BAT4Max render settings

[wallacet 336]

Good evening all,

So I gave up on modeling for SC4 a while back, but am now trying my hand at modeling for C:S...I know this forum section isn't the most Skylines friendly (dont kill me! ), but I have a question about the render settings used in BAT4Max...I had it installed with my 3dsMax, and tried to use it to render a C:S building, but for some reason, when you try to render using the BAT4Max render function, it screws up something with the file and won't work with the asset editor in Skylines...

What I was wanting to know...does anyone happen to know all the render settings used in BAT4Max, such as lighting, view angle, etc.? I LOVED the way renders came out looking with BAT4Max (SO SO SO much better than the basic render with 3dsMax) but do not know how BAT4Max set up the render settings to achieve the final render. If anyone knows anything about this, please let me know. I fear these details have gone down with the SimFox ship, but please prove me wrong. 

[art128 4,618]

Normally you don't have to touch anything once you install BAT4MAX v5. You'll just maybe have to patch things up because of the gamma settings, but that's about it.

Which version of 3dsmax are you using?

I say that, but I'm interested too, I'm using 2015 and there's a thin white/grey outline on my buildings, quite annoying.

[Huston 5,798]

Normally you don't have to touch anything once you install BAT4MAX v5. You'll just maybe have to patch things up because of the gamma settings, but that's about it.

Which version of 3dsmax are you using?

I say that, but I'm interested too, I'm using 2015 and there's a thin white/grey outline on my buildings, quite annoying.

I've heard that those lines are usually caused and influenced by the brightness of the gray backdrop of building renders. If they're lighter than usual you will normally get an annoying outline. Try editing the backdrop color/environment color and see if that fixes things

[wallacet 336]

Normally you don't have to touch anything once you install BAT4MAX v5. You'll just maybe have to patch things up because of the gamma settings, but that's about it.

Which version of 3dsmax are you using?

I say that, but I'm interested too, I'm using 2015 and there's a thin white/grey outline on my buildings, quite annoying.

I had to uninstall BAT4Max because it made the file incompatible with Skylines. I want the rendering capability of BAT4Max without having BAT4Max, if that makes sense.

[rsc204 21,815]

I think you are missing the point of BAT4MAX, which is specifically designed to make renders compatible with SC4, whatever requirements C:S needs will be totally different and those settings simply won't work. If you need to configure 3DSMax for C:S you are probably better off asking the question "how do I optimise the rendering process for C:S" in the appropriate forum or on the Paradox site.

[JP Schriefer 5,590]

First of all, I don't know exactly how things work when doing C:S models with 3ds Max.
I think you can, actually, use BAT4Max gamma and light configurations to your model (probably due to these things you like the BAT4Max rendering) but you can't use BAT4Max export fields. As far as I know you've just to export your model as a .obj file to C:S, isn't? If I'm not wrong, you have just to activate 'Sky' and 'Day' in 'Let there be light' on BAT4Max tools and model what you want. Then to export you just go to the main menu, export, export non-native files and choose .obj.
As I said I don't know exactly how things work in this case, but maybe you should try. Once I tried to have help using 3ds Max on Paradox forum but without success, everybody uses Blender.

  Edited July 23, 2015 by JP Schriefer  

[Jasoncw 11,840]

I think for what you're doing it would be better to go to Create > Lights > Daylight System. You can google it to learn more about it. 

The goal of this is to just get some basic shadows and lighting to help you judge the shapes you're modeling, so I wouldn't bother getting too deep into it. The building will be rendered in the game, not in 3ds max, so how your renders in max look is not especially relevant. 

There might be a plugin for making the viewports the same as the game (I haven't dug into these things yet), but if not then try to change your viewport settings so that they kind of look like it.