JP Schriefer's BATs

[matias93 7,535]

Oh, cool! Downloading right now... 

Just BTW: the STEX supports versioning, you could upload a new version of a building on the same entry, and even to block the downloading of the previous versions. 

[JP Schriefer 5,591]

matias93: yeah I thought about it before uploading it. The thing is that the old file was sent to make part of the challenge week, it wasn't featured on STEx and its views were way lower than the average, meaning that most people actually didn't even knew about it. So I decided just to delete the old one and upload the new version as a different file particularly in this case.

So I released a building I started in the end of 2015 and just finished today '-'

For a long time I'm avoiding to show here and on SC4Devotion every project I start because I feel bad showing lots of things and just releasing a few of them. I don't know if other batters are like that as well, but I have 54 projects that are not finished yet. On the first post I only show here 19, so I believe you understand what I mean feeling bad about it

But I like to show something especially when I release a new BAT
This one is 667 Madison Avenue, I started it at the same time as 261 5th Avenue. I just need to work on the roofs now - hate that part - and the textures of course.

[Fantozzi 4,068]

4 hours ago, JP Schriefer said:

For a long time I'm avoiding to show here and on SC4Devotion every project I start because I feel bad showing lots of things and just releasing a few of them.

Well, solution to that would be to show lots of things and release lots of them.

No, seriously - I think it's like those prototypes and concept cars in automobile industry. They not always evolve into products but are some kind of storage for idears. And they are presented anyway on motorshows. Shure me, I'll stand there and ask - can I buy that? And the reply is: no, sorry, that's only a design study.  So maybe a development thread is something similar to a motorshow. You can present upcoming models but also latest designs and idears, doing a showcase for the folks but also meet with coleagues and discussing new idears and future concepts, showing some 'behind the scenes'. I personally think development threads aren't limited to a single use and for an audience that wants to buy and drive.

If the only question is 'can I drive it?' - you'd better never go to an automobile museum. Most cars there you can't even touch. But beauty isn't all about 'can I have it, can I touch it?" I'm a lucky man to have seen some incredible beautiful things in my life. And not to own them - like the sunset in Taormina - doesn't hurt as much as the idea, to die without having seen them.

Melancholia and wanderlust are close relatives - and they wouldn't be without beauty. So what you might be afraid of - sharing only pictures of beautiful bats but not the bats everybody can own - is creating the feeling of melancholia. Like in childhood days the feeling of disapointment when on christmas you didn't get the present you were hoping for. But that's a confusion of luxury and beauty. Again it's like with cars - 'luxury cars' are about you can afford them or you can't afford them and they make up beauty by value. But this doesn't mean beauty always is made up by value. To have your bats in my plugin folder is luxury. And therefore I want to have them like I want to have luxury cars, to gather beauty. This may satisfy my demand for luxury but not my demand for beauty. So I'll ask for more bats. And even if I had a million bats I still would ask for more.

Until I find - no matter how much I own I can't get satisfied regarding beauty. It's like being thirsty. You drink but after a while thirst returns. And this never stops. And the same with beauty - the desire for beauty always can be satsified by luxury only for a certain laps of time.

So regarding this - imho it doesn't really matter how many bats you show here and how many you upload, the relation. You show beauty here and you are generous to offer luxury to download those beauties on the STEX. But with your uploads you will satisfy people only for a certain lapse of time. To avoid melancholia in the long run luxury isn't powerfull enough.

 

[edwardjeria 503]

Great, I look forward to seeing more updates

[edwardjeria 503]

On 23/4/2017 at 2:33 AM, JP Schriefer said:

The Capital Building, Park Tower and Continental Tower, from Cidade Jardim Corporate Center, are finished. I sent them to Simmer2, who will do their lots

I was looking for nice buildings from other cities in South America and I end up in Santiago de Chile. I decided to do 3 buildings from there by my own, but @matias93gave me a suggestion that made me very excited. So I'm doing several buildings very similar to the ones around the Palacio de La Moneda that will be W2W pieces, so people can set up some complex buildings with it.

The small pieces are 2x1, the corner piece is 2x2, those big mirrored buildings are 3x4 and the one in the middle is 3x2.
There is a big gap on the mirrored buildings with 16 meters wide, so I'll make it possible to add a road there - probably doing the building as a prop. Also, I figured out a way to make seamless roof there so it can perfectly work as W2W, it's going to be laborious but I think it will work.

