Reddonquixote's Q1 Project

[SilverCyric 130]

Nice!! You do amazing work my friend!

[dubaidude303 1,119]

Oh my word!!! It is so wonderful!!  This might be one of the best BATs of the year! 

[Reddonquixote 4,338]

Transparent Shop Windows

 

Now, the shops around the Q1 base are quite transparent... tricky! We can make transparent glass, but then we need to model everything inside the shop so it doesn't look empty. Or... we can fudge it

 

So what do we need to fudge it?

 

Ingredients:

1. A shop model, with big glass windows. I don't think this is the right glass for small windows. This is for those big glass fronted shop windows that let in lots of light.
2. A ground plane, with ground map

 

Hmmm.... that's not a big list. I think that's all we need :kitty:

 

Method:

• Lets start by selecting our glass window object, and apply a UVW Map, set to Face
• In the material editor, create an Arch & Design material in one of the empty slots, and select a Glass thin geometry template
• In the Diffuse Colour slot, we want a dark green colour. This will give our glass a greenish tinge to start with.

 

Lets leave the reflectivity settings, and move down to the IOR. The IOR setting for water is 1.33, so lets lower it to that. (Why water?.. dunno, maybe because I just finished making water... anyway, 1.33 works!) Remember, the higher the IOR setting, the more blingy it is. We want glass we can see through, not glass that reflects back brightly at us.

 

Now lets skip down to the Advanced Rendering Options>Refraction. Here we want to utilise the Max Distance features again. Remember from my previous post, Max Distance allows us to see behind glass up to a specified depth. If we get this right, we can create the illusion of depth, we'll start feeling like we can see inside the shop, but not enough to make anything out. For our shop windows, I've set the Max depth to 6m, and for the Color at Max Distance, I've used a dark green again.

 

 

That's actually it for the material. The last thing we need to do is use a ground map that helps complete the illusion.

 

To make a Ground Plane, we create a plane, at Z-0 height. As we need two ground planes for this model, one for the shops, and one for the tower, we place a small-ish ground plane just around the shops.

 

 

With this ground plane selected, right click and select Object Properties. Under the General tab, I usually deselect Visible to Camera, and anything to do with shadows. In the Mental Ray tab, we select Pass through (invisible to FG). This ensures the ground plane doesn't show up when we render our BAT.

 

 

Now we just need an image, I'm thinking its something that mimics looking inside a busy glass and steel structure. I can't remember what I typed into google (Probably "Glassy reflections")... but I somehow came across this image:

 

 

We need to apply a UVW map to our ground plane, and apply the busy glass texture to it, relatively small, mine is set to 16mx16m.

 

Now, lets do a test render. In Bat4Max, under Let there be Light, we make a Sky, and set the rig for Day. For this purpose, lets just select Automatic LODs, and under Preview, select a Rotation and Zoom. Press the 'Preview' button...

 

 

hmmm.. deja-vu... I think I've posted how to preview renders before... .. oh well, here it is again

 

and check out the result... Transparent Shop Windows

 

 

If you wanted to you could fit these out with some basic geometry applied with a silvery-grey colour just to give it a bit more life (I'll cover this when we get to the tower windows)

[dubaidude303 1,119]

That looks awesome!!!! Looking amazing! 

[RepublicMaster 428]

Awesome work! I've been to that Ice cream shop.

[Charlie_Zane 963]

That glass looks amazing! And I've been there too!

[Huston 5,798]

Wow, just love how there are darker shades on the glass, does indeed give it more life and realism

[KonstantinII 1,106]

Your tutorials are useful

[Reddonquixote 4,338]

Residential Tower Windows

 

This update isn't so much about the glass material used, I'll come back to that, this is about the window dressings used to make the building look more inhabited.

 

The thing about residential tower windows, as distinct from office windows, they are generally more transparent (that of course is a generalisation)... in any case, windows that are tinted are more reflective and you can't really see inside, you mostly just see the outside reflected back in the glass. When the glass is untinted, its obviously a lot more transparent. This is harder to do because you can't disguise the emptiness of the building with reflections, you need to create the illusion that the building is inhabited. There are probably 4 tricks I can think of:

1. Window blinds
2. Max Distance
3. Furniture
4. Fake-interior floor textures

We're only going to use the first three.

