Mushy's Random BATs

[Harry's Place 918]

amazing work. what do you think about those vintage tankers?

 

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

Damn it I love your work!!

[Belfastsocrates 1,753]

Those trucks look absolutely fantastic. I know you mentioned different textures for variety but are you also planning to have 'stuff' in some of the trucks. Things like gravel, sand or even equipment? 

[MushyMushy 3,617]

Replies

• @tigerbuilder - Thanks!
• @airman15 - I'd be happy to make that color one of the CR-V variations!
• @raynev1 - Thanks!
• @JP Schriefer - Thanks!
• @mattb325 - Thanks!
• @tankmank - Thanks, and automata aren't out of the question yet...
• @Urban Constanta - Thanks, I could consider doing something like that if I make vintage cars at some point - we'll see.
• @Aaron Graham - Thanks a bunch!
• @Belfastsocrates - Thanks! I'll certainly also be representing different kinds of cargo, it'll just depend on the back ends of the trucks. Japan appears to have several (subtly) different designs for the rears of trucks. Some of the more "unique" things will be saved for a pack dedicated to that sort of thing, but yeah, all of the things you mentioned (and more) are planned.

I decided to make "only" 8 vehicles for the last batch for the car pack. This brings the overall model count to 34. Different cars will have different numbers of color variants , probably ranging from 1 (micro truck) to 5 or 6 for some cars. This will also help control the frequency of cars spawning in the prop packs. Hopefully for the prop packs several blank props can be included so that there are some blank spots in parking lots.

Due to the size of the prop pack, I suspect it will be released based on angles. If that is the case, the first release will obviously be the orthogonal ones.

[T Wrecks 10,209]

You know, concerning blank props (a great idea that should be used more often, btw!) I have recently wondered if you actually need an invisible dummy model at all, or if it would be sufficient to add a few resource keys that are all zeroes. Just a random thought, I haven't made any tests myself yet.

If things don't work like that, another thought is that Maxis has used the technique as well, some notable examples being those irrigation things on the farm fields and trashcans in front of family homes. If using all-zero resource keys is not possible, it may be possible to tap into whatever Maxis used as a blank dummy. This would keep external content to a minimum, so it would be a much more elegant solution than what I have used before...

[rsc204 21,808]

 A null RTK value has worked fine for me. Assuming you are adding them as timed groups also, they will need RTK4 values. If you are using RTK4, then you can add a property "Prop random chance" which works the same as having blank props. If a prop is selected in a family, it could have say a 70% chance of actually appearing. You really need to decide on these values before modding though. My best attempts to make props use a cohort for easy reconfiguration all failed. From what sparse information on this there seems to be, I'd say it's probably not possible :(. So unless you want to edit many props later, best to work these things out with a small test group first.

[SimCoug 5,973]

Vortext is the modding master who helped with the historic harbor set, and he used the 'prop random chance' property on many of the props in that set.  You could take a look at them, or shoot him a PM, I'm sure he would share his knowledge. 

[MushyMushy 3,617]

Replies

I personally don't understand much about prop families to be honest . I figured I'd leave it up to nos.17 about how to go about it, but what I was hoping for was for there to be maybe a 1/10 chance for the family to show a blank prop. I'm assuming a prop family can reference the same model multiple times (in this case the blank one)?

---

I'll probably have a post sometime soon about the Japanese Car Pack's color variations. Like I said before, I'll be using the color variations to control how frequently the cars appear in the prop families (a car with 6 colors is more likely to show up than one with 3 for example). I'm hoping to actually attempt to release some stuff once summer break rolls around for me. Until then I have lots of stuff to do related to school, as well as get a job, so I'd rather do the more enjoyable part of modding (modeling) during all that.

In this post I'll show an update on the fire station (I scaled it up vertically by 133% for this test render):

There is quite a bit of stuff I'll likely change, particularly the curved wall on the side and the little short wall on the other side as they're both too tall. The tower still needs the light grey trim and the tornado siren on top. Lot of roof junk to add on the main part of the roof. There's lot of other stuff too.

[TakemeThere 5,833]

Good stuff we could always use more fire stations. Love the detailing on the trucks, can you maintain nearly the same level of detail in game?

