Reddonquixote's BAT thread

[ROFLyoshi 1,760]

My jaw is dropping like mad here. As a Melburnian I am loving these buildings, considering they show how beautiful my hometown is!

I cannot wait, and I only wish I could BAT like this.

PS: Can you mod transit networks? If you can, I'd love to see Flinders. St station transformed (if you're taking a request ahaha)

[Reddonquixote 4,338]

Thanks ROFLyoshi, glad you like my BATs, Flinders Street Station is definitely on my list of projects to do.

Here's my last update for tonight. These are getting pretty close now, hopefully finish off tomorrow then I can release finally! (If I can just get that glass looking better!!)

[Xander Dax 310]

WOW AMAZING your work never ceases to amaze (now if only Adelaide had great buildings like this) lol.

[darn42 1,268]

Yea, your normal glass is lookin funky. Did you copy the planes for night and forget to turn them off or something?

Also, the lights running up the building confuse me. I don't know where they are coming for or what their purpose is. You should model a light source from them, and in the photometric light section, under presets, drop down and choose one of the wallwash presets. This will change the photometric web (how the light distributes its light, the distance from the centerpoint is how much the light will go in the direction) and will create a more desirable wallwash effect. Similar thing on the roof. I like the purple lights, but they have no source I can see.

Your nightmaps are looking very repetitive. They look like very similar colors and very similar scenes inside.

Finally a small suggestion. I feel like volumetric lights would look really good coming out of the church and the other parts of the base facing the inside. I'm not sure if it would work within simcity, but if you limit the lights to the courtyard I think it wouldn't look out of place.

Here's a tutorial for it. http://www.cgrats.co...in-3ds-max.html

You really don't have to do the last thing I mentioned, just an idea.

Looks great already, good luck

[Reddonquixote 4,338]

Thanks Darn, very helpful as always. Couple of things...

Yea, your normal glass is lookin funky. Did you copy the planes for night and forget to turn them off or something?

- Am I supposed to turn something off?? Lol... I've never done that... I'll give it a go. I'll have another look at Jason's tutorial as well and see if i can work out what's going wrong. The glass has been most unsuccessful for this BAT and I don't really know why...

With with wallwash... Thanks for the suggestion! I tried a couple of different things and this was the best effect I could get, but to be honest I didn't try very hard, the model is too big and its getting very painful to work with. But I shouldn't let that be an excuse for sloppy work lol, I'll practice on a smaller model and replicate the effect once I get it working. (In terms of where they are coming from, there's little lamps sitting on each of the ledges shining up onto the facade)

I'm interested in your comments about the light sources though... I deliberately haven't modeled them yet because I thought I'd get the lights how I want them first then model some light sources afterwards, once I know where to put them.. but the way you've written it, it sounds as though they are important to the light effect itself? (Or am I mis-reading it?)

Finally, do you have any tips for getting the streak effect to work with the glare? Not sure they will work on this building, but I tried to make it work just to try it out and doesn't seem to streak for me, only glows... can't work out what I've done wrong (I've tried using a couple of different streak maps as well)

Thanks again!

WOW AMAZING your work never ceases to amaze (now if only Adelaide had great buildings like this) lol.

Thanks Xander... I was just in Adelaide over Christmas. Adelaide has a lot of beautiful historical buildings but not a lot in the way of skyscrapers lol. I always thought the festival theatre would be an interesting project though

[Jasoncw 11,840]

For the glass, try making the noise map bigger, and then also make the uvw map for the ground plane much bigger.

[darn42 1,268]

Including the light source will change the look drastically. It shouldn't really change how the light spills out except for where the light source is closed off (below it in the case of wallwashes), and how the light looks directly where it is--you won't see the big circle of light on the facade. That's the main reason to include them.

[patat 4]

Hi Reddonquixote really love your work! Could I make a request though? not of a building but if you could make your buildings just plop without the construction effect? I can't use the Eureka tower in my city as I like to do recreations and sometimes I have to play in pause. If your next couple could come without this feature that would be amazing. And if you know how I can turn off the construction effect that would be amazing aha.

[gutterclub 2,729]

Eh? Just wait till it's built then pause it?

[LoonyMan 239]

Wow, such lovely nightlights! The glass could be improved like others have said, but other than that it seems fine!

[ROFLyoshi 1,760]

I do like how you've toned down the facade and brick church. Fits in so well.

[patat 4]

Eh? Just wait till it's built then pause it?

After building an entire large tile and using buildings like porkissimo's W2W french building, plopping this down and waiting for it to build causes half the city I worked several days doing to dilapidate.

[Reddonquixote 4,338]

For the glass, try making the noise map bigger.

Thanks Jason, not sure I understand what you mean though... do you mean make the size of the bump maps bigger.. or increase the noise settings?... If the latter, per your tutorial I have one set at 8 and the other set at 10, do you mean increase the difference between those numbers eg. 6-12, or increase the numbers, eg. 12-16... I don't really understand what the settings do to be honest, sometimes I just fiddle with them but I don't always know what I've actually done!

