Koesj's Building Woes: Dingbats!

[Koesj 659]

Awesome to hear!

Now, before I call it a day, let's check out my illumination map progress...

It's hella basic, but it works. 

I've taken 6 out of my 8 strips of windows (four medium height and four tall ones in total) and applied either a 'main' 250x3 RGB or 'alt' 130x3 RGB variable light intensity. This way there's a good chance 0 to 3/7ths of my facade light up since I applied a random number to every strip of windows, and on a 1, 2, or 3 they'd get offset from the non-illuminated parts of the texture downwards, by multiples of 64px. Should provide for a nice mix...

And here it is in its fully-lit glory. Every single windowpane had a 50-50 chance of having its UV flipped as well, and I ultimately tiled them across the 8x32px horizontal strips at random; 0-2x32px for the six window-wide strips, 0-3x32px for the five window ones . The result? Very little repetition.

Plus, the added 'benefit' (if you will) in that my facade is now broken up because of the tangent normals not connecting quite well from medium to far distance or something. Not quite sure what's going on, but as you can see in the above pic it's kinda blocky. 

I consider this to be a boon though! Both the geometry and the textures on this asset are very, very clean, and this way the building shows the kind of imperfections that you'd get in real life all the times. No perfectly straight angles on windowpane installation for example! Beforehand I was planning on testing out some smoothing group shenanigans to get the windows to be kinda wavy from close-by as well, but I think the current effect is just about enough.

Does anyone know if the latter effect can be done anyway? My windows aren't alone on their texture strips so I gather the other parts of the diffuse would be smoothed out as well?

Pah, off to bed and into 'vacation'. Which isn't, when you work in education  

e: Nevermind on the smoothing groups, of course they mess up my shading, how could I've forgotten such a simple thing  

[Koesj 659]

Since I enjoy semi-liveblogging my progress and hope that people'll find checking out my workflow useful, here's a small update for youse.

First up, I've added a decent amount of grit/grime/dust/jank/whatever to the shaft facade elements. It's not entirely what I had hoped from up close wrt the paneling (windows seem to be fine), but at medium distance it breaks up the monotony of the building:

 

I've also been testing out some plaza-like effects within the building's 8x8 footprint using only vanilla prop elements. You know what really helps here? An awesome map theme like Vanilla Rock by @GC_Vos 

Second to last, and definitely least-liked, I'm fast running out of texture space. Either I dispense with a lot of roof detailing I had planned, or pick up the slack by applying all sorts of 3rd party props:

(Free space = green)

 

Oh and I had to un-flip those window UVs. Weird stuff will happen with spec mapped geometry when you're flipping it in tangent space.

[boformer 3,169]

The roof is symmetric, so you would only need one quarter of the texture.

[Koesj 659]

That's what I was thinking as well, but I'd rather apply a number of asymmetrical macro elements at the cost of micro details than get a really 'flat' roof. There's also my impression that only a relatively small slice of normal mapping techniques seem to work well if you rotate geometry on a C:S asset. Right now I'm leaning towards doing a really great full normal map on the roof(s) instead of a quarter-sized simple one with a dozen or so small custom hvac thingies and such added.  

[Avanya 2,605]

I enjoy having a peak at your work process. Always interesting to see how others do it and I figure I might pick up a trick or two.

[Koesj 659]

Hah, that's what I wanted to hear 

Here's what I mean by macro elements on the roofs btw:

Relatively big color differences so I can mess around with rusted/wet/dirty areas (this is not the final texture haha).

 

[Ocram's Razr 964]

4 hours ago, Koesj said:

Hah, that's what I wanted to hear 

Here's what I mean by macro elements on the roofs btw:

Relatively big color differences so I can mess around with rusted/wet/dirty areas (this is not the final texture haha).

 

You might be able to use half the texture space and use it twice and have an imperceptibly diminished quality. I also recommend using 3rd-Party props. My medium density buildings will use 3rd party props. Feinbold made good chimneys.

