Chicago BAT Project

[PBGV103 729]

The pool in the middle (I think it's a pool?) looks more like 60s/70s smoked glass and the bushes aren't working.  They remind me of gumby.  Also the roof top looks a little too clean, like it's been bleached.  I don't think it needs to look filthy by any means, but the concrete would have slight water stains.  As for the HVAC units, I see the rust/variation in the material, but to my eye it looks like they are made of paper instead of aluminum or steel.  If you're going for an anodized/painted look, you could make it seem like they are made of multiple panels with very slight color variations to decrease the uniformity, but right now something about it reminds me of the miniature buildings people make for model trains.  I think the glass is perfect, except I think the ground map material could be scaled up slightly.  The zebra-effect you're getting in the reflections is almost dizzying and it makes it seem as though the buildings that are being reflected are either 25% the normal floor height or very far away.

[T Wrecks 10,209]

In addition to what Paul just said, I think the shadows are still wrong/missing. Could there be some problem with your light rig?

[darn42 1,268]

Paul, thanks for that great critique. I'll get on all those points. I'm hoping you mean the darker green bushes and not the lighter green ones... The darker green ones would be much easier to change.

The roof, I mean I tried to recreate the roof as best as possible. I can do what I do with the ground tile most recently to add some more grime in between the tiles. actually when I look at the image you all see, the compression from imgur seems to have gotten rid of them... that probably adds some confusion. Regardless I will add some slight grunge and the grime between tiles to hopefully make it look a bit more realistic, but really there aren't many dark spots on this roof...

The pool I've seen before and it didn't seem right, so I didn't change it cause nobody said anything so I figured it was just me I'd like to add some fountain stuff to the pool, but I'm not quite sure how to do that convincingly. I've seen darknono do that in his BATs, I'll message him or see if he replies how he did that.

The glass I totally agree, I didn't like the zebra thing but I wasn't sure what caused it. I'll scale it up asap

 

 

Twrecks, I'm not sure where you see the weird shadows, they look normal to me.

 

 

And now... since I decided to do a night render last night, here it is

 

 

A lot of it's too brilliant and the plaza lights definitely need to be redone as well as turning off the plaza reflections (I'm not gonna turn samples high enough to make those work)

 

I used kellydales displacement method for this with omni lights rather than photometric to try and cut down on rendertime... I'll try some lower settings next time, lol.

 

Also...

[

 

...that happened... I'm going to be editing those lights to be much more efficient... lol

 

Anyways, tell me what you think of the night lights while I work on fixing the last of the day scene.

[scotty222 549]

Loving the nightlights so far

regarding the shadows if you look at the comparison images GC posted on the previous page you can see the shadows are being cast in different directions, you want them be be as they were in the older render or else your BAT is going to look really out of place in gane

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Yup, that's precisely what I meant - if shadows were normal, the right side wall would be in the dark, for example.

[Francis90b 748]

Speaking about 333 Wacker, i'm not a fan of the glass.
 

You might, as someone had noticed, have used one Manhattan pic as a source for reflections....but wheter you used Manhattan, Mars, or the Moon, that's quite a minor problem.

 

The problem i see is that the picture's angle is way off...i think you might know about "inception", you might have seen the movie, you might remember the movie's poster, that for everyone's reference i might post there:

 

 

You see, the guys in the foreground standing in the middle of a road, then the road going beyond and then sharply bending itself at what seem close to a 90 deg angle....that's something i notice in the pic you used as a source of reflection for 333 N wacker, that is, your BAT seem to stand in a plane, and the buildings you've used as a source of reference seem to stand at another one...pretty much "inception-like"

[darn42 1,268]

So I'm having a lot of trouble with the lights. No matter what I do, removing the xref, resetting lights, deleting lights, mirroring the lights, the lighting system is still messed up. I really need a fix with this, cause its really getting annoying.

[Francis90b 748]

So, i've decided for the sake of it to give a try at how glass would reflect other objects, were they not be part of an image applied to a ground plane but actually modelled.

 

This is the scene i've used:

 

 

I modelled one box, representing the glass building that was the subject - and i modified the ground plane, so that it could have different "building boxes" that were to offer the "modelled environment" the glass would have to reflect.