[Reddonquixote 4,338]

Hi Patat, As you're the only person who has raised this, could I suggest first of all maybe try posting something in the Modding forum and see if you can switch it off, I suspect its a pretty easy thing to do - actually, let me have a quick play and if I can work it out I'll let you know.

[Reddonquixote 4,338]

ok... its seems pretty simple.

1. Download I-Live reader

2. Take a back-up of your dat file!

3. Open I-Live Reader and go File>Open and locate the Dat file and open it

4. Press fill the list

5. Scroll down the list until you find Exemplar File (there are 2, try one, if its not the right one try the other one). Click on it.

6. On the right hand pane scroll down to the bottom of the list and locate 'LotConfigPropertyDoConstruction', right click on it and press delete.

7. Press Save!

8. Replace it in your plugins folder and that should work..

Good luck!!

[Xander Dax 310]

Thanks Darn, very helpful as always. Couple of things...

Yea, your normal glass is lookin funky. Did you copy the planes for night and forget to turn them off or something?

- Am I supposed to turn something off?? Lol... I've never done that... I'll give it a go. I'll have another look at Jason's tutorial as well and see if i can work out what's going wrong. The glass has been most unsuccessful for this BAT and I don't really know why...

With with wallwash... Thanks for the suggestion! I tried a couple of different things and this was the best effect I could get, but to be honest I didn't try very hard, the model is too big and its getting very painful to work with. But I shouldn't let that be an excuse for sloppy work lol, I'll practice on a smaller model and replicate the effect once I get it working. (In terms of where they are coming from, there's little lamps sitting on each of the ledges shining up onto the facade)

I'm interested in your comments about the light sources though... I deliberately haven't modeled them yet because I thought I'd get the lights how I want them first then model some light sources afterwards, once I know where to put them.. but the way you've written it, it sounds as though they are important to the light effect itself? (Or am I mis-reading it?)

Finally, do you have any tips for getting the streak effect to work with the glare? Not sure they will work on this building, but I tried to make it work just to try it out and doesn't seem to streak for me, only glows... can't work out what I've done wrong (I've tried using a couple of different streak maps as well)

Thanks again!

WOW AMAZING your work never ceases to amaze (now if only Adelaide had great buildings like this) lol.

Thanks Xander... I was just in Adelaide over Christmas. Adelaide has a lot of beautiful historical buildings but not a lot in the way of skyscrapers lol. I always thought the festival theatre would be an interesting project though

Yea it is a bit of an Adelaide icon, but we also kind of have a love hate relationship with it to lol.

Would be interesting to see your take on it though.

[Reddonquixote 4,338]

So.. I spent most of tonight fiddling with the glass.. firstly I took an eyedropper to one of the glass sections and the settings were just.. wrong!.. Not sure how they got so mucked up... but also upon re-reading Jason's tutorial I had forgotten to randomise the material maps to the different panes of glass... ... Finally while I was in there I noticed the ground plane Jason used was quite different to what I had created trying to compensate for all the other shortcomings my texture was very dark and over-contrasted so I have gone for something lighter and much more colourful... I also played with transparency, noise map settings, bump maps and diffuse maps... pretty much everything!.. here's the result.. I'd say far from perfect but a million times better than it was... I'm thinking I need to find a ground texture with more light and dark areas (and darker overall) to create more variation in the glass and I'm not sure but I think the night maps are still showing so need to remember to turn them off, and I think I need new bump maps these ones are a bit skewey ... but I'm happy this is on its way now... . Thanks Jason for creating such brilliant tutorials for us to learn from

Unfortunately this is all I have time for tonight- render times are terrible.

[gutterclub 2,729]

Here's the one I use a lot of the time, I know Simfox used to also use this..it has a bit of everything..worth a shot if you don't already have it. Glass is WAY better

[libellibicus 396]

The glass is a helluva lot better now. Deffo getting there

[Jasoncw 11,840]

No problem!

The glass looks a lot better and you're right about what the next steps are for improving it.

The only thing is I wouldn't make the glass transparent unless you've modeled the interior floors.

For the walls I think they could be darker, less saturated, and the grungy part could be made more subtle.

For the metal columns (and anything else), it looks like you have a bump map. The way bump maps work is that the minimum size of a bump map's appearance in the render is one pixel, because all of the bump map "stuff" that's done happens at the render level. What I mean is that the bump effects are done on a per-pixel basis for the render itself. So it's almost as if you copied the render and applied a bevel & emboss style to something in photoshop, the minimum size of the effect is one pixel. So if you make a cube and give it a bump map that is white with just a thin black line going through it, and then render it at, say, zoom 5, it will make one pixel below the line brighter, and one pixel above the row darker, to simulate that there is a grove there. Then at zoom 4, it will also make one pixel below and above darker or brighter. And then at zoom 3 it will make one pixel above and below darker or brighter.