Preview in zoom 5, click on the image to see it full size:

That is the Paseo Bulnes, is a complex full of buildings in relation to ministries, like the one of economy, of laws and even this is the seat of the Chilean national police. How do I know ??? And I live in Santiago .... thanks for fixing in my nation;)

 

PS: Since you are interested in santiago, in case you are interested .... Torre Entel

[JP Schriefer 5,591]

Thank you very much, Fantozzi! I like how your replies are always so nice to read

Thanks for the suggestion, edwardjeria

My classes are coming back tomorrow, but I hope to release 667 Madison Avenue soon anyway. Everything is now modelled so I'm just working on the textures. The building was 14 meters taller on the last preview and it was wrong, it's now fixed. Don't worry about the weird effects on some shadowed faces btw, failed test

 

Oh and 600 Madison Avenue is available on STEx:

 

[gutterclub 2,729]

Looking good, nice crisp materials. My only suggestion would be (might be the glass or the blind material) is that the blinds look too blue, I took a quick look and am sure they are that classic boring beige/cream colour.

Also as mentioned a few times, I think by Jason perhaps, I think the bump or noise on the windows material is too small, giving it a kind of screwed up tin foil affect as opposed to a wavy affect...excuse my lack of technical knowledge.

Otherwise you are producing great looking NYC bats right now

[Fantozzi 4,068]

I like the windows, how they differ - making the building very vivid.

Most probably the blinds - seeing some reflections on them, and considering the esthetic of the game, they maybe will be recognized as reflections rather than blinds.

And to me this would work perfectly - while in the picture below on the lower floors these are blinds but on the upper floors these are reflections - or no? Blinds are behind windows and therefore won't block reflection.

So this is confusing on the original building and on the bat too - is it reflection or is it the blind? So the bat matches RL building in an amazing way. IMHO.

Me, I love that. 

 

 

[gutterclub 2,729]

Sorry but the pic in question is at a totally different angle to the game and buildings in the game.....if I understand your post correctly? Buildings in Sc4 would never reflect clouds  

[Fantozzi 4,068]

I deleted the word 'clouds' from my previous post.

[Francis90b 748]

I really appreciate all that you've been doing lately (including the BATs you did not show there)!.

 

667 Madison is a fairly interesting building - several elements setting it apart from both prewar towers and postwar ones, and each of them striving to incorporate the best from both types.

There's a staggered mass - a nod to older wedding cake buildings, a clever device to offer as many (valuable) corner offices into what's essentially a botique office building.Perhaps rendered in an overdramatic fashion, as it commonly occurs with several features in postmodern buildings, but powefully emphasizing the corner the building sits on in a way that maybe a more sedate or "classic" massing would never have been able to.

And there's a stone veneer exterior, a refreshing take from steel and glass curtains, almost mandatory in the 60's - early 70's, as well as from early 80's fads for reflective glass prisms and horizontal stacks of granite or marble or whichever stone like material and ribbon window, multiplied for whichever number of floors that were needed, the resulting box sometimes cut with one or two diagonal at strategic locations.

There's nothing of that, but clearly definite, evenly spaced window holes punctuating the facade in a regular pattern, as in prewar buildings - still, said windows are asymmetrically subdivided, a simple but clever way to escape the monotony that could easily originate from this arrangement.

The ground floor arcade is a noteworthy touch too - still offering public space the way several modern buildings attempt to, but in a far more inspired and useful way than the usual, empty and semi-private plazas you see around many modern nyc skyscrapers, plazas which are usually thrown in merely to snatch more allowable FAR.

It's only downside, it's construction required the demolition of an old apartment building, not really noteworthy per se, but interesting as one of the oldest ones built in that area, still rendered with detailing choices not really common on slightly more modern apartment buildings around (for example the variety of lintel designs used there is very uncommon, more similar to what you might find in my european hometown than in several posh park avenue buildings).

Aestethically it's not my favourite, but there are several reasons why this specific skyscraper might be a step above much of what had been built before it, or has been built since.

So i'm quite pleased to see it being modelled.

 

As far as your rendition goes, i'd subscribe with both Gutterclub and Fantozzi's positions...while the blind color might actually lean towards yellow/beinge, chances are that the glass type used on this building and the reflections it filters might add a slightly blue-ish tinge to them.

My advice would be to take a look at a bing maps 3d view of this buildings, and see what's there - to check if you can actually see any blind there, and then to check which color it has - bing 3d has a roughly (very roughly, mind you!) similar perspective to SC4, so maybe looking at that might help.

I have the impression you might have made masonry cladding slightly darker than it needs to be / than it needs to represent RL situation.Maybe that's just me, though.

 

On a completely unrelated note, would you mind, when releasing the Singer building, to consider the idea of making a towerless version? The tower, while striking, was just an addition to an already existing building, and the base might still be quite useful in game as a stately midrise for the 1890 tileset.

