections create distortions in the reflections.

In order to tell that the glass is reflective, there needs to be something for it to reflect.

Glass is reflective

The reflectivity of the glass is the simplest part, it's created by changing some of the basic settings of the Arch & Design material. Reflectivity is .75. It could have been 1, but I preferred the result with slightly weaker reflections. Glossiness is 1, because we want perfect mirror reflections and not blurry reflections.

The Index of Refractions (IOR) is 35. The metallic coating on the glass is responsible for character of the reflections, not the glass itself, which would have an IOR of 1.5. In the BRDF rollout you can see a chart showing reflectivity vs. angle. If you select By IOR the graph's curve will be determined by the IOR rather than the manual settings to the left of the graph. As you can see from the graph, this material is very reflective from all angles, except when you look perpendicularly at the glass the reflection isn't as strong. I haven't visited any of this kind of glass in real life to know if that is correct or not, but I do know that this it's very reflective from most angles and that metals have high IORs, so I was satisfied with an IOR of 35.

Glass isn't a perfectly flat surface

Each pane of glass typically has some bulge to it, plus some general waviness. The imperfections of the glass could be modeled, but that would be tedious. Instead, a bump map is used. The bulge and the general waviness will be done separately, but will be combined using a RGB Multiply map, which will multiply two other maps together, like setting a layer to the "Multiply" blending mode would in Photoshop. (Note from 2017: The Composite map is much better than the RGB Multiply map)

In each of the slots in the RGB Multiply map, there's a Multi/Sub-Map, which is an easy way of having a variety of maps in one material. To simulate the bulges, there are 4 bitmaps which were made in Photoshop. This Multi/Sub-Map has been set to assign each map based on the Material ID of what the material is applied to, so geometry with a material ID of 1 will get the first map in that list. 4 will get the fourth map in the list.

To simulate the general waviness, some simple noise maps are used. But since each individual window is a separate pane of glass, we don't want the waviness from one pane to cross into the next pane. So there are two different noises, so that adjacent panes will frequently have different noises and thus a different waviness. Here, something with a material ID of 1 will get the first map in the list. There is no fourth map in the list for something with a material ID of 4. But the "Repeat" checkbox has been checked, meaning that the first two noise maps are hypothetically repeated down the entire list. So geometry with a material ID of 4 will get the second noise map. Something with a material ID of 5 will get the first noise map. This way, your material IDs and the number of maps don't need to be exactly the same.

Above is a portion of the building's glass (it's all one object for convenience), with everything else hidden. One of the polygons is selected, and you can see to the right that this polygon has a material ID of 3. It will get GlassBump-02.psd, and the first noise map. Luckily we don't have to manually change the material ID of each pane of glass on this building. If you search google for "random material ID script" you can find a lot of scripts that will do it for you automatically.

The bulge bitmaps need to be fitted to the individual panes of glass. To do this, apply a UVW Map to the glass object, and choose "Face" as the mapping type. This will automatically fit the bitmaps to each individual polygon in the object. Since each bitmap represents one pane of glass, and each polygon represents one pane of glass, the UVW map will fit the bitmaps perfectly. Below is a render showing the bump map.

There needs to be something for the glass to reflect

The ground plane is the hardest part, since it needs to be generic enough to fit into the game without drawing too much attention, while still looking specific enough that it looks like something when it's being reflected in the glass. The design of the building is an important consideration too, since the character of the glass is best conveyed when you have an actual environment to reflect. The broad sides of the Gardener Center have a plaza and a roof to showcase the reflected environment and draw the eye away from the less flattering areas of glass. Below is a render with the ground plane visible. To make objects in your scene invisible to the camera, right click on them, go to properties, and uncheck "Visible to Camera".

(Note from 2017: It's very important that the ground plane is as neutral as possible. Several screenshots from the game jumbled together in Photoshop do the best job (it might look like SC4 patterned confetti). DO NOT try to modify the color of the glass by changing the color of the ground plane. If you want to modify the color of the glass, change the Reflection Color. Doing this will tint the reflections. If I had known about these two points while making Gardener Center it would have turned out much better. Also, do not blur the ground plane. The reflections on the glass should be sharp lines that are curved by the glass bulges. If the reflections are too specific looking, try jumbling the images in the ground plane more.) 

ORIGINALLY POSTED OCTOBER 9, 2010

[Jasoncw 11,840]

ok guys, I've gotten my blog tutorials over into my thread. There's a tutorial listing in the first post which will bring you straight to the post of the tutorial. This will be important once these tutorial posts get buried by other posts. If you find these tutorials helpful, consider rating the posts up. I'd appreciate it, and it would also let me know how popular the tutorials are as a whole and individually.

Enjoy!!