[philforhockey51 4,211]

Yes I do see very nice new trucks, and I'm liking your roof so far, nice color

[MushyMushy 3,617]

Replies

@takemethere - Thanks! They should look the same in-game. They look so crisp because it's an HD render. I'll probably also offer SD in the end, because even though SD will likely blur out a lot of the small details on stuff (like the trucks), there seems to be plenty of people who prefer SD.

@philforhockey51 - Thanks!

---

While this post doesn't have any new renders to look at, it does represent a major milestone - I just finished the color variations for the car set. This went hand-in-hand with fixing any issues I was having with LODs on some of the cars, making sure they were all oriented the same in their scenes, and a slew of other things. This post will be devoted to listing the color variants for each car. The set will have a total of 33 different car models with 149 total color variations. They will be released in orthogonal, diagonal, FAR-2 (L/R), and FAR3 (L/R) orientations, which adds up to 894 total models for all of the sets. I'm adding the FAR3 compatibility for this particular set because this  is intended to be used in the creation of parking lots and I felt it would be silly to make it compatible for everything but FAR3 (which is technically more common than FAR2). Since there are 149 cars, there should be 15 instances of the dummy model in the prop family to give the family a 10% chance to show a blank prop. The "spawn chance" shown for each car below is taking this dummy prop into account (so it's out of 164 instead of 149).

I actually put some thought into it, and I can say that I would be willing to render these cars and the Euro Trucks (those are ready to be rendered as well) before my break. If somebody wants to do the modding for them (it's obviously super easy, there's just hundreds of them to do) both sets could be released quite a bit sooner and then subsequently made into prop families.

-Mushy

[Girafe 1,729]

Really nice job.

I just would be cautious about the size especially if you intend to use these models for parking. 

Someone released extremly good parking textures recently. I think they will be the reference in the future. Therefore I would encourage you to do some testing with them to define the proper size eve if cheating with the real dimensions. 

As it seems you use 3dsmax, I would advice you to have a look at the metallic paint material which gives nice result for cars. 

I am eagerly waiting for the trucks, they are so amazing

[kingofsimcity 5,739]

The cars look amazing! That is a ridiculous number of car & color configurations.

...I love it.

[Belfastsocrates 1,753]

Very exciting! This is going to be an immense and much welcome vehicle expansion pack. 

I like Girafe's suggestion of trying to achieve a metallic paint finish, if you can. I think that would add something extra to the pack.

[MushyMushy 3,617]

Replies

@Girafe- Thanks! I probably could have made the paint more reflective, though white is a bad representation so I made a render for this post that has all of the colors represented so I'm curious what you think based on those. I originally had the reflectivity up higher but I thought it reflected the sky too strongly, though I could change it back (granted, that would take a long time since I'd need to go back and apply it to all of the cars). I'll talk about scale in more detail below.

@kingofsimcity- Thanks! The set I want to do for the US may very well be slightly larger since from what I can tell, there's a lot more variety in car designs and styles here than there is in Japan.

@Belfastsocrates- Thanks! See my reply to Girafe about the paint.

---

I suppose it's about time I really lay out what my plan for scale is. I've been working on a set of US cars and will probably have a post about that soon (that set will have overlap with certain internationally sold cars from the JPN set), so that will factor into this. Now, we all know that people who've made content for this game have used a lot of different scales for things. From my observation, most popular Japanese custom content has been scaled more or less to a strictly real scale. The most popular Japanese parking set, Jim's, adheres to this (6 cars per row on a tile for a total of 12 cars parked per tile). He also has a set of cars that match this scale (the cars and the textures are all orthogonal only). Most American custom content seems to fall between this scale and a scale that fits very well with the shk and KOSC parking sets, with more of it seeming to lean towards the KOSC/shk scale. This has led to me thinking the best route is to scale the US set to match KOSC's scale (which also works well since most of his lot-work seems to resemble US-styled stuff to me) and to scale the JPN set to match Jim's scale. The problem of of his set only having orthogonal parking is being solved by me. A while ago I had actually wanted to expand his set, but got busy with other things and didn't get around to it. But now I've started working on that. I've adopted his scale and copied his layout but I'm making the set from scratch (since I don't want to wrongly use his base textures or anything like that). I wanted to make the JPN car set fit this scale since that's what it was originally intended for (since at some point I'm going to start building a city that's primarily Japanese-themed.

Anyway, here's what I have to show today. The parking textures used in these renders are not mine - they are Jim's.

