Jason's BATs & Tutorials

[Jasoncw 11,841]

Thanks guys.

There are some other tutorials I'm going to make, but they're a little more involved, so I'm not going to be able to get to them for a little while. I think the tutorials remaining are: LODs, bushes, and masking underground parts with the method Aaron posted (this would be a simple tutorial but it's causing Max to crash and I don't know why yet).

skyscraper21: There will not be problems.

[Amthaak 1,501]

"masking underground parts...!" I am desperately waiting for this one...!

[Francis90b 748]

Fully agree with Amthaak - oh, and looking forward the other ones you listed !

[Sgt Pepper 864]

Can't wait for the LOD one and the Underground parts tutorial.

[Jasoncw 11,841]

MASKING UNDERGROUND OBJECTS

I'm afraid this won't be too much of a tutorial. I'll explain what you should do to mask underground objects in 3ds Max, but doing this actually causes Max to crash for me. I haven't been able to figure out why. So make sure you save your scene before trying this out. If I ever figure out why this causes Max to crash for me, I'll update the tutorial with screenshots. Doing this method has worked for other people without incident, so go ahead and try this tutorial, and post whether or not it works for you.

1. We'll be using the Matte/Shadow/Reflection material instead of the Arch & Design material. You can go ahead and read the documentation to learn what this material is and what it is normally used for if you'd like.

2. By default some of the options in the material will be checked and some won't. Go through the material and uncheck all of the checkboxes. These options all relate to how this material interacts with the scene (in terms of lighting), and since we don't want this material interacting with the scene at all, we want all of these options unchecked.

3. Create a few objects that overlap each other to test our material with. Apply the Matte/Shadow/Reflection material to one/some of the objects, and do a render. At first it might look like you simply made a black material, because the object will be black.

At the top of the preview render window, there's a row of icons. One of the icons is a black and white circle named "Display Alpha Channel". Click this. As you can see, things that are opaque are white, and things that are transparent/don't exist are black. The object with the Matte/Shadow/Reflection material on it is not included, meaning we've successfully masked anything that is behind that object. At a bare minimum this is all you need to do.

4. Next, go to Rendering>Environment. Right click on the environment map (which should be a mr Physical Sky after pressing the Sky button with BAT4Max), and select Copy. Go to your Matte/Shadow/Reflection material, and right click and Paste (Instance) into the Camera Mapped Background slot. Now instead of rendering as black, this material will render as the grey background, and will be indistinguishable from it.

5. Finally, right click on the object that you applied the Matte/Shadow/Reflection material to, and go to Object Properties. Find the Rendering Control area of the window that pops up, and make sure that the button says By Object (instead of By Layer). Then uncheck all of the check boxes in that section except for Renderable and Visible to Camera. Some of this is redundant to the unchecking we did in the material itself, but it further ensures that our object will not interact with the scene. Next, at the top of the window, switch to the Mental Ray tab. Change the radio button to Pass Through (Invisible to FG), and then uncheck the Receive Illumination from Final Gather check box. Click OK, and now you're done.

Now you have a material and object which will subtract from the alpha mask instead of add to it, and which will render as the exact same color as the grey background, and won't cast shadows, receive shadows, appear in reflections, or impact final gather, or anything else.

[Jasoncw 11,841]

MAKING BUSHES (NOISY BOX METHOD)

There are a few different ways of making bushes. I'll explain the simplest first, and I'll do other methods later in separate tutorials.

At its most basic, this tutorial is "make a green box". And believe it or not, in some situations making a green box is all you need to do. But there are various things we can do to the box to produce better results, which boil down to "make a noisy green box".

Above is a Box with a bunch of subdivisions, with a green Arch & Design material applied to it, with a Reflectivity and Glossiness of 0.3, and Ambient Occlusion turned on. You'll want subdivisions every 0.1 m or so. If you want to you can start with a Sphere instead of a Box, or you can even poly model your own object, as long as you have a lot of subdivisions/edges within your object.

In the Special Effects rollout of the Arch & Design material, turn on Round Corners, and set the Fillet Radius to 0.1. Turning Round Corners on will make the hard edges of your object appear rounded. You can experiment with the Fillet Radius later, but for now do a preview render. As you can see above, it's looking more like a bush already.

Next, select your bush object, and go to Modifiers>Parametric Deformers>Noise. The Noise modifier will randomly push and pull on your object, basically adding three dimensional noise to your object.

In the Noise modifier, change the Scale to 0.15. This is the size of the noise, meaning that roughly every 0.15 m, the surface will either be pushed or pulled. You can experiment with this number later, but it needs to be a small number because we want small fine grain noise on our bush.

Change the X, Y, and Z Strength to 0.2. This is how much the noise will move the points of your object around. You can also experiment with this number later on, but it should be small because we want small fine grain noise on our bush.