[Koesj 659]

Turns out I'm probably good on texturespace even with the fully unwrapped roof(s). Who said you needed pixels when geometry can provide for lots of detail as well?!

 

 

I'm already annoyed by the drawdistance on those props so I'll wait and see how deep I want to take it with 'em. 

 

 

[wallacet 336]

14 minutes ago, Koesj said:

Turns out I'm probably good on texturespace even with the fully unwrapped roof(s). Who said you needed pixels when geometry can provide for lots of detail as well?!

 

 

I'm already annoyed by the drawdistance on those props so I'll wait and see how deep I want to take it with 'em. 

 

 

Oh roof junk, my old friend....how I've missed you

[Koesj 659]

And I've made it way too late again.

95% done though. I wonder if it's worth putting some more time into a roof re-texture. Anyway, LOD's done, only building properties (including RICO!) and promotional stuff are left to be finished. Have some teaser pics; golden hour!

 

Mah LOD!! 

There are times when it looks better than the main asset itself at medium distance. The partial spec tends to lead to artifacting when looked at in the shade while the LOD is cleaner haha.

 

e: Oh, umm, stats! Size is 8x8, with 2814 tris // 1024x512 [d s n a i] on the main, 126 tris // 256x256 [d s i] on the LOD (Mesh Info says weights are 11.47 and .52, almost the same as Chirpigroup and similar to some of @Cool_Z lighter assets).

The asset folder tells me it's 2.3 MB in size?! That's around what it'll be on the Workshop too, right? Nice!

[Darf 1,439]

Looks a lot better than Gula's latest asset and he uses a 2k map for the whole thing.

[Avanya 2,605]

Looks great!   And sounds awesome if you get it to work with RICO  

[Koesj 659]

13 minutes ago, Avanya said:

Looks great!   And sounds awesome if you get it to work with RICO  

All my other assets are already tried and tested for RICO 

I'm thinking of releasing an update in one go.

[Koesj 659]

As far as RICO goes, y'all are good to at least download my new, enabled asset  

I'll do the rest soon(ish)!

 

e: might as well show it in action

[Avanya 2,605]

Nice! Can't wait to try it out  

[Judazzz 1,936]

Stunning! Like a super model: gorgeous to look at and very light-weight  

[Koesj 659]

Hahaha that's not what I was thinking when building this porker of a midrise 

e: Someone on Reddit felt the need to correct me, of course it's not a midrise, this isn't in any way in the eye of the beholder, or relative, the shorter pencil needs to go in the other cup... 

[Judazzz 1,936]

Maybe it's one of these? 

[Ryno917 102]

Great stuff! I, too, love reading your 'thinking out loud' stuff. Great insight!

[Simulanten 681]

Great stuff. Makes me wanting to restart my work on Boston again...

[Koesj 659]

Lemme share some stuff now that this sucker's out and about:

First off my final diffuse. I'm pretty happy with how I was able to do some macro-level elements on the roofs! The parts where the AO overlaps on top of the base and entrance mullions (grey pane with the door cutouts) was a pretty sweet effect as well. Gots to keep searching for the kinds of tricks that add a little bit more depth to a flat texture. BTW, while the roof is fully mapped out, the roof and helipad walls are all overlapping across the small area in the middle bottom. I do know how to use my scarce mapspace efficiently  

The spec map is really straightforward: 2 levels of high brightness for the facade glass, small amounts for the curtain wall elements and the roofs, and a somewhat brighter strip of reflection for the building's top rim.

Normals! I handpainted all the straight elements. Normally I use AwesomeBump but with the pixelart preciseness I was using here there could be no substitute for placing those bumps just right. The roofs are all straight up copies of the underlying layers on the diffuse, all desaturated and leveled out until they were barely noticeable on my heightmap.

I already showed it at an earlier stage upthread, but a halfway decent _i map doesn't need to be any more complicated than this. A simple vertical gradient up and down from 192 for two different window colors with some random blinds in front, and an ovoid gradient on the entrance because damn was I ever inspirationless haha.