 

Blinds

Well, not sure there's much point describing how to do this.. maybe just some of the high level stuff. Firstly, you need to download a blind script. There are probably a few around, I use this one - http://www.cgtechniques.com/goodies/blinds/

The general instructions for its use are provided, I won't rehash it here.

 

The script above has settings for 'Type' of blind, mostly geared around the openess/closedness of the blinds, I've used Random-Open, and the other main setting is Up-Down %, this is used to further adjust the amount of blinds that are Up vs. Down. I've set it to 60%. The key is to achieve good variation of heights in blinds that are mostly open. Make sure you use different seeds for each set of blinds you create, the seeds will further randomise which blinds are up and down.

 

 

One other key point is we have a curved facade on Q1, and the blind script makes straight-line blinds. This is pretty easy to fix, we simply add a Bend modifier. The Bend modifier needs to have direction set to 90.0 and Bend Axis set to X. The bend Angle, we need to adjust according to the curvature of the section of glass we're attaching the blinds to. We do this in the top view, and if the bend goes in the wrong direction, we apply a negative Bend angle instead to make it go back the other way.

 

 

For the blinds material, I've just applied a neutral coloured canvas texture, set to a transparency of 0.5. Generally for anything inside the glass we want to keep fairly neutral sorts of colours with low contrast to give the impression of partial obscurity. The UVW map is just set to face.

 

 

That's it for blinds.

 

Max distance

 

I won't cover this again, but if you recall the feedback I recieved was the glass needed to be more turquoise? Well, the Colour at Max distance is how this was changed. I'll cover the full range of Glass settings later, but the Max Distance settings are:

 

 

Furniture

Now, with furniture, we really just want stuff that makes the floor look populated. I've used real-world furniture shapes, but for all you can tell from the final image we could just as easily have used basic geometric shapes. Well, realisitically, thats what these are, they are just composited together in a way that resembles furniture

 

The important thing to note here is that due to the angle of the building, we don't want to recreate perfectly arranged bedroom and living room furniture, if you do that, a) mostly you won't see it and its just consuming resources; and b) you won't see it anyway. You need to ram the furniture up as close to the glass as possible without it poking through, obviously. I've failed miserably in places, I need to go back and tuck them back in as I spot them.

 

We start by making furniture shapes. Might sound silly, but type 'furniture' into Google images, and a broad range of furniture types come up. Now we don't need to think too hard about it, we just assemble rescaled/resized blocks until the furniture pieces are completed, and move onto the next one. Just to provide a bit of extra variation, once we've made a full set, we apply a flat creamy-white colour, make a duplicate set, and apply a dark colour. Then we can mix and match. This furniture set took not more than 20 minutes, if that.

 

My little purple dude makes a reappearance to help with the scale.

 

 

There are three different floor footprints as we go up the tower, we take a copy of each and place them next to eachother at Z-0 axis. We can make some internal walls and pillars, one set can basically extend up the full length of the building.

 

 

Now we can just grab and copy pieces of the furniture and arrange them around the glass, but not in the middle, we won't see them. Drag these across to one of the floors in the building, and repeat for each next floor. Each time, grab different pieces, different colours, placed in different rooms.

 

Even these aren't close enough to the edge, we will need to ram these right up against the glass in order to be seen.

 

 

Do this for as many floors as you can be bothered with, but enough that we don't see obvious repetition as we scroll up the side of the building. From memory, I made about 12 floors.

Once we've completed our 12 floors, we simply select all the furniture pieces at once, press Shift+mouse up and make duplicates on subsequent floors. To save resources, we use 'Instances', otherwise we'll end up grinding our model to a halt.

 

 

When I got the feedback about making the glass more turquoise, I also applied a turquoise flat colour to the dark set of furniture pieces. The building starts to give off glints of turquoise, adding to the overall turquoiseness

 

Lets do a test render and see what we ended up with:

 

 

[Toothless Stitch 2,901]

Totally awesome and probably one of the most important entries in this project!

[art128 4,618]

Looks great!

[Reddonquixote 4,338]

Tower Glass

 

I'm just going to add this one in for completeness, but not going to say much about the glass material. Everything that needs to be said has been covered in Jason's glass tutorial already, I'm really just going to post a couple of images showing the exact settings I used, which are really only going to be useful if you want to recreate exactly what I've done for some reason. The bulk of this update will be how I apply the materials to the tower. I have no idea if this is the right way, or if any of these steps are necessary, its just how I've always done it.