Add another Noise modifier, and this time use a larger Scale and X, Y, Z Strength. In this example I used a 0.5 Scale and 0.2 Strength. This simply adds another level of variation. This step is optional, and you can add as many Noise modifiers you want, depending on how well-manicured you want your bush to be.

At this point the modeling is done, and even without doing much with our material it's looking pretty good.

There are a lot of different things we can do to our material now. The most obvious one is to give it a texture. Most vegetation or grass textures will do the job. The important thing is to tweak the color so that it fits in with the game correctly. Vegetation in the game is usually more olive than it is in real life (meaning it's green with some extra red added in). In this example I used a Noise map instead of a Bitmap.

I made a few other minor changes, like increasing the strength of the noise of the bushes.

I also increased the Roughness of the Arch & Design material, and made the Reflectivity Color a light green, instead of the default white. Together these things should soften hard shadows and hard highlights, which is desirable because our bush isn't supposed to behave like a box, but like a fluffy group of leaves arranged in a box.

All in all, bushes take a lot of tweaking, and the more you fiddle with them the better they'll turn out. But keep in mind that most people won't be staring right at your bushes, so they don't have to be as good as you might think they do, they'll still look good when combined with the rest of your building and other flora.

[Jasoncw 11,841]

MAKING BUSHES (PREMADE METHOD)

Perhaps a simpler way than the "noisy box" method is the "go online and download free premade bushes" method. There are a lot of free plant models available online. Some of them are high quality and are suitable for doing realistic up-close renderings, and some of them are low quality. But luckily, things are rendered so small in SimCity that even low quality plant models can look good.

With this "method" you'll be spending your time searching and preparing premade bushes instead of making the bushes yourself.

Searching

This part needs the least explanation. Search for relevant key words on google. Browse sites that sell 3d models and see if they give away free samples. etc.

Preparing

Whatever you download will more than likely not be ready for BATing uses. To prepare your bushes effectively you'll need an understanding of different aspects of Max.

1. Switch materials to something compatible with Mental Ray. Some things you download might be using VRay materials. You'll need to recreate those materials as best you can, preferably using the Arch & Design material. Some things you download might come with Standard materials, which are compatible with Mental Ray, but the Arch & Design materials are more powerful and streamlined, so you still might want to recreate the materials. If you need to make a material from scratch, search google for tips on how.

2. Replace high resolution bitmaps with lower resolution bitmaps, or remove them entirely. The models you'll be downloading will likely be individually modeled leaves, and the textures will also be individual leaves. They'll also probably be a high resolution, so that when doing realistic, up close perspective renders they look good. But the more pixels your textures have the more resources they'll use and the slower Max will go, and considering how small the leaves will render, you can usually significantly reduce the image size of textures without sacrificing quality. You can probably completely remove the Diffuse Bitmap, and use a solid color instead, because the leaves are so small that there aren't enough pixels in your render to even show whatever detail the textures have.

3. Attach/Detach materials and objects as convenient. Sometimes branches and different sets of leaves will be separate objects, and sometimes the number of materials or submaterials will be more than needed, so go ahead and simplify.

4. Further optimize your materials and objects. Plants are something that get repeated a lot in a scene, so if the material isn't optimized, or if the objects have too many polygons, it can have a big impact. Remove bump maps, and reduce glossiness samples if they're high.

5. Save the updated bush as its own file so that it's easy to use for future BATs.

[Jasoncw 11,841]

MAKING BUSHES (PARTICLE FLOW METHOD)

This method is more advanced, but it's not hard. It's important that you go to Help>3ds Max Help and search for PCloud. After you're done reading, the concept behind this method should make sense.

The PCloud will make a cloud of particles. Which is to say that we will have a large number of particles (our leaves) distributed within a specific volume (a volume with the dimensions of our bush). We'll specify the shape our cloud/bush, the shape of our particles, their size, and how many of them there are, which will determine the appearance of our bush.

For the shape of our cloud, we can choose between square, sphere, and cylinder, which, conveniently, covers typical bush shapes. There's also an option called Object-Based Emitter, which lets us pick our own shape, so if you want to model your own bush shape you can, and the PCloud will fill it with particles for you.

One of the benefits to this method is that we don't have to attempt to give the appearance of individual leaves, or of depth (the interior parts of the bush that are usually partially visible), because our bush is a bunch of leaves, and not a hollow shell. This means that when we make our leaf material we can turn on stuff like translucency, or we can even give the leafs individual leaf cutout maps. Or if you downloaded a bush model and it came with a nice leaf material you can reuse it. The downside to this method is that the leafs are randomly arranged, not attached to branches in any logical way, but for SimCity purposes this is ok. The other downside is that these bushes take longer to render.

The screenshot used here is of the Grosse Pointe Public Library:

I also used this method for:

 

 

ok guys, let me know if these tutorials are confusing or if you have any questions.

There's one more tutorial left to do (about LODs), which I'll be getting to within the next few days.

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

Great Tutorials, I love the second bush Tutorial, the first one make me think of a stone hard bush.