 

The said environment is not, as you can see, very realistic - it does not represent a "city", so to say, unless you consider it at a very basic level - however, buildings might be thought as more detailed kind of "boxes".

 

The glass building is itself a box, with one glass material (A&D thin glass) applied to it.I set transparency to 0, increased reflectivity to 2,2 to simulate an highly reflective glass (i red somewhere that glass IOR might vary from values lower than 1.4 to about 2.2 according to the type of glass) and rendered the result.I know this is an exxageration, meant to represent a mirror-like glass - there would be less, and far blurrier reflections on a decently-done glass.

 

So, i rendered the scene in two situations, first with one glass box:

 

 

Then with a 45 deg curve, similar to 333 N wacker:

 

 

Thoughts are welcome - suggestions about how to improve this simulation are welcome as well - interpretation is up to you.

[darn42 1,268]

Some updates, I think I fixed everything. The glass, I don't think, will ever be rid of the zebra stripes, so I'm just gonna leave it be.

The roof:

I just barely added burns to this, not much.

 

The plaza:

I redid the water at the base, I have what I want with that, I'll change it if it looks weird with the full building there. Also, I realized there were trees all along the edges of the plaza. Overall, I think the building is going to be... 8x7? I'm trying to do this by memory. It's either 8 or 9 x 7 though.

 

Also, the pink glow on the left side is one of my invisible boxes contributing to FG, I'll take care of that

 

And the shadows! I got them done, did you notice? did you see? did you see!?

 

They wouldn't reset correctly the normal way, so I ended up having to rotate the lighting handle to be correct before I reset...

just in case someone has this problem again.

 

Francis: the curved reflections aren't the problem, it's my ground plane is really bad though that is interesting. Thanks for doing that study. Light is just the coolest thing.

[Francis90b 748]

I never said the curved glass was the problem...i had another opinion about your ground plane, tho .

 

IIRC jasoncw did nightlights on the Inland steel building by rotating the image so that it could give the illusion of depht...perhaps you might consider doing it for your ground plane...

[darn42 1,268]

Ohh, that's an interesting thought. Maybe, so that I can get reflections all around (because of the angle) a cone shaped panorama below/around the BAT?

[Darknono35 3,137]

OH WOW Huge progress on the Chase . I love the nighlight and the plaza It's too beautiful !!!

Congratulation on this one

I want to see more and I'm waiting the upload day man !!

[Francis90b 748]

To be honest i never really faced this problem - nothing i did so far ever required much thought or care about reflections, so all i did was to slap into the ground plane a bitmap that wasn't even mine - I stole it from another person's BAT that i exported, lol.

 

This said, i'm afraid that much of the trouble comes from the angle where the roofs are...i'm afraid that most of the pics you might find wouldn't really do well in avoiding the "inception effect" - you would need a bitmap that both closely resembles SC4 perspective and that could work on a ground plane, and i'm afraid very few of them would really answer to both conditions.

 

On the other hand, my experiment leads me to think that perhaps you might actually model (not in detail, just the basic outline) some stuff, or even use a ground + displacement map (never tried this satisfactorily, though) - and then play with the blurryness of reflection to somehow lessen the "peculiarity" of what's reflected into the glass (and in any case, even IRL reflections would probably not be very sharp or clear in most cases...) so that the BAT doesn't seem to belong to a specific environment....

 

...which brings me to the point of environment - each building having a very reflective glass would reflect much of tne environment around it, and this is a problem as SC4 has NO environment - this means that one key feature of those buildings, and perhaps one that makes them so attractive to our eyes, is almost impossible to recreate....or it would be necessary for BATs to actually reflect what's around there, or perhaps having one BAT for each specific spot in each city of each secific player where it comes up .

 

Either way, i'd be interested to hear your take on this - the overall problem, i mean - i'm rather confident you would sooner or later come up with something, perhaps something that would dwarf anything that had been done or proposed so far .

[darn42 1,268]

Francis: Interesting... I'm going to put a lot more thought into that once I'm back on wacker...

 

So I have the last day preview of chase. I am satisfied with it, sans the artifacts in the pool, I'm going to fix those. Other than that I'm going to export day. Small problem, though: I can't seem to get the gmax BAT to export my LODs. Anyone have any ideas? I try to avoid gmax as much as possible so I really have no clue what's going on. It just kinda freezes whenever I do a preview or an export.