Here is an example. I modeled a box with a black grid as a bump map. I rendered it at zoom 4 and zoom 3. The image to the left is the zoom 4 render. The next image is the zoom 4 render with one of the grid intersections from the zoom 3 render put on top of the same spot. The original spot is circled in red in the first image. You can see that the lines are less dark and less bright, but if you look closely, they are still both the same size. In the third picture I increased the contrast of the zoom 3 portion to demonstrate that it's the same effect, with the same thickness, only lighter.

So basically SC4 is too low resolution for these kinds of details to be done using bump maps. If it's big enough that it could be done with a bump map then it's big enough that you should probably model it. For example, the grooves in the facade could have been done with a bump map but they were also easy enough to just model, and they look better. And they scale correctly. At zoom 4 they will be half as small as they were at zoom 5. Or if you want to add this kind of detail you can add it to the texture as just a black line, and here too, the texture exists in dimensioned space because of the UVW Map. For example if the texture is 100 pixels, and the uvw map is 100 meter, then a 1 pixel line would be 1m. It would render twice as big in zoom 5 as zoom 4.

The main use for bump maps for BATing is for glass, or other surfaces if you want to distort the surface for reflections. The features (the soft noise map) are big enough and smooth enough that there isn't an issue of scale from zoom to zoom. Off the top of my head that's the only thing that bump maps are good for for BATing. Also they can add a surprising amount of time to render times.

[Reddonquixote 4,338]

Gutterclub & Jason... Hugely helpful.. thankyou so much... Interesting points about bump maps.. I have them on almost everything.. bricks, stone, roofs, paving... eek no wonder so slow. I'll get back to work on it tonight

[Toothless Stitch 2,901]

The main use for bump maps for BATing is for glass, or other surfaces if you want to distort the surface for reflections.

I just wanna be sure that I got this point right. The only thing bump maps make sense is if the texture has something to do with reflections!? Because as far as I know you use them for other things, for example to randomize the surface colour of tiling textures. Or am I wrong ?

[gutterclub 2,729]

There is no need to use bump maps other than for glass or large surfaces (even with large surfaces its not needed)..they will not bring out small details better than modelling or a good texture would.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

I think maybe you're mixing up bump maps and noise maps.

Bump maps are specifically for adding surface detail, for example, taking a flat surface and giving it bumps (a "bump" map). You can make a Bitmap a bump map, or a Noise map as a bump map, or a Tiles map as a bump map, or many other kinds of maps. Basically for anything you use as a bump map, white is supposed to be "raised" and black is supposed to be "recessed".

A noise map is a specific kind of map. It just takes the two colors you choose and... makes a noisy pattern with them. You can use a noise map for however you'd like. I use it a lot instead of using flat colors to give just a little bit of variation. Sometimes when I make bricks I put the brick into a Composite map, and then add a layer with noise in it to add variation to it. And then you can make the noise map black and white and the noise big, and you can use it to make the surface of metal and glass not perfectly flat by using it as a bump map.

[Fargo 543]

Just an interesting picture, 120 Collins St. before the antenna was installed.

[Reddonquixote 4,338]

Lol.. that's so wrong! Thanks for sharing though

[Superted125 1]

Just wanted to say that I just found you Australian bats and I love them and can't wait for more. Thank you so much for all the hard work you have put into these! Well worth it. =)

[Charlie_Zane 963]

It looks so odd without the antenna! Looks way better with it! haha

[Toothless Stitch 2,901]

I think maybe you're mixing up bump maps and noise maps.

Bump maps are specifically for adding surface detail, for example, taking a flat surface and giving it bumps (a "bump" map). You can make a Bitmap a bump map, or a Noise map as a bump map, or a Tiles map as a bump map, or many other kinds of maps. Basically for anything you use as a bump map, white is supposed to be "raised" and black is supposed to be "recessed".

A noise map is a specific kind of map. It just takes the two colors you choose and... makes a noisy pattern with them. You can use a noise map for however you'd like. I use it a lot instead of using flat colors to give just a little bit of variation. Sometimes when I make bricks I put the brick into a Composite map, and then add a layer with noise in it to add variation to it. And then you can make the noise map black and white and the noise big, and you can use it to make the surface of metal and glass not perfectly flat by using it as a bump map.

Oh, sorry Jason, I got a bit confused. Of course you are right, I mean noise maps.

[Reddonquixote 4,338]

This has been the week of a thousand test renders... I think I'm happy with the day glass now, and the night windows as well, but still not happy with the wall wash lamps on the side of the building. They are really hard to get right. The hotspot where it first hits the building is way too bright, but this is as soft as I can seem to make it without the rest of the glow disappearing altogether. but when even a minimal glare effect is applied they look like miniature suns I also want the effect going more elongated up the side of the building but it just seems to spread in a sphere instead. I'm sure there are methods to make it do what I want I just don't know what they are I'll keep playing with it. I also want to find a way to make more of a halo effect around the antenna spire, doesn't really have a glow about it that I would like. But overall I think its getting pretty close now...