Koesj's Building Woes: Dingbats!

[Judazzz 1,936]

Already saw your gorgeous shot on Reddit  

Have you got any closer pics of the downtown area? It might just give me an idea of what to aim for with producing a largeish number of 1960s/70s potemkin village buildings (strange, how realistic this is both in game and irl haha).

Sure, no problem.
I'll post a few shots in the 'Show your downtown'-thread after I get home from work, okay?


edit: I posted a few screenshots in the topic I mentioned 

  Edited October 15, 2015 by Judazzz  

[Koesj 659]

Oh gawd the 60s/70s horror, murder rate through the roof  

[ethansprang 41]

Why not both?  I don't think @Koesj is saying "Only Uniques".  But i understand that to many uniques makes the neighborhoods empty.  What to do if too many buildings in your CBD are plopped without jobs or commerce?  Put the jobs someplace else!

I have a theme I call "Low Commercial Parking" that is low-commercial growable parking lots from the workshop (Parking Lot, and Variable Fillers).  If you add this theme to you CBD, then you have zonable parking lots in up to 2x4 sizes.  You don't even need the eyedropper. And now you get the traffic back on your streets!.  You could do the same by making a growable plaza or park, maybe with "Low Residential", or something that you're otherwise unlikely to zone in the middle of the CBD.

Another source of "space" in your downtown is the service buildings.  There's already a version of the NYC "Long Lines" telephone exchange building on the Workshop as a garbage dump. Some of these filler buildings could be in other categories, leaving some other space for growables.

Finally, it'd be helpful if these fillers are on deeper lots to reach into the middle of larger blocks.  4x8, 4x10, 6x8.  They could have an alley or a loading dock stuck on the back, so that dead space in the middle of the blocks is used.  Even if NYC blocks are only 8 cells deep in real life, most other American city grids have much larger blocks that the game has trouble filling.  SF, for example has a regular grid (excluding streets) of 16x11 in the City, 11x11 near the Embarcadero, and 10x21 in SoMa,

[Attercap 123]

The first interest of this game is "trafic management" (or at least the first challenge) / A CBD has to be full of life, trafic and trafic jams, and I want a perfect regulation and control. You create new transports lines, the CBD can grow : one more building. And another. So ploppable landmarks  are like a movie without the sound ; it's nice, but it's useless.

Some people wants to create beautiful cities / realistic cities. Others want to create a working-system, a machine. Lot of people want both...

Using growable or services buildings to create life.. why not. But we dont want only life, we want jams ! We want a real CBD with all the classical problematics it involves.

 

Skyscrapers without the challenges created by skyscrapers = frustration.

  Edited October 16, 2015 by Attercap  

[Darf 1,439]

Nope, don't agree. First of all, no-one is saying anything about making entire cities of uniques, that's a strawman argument. Second, I'd contest the notion that loading up on landmark buildings is a bad and/or weird idea for run-of-the-mill downtown areas. How many blocks should it be anyway to make it look good? 10 by 10 or something? Because that's a pretty good value proposition to me: reserve some space for taller skyscrapers (maybe 4 or 5 like I said), add >10 Midrise buildings, plop some parking garages, full squares of surface parking, service buildings, vanilla uniques, etc. There you are, downtown's more than half filled. 

All this can be done pretty quickly, without fooling around with the eyedropper or what have you. This way, adding relatively mid-rise buildings with distinct, historically accurate architectural styles to the current tall/supertall landmark glut is a very attractive proposition to me, especially in the 'let's make a cookie-cutter North American city'-context. We can debate the relative merits of growables vs. ploppables some more, but the fact is that at a superbly manageable <1.5 MB (right now), these 50-150 large footprint uniques can add a much-needed extra variety to the existing palette of workshop ploppables. All you'll have to do is scroll through some icons, and start playing this game like bonsai for even bigger nerds  

Also, take a look at this 4x4 vs 4x8 test:

 

The bigger one on the left is as of right now 258 KB larger, so from a performance POV there's no need to go for ploppables if you want a handful of these kinds of towers in your city IMO. I also think that the vertical elements on this building's facade come out way better with more repetition. They're boring buildings either way, but the pure blandness of yet another 4x4 tower in this game just gets to me somehow. And then there's the issue of managing this building in whatever growable system you've got going

 

I like the right one a bit better to be honest, but both are nice. That was not my point though. I understand we need variation in shapes and if it were possible to get 4x8 as growable in the game, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.  My point for the visual aspect was if the game was to put 2 of the right buildings next to eachother they'd look like the left one (if you made it really w2w that is). You've already got a lot of repeating buildings in there next to eachother. I usually destroy buildings like that, unless they transition into eachother.

Functionally, I totally agree with Attercap.

But, hey, these are your creations, make what you want! I'd love to have them in my city and I'm sure we'll be able to make ploppables or growables like this in the future. I'm just saying that unique fillers like these don't make sense to me right now if you consider the functional aspect.

 

[Koesj 659]

Wow, some really great replies here, thanks people!