 

Image 1 - Here's the settings I've used for the glass on the Q1 tower.

 

Heres the Diffuse colour settings, and reflection colour settings, respectively:

 

 

 

You will know from Jason's tutorial, we use 4 bump maps. These are the ones I use:

 

 

 

 

 

You will note I have 4 slots with glass materials, that's because of the 4 bump maps. I have no idea whether this is a necessary thing to do, but is the way I've always done it and seems to work ok. (Maybe Jason can jump in if I'm way off track here)...

 

After creating the first glass material, in each of the 4 bump map slots I change the Map Channel to a different consecutive number 1,2,3,4

 

 

Now copy the glass material named Tower_Glass_01 into the next slot, and rename it Tower_Glass_02, and two more times, renumbering each time. ( _03 & _04)

 

We start by selecting all of the glass objects on the tower, and if not already one object, attach them all together, and name them Tower_Glass_01. Under the tools menu, we select Graphite Modeling Tools.

1. With Tower_Glass_01 selected and the Polygon sub-object selected under that, select all of the polygons that make up Tower_Glass_01.

2. In that selector tool I've highlighted in red, we can tell it to select a % of the selected glass polygons. We ultimately want to divide into 4 separate glass objects, so enter 25% in the % field, and hit the Arrow button. We can see only 25% of all the glass polygons are now selected. Press Detach to detach these from the main object, and call it Tower_Glass_02

3. Now reselect all the remaining polygons again, noting this time we have 3/4 of our glass polygons left, and we want to detach 1/3 as a separate glass object. So this time we enter 33% and detach these, name them Tower_Glass_03

4. Now we have 1/2 our glass polygons left. This time we enter 50% and detach as Tower_Glass_04

 

 

Now we just need to add UVW Maps to each of our glass objects, set to Face. The key difference here is that for each of the Tower_Glass Objects, we need to apply the corresponding Tower_Glass Material

e.g. the Tower_Glass_01 material is applied to Tower_Glass_01 object. (2 to 2, 3 to 3, and 4 to 4.)

Now, in each UVW Map rollout, we need to assign a corresponding Map Channel. (1 to 1, 2 to 2, 3 to 3 and 4 to 4). This assigns each of the 4 numbered bump maps to each of the 4 sets of randomised glass materials.

 

The last thing we need to do is create a ground plane. Due to the viewing angle of SC4, glass reflects the ground, and not the sky. This can be a difficult concept to get our heads around because our everyday experience when we look at buildings is usually from the ground, and from that angle, the building reflects the sky. Hence most glass buildings look blue. Our first inclination when we make glass is to make it blue. We need to try and find aerial images of our building to see how it reflects the ground. Bing maps is great for this.

 

Bat4Max has an automated ground plane tool under the LODs rollout. Realistically it might be easier just to create a large plane around our building, but if you use the Bat4Max tool, there's a couple of things we need to remember.

1. First, create the building LODs before making the ground plane (Unless you're making customised LODs). The Automatic LODs will include the ground plane within its boundary, and we don't want 1000mx1000m LODs!
2. The automatic ground plane will be frozen when its created. Bit annoying, but rightclick and select the Unfreeze option
3. Now we can apply a UVW Map to the ground plane. The size of the map is going to depend on the ground plane image you choose.

Side note - I decided after about my 6 BAT that some things need to be kept consistent, you can't keep changing some stuff everytime you make a new BAT. When they are put together they don't look good together. Nightlights is one, the Ground Map is the other. So this is the ground map I always use. (This is my personal preference, others will have a different view )

 

The ground map image I use is a chopped-up SC4 in-game image. Some people use aerial views from Google Earth, or probably any other number of sources. I like the effect of the in-game ground-map

 

On a 1000mx1000m ground plane, I set the UVW Map to 256x256.

 

 

That's it for the Tower Glass. I won't show another render, its just what's already been posted previously

[Darknono35 3,137]

Great work

[dubaidude303 1,119]

Awesome! Can't wait for everything to start coming together!

