Jason's BATs & Tutorials

[dubaidude303 1,119]

Looks great! What is the lot size?

[art128 4,618]

Amazing building, Jason! Would gladly use it.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Thanks guys. It's uploaded now.

 

I didn't add stuff to the balconies this time because the shape of the balconies would make it hard to see stuff and it wouldn't make much of a visual difference.

 

I also didn't make extra color versions because I wasn't paid to. But for this one I wouldn't because I spent pretty much all day yesterday exporting it over and over again because it kept on glitching out (with certain zoom/rotations being skewed). But I was finally able to get a good export. The previous one I also had a lot of export problems, because for some reason every time I rendered there was a missing square (as if one of the render buckets didn't finish rendering before the render was saved). Normally rendering is the easy part but lately it's been more time consuming than some of the actual BATing.

[JP Schriefer 5,590]

The building is amazing! Really nice work.

I am anxious to know what will be the next project. 

[edwardjeria 503]

GOOD JOB 

do not bother, but when we see something of detroit again

[Cool_Z 1,547]

It is lovely... as always 

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Thanks everyone.

 

 

GOOD JOB 

do not bother, but when we see something of detroit again

 

 

Today!

[KonstantinII 1,106]

Please make Pentonium building in Dubai!

[edwardjeria 503]

detroit jejejeje

is asome city 

 

 

pity that both abandoned and neglected building 

happens has this world who do not care their amazing buildings

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Thanks guys

 

 

Do people want the TELUS signs on the individual versions of Telus towers? Originally I was going to take them off in order to have it be more generic, but if people want the sign still on I'll leave it there.

[Vlasky 1,803]

I'd say remove it. Because there it is already on complex.

[MTT9 187]

I'll second Vlasky on this one

[T Wrecks 10,209]

I'll third Vlasky.

 

"Generic office tower is generic".

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Individual Telus BATs have been released!

 

This is actually the first time that I've had 4 uploads in a single month.

 

I've had 3 uploads in one month 10 times, but somehow it never pushed up into 4 in one month. A new record! And looking at my pipeline there might be 4 uploads in April as well.

 

 

I also have a new goal for this year. Last year my goal was to upload something every month, and I successfully averaged one BAT a month. My goal heading forward is to upload enough BATs that I will have averaged one BAT a month for my entire career. I counted everything and have found that I need to upload 19 BATs, in addition to the typical monthly BAT, in order to do this. I think that it will be possible for me to do this in about a year.

 

So look forward to a bunch of uploads this year.

[PBGV103 729]

Someone must have a lot of free time these days.  haha

[weixc812 509]

you're a productive BATer, Jason. It's amazing that you always combine speed with quality. Thank you for bringing us so much fun. So we'll just wait, focus and enjoy what comes next.

[AndisArt 2,066]

You're a busy bee!

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Yikes this thread has been collecting dust!

 

I've taken a break from BATing to work on some non-SimCity things (mainly another architecture project, some rowhouses, which will be adapted into a BAT afterwards), but today I finished up Version 2 of the M. Maria Branch Library.

 

And also since last posting in this thread I've made some updates to The Kean and a new small building in the mipro thread.

 

Here's a link to M Maria Branch Library V2, since it's already been bumped down to the 2nd page.

 

[SimCoug 5,972]

That's a great revision! Thanks for sharing.

[Turjan 1,048]

Here's a link to M Maria Branch Library V2, since it's already been bumped down to the 2nd page.

 

 

Very nice. I had already been looking forward to using this one, and one of the versions already made its way into my game.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Hey guys. Not a real update but I figured I'd share some random stuff:

 

 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/klaasfotocollectie/14819361447/

 

This is a photo of Ibex House, in London, which someone who I follow on flickr posted. My Nafmis Department Store was loosely based off this building.

 

 

http://www.peterguthrie.net/blog/2013/01/3dsmax-annoyances-no-1

 

Newer versions of 3ds max have a newer version of the select by object name, and the material/map browser, which are laggy and without particularly useful new functionality. The normal select tool's button and the select by name's button are right next to each other and so I occasionally accidentally click the select by object button, and after reverting to the old one I realized how much of a negative response I had trained my brain (what's worse, electrical shocks, or lag??). But with time I'll recover. The new material/map browser wasn't as bad, but it still added a lot of scrolling and menu opening. The old one just has everything in a convenient and compact list with the filters off to the side.

 

 

http://www.ronenbekerman.com/making-of-esherick-house-part-2/

 

I've posted this before but it remains the single best resource for understanding how to make good materials with the arch & design material.

 

The short version, for BATing:

- Pretty much all of your major materials should use a glossiness map, instead of just a flat numerical value. Using a texture will make your material more dynamic and detailed in different lighting situations.

- It should go without saying that for every material you should adjust the reflection and the glossiness, but I don't think all BATers do. Reflectivity, of course, is how reflective something is. For glossiness, the higher the glossiness setting the sharper the reflections and the lower the fuzzier the reflections (but this does not affect how reflective the material is. some materials appear to not be very reflective, but are actually more reflective than you think and just have really fuzzy reflections). I'd say a good generic setting and starting point for reflectivity and glossiness would be 0.3/0.3.

