Chicago BAT Project

[Za 164]

 

Your patience with and effort on that scene are remarkable.

[kellydale2003 2,276]

 

LOVE IT!

[darn42 1,268]

So I was experimenting with lighting and various effects. Gonna start the texturing of roads and bridges and stuff of this block now.

 

 

Anyways, tell me what you think of the lighting rig and such.

 

Edit: And here's some texturing.

 

And what it looks like after a bit of post-production

 

[libellibicus 396]

The river texture is stupendous.

[Darknono35 3,137]

It's too real   

[Vlasky 1,803]

Mindblowing. Not for SC but for your prtfolio shots, add image of the across river buildings so that they reflect in all dat glass.  

[Za 164]

It's looking great as usual. Pretty much the only thing I can find is that the shadow on the left side (on the incomplete building) doesn't look quite right; perhaps it's a bit too diffuse. But I'm not really sure one can do about that.

[Toothless Stitch 2,901]

I'm glad to say that general modelling and texturing is done. Now it's you turn to give constructive feedback to make it look better (Constructive feedback would be very appreciated!)

 

[weixc812 509]

I'm glad to say that general modelling and texturing is done. Now it's you turn to give constructive feedback to make it look better (Constructive feedback would be very appreciated!)

Maybe it's too clean on the roof of the lower part? A few stuffs can be added to it in my opinion

[libellibicus 396]

I agree about the roof being too clean. Maybe some grime and weathering could be added. The modelling looks spot on to me.

[darn42 1,268]

So I've gotten far enough in the chicago scene that I need to start finishing up buildings. I decided to go for chase tower because it's long overdue.

 

 

So there's that. I decided to get rid of textures until all of them are done, so I'll do that eventually. Until then...

 

 

...more problems with chase

 

So I got the scene so it doesn't use 8 gigs of ram anymore... It was some problem with the itoo forestpack thing. Here's the plaza. Just a little bit more this and I can nightlite (just the smaller building on the bottom left)

 

Anyways, does anyone know how to fix the shadows on chase? I tried resetting the lights. I tried deleting the lights and then redoing it. But I haven't gotten any different results. I feel like I saw simfox posting on a problem like this a long time ago. I cancelled the render when I noticed this.

 

edit: fixed it. There was an xref of the lights and it was making my lights backwards. New render incoming

 

Chase tower should be done very soon and I'm gonna try out the new nightlights with displacement in a bit.

 

Here's the render

 

[libellibicus 396]

The plaza modelling is absolutely fantastic. I can't wait to see the textures applied. I haven't got a clue about the shadows, best to probably PM jasoncw, as he is the font of all knowledge on all things BAT/MAX/modelling/lighting/etc.

[Darknono35 3,137]

Your work on the wacker drive and the Chase is awesome and gorgeous. Your plaza is so beautiful and very detailed. Congratulation for your work Darn

[RepublicMaster 428]

Wow, that BAT is amazing! Keep up the great work! I especially like the plaza.

[gutterclub 2,729]

It's a superb BAT as we already know..not sure why you changed the glass from this

 

 

to this

 

 

i thought the original glass received a lot of praise with people like Cockatoo even comparing it to Simfoxes work..personaly i prefered the original..maybe it's just personal preference? Either way, looking forward to this a lot

[Francis90b 748]

..not sure why you changed the glass

 

 

i thought the original glass received a lot of praise with people like Cockatoo even comparing it to Simfoxes work..personaly i prefered the original..maybe it's just personal preference? Either way, looking forward to this a lot

 

I'd be curious to hear from Darn42 about the changes he has introduced, how, why, and especially what the real situation is.

 

I took a look at what Bing and Google show in their aerial views - those might not exactly reflect what might happen if someone looks at the Chase from SC4 viewing angle, yet they are somewhat similar.

 

Looking at Bing, i can see reflections going on on the building's glass, especially at the top - curtains sometimes interfere with them, but rarely happens.Those reflections seem quite sharp, but not as much as those portrayed in Darn's most recent version.

 

Looking at google, i can see very weak reflections, and very noticeable curtains.

[Toothless Stitch 2,901]

Well, it's just fabulous what you're doing. Some things:

 

1: Glass looks to strong I think, my personal opinion. 

 

2: The grime on the left small building looks to visible, or it is too obvious what has been made. I hope you know what I mean

 

3: The plaza textures doesn't really fit to the very detailed textures of Chase Tower. If you compare the plaza with the building the building looks kinda unreal.

 

I know that I'm not the best batter and I would be happy to have the result you have, but this shouldn't be too hard for you

 

The good thing about darn is that you just need to tell him what to change, but not how. He's good enough to know how to do things, and if not he will find out

 

EDIT: If you guys have the same problem with the shadows, you should try to put you modell into a new scene. Click to Import and then to past. The chase everything building realted except for the lights and the cameras and then to OK. This should solve your problems

[B.C builder 291]

I love it ! Especially the glass textures. The plaza is perfect =)

[darn42 1,268]

Gutterclub:

So I was experimenting with glass, namely trying to get photorealistic glass, and one of the things I realized was the ground planes don't take into account the vast amount of light that is brighter than white in real life due to the sun, so I tried a new ground plane with the output value raised to 1.4. (note: in recovering chase to be useable again, some objects were lost, on of them was ground planes so I had to do something anyways, why not try something new). Unfortunately, something I just realized, is that I kept my reflection curve at what it was instead of changing to the physically accurate fresnal to account for the increased intensity of the ground plane. I'll also reduce the output a bit.