As for the thing that makes it all work... F yeah, alphas! Every single window quad is overlaid by these curtain wall/mullion maps which let the bumps pop out, avoid a lot of spec map issues wrt color and non-whiteness, and produce tons of anti aliasing 

With this _a map I learned something new: Zed recommended a gray instead of a black transparency fill in this thread, but I turned it around and did a black transparency on gray opacity trick with my helipad netting. It works! 

Now that I look at his thread I suddenly realise that I never even tried to fill my transparant areas with gray instead of black  Maybe that'll fix the jaggies on the mipmapping? Stupid how I never thought of applying this method before!

e: no wait, after trying it out I remember what's wrong with it: colors only start showing up from close-by when you use this trick on overlapping alphas.

But I digress, I hope some of you at least had some fun with checking out the way I build stuff. If there are any egregious problems with my approach, or hints and tips to dole out, let me know!

[Ocram's Razr 964]

I will try to follow your process for my own projects.

[Koesj 659]

Cool, a lot of my tricks come straight out of other Simtroppers' playbook so don't forget to check the stickied thread as well!

Doing a slight retexture in my spare time on the last asset I hadn't yet retouched (new one on the left):

Now before all y'all start yelling "the old one is better!!" do note that this is: A. a work in progress, but also B. based on color samplings from pictures of the actual building and desaturated and balanced against the base game's LUT.

Basically the original version's blues aren't green enough, and a slight 2~5 percent gold colorization was needed on both the pillars and the stone paneling. I've also tweaked the service floor to have grating, and now it's flanked by grayscale windows. I *think* this is how it works on the irl 2 Prudential Plaza, but a Chitowner is welcome to go check it out for me.

Right now I'm looking at what's possible with the normal map plus those godawful textures on the top balconies (might have to switch this over to geometry ) There's also a basic _i map coming since it should be easy to add some overlapping strips in 3ds Max! Remember, this model started out in SketchUp 

 

[GC_Vos 714]

Left one does look better!

So wait, you are stacking alphamapped polygons on polygons so you have the glass sheets separated? Does this not cost you way more triangles (I would presume it's worth it)?

[Koesj 659]

It's basically what @Cool_Z does here. Partial spec colored windows produce nasty artifacts when they're not separate from, well, pretty much everything else. Especially the normal mapped structural curtain wall elements that're a big feature of modern towers give me trouble if they're on the same geometry as the windows (I'm running into some issues with 2 Pru as well).

On 1330 POB the vertical strips of alpha'd elements add 284 tris, so not too bad. The windows for the nightlight tiling are 1280 though, a bit more problematic.

e: models end up looking like this:

[Darf 1,439]

Wouldn't you save a $%&^! ton of verts/faces by tiling your texture vertically? Why do you split every floor? Was looking at your/CoolZ method for doing something like a tower of one57, but can't get my head around the curved surfaces.

[Koesj 659]

I split my floors so I get this:

If you know of a better way to do nightlights, please do share! I don't like having to spend >1000 tris on windowpanes either.

I do tile where possible of course:

 

Also, everything nice I ever said about SketchUp? Disregard. I'm finding all kinds of stupid problems with my older creations, even on my 2 Pru model where I went hog-wild with components  

[Avanya 2,605]

I totally prefer the new one over the old. The colors come out much better  

[boldlybuilding 873]

I think I'm gonna have to rethink the way I'm doing Willis Tower. Using that trick with the alpha'd facades and separate window glass behind, I could use far less space on my texture while also having higher-res facade detailing and more variation in the windows and lighting, and it'll look cleaner!

Yes, I'm going to try that...

[Koesj 659]

2 minutes ago, boldlybuilding said:

I think I'm gonna have to rethink the way I'm doing Willis Tower. Using that trick with the alpha'd facades and separate window glass behind, I could use far less space on my texture while also having higher-res facade detailing and more variation in the windows and lighting, and it'll look cleaner!

Yes, I'm going to try that...

Your assets are a big inspiration, and to me it's clear your techniques are often more advanced than mine, so I'm taking this as a huge compliment!