The Portland & Oregon BAT Team, Chapter 1

[sparkythepenguin 90]

OK just so we have an idea of what lights were used where, and where to put new stuff, I have made a guide to the last image I posted with lights, showing what kind of lights that I used.

Yellow=Omni

Red=targeted direct

This rotates around the tower the full 360 degrees (except the two bottom strips)

So where should I tame the harshness, taking this into comparison with the last lighting pic?

Oh, and for Hamster, those are actually thousands of light bulbs. They look pretty dull and unrealistic without the floodlighting.

I did try the same material for the joint, but it didn't look good. I needed the contrast to show that the area was indeed indented.

[Fledgeling 1]

Sparkythepenguin, are you using the same type of lighting system you did for your Standard Insurance Plaza? That one's lights were almost as dim as the ones you show now for the windows at the closest zoom, but they doubled in brightness every zoom or so - so at the farthest zoom it was insanely bight. Have you fixed that in your more recent works?

[Fledgeling 1]

Double post - I love how it does not show my post on the board sometimes so I think it did not go through so I have to re-submit it. Another simtropolis annoyance.

[sparkythepenguin 90]

Fledgeling: That's what we call the "First post bug". We all go or have went through that... Jason, you're a mod, can you go and prune out the double posts? No biggie if you can't.

The problem that you described is a problem with the nite maps. Not to get all technical or anything, but there's a special folder in GMax where you keep your night textures. You need one map for each zoom level, sized in certain dimensions. What I think the problem is, is that I took the biggest one, and progressively shrunk it down to the zoom 1 size. Each time I did that, the resizing compressed the jpg and it looks brighter than it is supposed to be.

I'm toying around with all that, and hopefully will have some progress on it to show soon.

Anyways, I did do a full, high-quality export of the Jackson Tower a couple days ago. It has the last shown lighting scheme and it was before I added the corner joints. Here are the night shots. It came out really weird in-game. A little dimmer than it looked in BAT....

The nite_windows still need to be worked on. And I think I know now what Jason was talking about. I need the light from inside the crown to sorta spill out and dimly hit the inside of the rail and floor, same with the seond level from the top. Then I lower the intensity of the existing lights because they'll overlap the new lights. Sound right Jason?

Here's the in-game shots:

It still may need a tad bit of a bump up on the vertical scale...

[Sim shady 12]

it looks awesome, my only request for the lot is that you try and make it align with jbsimio's w2w lots

[sparkythepenguin 90]

No prob Sim Shady! I just have to get some of his lots and test it all out...

As an aside, Iget to go to Phoenix on Dec 10th, and I hope to get this one finished up before then. Just so y'all have some figure on a timeline...

[Jasoncw 11,949]

Yep, that's what I mean. But don't compare anything to Chase Tower, the nitelites are too bright on it (don't tell anyone), lol.

[Sim shady 12]

!!! the nitelites are too bright on Chase Tower?!?! Alert the presses!!! You are such a perfectionist Jason Seriously Chase was a 10 star bat in my mind.

BTW, thnx for listening to my request Sparky

[sparkythepenguin 90]

These last 2 weeks have been quite crazy! But I did managed to get some more work done on lighting. One of the more frustrating things on my list to do was make the nite map intensities equal (or look that way) across all the zoom levels. I may be done with this, but may not be depending on further comments. Regardless of that, it's a good start. Just had to play around with brightness, saturation, and contrast in Photoshop:

In order to test this, I set the intensities to a uniform level and just hid aeverything else but the windows. This is NOT the final intensity level for these windows. I was more concerned with

getting them to look uniform across the zooms.

I also have added the omnis suggested by Jason, but I have a lot of tweaking to do with the overall spotlight scheme. Maybe I can have something up tonite, tomorrow, or Wend. at the latest....

Lighting is the toughest thing I have to do as a BATer. Only texturing gives me as much grief...

[bbfan02 23]

Looks great! Your making good progress on this lot.

[RON-E 0]

this is another great bat!

[Jasoncw 11,949]

So you opened the nitemaps in photoshop and adjusted them to make them equal?  I would have never thought of doing that.

[sparkythepenguin 90]

Well, if you look at 'em in Photoshop, they don't look equal at all. I had to go through a lot of trial and error before it looked anything decent...

The windows don't look as bad now, and the flood lights have been toned down. I tried more yellower flood lights, but they looked like dog vomit.

OK latest screens:

I think these are MUCH better

[RON-E 0]

lookin' mighty good!

[sparkythepenguin 90]

So shall I move forward with finalizing the scale? After that, it'll be pretty much smooth sailing through the modding process.

[Jasoncw 11,949]

Do the arches on the second floor have window frames?

Other than that, I think it's ready, it looks great.

[sparkythepenguin 90]

Originally posted by: Jasoncw Do the arches on the second floor have window frames?

Other than that, I think it's ready, it looks great. quote>

They used to, but now they don't . The building went through a restoration in the 80's, and they decided to replace the old arched frames with a single piece of glass. I believe the old arch frames were divided up verticaly into 3 or four panes of glass. But don't quote me on that. Kinda weird that they didn't keep something original to the building, but I guess they thought  that it looks better and they wanted to attract higher-end retail to the ground floor.