[Finnbhennach 161]

Damn, Red, so much has happened here while I was gone working at my new job for the past two-three weeks. I'm looking through your past posts and just love how improvements are being made here and there for this project--open/closed blinds, pool water, lounge chairs, umbrellas, just overall vivacity of the tower's surroundings, realistic façade/glass work, fantastic texturing, etc. Absolutely stunning!  And, I'm learning a lot from your tutorials, thanks for that. Keep up the good work and I might as well just say this now but just hold me once you start working on your night renders--I'm most likely going to faint just for the sheer awesomeness when the nightlighting is complete.  Haha, have a good one as always, Red.

[Huston 5,798]

That is some impeccable progress, and yet I'm not surprised

[Reddonquixote 4,338]

Thanks everyone, sorry I'm not stopping to acknowledge all your comments individually, just really keen to pump these how-to's out so I can get on with the nighlights ... I'm really grateful for your continued support for this project

 

Next update:

 

Foliage

 

The trick to making a leafy, brightly coloured, tropical garden in your BAT scene is to give the illusion of variety when there really isn't. Unless you're hooked into a Movie studio render farm you will most likely kill your model if you try to create a new plant for each piece of greenery in the scene - there are 244 individual plants in this scene, but there are only 4 unique plant models.

 

I further break these down into two categories - Hard leaf variety, and bushy leaf variety. Lets start with the hard leaf variety, they are the easiest.

 

This is another example of something that's way harder to explain than it is to make.

 

Hard-Leaf Plants

Hard leaf foliage I categorise as plants where the individual leaves are modeled, so we don't need alpha cutout maps for the leaves. If you remember from the tennis net, alpha cutouts are where there is a 'positive' image and a 'negative' image. The negative image creates transparencies in the positive image so we don't need to model small details, like small plant leaves, individually.

 

Because hard leaf foliage is modeled, we can just apply a normal material to the model. Examples of hard leaf foliage would be grasses and palm fronds. In our tropical setting, palm fronds are a perfect addition. In our Q1 complex, we have two types being represented:

 

Small Palm Trees

 

Large Palm Trees

 

Disclaimer - I'm just going to refer to these spiky shaped plants as 'palm trees'... botanists and horticulturists around the world, please forgive my ignorance

 

Both models are created the same way. In the Create>Geometry rollout, select AEC Extended from the dropdown list. Under Object Type, there is an option called Foliage. In the library of plants, there are two we are interested in, Generic Palm, and Yucca.

 

 

Simply select the one you want, and click anywhere in the orthographic viewport to create it.

 

• The first thing we note is, that's huge! Its like 300m tall or something. In the parameters rollout, change the height to the correct scale for our BAT.
• If you select away from the plant, you will see this weird 'canopy' forms over it. Not exactly sure what it's for, maybe helps free computer resources when not in use... not sure, but it does my head in. Luckily we can turn this off by switching 'Viewport Canopy Mode' to "never'.
• I usually go for 'High' level of detail, I don't know what the other options look like, but 'Low' level of detail doesn't sound appealing to me so I will probably never find out.
• Leave Density to 1.0 and pruning to 0.

 

Now we want to texture our tree, I haven't worked out a good way to do this so that the trunk and leaves have different textures. I do have a convoluted way though, and here it is

 

With the palm tree selected, go to Edit>Clone. This will create a duplicate palm tree in the same location as our existing tree. Over in the parameters rollout, deselect Leaves, and just have Trunk and Branches selected. Now select the duplicate palm tree, and do the opposite (select Leaves, deselect Trunk and Branches). Now we effectively have two separate objects, one is just the palm fronds, and one is just the palm trunk.

 

For the palm leaves we just create a good game-friendly green texture. Use the default Arch & Design material, but lower reflectivity right down to 0.1 and apply it to the palm leaves object. To finish off the palm leaves object, we need to rightclick and select Object Properties. Under the Mental Ray tab select 'Return Black'. I'm not exactly sure what this does, but plant guru's like Girafe insist this is how you make trees, who am I to argue with the experts

 

 

Create another material for the tree bark, and apply to the Trees & Branches object.

 

Let's Group these together and call them something like Large_Palm_Tree_01 and Small_Palm_Tree_01. Now I don't recall the exact number, but lets say there are about 12 Large Palm trees in our scene. Let's select our Palm tree model and Shift+mouse to make a duplicate, but select instance instead of copy. An instance will still allow us to scale and rotate the tree without affecting the original, but is less consumption of computer resources.

