Jason's BATs & Tutorials

[Jasoncw 11,840]

lol, well I've been working on some other WIPs but haven't been posting about them. I'm hoping to have this one finished and uploaded within a few days. And then within a month or two I'll hopefully have a few more finished WIPs to upload.

So I updated my status about the tutorials so I'll give more details on what I'll be doing. Tomorrow I'll be spending most of the day finishing the day version (and the night version too if I'm lucky) of this building and doing some tutorials. I don't know how many I'll do, but I'll try to answer all questions in some way. I'll definitely do one about the green roof. I'll try to answer them as they're posted.

Asking how I did a particular part of a particular building will be easiest for me to answer, because I can just open up that building and tell you what I did. If you ask a big general question (like "how do you make your textures") it's hard to give specific helpful concise advice, so don't as big general questions unless you're ok with getting nonspecific rambling as a response.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

GREEN ROOF

Pre-existing Roof

First, there's the space that the green roof is going to be located. Underneath the green roof will be a normal roof, so create your roof as you normally would. The green roof will be added on top of it.

Modeling the Trays and the Grass

Next you have to model the green roof. There are different kinds of green roofs, but the example here will be a system where a bunch of trays are laid on top of the roof. The trays are essentially planters for the grass to grow on. There are other kinds of green roofs where the grass is grown directly on the roof itself, but for those you can just use a grass texture.

To model the trays, I created a plane, with the corners snapped to the interior corners of the space I wanted to add a green roof to. I increased the number of Length Segments and Width Segments on the plane until I had a bunch of roughly square shapes of a good size. This way it's really easy to get evenly spaced trays that completely fill the roof without having to do the math or trial and error you would have to if you modeled a single tray and then used the Array tool to copy them across the entire roof.

Following that, I converted the plane into an editable polygon, selected all the faces, and then Inset all of the faces. Afterwards I inverted my selection, and Deleted it. This left me with a bunch of square faces separated by gaps. Then I selected all of the faces and Extruded upwards to give the trays height, Inset to give the edges of the trays thickness, and then Extruded by a negative amount to create the interior faces for the edges of the trays. Then I Detached the selection. At the end I had an object that had a bunch of trays, and an object that had a bunch of squares that fit into the trays.

The different grass squares look like they have different textures because they do.

If you don't have one already, you'll need a script to help you randomize the Material IDs of the grass polygons. You can download one at http://www.scriptspo...al-id-dashboard (and this is just one of many randomizers out there to download). Follow the installation instructions on that site for how to install and use it, and search google if you're having trouble.

Next, select all of the grass object's faces, and use Material ID Dashboard (or whatever randomization script you're using) to randomize the Material IDs to a number between 1 and 3.

Grass Material

Here's the grass material shown in the Slate Material Editor.

This is more complicated looking than it needs to be, but the important parts of this are:

The three different Bitmaps. Most of the time when making a material the Bitmap is put directly into the Diffuse Color, but since we have three of them we can't do that here. The Bitmap is the "texture" itself.

The Multi/Sub Map, plugged into the Diffuse Color, which allows us to use separate textures in one material. In the Multi/Sub map, you have a bunch of different map slots in a list, and each slot in the list has a number. You can choose whether that number corresponds to a Material ID, Object ID, Smoothing Group, or Random. We have three different Bitmaps here. We've already randomized the Material IDs of the polygons of our grass object to range between 1 and 3. So if the Material ID of a polygon is 1, then it will use the first Bitmap. If it's 2, then it will use the 2nd Bitmap. This is how we're randomizing the textures on the trays.

The Arch & Design material. You can see that I instanced everything in the Diffuse Color to the Reflection Glossiness and Bump as well. The Reflection Glossiness controls how sharp or fuzzy the reflections are. White is a sharp reflection and black is a completely unsharp reflection. But visually, the effect of this is that the bright spots of the texture will appear to be more reflective than the dark spots. This just adds some visual richness, and is optional. Then it's also instanced into the bump map where the bright spots of the texture will show up as bumps. This also helps add some visual richness by giving the surface a little sense of topography (although I don't think this made much of a difference), and is also optional.