[edwardjeria 503]

Of anything, I look forward to seeing more of his work and seeing leave 667 madison, just out of the kitchen

[JP Schriefer 5,591]

@gutterclub thank you! So I desaturated the blinds a bit, because the glasses make them blueish anyway but I think the final result was good to go  

@Fantozzi thank you! I use Google Earth to check the higher parts, and it's possible to see where are the blinds in most of the cases, so the sky reflections aren't really a problem

@Francis90b thank you! Great analysis! Have you ever thought about doing a blog about buildings? You look so interested on their history, meanings, appearances and you do it really well. If you don't want a blog maybe a great addition to Wiki pages
I always use Google Earth to check the whole buildings. There are blueish blinds there indeed (probably due to the glass effects as you said), so I just desaturated them a bit. Also the masonry was too dark indeed, reddonquixote said the same about it, so I changed it too.
Regarding the Singer Building, I can do it, but actually the old one was smaller than the base of the skyscraper. Possibly I can do both anyway, the original old one and also only the base of the "new" one. They used the same pieces, only in different configurations.

@edwardjeria it's now on STEX!

Here you go to 667 Madison Avenue:

Now another one that is in the end of the drawer for almost one year. I started this one thinking about getting some experience to start the Municipal Theatre from Rio someday. Some time later I started the Singer Building and today I think the only thing I need is actually a lot of patience for these buildings with so many details

CCBB (Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil - Bank of Brazil Culture Centre)
I'm focusing the HD version to this one.

 

[Tyberius06 12,254]

Whoops  It looks awesome @JP Schriefer!

And thank you for your very nice releases! I will be enjoying to play with them!

- Tyberius

[Jasoncw 11,949]

The new building is looking good so far, and I appreciate that you've payed attention to the block lines. 

I've noticed that on your w2w buildings that you haven't been setting them back at all? They won't line up with buildings using the standard one paver setback, or even the two paver setback. 

[Francis90b 748]

I'm looking forward to see how the skylight well will lit up at night :).

 

Jasoncw is right, there's a common standard by which BATs which are supposed to meet the sidewalk straight away are set back one sidewalk tile (1.6 mtrs) from whichever side of the LOT where a sidewalk is expected to exist.Oh, and there's also a standard dictating for 3.2 mtrs setback, but that's much less frequently used, afaik.

There's a silver lining on that, though, because several corner buildings in Manhattan have one, or both sides being 100' wide, 100' is equivalent to 30.48 mtrs, and then the usable lenght of 2 sc4 tiles next to a corner, assuming you're using the 1.6 mtrs sidewalk standard, is (32-1.6) 30,4 mtrs.

 

I didn't know the original base was smaller than the "new" base the tower ended up with...had to dust off a pic in my archive to notice it .

Both the towerless version and the original base would bring something interesting to the game.

The towerless version might probably be quicker and easier to make, as you'll "just" have to remove the tower and fill the resulting gap with a roof.The "old" base will also require you to surgically remove the three floors which were added in the middle of the "new" base, and to check wheter the "narrower" side of the "old" base can actually fit within the constraints imposed by SC4 grid without leaving too much of a gap.

And you're way too kind as far as my random musings about buildings are concerned .

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

JP Schriefer, I am so proud of you. You've have put a smile on my face with those NYC buildings. Can we all pray I can get back to batting. 

[darn42 1,268]

These are so beautiful! Excellent work! Happy to see how much you've improved!

The yellow building in particular is absolutely charming.

[gtgx666 13]

On 2016/6/14 at 1:29 AM, JP Schriefer said:

Toothless Stitch, Thin White Duck and matias93, thanks you very much

Finnbhennach: I'll try to do that, thank you

Quick preview test. I did some modifications on Hearst Tower, including transparent glass where you can see the floors. Tests and reflections are nothing but tests, so I'll improve them later. The weird top will be modified soon as well.

what about Hearst Tower  now?

[gtgx666 13]

when Hearst Tower will be releaesed?

[gtgx666 13]

your lots are so great!I think you do Shanghai center, Beijing, Chinazun tower of such buildings must be very good, looking forward 

[JP Schriefer 5,591]

@Tyberius06 thank you very much!

@Jasoncw thanks, Jason! I thought w2w buildings were supposed to be exactly the same size as the tiles. Do you think I need to resize and render them again? Thanks for the tip.

@Francis90b thanks, Francis! I'll start to set it as 1.6m from now on.
So I already have the informations about the old Singer Building. It was 33,5m x 17,7m. I believe that particularly in this case the best option is to resize it to 32m x 16m with no setbacks, otherwise it would be too modified. What do you think?

In case people doesn't know what we're talking about:

@Aaron Graham thanks, Aaron! I'm happy you like them, and I hope you can get time to bring us more amazing buildings again

@darn42 thanks! It's great to see you around.

@gtgx666 the roof from the Hearst Tower is now modified. I didn't bring it yet because since I'm doing modelled floors it's being a pain, but I'll post a preview soon then. TBH I'm not good with glassed buildings, so I'm not sure if someday I'll be able to do so gigantic glass structures.

