Jason's BATs & Tutorials

[Fantozzi 4,067]

WAIT ...

... on September 9. 2005 you uploaded your first bat on the STEX, didn't you? So sorry for being late - but ten years of outstanding batting deserves to say it in big letters:

THANK YOU SO MUCH!

 

[slickbg56 778]

THANKS FOR ALL THE GREAT STUFF OVER THE PAST TEN YEARS!!! GREAT WORK!!!

[Bombardiere 591]

Hello Jason. I have only now found your marvelous Warwick Square. I can't understand how I did miss this gem.

 

 

Your batting is great, but that is not what I am so impressed with. It is the details, your clearly have an artist eye. The facade is great, no question about it, but I more impressed with the back side. You have captured so well what London back yard look like. This is something that I have failed.

 

However. Could I request for a HD version? I would like so much to see these in full HD beauty. I know that HD buildings are mixed blessing, and large buildings do not come out well, but I think these are in size that would still benefit HD.

[steffix0168 0]

On ‎2005‎-‎09‎-‎25 at 8:28 PM, sharkbait16 said:

Interesting. I really like the style of these buildings.

 

On ‎2005‎-‎09‎-‎26 at 7:00 PM, Stormtrooper said:

I been wating for a new station.

 

[JP Schriefer 5,590]

You made me feel hope of an update for nothing -.-

Come back, Jason

[Jasoncw 11,840]

I literally looked at this thread yesterday and was surprised how dead it was.  

But I'm still alive and BATing.  Expect some uploads in the fall. 

[rocker289 75]

Yes you are right

Your'e stuff is awsume

But I hear you perfection takes a lot of time

Hang in There

[PanzerMan1001 16]

You've got some of the best stuff on the website. Looking forward to seeing some of your new BATs. 

[Toothless Stitch 2,901]

On 9.7.2016 at 5:37 AM, Jasoncw said:

I literally looked at this thread yesterday and was surprised how dead it was.  

But I'm still alive and BATing.  Expect some uploads in the fall. 

Let's hope this thread isn't going to fall victim to fall laziness or this thread will fall asleep again D:

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Thanks guys! 

So I've made something that is not in Rio or Detroit, so I have something for this thread.  

I made an entry for the roundabout competition. 

And here's a little diorama I made for it for the competition entry. My understanding is that voting will start sometime today.

A few non-art deco buildings managed to sneak in.  

[raynev1 1,886]

Very nice , done downloaded and installed can't wait to see how this looks in my cities .

[gutterclub 2,729]

Love the little statue!!! This scene also makes me wish you'd import the Regal Theatre into Max and give it the 2016 treatment  

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Thanks guys.  

@gutterclub don't say things like that or else I might do it.  I already know what I would do for the facade since it was a good facade to begin with. But the theater section has a super weird shape. It's as if there were two very narrow and long theaters stacked on top of each other. So ideally I'd like to make the theater section make more sense, but without changing the massing, because I don't want to remove the setbacks and I don't want to change the lot size. And while I'm pretty sure I would change the details on the theater section to be art deco and not classical, idk if I'd change the brown brick to grey brick or if I'd change it to limestone on the street facing sides. One thing for sure that I'd change though is the one wall on the setback will be orthogonal rather than diagonal which never made any sense whatsoever.  

Just for a rough comparison for the theater massing, you can plop Music Hall next to it. Any smaller than that and you're getting into neighborhood theater territory. If I made the building a 3x4 and reduced the entire building by one or two floors I could keep the massing how it is now, juts extended back another tile.

It depends on what people want out of a remade version. The original idea reimagined to solve problems, or the original BAT just with some extra refinement. I don't want to George Lucas it.

 

[Thin White Duke 4,072]

I'd prefer the current 4x2 footprint. We already a 4x3 corner lot in the form of a mid rise art deco night club, and as little of a difference as it may seem, it's much more difficult to fit in a 4x3 corner lot than a 4x2 one. Especially when your usual city building preference is 4-tile-wide blocks. Other than that, I can barely remember what it was like, because I haven't used it for a long time. The reason is, I have a love/hate relationship with this BAT. I absolutely love the way it looks, but the nightlights particularly are so outdated I can't stand having it in any night scenes. The same goes for the Detroit free press building. 