But there are some extra map types in between those other ones. One is a Color Correction map, which allows you to control brightness, contrast, hue and saturation directly within 3ds Max (instead of through Photoshop). The other is a Composite map, which lets you layer different maps together directly within 3ds Max (instead of through Photoshop). I used the Composite Map to add random noise to the textures, to add more variation to them. All of this was basically a quick and easy way of doing small changes to the textures without having to open Photoshop and make whole new texture files.

Finally, apply the material to the grass object, and give it a UVW map, and you're done.

[Toothless Stitch 2,901]

This is what I like about Jason: He keeps his promises and is calling his BATs "quickies although other people like me would need about 1 month for the modelling

Two questions:

1: When you inset all the faces, did you use by selection or by polygon. I assume you used by polygon but I wanted to ask.

2: Why are you inverting them. Because if I do everything remains the same and after deleting my selction I only have the frames you wanted to get rid of.

Jason aka the BATtutman.

  Edited October 19, 2012 by skyscraper241  

[Sgt Pepper 864]

You're a some kind of BATing wizard.

This building is perfect to fill that demand for high tech industries. I'm sure it will go well with the one you released a while back.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

skyscraper241: Thanks

1. Yeah, by polygon. Should I go back and clarify? I thought it would be clear because doing it by group would make a result that looks wrong.

2. When you select a face and inset it, that face should still be selected by default afterwards. So if you immediately press delete, you'll delete the parts that will become the trays. If you invert your selection, then those faces will automatically be deselected, and the parts we want to delete will be selected. Alternatively you can select all of the faces in the object, and then manually deselect the polygons you want to keep by holding down the Alt key (if you hold down Ctrl while clicking things it will add to the selection, and if you hold Alt it will remove what you click on from the selection).

I think I might add a screenshot showing the geometry of the trays, so that even if my description of how to model them is bad it will be easy to figure out how they're shaped.

Sgt. Pepper: Thanks! Hopefully it will. They're both 6x6s so it should be easy to get them to fit a street grid next to each other.

If anyone has anything they want me to write a tutorial for, go ahead and ask. I thought my problem was going to be getting too many tutorial requests, not getting none.

Any tutorial requests made within a few hours I'll do right away. After that I'll still do them but they'll be worked into my "schedule" (which as you guys know means anything from a few days to a few years )

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

Great tutorial please make more, this can come in handy in the future.

[anotn 223]

Nice tutorial, are we going to see an influx of green roofed buildings now? Another way to randomize the material ID's for the grass would be to use the MaterialByElement modifier.

[Toothless Stitch 2,901]

Thanks for the fast reply! :DYou want more tutorial requests,

maybe you should show us how you made that black stuff on the roof. They look like railways!

[Francis90b 748]

Ok, one take - the brisee soleil wood on the building's outer shell.

[gutterclub 2,729]

I'd love a tutorial on doing night enviroment maps, or 'red squiggles' as we've called them before. I believe you did a great job with them on the Gardener Centre glass..

I'd also like a quick tutorial on making flora bushes and hedges..I tried the chamfer box, with noise etc but the results were not what I was after..

Thanks bud

[MTT9 187]

Thats really usefull jason!!! A quick one, can you show the material properties of those shiny metal things on the roof?

[Jasoncw 11,840]

BRISE SOLEIL

The main difficulty with making a brise soleil is figuring out the size of the louvers and the gaps between. In real life louvers are very small, and if you BATed them accurately they would appear to be a flat, monotonous surface, so they must be exaggerated. You want the louvers to be as small as possible while still being thick enough for a reasonable level of visual clarity.

Modeling Method

The most obvious way is to simply model them. To do this, you would either create and extrude splines of the desired shape (rectangles or circles), or you would create either box or cylinder standard primitives of the desired dimensions. The advantage to this method is that you can model them exactly as you want them without much compromise, and the disadvantage is that you need to do a lot of tedious and time consuming trial and error to figure out what the right size they should be. My guess is that this way of creating a brise soleil will have better results but will take more time.

Material Method

I made my brise soleil as a material instead of modeling them. The only modeling involved is creating a Plane to apply your material to. You'll also have to model frames or racks of some kind (in my case they are just black rectangles). The advantage of this is that it's easier to tweak the thickness of the louvers, but the disadvantage is that your louvers will be two dimensional. Luckily, the louvers being 2D won't be a problem most of the time for SimCity purposes. This is the lazy way of making a brise soleil, even though it requires more advanced knowledge.