@ethansprang, re: deeper lots. Great idea! I hadn't considered using these kinds of uniques to fill-in the blank space you get from using larger than 8x8 blocks, but that actually sounds like a great use case. 

@attercap & darf: dang, now I gotta rethink my whole approach to downtown functionality  I don't know half enough how these buildings would work as uniques/landmarks/whatever vs. as puzzle-piece growables! Sooo... questions: if I just treat them as office block substitutes, couldn't I just add the amount of jobs that the equivalent amount of cells would have generated if zoned as such? IOW, I've got a 8x4 cell midrise and I give it 96 'workers' (3 per cell for lvl 3 office) so it can function the same? Or I go hog-wild and double the amount if it's a proper highrise, so that people'll still come to these locations and create a living area?

 

[Turjan 1,048]

If you go the "unique buildings" route, just keep in mind to keep attractiveness way down in order not to trigger the tourism bug. Either that, or don't care about tourism (not the biggest loss).

[boldlybuilding 873]

I'd be careful upping the amount of workers. I've done this on a few of my old buildings when I first started (still need to fic a couple of them), and those buildings always had a high crime rate (with the warning icon) and it would never go down no matter how many police stations you placed. I suspect it was because of so many workers being in one building. So it probably can't be much more than the default settings for workers.

[Bolduck91 54]

I thought you might appreciate you building in this nice sunny day picture ! 

Thanks Again ! 

[Koesj 659]

Hiya folks, as you might have seen in Zed's thread, I've been reentering the C:S assetbuilding fold with some tests and proofs of concepts. I feel like I've got the colored windows/decent nightlights down pretty well at the moment, and I'm moving into making better textures with my own brushes and some creative blending of stock pics in Photoshop, modeling in 3ds Max, and doing AO bakes in there as well.

Anyway, show is better than tell, so here's two screenshots y'all can critique:

 

First up is me being all fancy with ~difference clouds~ to do a 'quick' and dirty nightlight test on a roofless tower. There's four vertical, tiling strips of 8 windows each on this texture, so I randomly superimposed the 180 window quad UVs on 32 possible texture positions. A thankless job, but luckily it only took about 20 minutes and the results are what I was hoping for. I've left half of the windows completely unlit so as to simulate people not being total morons with leaving the lights on in their office during the night 

 

Second is an older (2/3rds as tall) version of the same building all decked out, except for the aforementioned truly random window trick. This was mostly to see how a modernist 45x45m towerblock looks inside a C:S 8x8 cell plot. I think I'd rather go for a building that isn't exactly centered next time, so as to break up the unnatural-looking symmetry of it, but my initial plan of providing 1960s-70s 'filler' buildings is well suited for large plot sizes IMO.

Also, I'm experimenting around with different bump and spec settings for my roofs. I want them to look at least as good as some of the patched-in stock buildings, but with a building this big there's only so much you can do on a 512x512 texture - for the tower in the first pic I've actually gone to 1024 width to provide for a max square of non-tiling texture. Anyway, it's quite possible to get some nice puddles going on rooftops, but the partial specularity means there's the usual artifacting going on. I've also toned the heightmap on these roofs wayyy down since too much bumps equals ugliness (not very visible in this still pic though).

So, yet another Chase Manhattan-lookalike project  I hope to be able to work on different modernist styles into the new year though.

 

Tell me what you think!

  Edited December 8, 2015 by Koesj  

[Matthias King 348]

I hope to see you release some new buildings. The ones you've shown look good. Not everything should be a landmark. Part of the personality of a city is in its utilitarian office towers and things like that.

Personally, I'd like to see more international, modern, and post-modern offices on the workshop, especially if the file size is small like your other two buildings (which are shockingly small for how amazing they look.)

I'm looking forward to seeing some of these.

[Koesj 659]

I think I'll be releasing this thing soon, the lod looks okay and I've managed to churn out a respectable-looking top-up and roof on the main model:

 

The only thing I'm kind of in doubt about is my really sloppy illumination map, but OTOH leaving it in its current difference clouds-state might be a great easter egg:

 

So it's off to fiddling around with props for me! 

[Koesj 659]

Righto, I've set the asset as hidden on the workshop for the moment, but y'all can still download it with the link right? Because if so, here it is: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=573263812

Please let me know how you like it and if anything's obviously wrong with it  

 

e: Blaahh Steam is being unhelpful with resetting the asset to public every time I do a tiny change, so I guess I'll just release it anyway.

[Judazzz 1,936]

Looks really nice, C:SL can most definitely use more of this type of 'filler' buildings (growable or not)!
One point of (constructive) critique: I think a grey/neutral window color would fit the style of this building better than the current turquoise-ish color - but that's just me.

[merc187 46]

@Koesj nice work!  Would you mind sharing how you UV unwrapped your windows so they look more random - only off of your single diffuse section of windows?  Whenver I try that I always get a very generic repetitive and very unnatural and horrible look to my windows.  Here's an example that I'd like to fix soon.   Looks soooooo bad.  Thanks for any tips on how you are doing your strips of windows to arrange the _I map! 

