Chicago BAT Project

[Gn_leugim 853]

very nce I guess that wound give you much work loting

[darn42 1,268]

Sgt: It's not small, definitely not small. It's 7x8 including the plaza. The building itself is pretty big, too. We had exact dimensions earlier in the thread and they were like 240x 140 feet or something like that. It's also 600 something feet tall, yet only 31 stories. I just haven't scaled it up yet.

Wolverine: That's cool. I really hope this comes out as an impressive portfolio piece. I'm giving myself until march or so to get a few very good pieces for my portfolio. Btw, what do you do now?

Coug: Thanks! I will try to include the building as seperate itself, depending on render times. I may or may not end up having to keep this thing at draft quality final gather because it takes a while to render. I know that picasso is 100% being a prop because it's smaller in size. I do hope that I can do the building seperate though.

I'm having some trouble on the plaza texture though.

I've made a base texture that I like so far.

But I want to add a bit of grime over it, not much, and i wanted to do it using a separate map. So I made a grime map that I liked and made it so that everything is mostly transparent

On the left is the grime, the white background is just to show what it is. And on the right is what happens when I save it as a png or a tga and put it in as a composite layer or an rgb multiply part. I have absolutely no clue. I'm using gimp atm. Does anyone know what's going on?

  Edited August 28, 2012 by darn42  

[Sgt Pepper 864]

Ahhh I see. Miscalculation on my part. It just looked small to me, like I thought it the tower would ffit a 4x2 or a 3x2 lot. Maybe I was misled by the size of the windows.

Well I better save some sizable room for it.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

I really have no idea what is wrong, because it should work just fine. But just to double check, have you done a preview render? Certain maps don't show up correctly in the viewport, although I don't remember which ones off the top of my head.

There are a few different ways of going about what you're doing.

One is to do what you're doing now. imo that's best when you already have textures and you want to adjust or add grime to the textures without using photoshop to make an entirely new texture. So, for example, if you were using the Maxis paver texture, you could just use that texture, and then do all your modifications in max, and that way you don't have a million different custom paver textures all over. This has less to do with results and more to do with workflow and file organization.

A different way to go about doing this has the goal of using smaller textures. I'm not 100% sure, but I think the way max deals with textures, is that it doesn't really matter as much what the file size of the texture is, and what really matters is how many pixels it is, because when max uses textures I think it internally converts the textures into its own lossless image format. So what you can do is you can use a smaller tileable bitmap for the pavers (or you could use the Tiles map which is a very useful map), then you could use a small tileable bitmap for the grunge, and then you could use a lowish resolution black and white/grey scale image for the alpha mask to control where each one goes. And then in addition to that you can use noise maps and other maps to essentially make a semi-procedural material to cover a large area without using huge textures, and still having high enough resolution for close ups.

Because imagine your doing an architectural visualization, and you want to do a few perspective renders from different spots in the same scene (for example if you don't want to make unique, customized scenes for each render). The ground is a large area. But close to the camera it's actually going to be pretty big in the render so the texture is going to need to be a decent resolution, especially if you're going to be rendering for printing at 300 dpi. But having a high resolution image that covers the entire area would be such a huge huge image that it wouldn't be practical and would bog down your computer. Image sizes is actually one of the main ways you can bog down your scene, so if you're ever having a hard time rendering something, go through and replace what images you can with lower resolution images. When max is rendering not only does it have to do the rendering itself, but it has to manage all of the images, and if you have gigs of images in your scene that's all extra stuff it has to manage.

But luckily for SimCity none of this is a big issue, because even if you do a 1 to 1 texture for the entire 7x8 paver area, and you make it the highest resolution necessary to match the size it will be rendered at at zoom 5, the texture still won't be so huge that it bothers your scene. So for BATing making full resolution textures for large surface areas isn't much of a problem (although anyone out there having rendering problems, try replacing your textures with smaller resolution versions).

[darn42 1,268]

Thanks for the advice jason,

1 I have not done a preview render, but for the max preview of the texture when choosing the bitmap, it showed multicolored as well.

2 For the pavers, I am using a 1024x1024 bitmap of, I think, a 8x8 set of tiles. Which I decided was good enough to lower repetitiveness as well as keep the resolution up at perspective renders.

3 About the grunge thing. I think I'm going to experiment with procedural grunge if I can within max.

4 I'm still not very good at texturing though and all the little things that I can do with it. Is there some sort of tutorial you know of about the alpha mask controlling where to place the texture or something, or elaborate a bit more, I don't understand very well. What I think of when you say that is that I can have different alphas in different spots of the plaza and a tileable grunge texture over that, and depending where the alpha is, it shows through. Is that correct?

5 For procedural textures, (I'm not at my max computer so I can't experiment), would I figure out some sort of combination of noise and color correction and such that looks good?

[Jasoncw 11,840]

1. Yeah do a preview render and see how it looks. You should do lots of preview renders anyway.

4. So here you can see there are two layers and one of them is controlled by an alpha mask. Here I used dirt and grass textures. There are 3 UVW maps, a separate one for each of the textures (dirt, grass, mask). The mask is stretched across the entire plane, but the other two textures are tiled (all independently of one another). You can change the map channel on the uvw map modifier and in the bitmap, in the areas circled.

5. Yeah for procedural grunge you would just combine a few of the procedural maps. If you search google or the 3ds Max Help/Documentation you should be able to find a list of which maps are proceedural.