I started with the Arch & Design material as usual. I scrolled down to the Special Paramters Maps rollout, and found the Cutout map slot. It's more or less an opacity map where white is opaque and black is transparent. In this I put a Tiles map to automatically generate a pattern of horizontal black and white lines. Click on the "None" button next to Cutout, and find "Tile". Go to Help>Autodesk 3ds Max Help and search for Tiles to learn more about the different settings. While you're at it you can search for Cutout to learn more about that and some of its technical nuances which I won't bother with here.

There are a few settings to take note of when using a Tiles map for this purpose. In the Tiles map, in the Coordinates rollout, there is a setting called Blur which is 1.0 by default but which should be lowered to either 0.1 or 0.01, the minimum setting. This setting controls how sharp the map is, and most map types have this setting, including the Bitmap, so if you ever want any of your textures to render sharper, lower the Blur. But be warned that it will increase render times. It's optional for other uses, but anything being used as a Cutout should be lowered or else you won't get sharp edges. In the Standard Controls rollout, you'll want the Bond set to Stack Bond, which will basically make a grid pattern (running bond is useful for automatically generating a brick or block pattern). In the Advanced Settings rollout you'll want the Tiles and Grout colors to be white and black, corresponding with opaque and transparent. You'll want the Horizontal Count to be 1, and the Horizontal Gap to be 0.0. To control Horizontal and Vertical Gap separately (by default they're automatically the same size, for convenience) click the big lock button to the right.

The Vertical Count and Vertical Gap will have to be figured on your own according to your specific BAT. This, in combination with your UVW Map, is how you control how many louvers there are and how big the gap between them is. This will take trial and error, but it's only a matter of changing a number and doing a preview render.

This is all you really have to do, but if you want there to be variety between the individual louvers you can. To do this, right click on the Tiles map, and select Copy. Then right click on the Diffuse Color slot (where you normally put your textures) and pick Paste (Copy). Now you can change the Tiles color to brown, for wood, white, for glazed terra cotta, or any other color you'd like. Increasing the Color Variance setting will automatically make some of your tiles (in this case louvers) darker or brighter which will create variation. Then you can adjust the Horizontal Count and any other settings so that the louvers in the material line up with the louvers you want on your BAT. For example, if your facade has 10 sections of louver you can set the Horizontal Count to 10, and the brightness variation will align with your sections.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

CATWALKS & FENCES

To make this (hopefully) easier to understand, I'm going to use clay/wireframe renders instead of viewport screenshots. Faces will be light grey, and edges will be black lines.

The tutorial will cover catwalks, but by following this you'll also understand how to make fences and a bunch of other stuff.

Modeling

Go to Create>Standard Primitives>Box, and create a box that's the size of your catwalk. Give it 3 Height Segments, and any number of Width Segments. In this example I created a 1x8x1.5 meter box, with 7 Width Segments. These are just numbers I picked for this tutorial. For your own BATs, you'll want to look at reference materials and decide for yourself how big your catwalk should be.

Next, right click on the object and convert it into an editable polygon. Select the horizontal edges in the middle and lower them so you get something like my example.

Then, select ALL of the edges, and in the right pane menu, and click on the Create Shape From Selection button. Choose Linear when prompted. This will create a new editable spline object with the edges you had selected. We'll work more with this editable spline object later, for now we'll continue with our editable polygon. Go ahead and hide the new spline object.

Now, select and delete the faces shown below, which will result in the object shown beneath that.

Unhide the editable spline object we made earlier. Go to Modifiers>Patch/Spine Editing>Sweep to apply a sweep modifier. Change the Built-In Section to Bar, and change the Length and Width to 0.075. Now that the spline object has thickness, it's going to be our major posts and rails.

Next, some edges will need to be deleted, and others will need to be copied/moved. If you hold down shift, and then move something, instead of moving it, it will make a copy of it instead (for more information go to Help>3ds Max Help and search for Shift+Clone). Do what you have to do to get what's shown below.