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

Should these tutorials be some where else like a tutorial thread or the Omnibus?? Maybe need to be a new tutorials thread, the first post can be a table of contents for all the bat tutorials for the bat open discussion area.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

The BAT Mega FAQ has that, and this resource will be represented there along with the others. I feel like the BAT Mega FAQ is more for linking to other information and posting answers to common questions, rather than be a collection of a lot of tutorials, and I figured it would be better to have my tutorials in my thread rather than make a new thread just for them. This way the tutorials will always be safe and accessible in my thread.

btw, thanks everyone for the rates, I wasn't expecting them to be rated up so much so fast.

[AlexandrosB13 184]

Hey! Thanks so much these tutorials, they helped me a lot, especially with self illumination night windows. I just lernt something that i thought i would never succeed, thanks to you. I am very happy you found the time to make these small but extremely helpfull tutorials!

  Edited April 17, 2011 by AlexandrosB13  

[ExtraNoise 18]

Fantastic work, Jason! This is great stuff.

You gotta tell us next how you get the finer intricacies of that groundplane texture. I'm having a hard time getting the road to wrap around my model, messing with proportions and skewing and rotating in-game screenshots to align with the center of my groundplane texture.

Any advice would be super-appreciated!

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Thanks guys!

To get the road textures you can just go into ilive reader and open one of the sc4.dat files, and find the road images and export them. After that, you just go into photoshop and you build your fake lot. So if it's going to be a 4x4 you just copy and paste 4 of the road images in a row, and if you have it enabled in photoshop they'll snap together. Then you do the same for whatever paver textures you're using. Outside of the main lot, you just do a ton of tweaking and experimenting.

Outside of the road you'll want to plan how many "tiles" out you want the ground to go. If you used the 128x128 road textures, and your ground is going to be 10x10 tiles wide, then you make the texture 1280x1280 pixels, and in max you make the planar uvw map 160x160 meters. The ground plane is literally a plane object, with a planar uvw map, not an environment map.

Here are the road textures I extracted from one of the main .dats.

edit: Actually, those aren't the images I used, but I can't find the 128x128 intersection. You can just scale the straight road piece down to match the intersection though, the ground plane doesn't need to be high resolution, and actually if it's not a low resolution it could easily become the biggest texture file in the scene.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Hi everyone

So, to make a long story short, my computer broke while I was trying to upgrade it, so I got an entirely new computer. But it's a fast! The Pavilion (a modern apartment tower you can see in the BSP thread) previously took about 15 minutes to render with my new computer, and now it only takes 3 minutes.

I plan on doing more BATing this summer, including working on the United Nations HQ.

My comptuer was broken for about a week, and before that I was busy and before that I was out of town, so I haven't done any 3d stuff in a while. To get warmed up, over 5 hours yesterday and today I threw something (not a BAT or for anything else) together and I thought I'd share.

[Roger51 381]

WOW.....for a second I thought that was a proper picture, nice work

[Vlasky 1,803]

Got me confused as well. Amazing quality! So realistic.

Nice to hear that there a lot more to come from you and that you have a new motivation (new pc) for BATting

khm penobscot building khm

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

I just can't wait to see updates from you and the rest of BSP.

[SimHoTToDDy 2,938]

Far more stylish and tasteful than my recent foray into non-SC4 matters.

[Girafe 1,729]

Indeed amazing job !!

Onyx tree ?

  Edited May 17, 2011 by Girafe  

[harishna 847]

Pity that your computer failed but at least you got something good out of it hope you didn't loss anything in the process.

Looking forward to see more of your creations!

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Thanks guys!

Giraffe: They're either evermotion trees, or xfrog trees (the free ones on autodesk seek), I don't recall which right now.

Harishina: Luckily I didn't loose anything.

[Girafe 1,729]

oh I see, I let down xfrog trees which are not good for me. Evermotion database is really interesting and I discovered it few weeks ago. Do you have the entire pack or only the samples?

++

[Evillions 552]

Is that real???

[sumwonyuno 42]

Heh, and I thought I seen the limits of SC4 realism... I admit I thought it was a real picture too.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Hey guys, here's something that I've been working on on the side. It's another air filter. This one is a 1x1 and will fit in roundabouts.

I'm not sure where the little white lights at the top are coming from, but if you think they look like they belong there I won't bother trying to fix them.

[Jack_wilds 550]

...I think something on that order ought to be their as maintenance access illumination... perhaps a light-up of colored lights that glow color in holiday season -Christmas, but whatever...

also an enthusiastic concerning the tutorials...

[gutterclub 2,729]

You could add self illuminated lights all around the top to make it look symetrical. It's a funny little thing which I'd definately use..just glad you're still BATing and making things, its looks great.