I'm not complaining or even telling you to do this, and do this, and do this, because you have all the free time in the world! I'm just saying, if you ever feel a need to make the STEX a better place, but your creativity carriage is stuck in a mind swamp, you could just dust off one of your older BATs and bring it up to par with what you're producing now. I know it was two years ago, but the updated M. Maria Branch Library still feels fresh today. Not that there's any reason why it wouldn't. 

[Jasoncw 11,840]

No, that's the exact kind of input I'd like to hear! 

And for the record Regal Theater and the Detroit Free Press Building are not BATs that I plan money shots around any more. If they grow they grow. I was actually getting really nostalgic making that shot because making it lead me to going through and looking at all the ploppables in my landmarks menu that I'd practically forgotten about. 

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Work on Trier Tower V2. Unlike Regal Theater this one is just a matter of opening the files in max and redoing the materials. 

The original was made in an earlier version of max that didn't have the arch & design material and didn't have the same types as lights that the current lighting rig uses. So the materials have all been recreated to have reasonably appropriate physical characteristics. I've also been tweaking the colors and the textures getting them to match the original version closer (once the new materials and lighting were incorporated the colors didn't look the same even though they hadn't changed). I'll keep on tweaking them trying to get them closer.

The goal is to make it looks the same as before but with better materials and lighting quality.

However that does exclude some aspects of the original, mainly the super white infill panels and some of the reflections. Except for materials covering very small areas (like wires for example) you should never make a material with a pure white or a pure black color. If you want something to be pure white you should really make it light grey because pure white objects don't exist in nature. You really shouldn't go higher than like 0.8 which is like a white piece of paper or fresh snow. But even if I made the panels pure white they wouldn't be as bright as the original because they're behind glass. I also can't duplicate the reflections of the original glass because of the material type originally used. But the original glass/interior was pretty messed up. When I looked at the model I found that the original was missing a bunch of floors near the bottom of the tower and you couldn't even notice.

To make a long story short the original did things that made it look really visually sexy but physically unnatural, and I'd like to make it more natural looking while still keeping as much as the sexyness as I can.

I'd also like to, if possible, make it clearer to understand what the facade is. The facade is the grid of windows, but some of the windows are opaque. So some of the patterns on the facade comes from the window blinds, but most of it is from some of the windows being filled in. I know a lot of people thought that it was all window blinds.

When I'm done tweaking this I'll just use the same material settings for Trier Station.

[gutterclub 2,729]

 

 

[art128 4,618]

A 2016 version of one of my favorite towers, great!

[JP Schriefer 5,590]

Awesome!!!

[Thin White Duke 4,072]

Fantastic! Here's another one of those buildings that are in desperate need of a rework.

[Gn_leugim 853]

Good work always showing up here

[raynev1 1,886]

Wow that looks great , and a remake of Trier Station sounds fantastic . I use Trier Station in all of my larger cities . I can't wait to see both when they're done .

[T Wrecks 10,209]

I like the idea of remakes. So much great stuff that lacks only a DarkNite render... this also applies to some of Nolan's buildings!

Concerning Regal Theatre, I'd be perfectly content with a purely technical upgrade, without any design changes. Not that I'm opposed to other changes, I just don't think they are strictly necessary. By now, you are operating and designing on a level of architectural realism and conceptual depth that's far over the head of the average SimCity player. Therefore, the questions you ask yourself sometimes tend to be questions the average player wouldn't even think of.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Thanks guys, a quick update on Trier Tower: 

Just some more tweaking. I also added some air intake/exhaust vents on the mechanical floors. Next I'm going to put some furniture in the lobby. I might try putting some cubicles into the office floors but it's looking pretty good as it is so it depends on how I'm feeling. 

I also did an export of the building and unfortunately I'm having the grey halo problems (click for full size):

It's most noticeable on the shadow side of the building, especially in the lower right around the columns. After exporting it I did a bunch of experiments to see if I could get a better alpha mask since that's what's causing the problems. The outline of the building is antialiased (grey pixels for the alpha channel) but buildings in the game aren't set to have antialiasing, so the grey pixels are rounded up to being opaque, and since those pixels are opaque a bit of the grey background shows through. The weird thing though is I looked at some BATs that don't have the problem and their alpha masks aren't any better so I really don't know what exactly is causing the problem to happen. I haven't tried reexporting it again but changing the settings didn't really change the render much so I'm not expecting it to solve the problem. I also know that a lot of other people have the problem and that as far as I know it hasn't been solved. 