 

btw, there's the pic.

[Reddonquixote 4,338]

Small problem, though: I can't seem to get the gmax BAT to export my LODs. Anyone have any ideas? I try to avoid gmax as much as possible so I really have no clue what's going on. It just kinda freezes whenever I do a preview or an export.

Be careful that your mouse doesn't touch/ hover over the preview window while its exporting, otherwise it will freeze up. You kind of have to push the button, quickly let go and walk away... don't do ANYTHING else until its finished or it will stall... that's my experience anyway... hope that helps you?

[Reddonquixote 4,338]

Me again.. double post sorry.. just looking at your nightlights.. they look a bit incongruent? The top half of the building and the plaza have a lovely ethereal glow about them (I'd love to know how you did that btw) and the windows look super-crisp which also looks amazing.. but together, they look like they belong on different models... or is that just me?

 

Edit:- just by way of example, why does upper window emanate as hard light while the lower window emanates as diffuse light?

 

[darn42 1,268]

Red: Thanks a lot for the advice on exporting, that was really getting frustrating.

 

About the nightlites. For the windows I used omni lights to light the interior and because of that, they are much less accurate than the photometric lights I used to light the top and bottom, they also don't have area lights, or as accurate of falloff. I'm working on making the cast light softer though.

 

The ethereal glow is something I wasn't sure what caused, but I really liked it, until a bit ago. The method I'm using for adding dirt to my plaza and buildings is using invisible objects to cast ambient occlusion onto them:

 

You can see the objects spread throughout my plaza in the picture I took explaining how I reset my lights:

 

These objects weren't turned off to final gather (which would cause the ambient occlusion to not happen), but they were still casting their color onto the scene with the final gather, and so, whenever there's a pink object in darkness, it casts a pink glow around it to other objects, which I think works great as ambient light caused by a city.

 

Not so much during the day. Turning the final gather setting for those objects to "return black" will get rid of the glow if you don't want it.

 

I am probably going to do some more exploration into using invisible objects to make fun stuff happen in the scene because, from what I've seen, this just gets really clean, nice results, with very very little work involved. And you get to stay in max

[Toothless Stitch 2,901]

I don't konw what you guys think, but I would like to see how it looks form another point of view, 

 

Also, about the textures, take a look at this pic.

 

 

To me, the actual wall thexture looks a bit moregreyish than yours. I don't know if this is only because of the fact that the sun is shining right on the wall.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

I think you should remove the BATed ground and only have the sunken levels be BATed.  And especially since your pavers look similar to the Maxis pavers, there's not much reason to BAT the ground.

[PBGV103 729]

Why would you remove the ground? Simply because the 3ds max shadow crossing to the game-generated shadow would exemplify how horrible the game shadows are?  haha  Maybe it's just me but I'd rather see some good rather than nothing but bad.

[Francis90b 748]

I'd second Paul.

[libellibicus 396]

Thirded.

[Toothless Stitch 2,901]

A new secret fictional project 

 

 

 

 

[libellibicus 396]

Nice bench

[Toothless Stitch 2,901]

I just felt like sharing this with you!

 

[darn42 1,268]

Looks nice. I like the architecture so far. 

 

The only thing wrong so far is the base, mainly. Rethink the windows and the stairs look really stretched. Other than that, good work.

 

Also, if this is a fictional project, you should use a separate thread for it, since this is for Chicago stuff, after all.

[darn42 1,268]

 

The glare got reset when I reset the maxis night cause I was having more problems, but I'm going to add it back in. Also, something happened to change the magically glow at the bottom in other previews... Not sure what it was that changed it, but I'll try and figure it out. My theory is the fg bounces are 1 less than before

 

Other than that, I think I have the windows done, though. I've also reduced render time by 6 hours to only 3 Big improvement.

 

Thoughts?

[SimCoug 5,973]

Stunning!  

[weixc812 509]

The reduction of rendering time is the best news so far  

I think it's all ready (Please don't trust what a Non-BATer says )

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

Not just yet, I'm kinda worried about the plants in the day render, if the building looks 100% so should the trees, I think you can lighten the leaves on the trees and bushes a bit and may be try to scale the size of the a bit more not to much sense the trees are small, I think the bushes and the trees should be around the same color.