 

See, scaled and rotated, it looks like two different tree models!

 

Bushy-Leaf Plants

Green version:

 

Red version:

 

Bushy leaf foliage are plants with lots of small leaves attached in clusters to twigs and branches (e.g. Trees, shrubs, ground cover etc). To model each individual leaf would just kill the model again (provided we didn't kill ourselves first), so we normally apply the leaves as alpha-cutouts to mini-square planes attached to modeled branches. We could just apply a flat green like our palm trees to the mini planes, but that just looks cheap n' nasty.

 

Unfortunately, the bushy-leaf trees that come with 3ds Max (Oak & Elm) are pretty hideous as well, so instead I use a free program called Tree[d]. I won't go through how to use/import, that's all on their website, but while the trees that are produced out of Tree[d] look great, the colours aren't suitable for SC4, they are pale, sickly, even luminescent looking.

 

To fix, we locate the .png we used on the tree in the Tree[d] program directory, and make a copy of it somewhere in our own location. I wouldn't recommend changing the original image, we're better off leaving these in their orignal form, and only change the ones we need to, as we need them.

 

Open our own copy in photoshop, select the transparent background, invert the selection, then just fill the selection with an Sc4 compatible green. I didn't see any need to change the green I already had for the palm trees, so I just used that again.

 

In the material editor, you will see the import created a multi-material in the material editor (3-4 slots). We need to change the leaf texture(s) to the one we just edited in photoshop, and because of the way the transparent background in the .png file works, we need to apply it to both the diffuse slot and the alpha slot. If you like, you can change the wood texture as well.

 

One of the reasons why this is so much better imported out of Tree[d] than made in 3DS Max, other than the limitless varieties of trees we can make, it also does all the material mapping perfectly, which is really hard to make it look any good in 3DS Max.

 

The last thing we need to do is group all the objects, for some reason it imports as lots of small objects. We can then right click and select object properties> return to black again.

 

Again, we make duplicates as instances, and rescale and rotate where required. We can also flatten it right down using the scale tool and use as ground cover.

 

The only limitation, and something we need to be very wary of, we can't have any part of the bushy-leaf plants rendering against a ground map. The ground map shows through the alpha and gives the shapes an ugly looking halo. We can either try making holes in the ground plane behind where the trees render (I haven't tried this, no idea if it works), or we can just be very prudent about how and where we place these plants. Luckily we don't have this issue with the hard-leaf plants.

 

Oh, for the bright red plants we just go back into photoshop and edit the .png and make it a nice bright magenta colour, and apply to a copy (not an instance) of our imported Tree[d] shrub. Once we have an original, we can make more instances. We tuck these in under our green shrubs to look like flowers, or poking out a bit more, like a bright tropical plant.

 

Now all we need to do is be a bit creative and arrange instances of our 4 plant models to make nice looking gardens

 

Hope you found this useful, I think the next one will be the cars, and that's the last one before night lights

[dubaidude303 1,119]

That is awesome! That last pic has so much detail! Looks great man!

[blunder 1,079]

Thanks so much for the foliage tutorial!!!  

 

I can't wait to give this a shot.  I had completely given up on modifying the 3ds foliage library deciduous trees    so this should be great.

 

[Finnbhennach 161]

Red, I can almost picture how it would feel to run my hands through those bushes and "palm trees" while I get the occasional aromatic hint of flowers, grass, dirt, and leaves there--they are just so lively and realistic! Excellent work on the garden!  I get a little lost when it comes to the specifics of what certain vegetation and those small palm trees are supposed to be called, so no worries there, haha. Nonetheless, it could be that I don't see the garden along with the rest of your other amazing work so far for context, but the curb around the garden seems a bit "cold". Adding some warmth and light sprinkles of dirt and cut grass to it should help with the overall vivacity of the garden and balance things to perfection. Now, being a perfectionist myself, I just had to point it out, hope you don't mind.  (uh-oh, please don't bite me) Haha, but yeah I'm loving the garden and thanks again for your awesome tutorial on making realistic bushes and trees! You're awesome as always.