[darn42 1,268]

finally had a bit of time to work. I experimented a bit with procedural but ended up just using 2 bitmaps. You were right jason, it just was showing up in the viewport weird.

Anyways I've had school and 4 soccer/football games (for harishna) in as many days so I've only had the past little bit to work. Anyways, I will definitely use procedural stuff more. I'm glad I'm finally getting into the more advanced texturing stuff in 3ds max. Btw, I have just been using one uvw map and adjusting the tiling for the individual bitmaps. .25 for the tiles and .125 for the grunge. Is there any benefit to uvw mapping it when using tiling textures?

[darn42 1,268]

Here are two recent perspective renders.

[Sgt Pepper 864]

Absolutely beautiful.

I see you've taken to fancy the more simplistic international style with this one. I'm quite fond of it, just as much as I am fond of mostly all architecture.

I could never try modelling interiors for my buildings though. Perhaps on a smaller scale. I just don't have the skill or that dedication. But you clearly do and have pulled off the interior of the building well. I could go on and on about how astounding this simple(of course in appearance is simple but the hard work isn't so simple ) structure is.

Great work I can't wait to get my hands on it...um metaphorically speaking of course. Or err my eyes on it or...well just in my game.

  Edited August 31, 2012 by Sgt Pepper  

[Gn_leugim 853]

your hard drive on it? better, it on your hard drive XD

Awesome work it is

[QuadBaconatorWithHamAndEgg 31]

Wow! Simply amazing!

[Susaji 523]

Look Nice.

[darn42 1,268]

an update on the plaza.

What do you guys think of the flags? I had to use ffd and noise to model them rather than cloth cause cloth didn't want to work for me this time for some reason.

Is there any way to use photemetric lights with BAT4Max? I want to make this a bit more realistic by putting lights in the interior and lights in the underground parts that are visible.

  Edited September 1, 2012 by darn42  

[Cockatoo 2,256]

What do you guys think of the flags? I had to use ffd and noise to model them rather than cloth cause cloth didn't want to work for me this time for some reason.

Yeah, the cloth modifier is known to have issues when your units are in metric. A way to get around it (I've found) is to group your flag and pole, scale them up by 1000% or even 10000% (if your flags are very small), do your thing with cloth, regroup and then scale back down to 100. It's just a bug in Max, I don't know how to explain it further than that, but it seems to only effect objects below a certain size (in metric, that is.)

Is there any way to use photemetric lights with BAT4Max? I want to make this a bit more realistic by putting lights in the interior and lights in the underground parts that are visible.

Not in the daytime. Although at night, certainly. The lighting setup in BAT4Max (during the daytime) renders regular lights very difficult to work with. This usually isn't a problem; I don't think anyone's ever used them with a day scene before. From my understanding, the multiplier needs to be set to a ridiculous level before you'll even start to get a hint of any additional light, simply because of how powerful the sun is. But you can certainly give it a go.

All the props look good, although the base texture needs more work. The tiling is still very noticeable, and it looks too blurred to me.

[darn42 1,268]

about the lights, I'm not even sure that they are turned on during the daytime. The sun shouldn't affect how well lights work on places it doesn't reach. What I wanted to do was light up the base of the stairways that get dark. Also, for my perspective renders for my portfolio, I want to have lights on in the base and some of the offices for more realism since they are on during day time in real life. I'll experiments and see if it's just power though.

I will definitely do that the next time I use cloth modifier, though I'm not in metric atm. I find it easier to model things to real life scale when I'm using feet and inches. Thanks for the tip there.

I agree I need work on the base texture. I did just a little bit of work on it to make it slightly less noticeable when the vertical tiling begins because of that dark line. About the blurriness I'm not sure what to do about that. That was supposed to be the dirt marks that collect around the cracks in the tilings.

This is the texture I'm using atm.

Btw, I finally added bumps to the glass and I think it looks a bit better than it did.

[Sgt Pepper 864]

My hard drive loooongs for this.

[QuadBaconatorWithHamAndEgg 31]

Yes! Looking forward to this one, Darn.

[Toothless Stitch 2,901]

*bump*

Slow progress as I couldn't load Aaron's version. -.-

[darn42 1,268]

The window texture looks too noisy. Tone it down a bit/lower the bump amount. Otherwise it's lookin great

[gutterclub 2,729]

Set the noise to around size 8 and lower the bump..it looks like water roight now..you also want to try and make a few glass materials with slightly different noise settings and randomise them so that it doesn't flow from one pane to another. This has great potential

[Toothless Stitch 2,901]

I was experimenting with my glass materials and I ended up with this one which is, in my opinion, pretty nice.

[Ion_Cannon 677]

The glass on the base looks fine (apart from the vertical section), but the glass on the tower still has to much noise IMO.

[Ceafus 88 1,794]

I agree, The glass on bottom is great, now just replicate that with the glass on the tower, which has waaay to much noise, and looks like it wrinkled everywhere

[Susaji 523]

The glass in Very Nice!

[harishna 847]

I think you still need to play a bit more with the settings, not only the noise size but also the value for the bump.

[Toothless Stitch 2,901]

Less bump, brighter diffuse map, better ground plane.

[art128 4,618]

Looks really great man!

[darn42 1,268]

It really is starting to look good. I'm excited to see this thing when it's finished.

[harishna 847]

I think you are moving in the right direction.

[gutterclub 2,729]

Yep, definately a move in the right direction..looking forward to this and hope you finish it