Now the major posts and rails of our catwalk are complete. But we still have to make the rest of the railing and floor of our catwalk. Select the polygons representing the floor, and move them vertically to where they are supposed to be.

Detach the floor polygons from the object. You should now have three objects: an editable spline, an editable polygon that has the walls of the catwalk, and an editable polygon that has the floor of the catwalk.

Apply a UVW Map to the catwalk floor, set to Planar, with square dimensions. Apply a UVW Map to the catwalk walls, set to Box, with the Length and Width being equal (forming a square when viewed from the top) and with the height equal to the height of the side rail walls. The UVW Maps' dimensions will be adjusted later, but they must remain square.

Modeling is now complete.

Materials

We'll need two materials, one for the walls of the catwalk, and one for the floor of the catwalk. They both follow the same process and start with an Arch & Design material. Scroll down and find the Special Purpose Maps rollout. Then find Cutout, and click on the None box next to it, and select the Tiles map. We're doing the same thing we did in the brise soleil tutorial.

If you need to, go to Help>3ds Max Help and search for Cutout or Tiles to learn about all of the different settings. The Tiles map will, in our case, generate a black and white grid pattern. The Tiles map will be put into the Cutout slot, where white will keep that area of the object opaque, and black will make that area of the object disappear.

In the Coordinates rollout, lower Blur from 1.0 to either 0.1 or 0.01, the lowest setting. This will make our Tiles map sharper, which is essential for using it as a Cutout. In the Standard Controls rollout, the preset should be set to Stack. In the Advanced Controls rollout, the Tiles Color should be black, and the Grout Color should be white. This way the grout of our Tiles map will be opaque and everything else will be transparent.

The next part is where the material for the catwalk walls is different from the material for the catwalk floor. For the catwalk floor, you'll want the Horizontal Count and Vertical Count to be the same, to create a square grid pattern. For the catwalk walls, you'll only want one Vertical Count, and a higher number for the Horizontal Count, which will create a grid that's only one grid high, or, in other words, a bunch of vertical lines.

Adjust the Horizontal and Vertical Count, the Gap Width, and the dimensions of the UVW Maps to refine the number and size of the walls and floor.

You might end up with something similar to what's below, which is the same as what's shown in the header image of this tutorial.

Some final notes:

- The final result doesn't have to look good close up. Catwalks are naturally jumbled looking.

- Depending on what your Horizontal Count is, the vertical parts of your catwalk walls won't line up with what you modeled. If that's the case, and if you can tell it doesn't look good in the preview renders, you can do the math required to make sure that they line up better.

- Using splines to make the rails can result in messy geometry. If that's a problem you can poly model it instead for cleaner results. Using splines in this situation is the quick and dirty way of doing which is good enough for most of the time.

- To keep your material navigator more tidy, you can put the three different materials (the floor material, the walls material, and the solid black material) into a Multi/Sub-Object material. You can then control which part of the catwalk gets which material using Material IDs.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

REFLECTIVE METAL

This one is pretty easy.

Start with an Arch & Design material, as usual.

In the Main Material Parameters rollout, change the IOR to something high. I usually put in 22, because pressing the "2" key twice is easier than pressing "2" once and then "5" (or whatever other number) once. Any big number is fine.

In the BRDF rollout, select By IOR (Fresnel Reflections) instead of Custom Reflectivity Function. I very very highly recommend going to Help>3ds Max Help, and searching for BRDF.

And that's all there is to it, but there are a few notes to add:

- There is a check box called "Metal Material" but checking it won't automatically make your material look like metal. The tool tip awkwardly states that checking that check box will change the reflection color to the diffuse color. The diffuse color is what you would most typically consider the color of your material, and it's where your "textures" go. The Reflection Color influences the color of reflections and highlights (change it to hot pink and see what happens). 

(Note from 2017: If you look into polished gold, your reflections will be very heavily tinted gold, no matter how colorful you are. Metals have a characteristic where the color of the material influences the color of the reflections. I recommend checking this checkbox when making metals.)

- SimFox put a "Sky" button in BAT4Max, which changes some environment settings so that you have a blue colored sky. I always press this anyway for consistency's sake, but if you're making a BAT that is reflecting the sky (so, reflective roof junk, or reflective glass skylights) you'll want to press this button. That way your materials will have something to reflect when they're pointing upwards.