Wanna see a pic from the 50's? I think I have one laying around somewhere.

*Proceding to final scaling*

Please stay tuned.....

[1ajs 49]

sparky are you going to make this bat aline with the edge of the lot? and not be set back???

[T Wrecks 10,210]

Actually, personally I'd prefer it set back by 1 tile on that Maxis texture because most US-style W2W buildings are set back by 1 tile, some even by 2, like most European W2W buildings.

Indepently of that, though, what a beautiful creation!

[bixel 1,228]

your Jackson Tower is really superb, btw I do not work at Leonidas chocolates any more - so dont bother going in unless your there for the chocolate! hahahah

Yeah seriously your dedication of the Jackson tower is remarkable. I think you should contact NC3D and sell them the model, of course you may have to convert the file to 3ds. I can do that for you. You should sell it for 2,000, nothing less.

[bbfan02 23]

Nice night shots. The night-lighting is great.

[Jasoncw 11,949]

Yeah, add those frames back in.  Just because they have to screw it up with a bad renovation doesn't mean you need to too. 

[Chris M 406]

The BAT looks great, I'm looking forward to using this one as soon as you upload it.

[sparkythepenguin 90]

OK 2 hours left of my 20's.... Then the big 3-0! Oh well, I managed to get a bit done in my last weeks as a20-something year old:

On the arched windows: I did find some old photos, and I was partly wrong about the arches: The corner ones were filled in, and I have no idea what the actual ones with windows looked lik. This old postcard is pretty representative of the old-time views:

Jason, I think I will just do what you suggested: add vertical mullions to the arches. I'll just have them continue the main window's spacing.

While we're being historical, let's go off-track to 1981 when Mt. St. Helens erupted! On a good, clear day you can see it from downtown. You couldn't misss it that day! I don't remember any of it; my mom kept me inside the whole time. My has the skyline really filled in since then:

It's kinda cool to have an active volcano right near by!

OK Back on track here:

I have been looking into the final scaling of Jackson Tower. I first had to endure what can only be described as "tedious-a** crap" in order to make the model not crash the computer (the lovely GMax export error #36 or something like that). Just so you know, all the little light bulbs are seperate objects. And each of them had like, oh 40 segments or something like that. In other words: over 2 million polygons just to make some objects look round, even though they were little. So I knocked them down to like 4 segments, and all is good in the land of the GMax scene, with everything now waaaay under 1 million polys. Ugh...

But once I got it in-game, how did it look? Well, I did the first scaling of the building to see how well it fit into a W2W situation. And this is where another problem happens.

Please do not mind the low-quality or lack of textures shown below. I didn't bother to reload all them and I did a low-quality render. Just checking dimensions today.

So here we have JB Simmio's lots with the Jackson Tower:

Don't quite line up, eh? They're about 60m in from the street, while the Jackson Tower is probably 30m.

So what does this look like with a big-city BATset. Naturally, I chose Porky's excellent Paris BATs to help out with this task:

Works on both sides. lines up great!

How about my own previous BATS?

Lines up good with the New Fleidner Block! Kells was too far out toward the street and Bishop's House was OK. I suppose this is because the New Fleidner and Bishop's House were aligned with Porky's lots.

So there is some more work to be done obviously. Here are what I think the options are:

*Make 2 versions, one for the big city set 30m back, and one for small towns, set 60m back. This works great for those who have Cj's.

*Make it 30m back and call it good. Jackson Tower is in a big city, so be it.

*Make it 60m back. The heck with the big city, it looks better in a small town.

*Bump up the z axis more (make it a little taller/skinnier). I don't know if that looks quite right yet...

OK das ist genug fur Heute! (That's enuf for today) Wish me luck on my finals in Poli Sci and German! After those are done, I'm taking a term off (I went thru Summer, so I deserve a break), going to Phoenix for a week, and then it its tim

[LarksTonguesInAspic 28]

Oh wow! When I first moved to the NW from Chicago, I lived at the Arthur, 11th and Morrison; I could see this building from the fire escape. You make PDX look good! I have quite a few of your lots, fine work.

BTW Happy Birthday!

[Jasoncw 11,949]

If I was doing it, I would keep it at its current scale. Offering versions for both scales is a good idea though.

Maybe it could be a little taller, but not much. Go on emporis and find out the height, multiply it by 1.3, and that should be the height in Gmax, and it should look correct.

Good luck on your finals! And happy birthday!! But even though you'll be thirty, there are still two years left until you're 32.

[Chris M 406]

They look great, Sparky. It wouldn't be a bad thing to keep it at its current scale because JBS' BATs were probably at a different scale and such than yours so naturally it will be different. Kinda like our BATs compared to Maxis ones.

Also, happy birthday and good luck with your finals. I will wish you well.

[ricb 19]

Sparky, your post may be a good time to let Simtropolians know that Portland actually has a volcano (extinct) within the city limits. Mt Tabor park sits on the cinder cone of an ancient volcano. They didn't know this when the park was first built, but expansion work in 1912 exposed the cone. Many of the cinders were used to pave roads within the park.

[Andreas Roth 626]

Auch von mir herzlichen Gl

[1ajs 49]

dam that looks good why not do both?