Also I'll be reusing the old .SC4Model file which means that when this is uploaded you can remove the old one and put the new one in and it will replace all of the existing instances of the building without having to demolish anything. Although I will be including new, separate, remodded lots using PIMX stats as well. 

And yeah my plugins folder is in complete disarray.  

[Thin White Duke 4,072]

Nice to hear I'm not the only one who makes a mess of the plugins folder. Everyone says everything gets harder to find. If there's something I'm search for that I can't find, I just go find it on the STEX or LEX, download it, look what the file is called and then go search for it in the plugins folder. Easy as can be!

Hope you get your problem resolved. It's great to see you working on somehting again.

[rsc204 21,806]

It's a great re-working of the original model, even with the "halo" effect, it will be welcome I'm sure.

The issue appears to be with newer versions of 3DS Max, if somehow the BAT4MAX scripts could be amended, it could probably be fixed. I for one will be sticking with 3DS Max 2011 to avoid such issues. As such, I would be happy to handle the renders for you, since that would solve the issue. Provided you've not used any of the newer features (whatever they are), it should give the same results. If you are feeling up to it, I posted a tutorial for how to manually modify the alpha channels to fix the problem, but that is a bit of a PITA really.

 

[JP Schriefer 5,590]

The only way to disguise this problem so far I believe is to choose the background color in the render settings similar to the color of the building's edge. It may work when the edges have almost the same color, like yours. If you choose a greenish background it can get better to this building in my opinion.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

@rsc204 I remember you making that tutorial and thinking it was very kind of you and that there was no way in hell I would do that.  Brute force manually fixing it is definitely something that can be done but like you said it's not really practical. Using batch processing in photoshop to automate the changes would speed it up but still. 

Your bridge tutorial was also helpful and your accent was completely unexpected.  

The other line of thought I had was that the models in the game could be changed so that they handle those alphas better. 

Here's the settings in the reader. Unfortunately I don't know what most of the options mean to even try anything, and I don't know of any documentation or explanation. 

But it would be much easier to automate this, and while we were at it we could change some other settings (for example the Wrap Mode should have been set to clamb as default instead of repeat).

@JP Schriefer Yeah that's the most practical solution at the moment, and it's what I did for the roundabout which worked well because it would always be up against the dark asphalt. 

 

[rsc204 21,806]

I did try setting transparency on Matt's model I was testing, but it didn't change the outcome. The thin grey line that is appearing is because parts that should either be transparent or semi-transparent are simply not set as such in the Alpha Channel. I don't think any of the settings within reader are likely to work around that problem, it's 3DS Max/BAT4Max that's causing it. I wonder if the grey used for backgrounds is just not quite the right shade to pick up against certain edges? But I think more likely this is just something that really needs sorting out in the scripts. Perhaps you can change the background colour, I think I read it's possible. Make that contrast more with the outline colours of the model, it would be interesting if this fixed a problem I know many are suffering of late.

In reality all these S3D settings relates to how different textures "stack" on top of each other or how they should be resampled. Neither are really things you need to get into for batting. About the only settings you might want here for a BAT are to set transparency for your model. Which is far easier done for you automatically, using Model Tweaker anyhow.

It's actually remarkably simple to get at the textures and adjust the alphas. But, if you've got models with many z5 textures, it can quickly becomes tedious work. To speed this up, I just tried to offset the entire edge of the model by adjusting the alpha textures by between .3 and 1 pixel. Getting at the textures and re-importing them should be a breeze, so it all depends on how quickly you can fix the alpha channels in a photo editor. You probably don't need to bother with z1/z2, perhaps even zoom 3 also. So the crux is how many textures z5 uses, but if you combine them into one image, that's only working on 2-3 images maximum per model. I guess I'm the sort of person that would do it, because little thing like this irk me. Then at the same time, I've released stuff with worse problems, I'm complicated . However once you see the alpha layered on top of the texture and adjust the transparency, you'll get a feel for how far it's off. From my limited testing, it did appear to be quite consistent, which supports my theory as to the cause.

[mattb325 28,880]

Looking at your preview render shot, I'd say that your background colour is off.

 

Open the material editor, and then under Rendering->Environment drag (as an instance, not a copy) of MR_Physical_Sky to an empty slot.

Then, click on the ground colour and slide the whiteness to its max value and the saturation to its leftmost value. You'll end up with an RGB of 0,008/0,008/0,007 and that seems to do the trick 99% of the time.