- I always need to lower my Reflectivity setting quite a bit.

- As always, a high Glossiness setting will make your reflections sharp, and a low Glossiness will make them blurry.

- Don't check the Highlights+FG Only check box. Normally this is a good box to check if you want to speed up your renders. It turns off true reflections and fakes them using Final Gather, which is fine for materials that only have subtle reflections in the first place, and obviously not fine for materials that are explicitly reflective.

- The thing that makes metal materials look good isn't as much the object/material itself, it's the reflections. So if you want a metal object to look really good, it needs to have interesting things around it to reflect. Round objects (like teapots) also make for better reflections. The isometric camera view and the orthogonal nature of buildings means that metal facades and most other metal objects will look flat and drab and not "metalish" and sometimes this is unavoidable.

(Note from 2017: In the past I've made my metals too obviously reflective. In real life most metal on buildings will be weathered. Giving the metal materials metallic characteristics is important but remember to keep it toned down)

[Jasoncw 11,840]

These are all the tutorials for today. I'll work on some more tomorrow.

Let me know if I need to explain anything more clearly.

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

OMG, you tought this to me in the past for my air vents I use on my roofs of my apartments I create. Great Job!!!!!

I think another tutorial you can make is how to hide objects blow 0 for other batters, Xyloxadoria tought me how to do this and I think this can help others?

  Edited October 21, 2012 by Aaron Graham  

[IDS2 3,346]

Awesome! That metal material one was especially helpful. I've been stuck on a building with a metal facade for quite a while now and hopefully this will clear it up.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Aaron:

!!!!!!!

I figured there was a simple way of doing that, but I didn't actually know what it was. Now I know! I'll write a tutorial explaining it more in depth tomorrow.

Thanks for sharing! It works great! It makes me want to do a BAT with an underground section, lol

(and now let's pretend that the awkward and clumsy way I used to do it never happened )

IDS2: No problem! It will help out a lot, but like I said before, most facades won't look super metallic because they're flat. The metal facade (and glass for that matter) on looks so good mainly because it's a curved surface.

If you're talking about your gold building, experiment with the "Metal Material" checkbox after you make the other changes. Gold is a metal that when I look at it the reflections have a gold tint to them. (as you guys can tell the metal checkbox is giving me a hard time lol)

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

So you figure it out? All I did was post two pictures and did not explain how to do it and you figured it out, damn you good, and out of all people I thought you knew about this because you made a underground drive way in the past.

  Edited October 21, 2012 by Aaron Graham  

[Girafe 1,729]

Extremly good tuts, thanks for sharing your knowledge

[Amthaak 1,501]

thank you Jason for sharing your knowledge! Your tuts are so useful!

[art128 4,618]

Great tutorials around there, Jason!

[I. Lostalim 588]

Glad to know this is still around!

Need to read over this more...

[Cockatoo 2,256]

...in the Coordinates rollout, there is a setting called Blur which is 1.0 by default but which should be lowered to either 0.1 or 0.01, the minimum setting...

OMGOGMGOG you just fixed a problem that'd been bugging me all week. I'd always just ignored that setting and could never work out why my tiling textures kept going so damn blurry as they receded into the distance.

Just sharing little tips like this in a tutorial can make a world of difference, even if you'd probably never need to recreate the exact circumstances of the whole tutorial. Thanks for doing these!

[MTT9 187]

This one is pretty easy.

I knew it was quite simple, but this tutorials will help me a lot. Thanks so much Jason

[Jasoncw 11,840]

MANAGING WINDOWS

This is just something I've started doing recently to help me keep my scenes more tidy. When I first started BATing, each window frame was made up of several objects. One or more for the glass itself, and one or more for the frame. All of the objects had names like Box453. To do something simple like make one row of windows shorter was an ordeal. Then in the Material Editor I'd have a material for the glass and one or more materials for the window frames. The way I deal with windows today is a lot better.

Modeling

First, let me explain how I usually model my windows (and walls). This will help you understand why this way of doing things works well for me, and how managing your windows this way might be a little different for you.