[gutterclub 2,729]

You absolute star! I will be playing with these bush tutorials later

On a second note and probably somethin gI shopuld pitch to T Wrecks...would there but a way to replace the Maxis hedges with my own, same with potted planter trees etc, so that even Maxis lots would use my flora instead? Really want to find something suitable to replace those maxis trees that are good but dated!

[Girafe 1,729]

for the bush modeling scatter option does the job too.

It's quicker to render above all with sub material.

Good tut.

[T Wrecks 10,209]

On a second note and probably somethin gI shopuld pitch to T Wrecks...would there but a way to replace the Maxis hedges with my own, same with potted planter trees etc, so that even Maxis lots would use my flora instead? Really want to find something suitable to replace those maxis trees that are good but dated!

This is entirely possible. All you need to do is assign the same Instance ID to the props in question, and the Maxis props will be overridden because the internal SimCity files get loaded first and any plugins afterwards. In fact, such mods have been done already - think of the car replacement mods, or of Andreas' mod which replaces Maxis trees with Cycledogg's.

While the technical side is clear, the critical part is finding suitable replacements. As a lotter, I know that the exact position e.g. of a potted tree is often a matter of pixels: One too far in, and the tree starts to be visibly cut off by the building's LOD shell, one too far out, and the prop's center point is no longer inside the lot, rendering lot saving impossible. Thus, if the replacement prop is even slightly larger in any dimension (height is not to be neglected here!), it may end up cut off by something (I'm thinking of a Gotye tree - "but you didn't have to cut me off" - here). If it is noticeably smaller, the purpose it was used for may be defeated in some cases. (I'll confess at this point that I'm a sneaky little cheat and sometimes use trees to cover up places where textures didn't quite meet up so that the problematic spot is always blocked from view - either by the building or by the tree. )

[PBGV103 729]

I love the "noisy box" method. I use it for just about anything smaller than a tree.

[Jasoncw 11,841]

Hey guys, I've started a new BAT.

I've been meaning to do this one for a few years now. It's one of my favorite office buildings.

Maybe a few people here will recognize it??

All aspects of this BAT are very much in progress, but it's starting to come together.

[Susaji 523]

Very Nice!

[poiuy1208 46]

Hey guys, I've started a new BAT.

I've been meaning to do this one for a few years now. It's one of my favorite office buildings.

Maybe a few people here will recognize it??

OOOH! It's the Inland Steel Building! Also One of my favorites.

[art128 4,618]

Seems like an interesting structure. I like it.

[Francis90b 748]

Oh yeah, one of my favourites as well - and i'm really glad to see it here!

[Girafe 1,729]

looks really good

[Jack_wilds 550]

it looking very promising ... and on another note: how likely will the 1001 woodward be released before the trixies

[gutterclub 2,729]

Might have to rustle up a 'where are they now?' post in the never made it to the STEX thread for some of your projects such as Penescob, the Pavillion and 1001 Woodward.

New BAT is looking superb so far

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

Wow!!!! Your batting something else that goodness.

[Jasoncw 11,841]

Thanks guys! I did some more work on it. I added the rest of the blinds (on the facades you can't see), and I also tried to work on the interior. At first I tried modeling some office furniture but it didn't have an affect. But I did model some partitions for some of the floors, based on the floor plans on the building's website. I've also made a new ground plane which I think is probably done, and I tweaked the rest of the materials except for the metal ones. I'm going to add some more blinds but I think the glass is getting close to being done.

I haven't forgotten 1001 but it's not going to be released for the Trixies (I'm guessing the first half of 2013). But I'm going to work hard to get this new BAT (Inland Steel Building) done in time.

[art128 4,618]

New texture looks fine! Though I prefer the previous dark tone.

[Toothless Stitch 2,901]

I'm very happy to have you back.

I like the fact that you are doing the interior as well. The windows with the blinds behind them are turning out very nicely. However, I think adding more blinds would make the building looks a bit odd. And what I really like is how you can see those shadows behind the glass.

One question: Why is the back of the wall of that tower visible. If I model a building by poly modelling you can't see anything if it if you see it back.

[MTT9 187]

Looking good Jason

[Jasoncw 11,841]

Thanks guys.

It's coming along but there's still a long ways to go.

sky: the arch & design material is 2-sided by default, so the back sides of faces should be visible.

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

Thanks guys.

It's coming along but there's still a long ways to go.

Well Damn it put it in full gear!!!!!

[io_bg 249]

Stunning. I love all your bats. Cannot wait to see more progress!

[Jasoncw 11,841]

I think the metal is getting pretty close to being done.

I've also started work on the base.

This building has a ground plane with an abstract texture as you'd expect, but it also has a separate object with the maxis pavers on it so it has something more literal to reflect at the base of the building. I'll be hiding it soon, but I've left it on for this preview to show the reflections at the base in context of the ground they'll be reflecting. Later on I'll be modeling the flag poles and other other stuff that's on the ground near the elevator tower.