 

[Koesj 659]

@Judazzz I wanted to add some pizzazz to my first decent-looking partial specularity building so maybe I went a bit overboard 

@merc187 the trick was to take vertical tiling windows that I prepared beforehand, and randomly assign them to the 190 window polygons on my model. Here are the texture maps:

: 

In other words: the window polys are all 32 meters/512 pixels tall and they overlap across 32 randomly selected 'starting positions' on my UV map (I made an excel sheet) like this:

 

 

 

 

[Feindbold 1,190]

Looks very nice, I woulnd´t recommend to set buildings on private for longer than a few hours though. The system is totaly broken and will publish your building on side 2 or 3 if you wait too long and than set it to public.

[homeslicee 0]

This is the 3d model I was talking about on steam, nothing special, but its some of the work already done

[Koesj 659]

Hey man, the model is a start, but right now it's probably best suited as a LOD!

So take a look at how I set up the window textures for Banhammer Bank. With those big slabs of walls you've got in your model right there, texture resolution would unfortunately be really low. In my last two models however, I've worked with 2m wide/32m high 'strips' that can easily tile across a 512p diffuse map vertically. More tris all with overlapping textures = more detail.

But don't believe everything I say just yet, there are people here who know tons more. Did you check out the resource thread stickied at the top of this forum? There's bound to be good uv-ing advice in there

[Koesj 659]

I had a very useful discussion with @Turjan on one of my assets' steam pages, and contrary to what we thought at the beginning - a LOD toggling in a weird way - it just seems that I'm not very familiar with render to texture 

So it's off to re-doing the LOD (and maybe some more stuff) on my 1k de la Gauchetière asset! And what better way to delve deeper into Max than trying to do some quick and dirty tests?

Unfortunately those two filler buildings aren't release-worthy (the one on the left is missing a wall XD), but as of now I'm way further in understanding how some of this stuff - pivot points, rendering, scripts in Max - works haha. 

[Matthias King 348]

I look forward to seeing what you come up with once you feel like you're ready. I really like your other buildings.

[Turjan 1,048]

It's good that you take it this way. Your file size is amazingly small for a building of that size, so I guess there's some wiggle room for updated LOD textures.

[Mr_Maison 2,426]

Wow, I totally missed the Banhammer building when it was published. Very nice. Thanks

[Koesj 659]

Good to know people are interested in even my boringest stuff 

Also, a sneak peek of lods of stuff that's to come:

The one in the back is my new 640 tris 512x512 LOD - going from 3.8MB to a 4.4MB asset size. Still, on a 10x10c footprint... who cares???

Having a problem with the spec map not lining up on different parts of the geometry though. Somehow I managed to turn on a smoothing group when I wasn't supposed to, and even with removing all that, resetting xform, resetting normals, etc. there's nasty artifacting left  

e: updated the asset anyway since A. I don't know what the hell's going on with those couple of tris and B. I desperately need to work on my workshop uploading skills

 

[Turjan 1,048]

Hey, thanks for updating. It looks much better now in the game.

[boformer 3,169]

20 hours ago, Koesj said:

512x512 LOD

I think that is too large for a LOD texture. 128x128 would be more appropriate.

[Feindbold 1,190]

24 minutes ago, boformer said:

I think that is too large for a LOD texture. 128x128 would be more appropriate.

I disagree,... with these big buildings 128² will be extremely blurry (well depending on the facadescaling on the texture of course, but there is only a certain amount of possible scaling, until you end up having to many triangles). Even on max settings, LODs with 128² are very visible, I guess on medium or low settings its even worse. I think 512² is actually fine in this case, especially considering it is a ploppable.
 

[Koesj 659]

2 hours ago, boformer said:

I think that is too large for a LOD texture. 128x128 would be more appropriate.

Like Feindbold said, with such a big ploppable I couldn't really get around the problem of it looking pretty bad at medium settings if I reduced it more. And 256 just wasn't cutting it either 

Am I wrong in thinking this LOD texture is about as ~relatively~ heavy on the game as a 2x3 building's 128x128 one? I know my texture size is sixteen times bigger, but so is the lot size; or 16 and 2/3rds times even!

 

 

 

[Turjan 1,048]

Just to add some background to the discussion: The old texture looked like this in my game (see left):

This is an original size (only cropped) image, and the building is pretty much the closest of the skyscrapers in this image. Which means that the texture needed some update.

[Koesj 659]

Anyway, I tried to do a Citigroup Center-like bland office tower with Zed's trick of alpha mapping for better speculars:

At 200% Dynamic resolution, looking good!

At native 1080p res and a bit further away, not so good!

I've given the overlapping & alpha'd geometry a pretty low texture resolution - those lines are only 1px wide - and obviously this doesn't look good when zoomed out. It's either back to the drawing board or towards breaking up the entire shell of the building in smaller tris for a higher texture resolution on the same space!