 

Another one from the drawer, Johns-Manville Building at 275 Madison Avenue:

[Toothless Stitch 2,901]

Awesome modelling there. However, you can see the reason why I never wanted to make any building from NYC: Those huge wall parts that are usually hidden behind other building are being a pain to texture. Even with all that noise you can still clearly see where it's repetitive. 

[MushyMushy 3,618]

Looks good! I'm confused though, where's the door? Is that part just not done yet?

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

JP Schriefer you are doing wonderful job on making these New York City skyscrapers. Jasoncw is right the building need to be setback 1.6 meters from the edge of the lot, reason why so the buildings that you create will be flushed in with other wall to wall buildings. I would say yes reexport the building.

[Jasoncw 11,949]

Yeah I would go back and reexport them with the 1.6m setback. It will take time to do that but I think it's worth it because the buildings lining up is so important to representing american cities. And I think you should also scale the old singer building. It's true that it will be scaling it more than you'd normally like, but the proportions being a little squashed is less important than the building being flush. Because you're recreating "the building", but there's more to the building than the literal building itself, there's also the building's surroundings. So for Paris, the fact that the buildings line up and have the same heights is just as important as what the facade looks like. Some buildings just don't fit the game very well, so compromises have to be made. 

The new building is looking good so far.  

[JP Schriefer 5,591]

@Toothless Stitch thank you! I have a plan to that issue

@MushyMushy thanks! Yeah I didn't make the base of the building yet

@Aaron Graham thank you!

@Jasoncw thanks! I'm going to reexport it then

 

My first intention was to make the Majestic from Central Park, but I was a bit impatient to be looking for the exact measurements and all those terraces furniture and roof junk, so I decided to do a building by my own - saying it's located in my fictional city - based on those four twin towers buildings from Central Park. I love their shape and I hope me or anyone else do it someday. I'll export two versions with different bricks colouration. To finish this one I need to add some dirty to the bricks and work on the roof junk and terraces, probably I'll do something simple there.

Click to see them at zoom 5.

 

[Fantozzi 4,068]

Man - what to say about an excellent bat not to become repetititve but else than it's excellent if it's the truth because it is excellent.

And look at me, worried about not being repetitive I used the word excellent three times in a row...

I like your texture work on the windows - each window a little different than the other makes it vivid, makes the beholder looking up and down - like a painter is a guide - guides your eyes - no matter where you watch, your eyes are guided to follow a line to the central point and the painting, a static thing, becomes something processual as your eyes follow a path.

Look how the people, their bearing, their view, guide your eyes:

It ropes your eyes into a movement, no matter where you start, following these pathes you always end at the central point.

On a plain box with every window the same there is no processual work for the eyes, no tension, no path to follow  - in a glance you saw it all.

 

I personlly think you could experiment with different textures on the facade. I know, this white ground floor and the upper floors - this way it's very typical, classic american cities.

But maybe on this one - as there are already verticale lines in the structure, it would be interesting to colour them slightly different to make the vertical lines stronger compared to the horizontal ones:

As looking on the backside the texture seems a little blotchy on the darker version to me while it looks better on the whiter version. And I would curious to know what happens when you use a slightly darker nuanced colour of the same texture on the vertical lines, the columns, than on the wall - basically mixing both versions. But maybe the difference is already to strong. Also the red roof colour maybe to strong and could need a little bit less saturation. But it's difficult to talk on colours on computer monitors. ATM I'm using my notbook that has a very bad screen and colours look different on my pc.

So these are just idears, no judgements.

[edwardjeria 503]

Ooo ... the Majestic is magnificent, I love the detail in the decorations on the walls.

I have to say something that might bother you, but and the Hearts Tower, Johns-Manville Building, Bank of Brazil Culture Center, The Hampshire House, The Paseo Bulnes ... etc ...
I love that you start so many projects, and you are free to do what you want, but it would be good to see more BAT finished and uploaded, than initiated, just my simple opinion and all my support for your work.

[Hotwheeler 409]

Oh,another Piece of Art from you,and a really mindblowing one,too.

Those "twin towered" Art Deco Buildings around Central Park are by far some of my favorite Manhattan Buildings ever (others would be the Dakota or the famous Plaza Hotel...coth coth :D)

I really love your Sense for Details,and your newest Creation is something i really hope to see in my Game soon.

Have to agree with Fantozzi about those Windows,each one looks unique which makes a Building look alive from the outside.Also a nice Idea to render the Building with different Colorschemes,adds a bit more diversity (and one could possibly plopp them around a large Park without someone screaming "Repetition" :D)

Can`t went to see the final Outcome of this,

stay awesome!