- In real life, how reflective something appears to be depends on what angle you are viewing that object at. You might have noticed this while trying to look through a window, that you can't see because reflections are in the way, but if you move your head (change your viewing angle) the reflections aren't as strong and you can see through the glass. The IOR and the "By IOR (Fresnel Reflections)" settings described in the tutorial describe this, and give some generic examples although IORs aren't an exact science, and depending on what specific material you're trying to create the numbers wouldn't be the same as the example numbers he gave. In general, the higher the IOR, the more consistent the reflectivity is at different angles. For example, a mirror is completely reflective at all angles, and so has a very high IOR (looking at the mirror from a different angle doesn't make it appear less reflective). The reflectivity and glossiness settings will change your material from a generic "fake cgi" appearance to something that has the characteristics of the different materials you're trying to make. Fresnel reflections aren't as important as reflectivity and glossiness but is another important part of the material.

- The "blur" setting for all bitmaps should always be reduced. The default is 1.0, but it should be reduced to at least 0.1, or ideally 0.01 (the minimum). However, this will increase render times, so if your renders are taking too long, increase the Blur.

- Because of the specific circumstances of BATing, bump maps are almost never good to use while BATing. Use bump maps for creating distortions in your glass reflections. Other than that, off the top of my head, the only other good use for bump maps in BATing would be for time where you need a very obvious effect, like for a relief carving, but even there it might be better to use displacement (generating actual geometry from your texture) instead of bump.

- 3ds Max needs to store all of your scene's textures in memory, so having too many big textures can have a drastically negative effect on performance. Ideally textures are bigger than how big they'll be in the render, but only a little big. So ideally if something is going to be 200x200 pixels in the render, the texture might be 250x250 pixels, not 2,000x 2,000 pixels. Luckily BATs don't require high resolution textures. Note that only the pixel dimensions matter to max, not the file size (so to max a super compressed .jpg is the same as a .png).

- Ambient Occlusion should be turned on for all your materials. I think I usually use a distance of 3 or 4 meters.

 

 

I thought I had more random stuff to share but maybe not. When I come across something useful I'll try to share it, even if I don't have a BAT update to go with it.

 

BAT uploads should resume sometime in September.

[darn42 1,268]

I stumbled upon that escherick tutorial a while ago while browsing ronens site and it's one of my most used bookmarks at this point. It's a good one.

[JakeMD 107]

Miss you Jason, looking good as always. And your modeling is great, as well Thanks for those tips, I am returning to the scene and I headed straight for your thread for refreshers and inspiration.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Thanks, I'm eager to do more BATing.

 

http://www.ramyhanna.com/2013/06/simple-way-to-speed-up-viewport-speed.html

 

Another helpful link, this one if you're experiencing a lot of viewport lag.

 

 

I posted this in the "The ones that never made it to the STEX" thread but I figured I'd post it here too since it shows a bunch of my earliest projects, which some people might find interesting.

 

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

I would love to order a number 1,2,6,8,9,and 12.

[weixc812 509]

I'll go for (blue) 8,9,11,12,14,16

[shinkansen1 84]

2; 3; 4; 6; 7; 8; 9; 11; and 12. I am such a glutton for tall buildings... ^_^'

[Girafe 1,729]

http://www.allegorithmic.com/products/bitmap2material

[Terring 6,473]

Can we have the buildings with the orange numbers please?

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Thanks guys. Yeah share your favorites.

 

 

Here's some more (hopefully) helpful stuff:

 

 

"Favoriting" your frequently used modifiers. At the top of the modify panel there are 4 buttons with modifiers in them. Beneath that to the right is an icon of a window with four buttons on it, and if you press that you can customize which modifiers show up in those buttons. You can change the number of buttons and you can hide them altogether. The buttons name is "Configure Modifier Sets". 

 

 

You can make the entire right panel bigger by hovering your mouse by the edge and resizing it (naturally it snaps to full widths). I keep mine at two columns wide so I don't have to scroll as much.

 

 

The color correction map is very useful. It lets you change the hue, saturation, brightness and contrast of a bitmap. This way you can use the same bitmap for different things. Most commonly you'd use it to to make a glossiness map out of your texture, instead of having to make a separate image file in photoshop. You can also use it to make brightness variations, in combination with the multi/sub-map, for panels or block variation. You can also use this map to just adjust your texture specifically for a certain BAT, so you don't need to make new photoshop files for every little texture variation you ever make. 

 

While the "basic" Brightness and Contrast controls work, there's also an alternative "Advanced" option which gives you better control and higher quality adjustments. The options here are: Gamma/Contrast (increasing this will make it brighter and less contrasty, lowering it will make it darker and more contrasty), Lift/Offset (this will uniformly make it brighter or darker), and Pivot (which is hard to explain but it sort of adjusts the curve that the gamma adjustment does, affecting midtones).

 

 

There's also an "Output" map which has, among other things, the color map section which is basically the same thing as Curves in Photoshop. This gives you more explicit control than the Color Correct map because you can just use the chart and say "I want this brightness value to be darker, but all of the others should stay the same". All this stuff is the same as the Output section of the bitmaps, but this way you can make these changes without making them directly to the bitmap. This way you can instance the same bitmap wherever it's used. To instance a map of any kind, just right click on it, and choose copy, and then "Paste (Instance)" it into any other slot. Instancing big images will save memory.

 

 

The Slate material editor (compared to the Compact material editor) is a pain in the butt most of the time, but there are some benefits to it. First, you can see more clearly how different maps are used and what the relationships are between everything, which might be hard for new users to understand by navigating around in the compact material editor. The other benefit is that you can see all of the maps of a material, with color correct changes and everything. So, for example, while adjusting a glossiness map you can see what your glossiness map looks like and you can see the final result on the sphere both at the same time. 

 

 

The composite map allows you to layer different other maps and set their blending modes, opacities, and even alpha masks, nearly replicating the layers system in photoshop. Between the composite map and the color correction map you can do a lot of the work you might normally do in photoshop all in max, once again, without having endless copies of the same textures for every single project.