[Reddonquixote 4,338]

Thanks for your comments Finn. Although I agree with what you're saying, I didn't mention this last pic was rendered in HD so that we could see the result a bit better. Not sure if what you're describing would show up in a SD render? You might be right though, the ground-level concrete could do with a little more.. something... I'll work on it

 

Last update before nightlights...

 

Sports Car

 

Even though there is a gazillion car tutorials out there already, I just thought I would add this is for completeness. I had to make it anyway so may as well show it's making here

 

I decided I wanted to make a sports car, and I know like.. nothing... about cars, and like the plants, the thing I ended up with may not resemble any known car to man, however I believe its satisfactory for my BAT. The sports car I made is based on a Corvette.

 

We start by locating a Corvette blue-print online. Make sure it has all the sides and the top in the image. I used this one, there are a plethora of them.

 

 

Lets start with the top. Like the tower model, we only make half of the model to start with and add a mirror copy to it later. Its a bit tricky to see the outline, I'll try mixing up the colours and what have you so you can see a bit better.

 

This is a low-poly model, so we start with a basic rectangle. I've made it the full length of the car, and divided into 2 segments high, 3 segments wide and 8 segments long. (10 would probably be better)

 

 

Next we start moving some of the vertices so they conform to the shape of the car. We can add some extra extrusions along the way as well.

 

 

 

 

Lets select some of these inner polygons and pull them up along the z-axis slightly, then make a couple of extrusions. Its starting to take shape now...

 

 

 

 

Now, lets go to the side view, and again we start to conform the vertices to the outline of the car. This time, we will need to keep all the viewports active. We need to cross check our movements in the orthographic view, otherwise we could end up with a terrible mess. Oh yes... save often

 

 

 

 

Now here's the really tricky part, we need to work with it mostly in the ortho view, spinning the model around making sure none of the vertices are sticking out at odd angles. We also need to look out for anywhere that needs an extrusion, maybe a poly needs to be disected, or some vertices collapsed. There's no magic formula here, you need to use your best skills

 

 

 

When we have something we're happy with, we need to cut out holes for the wheels. This is pretty easy, in the side view create a cylinder the same size as the wheel and wider than the car, and make a duplicate positioned over the other wheel. Convert the car model to a ProBoolean, and select the cylinders. We have now made spaces for our wheels.

 

 

 

Next we need to isolate the window polys. Unless you've been very clever or very lucky, you may need to slice up some of the polys so the shapes are right.

 

 

I'll just skip ahead here a bit. Add a symetry modifier / or a mirror image to complete both sides of the car. Create some more tubes the size of the wheel hubs and add on some toruses (or is it torusi?) to make the wheels. Lastly, we want to apply a meshsmooth modifier to the car chassis so that its not all blocky. If you want, it might help to select all the polys first and tesselate them. That will help the smooth modifier out, but don't go overboard, its still meant to be a low poly car.

 

Now it doesn't look all that fabulous when its still big, its only meant to be seen little after all.

 

 

Now we add some default Arch & Design materials (Glass, Chrome, Rubber etc) and shrink it down to SC4 scale.

 

Here's the final result:

 

 

I could probably iron out some of those hood wrinkles a little bit, but I've run out of time now. I'll fix it up later

[Ace3 1,209]

Every tutorial is detailed, and most of this information I was unaware of. Thanks for maintaining a high standard of teaching throughout this process reddon! I am also glad you've put the textures you used on here, which will be helpful for me especially

[Huston 5,798]

Amazing tutorial! Definitely some helpful info for BATing!

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Funny how autosmooth went totally overboard with the tops of the rear wheel arches.

[GeometryMath Algebra 614]

You've outdone yourself again!

 

Great tutorial, BTW, though I won't be making BATs in the next 4 or 5 years.

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

Funny how autosmooth went totally overboard with the tops of the rear wheel arches.

 Lol!!!!

 

Wonderful work on the car and the foliage reddonquixote, keep it up buddy!!! O

[dubaidude303 1,119]

Looking great!! 

[Darknono35 3,137]

Very very nice and amazing work, you're a chief, mister Reddonquixote !!

[Reddonquixote 4,338]

Here's a night pic.

 

[Lindsaygaskell94 13]

WOW!

That looks really good!!

Are you going to do a tutorial on how to do the different types of lights??

Cant wait to see the tower!