Zoom 6 color representation:

Some scale comparisons for different sets:

Vans (Not necessarily scaled correctly - have not done any testing):

This is the work I've done on parking textures. I'm not very far with the set (and there are quite a few rough edges to work out on the ones shown), but this is a decent start since it covers a decent bit of the bare basics. This obviously not a logical layout in the least - it's just for showing the textures. It is also my intent to smooth out the gradient for the dark strip in the center better. More stuff about what I'm going to do with this and how I'm going to go about it will be explained later.

[MushyMushy 3,617]

Well, after spending most of today modeling, I polished off the pickup trucks that will be part of the base US set (Tacoma carried over from the Japanese set). Similar to my plan to later make a van pack for the Japanese set, I plan to have a commercial pickup truck pack for the US set. I think that's pretty self-explanatory so I won't go into describing the contents of that. I think that these should really expand upon what's available in the game currently as far as pickup trucks go (read: nobody's really made many of them, which is funny since they're ridiculously common here in the States).

[nos.17 5,120]

 

So let me get this right. You'll render two different sets of vehicles, one JPN set, and one (slightly larger) US set? That seems like a lot of rendering to me. You continue to go above and beyond what I could ever expect...

[watercitymadero 804]

I would give you all my money, only to see all of them converted in to automata packs.  

Great work.

[Aaron Graham 4,417]

OMG!!!!!!! The car god. I would love to see school buses.

[APSMS 1,892]

I feel like it's a disservice to your work to only offer SD packs, though I can understand if the rendering time would kill you.

I do look at the VIP/Girafe HD car prop packs, though, and wonder if they are feeling lonely. They probably are, and you would do well to provide them company.

Excellent work all around, and like Aaron said, I think school buses would be a great underrepresented project as well. American school buses at least (I can think of 5 distinct styles off the top of my head that I've ridden in), and maybe Japanese (do they have those?) and British (I think they have them).

Anyways, the work here is incredible. Sorry for not stopping in more often.

[raynev1 1,886]

Cars , trucks , vans and parking lots . Oh my .

   Everything is looking really good so far . SD and HD would be great as some of us are using very old PC's . Either way , you're doing a great job . Looking forward to a release for DL .

[philforhockey51 4,211]

Great work Mushy, keep it up

[MushyMushy 3,617]

Replies

@nos.17 - Thanks! It is a lot of rendering, but thankfully since it's pretty quick to render each car I can find stopping points in the set and come back to it later.

@CDM Madero - Thanks! I'm sure it's not completely out of the question that some of them could get turned into automata, though someone else would have to do it.

@Aaron Graham - Thanks! I suspect you'll like what's at the end of this post.

@APSMS - Thanks! Actually, these are all HD packs! My machine renders them pretty quickly (the cars are also tiny, which helps). From what I looked up, it looks like there are British school buses, though purpose-built ones (like the iconic "American" school buses) are not very common. In Japan students either walk, bike, or ride public transit to school instead of riding school buses, though this could be explained by the proximity of things and Japans fairly extensive mass transit network.

@raynev1 - Add buses to that too! I could probably try to release an SD version of stuff (though that may be delayed). I'm familiar with that problem - before I saved up and built my current tower, my old laptop wasn't very happy when I started plopping girafe's cars everywhere.

@philforhockey51 - Thanks!

---

I decided to tackle the SUVs next, which was made easier since some of them are built off of the pickup versions. There's a few that are being carried over from the Japan set. I'm also happy to welcome my 4Runner into the isometric world of SimCity4!

The wheels of the bus go round and round....

Based on the E-450 van. The other 4 buses I'm making will be truck-based buses: a long and short version of a long nose bus, and a cabover (traditional bus) with the engine in the front and one with the engine in the back. This pack is small so I could probably try to push it out sooner rather than later. In theory the 3 full-length ones will be more-or-less the same length so they could be made into a small prop family. I don't think the shorter long nose one and the E-450 will be similar enough to each other for a family to be made for them.

Here's a Zoom 6 (where HD props really get to shine) closeup:

 

 

[kingofsimcity 5,739]

Wow! Stupendous work on those cars and school buses! Those textures look great as well. Man, seeing these after finishing up my modular parking set makes me kinda wish that didn't just stick with the SHK cars and went with the HD route. Wouldn't hurt to make another one I guess.  