I'll try doing that, if it doesn't work, I'll try to recreate the past as best I can if it's what everybody likes

 

Francis:

I've done a few changes:

      -Added the ambient occlusion dirt to plaza and roof (I'm going to add a noise alpha to that, I don't like how defined it is)

      -Changed the sampling algorithm to mitchell because I've learned to hate lanczos

      -Redid all the foliage in the plaza of course

      -Changed the glass on the overhang to be more realistic

      -Got rid of the photometric lights at the base, they were adding unnecessary render time. I'm going to experiment with omni lights and getting good results with them.

 

Sky:

1) I agree

2) I agree That was actually my first experiment in making procedural roofs, chase tower's is my 2nd

3) I agree :Px2 I'll get on that

 

I hope this post clarifies some stuff. I am definitely going to use the output map thing to increase the strength of reflections on other buildings with more mirrored glass. It ends up being a great way to keep the transparency realistic under dark reflections and very strong under white reflections.

 

Here's an example.

This was supposed to be a semi-mirrored red glass, so it would still have transparency. Ignore the ridiculous reflections and just notice the strength of them vs. the transparency in certain places. It maintains the look that real life mirrored buildings often have (I think). This is on the extreme side of the output, though, at a value of 2.5. That means the whites are 2.5 times brighter than normal and the blacks stay the same.

for a comparison of a default output vs. an output of 5....

 

 

Also, I'd like to point out that this recovery was very painful for me. To get to the point just before I added foliage required 3 computer crashes and and about 30 minutes total of loading lol.

 

Editx2: just did a quick change how I described to my window material and I think that made it look very nice. output of 1.2 and fresnal reflections

 

 

editx3 XD: I got excited by this and couldn't help but show this. I figure out a new procedural texturing method!!!  

 

Using the ambient occlusion method as a base for this, it requires no extra texturing work beyond that. The tutorial for that is

 

Anyways, I just had this idea, and I had to try it out and it works beautifully. If you turn off all the visibility for geometry and put it over an object with that on it, it puts dirt on the object without any fuss. You can get a ton of control over how the dirt looks as well.

 

 

Chamfer the edges, raise or lower the object, make it angled, whatever. It changes the kind of dirt that is applied. The only limitation is that it doesn't have any possibility of changing the color, but still. I think this is epic efficiency.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

I think it makes sense to think about how bright the ground is, but the reason why some things are very bright isn't because the objects (the roofs, whatever) are brighter than white, it's because the sun is shining on them.  The effect that you're expecting to happen is already happening in max from the sun hitting the white spots.  Increasing the output or making it self illuminated is doubling it.

 

At the same time BATing is not realistic, so if you have a well thought out idea of how something should look, and you have a way of getting it to look like that, then you can do it. 

[darn42 1,268]

I'm trying to think through this and I'm interested. So physically, color is just the frequency of reflected light and it changes based on how much light an object absorbs. 

 

In 3ds max I'm not sure if it would act how you described, or if the color is just a buffer on how bright it can get based on the lighting.

 

So if white has a value of 1 and black 0, a ray of illumination hits it with a value of 5, does that ray come back to the camera with a value of 1 or does it come back to the camera with a value of 5. From what I've seen, it seems like somewhat white materials end up with less than 1 values when under simulated sunlight. Is image value a cap or a starting point? If the former is true, then output would raise the cap. If the latter is true then it would be a multiplier. 

 

I totally agree with your second paragraph, I'm just really curious now. 

[Ceafus 88 1,794]

It's a superb BAT as we already know..not sure why you changed the glass from this

 

 

to this

 

 

i thought the original glass received a lot of praise with people like Cockatoo even comparing it to Simfoxes work..personaly i prefered the original..maybe it's just personal preference? Either way, looking forward to this a lot

 

 

100% Agree, other than that, great work!

[darn42 1,268]

 

plaza is done. Added some subtle grunge and faked the mural. 

 

gonna do a test render when I have an hour of something else to do, then I'm exporting day tonight. The night lights are not going to be the kind I was experimenting with earlier. They are way too much effort and they end up not looking right at some angles.

[Toothless Stitch 2,901]

I think the plaza tiles could do with a bit darker joints. Because as it looks now, it still looks too blurry in my opinion. 

[darn42 1,268]

So I have redone the glass material for 333 wacker.

 

 

opinions? I will probably end up changing the ground plane... but I think the material looks good.

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

Glass looks good to me.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

It would come back as 5.

 

But how bright everything appears in the render is subjective because of the exposure settings.  You can go to renderer>environment and change the exposure settings and you can make your entire render either completely black or completely white depending on how high or low you set it.

 

And max can also work with floating point images, like hrd or exr images, where a brightness and darkness can exist beyond the 0-255 range.  Then you can open those images and photoshop and you have a lot more control over adjusting things.

 

But anyway it would come back as 5 and then "5" would be mapped to some rgb value between 0-255.  Very bright things are compressed into the high ranges so that there is still some detail instead of everything being totally blown out.

[libellibicus 396]

The glass on 333 Whacker St is spot on. The plaza is starting to come along very nicely now.

[Darknono35 3,137]

Very good reflectives effect, but I'm agree with you to change the ground map, because it's NY Downtown here . I think you should trying with the reflection with the chicago river. It's maybe an funny touch
 

[darn42 1,268]

So chase rendered out and I'm done with it unless anyone has any ideas. I'm gonna start night lights now.

 

 

Funny thing, I made a procedural texture that almost perfectly recreates the maxis pavers XD Xylo pointed that out to me and I almost couldn't stop laughing.