My walls usually start as a Plane. Then I use a variety of polygon modeling tools to cut lines into the Plane where my windows and other features of the facade belong. It ends up looking something like the screenshots that Aaron Graham posted a few posts ago. Basically a grid of lines defining where the windows are, plus other major features. Then I select the faces where the windows are, extrude by a negative amount, to give the walls depth where the windows are, and then I Detach all of the faces I had selected. Then I take these faces, and poly model the frames. I mainly use Inset, Quick Slice, and Connect to draw the lines, and then Extrude for depth. This way all of the windows are modeled at once, and they're one object, usually named "Windows". But no matter how you model your windows, if you want to use this tip you can just attach them all together.

Materials

For the material, instead of starting with an Arch & Design material, start with a Multi/Sub-Object material. Then put two Arch & Design materials in it, and name them Glass and Frames (or whatever names you prefer). If you want more than one window frame color, add more Sub-Materials. Go ahead and create these materials as you normally would. Take note of the Material ID column. If a polygon has a Material ID of 1, it will use that material.

Then apply it to your windows object. Select your windows object and then select either the polygons representing the frames, or the glass, and then change their Material IDs to what they should be. Do this using the Set ID box. The Select ID box/button will automatically select everything in the object with the ID in the box (so in the example above, if I pressed that button it would select ALL of my window frame polygons).

Normally you would do this step as you're modeling them, because as you're modeling them you'll more than likely already have the panes of glass selected. To invert your selection (if you have all of your glass selected and want to select all of your frames) go to Edit>Select Invert.

Now you've got all of your windows as one object, and one material. If you want to make a row of windows shorter, you just select the object, select a row of vertexes, and move them up. You don't have a bunch of different mundane window materials cluttering your material editor.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

NIGHT GROUND PLANE (SQUIGGLY LIGHT REFLECTIONS)

I don't know exactly what to call these, but they're basically the squiggly lines that you can have in your windows at night to represent the windows reflecting things like street lights, car lights, and neighboring buildings. They're the reddish squiggly lines in the Gardener Center render shown above.

To make them, you basically turn Self Illumination (Glow) on for your ground plane material, and you use a Bitmap, just like you would if you were doing it to for night windows. I won't be redistributing the texture I used on Gardener Center because I wasn't the one who made it (SimFox was), but I'll tell you that it was just a photo of an urban area (possibly Hong Kong) taken from a high angle (probably from a skyscraper) and that the image was mostly black with a lot of little bright colored spots from cars/streetlights/etc. and a few larger areas that were more broadly illuminated. I can only imagine that most night time skyline shots would work.

If your main ground plane texture, and the night texture need separate UVW Maps, then go to the Coordinates rollout of each Bitmap and change the Map Channel. The UVW Map also has an area for changing the Map Channel. By default the Map Channel is 1. If you change the Map Channel in both the Bitmap and the UVW Map to, for example, 2, then you can have two different Bitmaps controlled independently by two different UVW Maps.

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

Another Great pack of tutorials. The first one and the second one, I just have not made a glass building yet, I never made one that's funny. For the first one that's how I manage my windows yet 80% of the building. Parts like corbels, cornice, and other detailed objects will not and should not really be all in one object. It's nothing like making a scene well organized, having less than 200 objects can speed of batting about 30% to 50%. I end up have a number of objects when i have to add chairs, bushes, ect on the roof of a building that's how the object count grow in my scenes. I can also group them and but it still will not be one object as attaching them. If you want to move one object in a group you can select open and click on the object you want to move around in the scene.

One the Ground plane tutorial I need to try it out but I will have to make a glass office building and that's not my style, to commercial up. I'm a residentail supporter, I support the people.

[Gn_leugim 853]

very uselful tutorials there some even to gmax

[Toothless Stitch 2,901]

I have a quick question, not about your tutorial but about something else.

Two days ago I decided to start playing SC4 again. However, I reinstalled it to get rid of all those BATs and Mods I didnt wanna have anymore. And to make the new building light up in the night, I also deleted BAT, GMAX, LE and PIM. Also, I'm an active Batter and would like to finish my first building soon. But now I don't know if exporting will work properly because BAT was reinstalled. Will there be problems.

Thanks in advance!