Keep up the great work! I am so, so looking forward to these, especially the FA3 variants. At this point I'm hoping that whatever textures that I end up making aren't doing a disservice to your vehicles.

[MushyMushy 3,617]

Replies

@kingofsimcity - Thanks! More parking textures from KOSC? That sounds too good to be true!

---

The long-nose versions are done now. I went with the 1990's design for the Navistar International 3800 class C bus frame to represent this. The two cabover buses (class D) will be represented by the 3900FE and the 3900RE. There really isn't anything else to explain so I'll just let the pictures talk this time.

 

 

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Those buses look great! I didn't even know about the short versions, but of course they make sense. I must confess, however, that I'm not entirely sold on the roof texture/material. It looks a bit too grainy and random for my taste, almost like white marble. Aren't there any roof hatches for ventilation, or longitudinal or transverse ribs on the real buses?

Not to forget the other cars, SUVs and trucks you posted - all these look mouth-watering and all around perfect!

[philforhockey51 4,211]

Look more Jeeps! Great pack, and the buses are looking good too, TWrecks is on to something, there should be some hatches

[MushyMushy 3,617]

Replies

@T Wrecks , @philforhockey51 - Thanks! I honestly kind of got lazy with the roofs in general, I must admit . I spent a few minutes today sitting in the parking lot before going to class looking at the tops of the school buses (well, what I could see of the tops - Google Images largely failed me on this so sitting in my car was about as good of a view as I could get). I didn't put an identification number, which appear to be written in very large black numbers, on the buses since nobody would want to look at the same 5 numbers over and over and over. Other than that, I tried to get as close as I could to what they looked like. They now have 1-2 escape hatches on the roof (I guess those are for if the bus rolls on its side?) and a few of these little white bulges that probably house something. I also redid the texture from scratch (the old one did indeed look like marble) and included ribbing based on what I saw. I also actually tried to make the weathering look more... realistic.

---

Here's the original 3 buses (Z6) with the reworked roofs:

And I also finished the two 3900 variants, which completes the pack:

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Ladies and gentlesims, we have a winner! The roofs look great now, and I think you did a very good job on the weathering, too.

You know what, once I'm nagging you, I might as well continue with the side windows. Your passenger cars and SUVs have pretty good and realistic windows (they do a great job at creating the illusion that you can vaguely see an interior), but the side windows of your buses seem to be all solid black. This may be aggravated by the bright colour scheme of the buses, which makes everything dark look even darker due to the contrast. Have you tried applying a texture with some distorted / garbled shapes and slight colour variations to hint at an interior we cannot really see? Just to make this clear, I'd take these buses as they are, and with great pleasure! I'm just wondering if they might get even better.

[MushyMushy 3,617]

Replies

@T Wrecks -  Thanks! It's actually not an illusion - the cars/trucks/buses all have an interior that include seats, a dash, and a steering wheel (visible on the renders in which the windshield is visible).  My guess as to why the side windows appear almost black is a combination of shadows inside the cars and the fact that the interior texture is a mid-grey color. The windshield (and back window on sedans) is angled quite a bit on almost all of the cars which I would imagine allows light to flood into the car from that side, making the interior visible. The side windows on all of the vehicles are either vertical or reasonably close to it, which probably makes more shadows. The other possibility I can think of is the side windows are reflecting more due to their angle. I suppose significantly boosting the brightness of the interior texture would make it more visible, but at the same time, most of the cars' interiors I've seen aren't exceedingly bright. Either way, that would require replacing the texture on so many scenes (I'd probably guess between 200 and 230) that I don't think it's feasible.

I looked up aerial parking lot photos just now, and it seems like in most cases the only windows that the interiors can be seen through are windshields and and the back windows of some sedans. I'm not really sure what causes this.

Spoiler

 

---

So I've spent the past few days put some finishing exterior touches on Firehouse No.21. I still need to do some basic interior modeling and then I'll address the night lights. The thing at the top of the tower is a tornado siren (Memphis is right on the border of tornado alley). I tried to get the roof junk to be pretty close to the real thing, though it was difficult since all I had to go on was Google's satellite images and what little I could see from the street. Right now it's looking like it'll sit on a 3 wide by 4 deep corner lot. The lot will have custom textures.

Here's a Zoom 5 HD render of all 4 angles (click for full size (large file))

Thoughts?