Koesj's Building Woes: Dingbats!

[Koesj 659]

Cool ideas folks! I'll probably add some grunge through PS brushes myself  

I'm also rethinking the uv layout for the roof. I've added some dormers and am not really planning to spend a huge amount of mapspace to the courtyard, so I'd say plenty space for rooftop variety is in order.

[Koesj 659]

Scratch that, textures.com's decals are better than my brush skills  

I tried to add variety to the bricks as well but because of all the overlap going on it gets horribly repetitive from further out 

 

[Darf 1,439]

That already looks a lot better! Now try adjusting your specular map with those little grimy details. I personally convert that part of texture to grayscale with green/turqoise more to white scale for my specular. You can also use 3ds max to add a displacement map and a bit of specular to create some more details (just use a plane and render it). For example, here´s the same texture of textures.com before and after I added some detail and did a rerender in 3ds max:

Ugh, for some reason I get the double image bug as well. :S

[Koesj 659]

Cool, thanks! I'm learning a lot about non- glass and steel materials here 

[Koesj 659]

It's slow going because of my other daily commitments, but I've pretty much finalized the positioning of the larger elements on my roof. I've also added nightlights randomized through 'clever' use of the =RANDBETWEEN function in Excel  

 

[Matthias King 348]

Looking better. I love those bricks.

[boformer 3,169]

I still don't think that this is the right approach. There are so many possible angles and sizes... but I don't have the time and motivation to work on a better solution.

[Koesj 659]

12 hours ago, boformer said:

I still don't think that this is the right approach. There are so many possible angles and sizes... but I don't have the time and motivation to work on a better solution.

Ummm what do you mean?

[boformer 3,169]

30 minutes ago, Koesj said:

Ummm what do you mean?

I'm talking about procedural meshes/buildings with proper collision.

[Koesj 659]

1 hour ago, boformer said:

I'm talking about procedural meshes/buildings with proper collision.

Ahh okay, yeah I'm not that happy about it myself, but I felt like I needed a gimmick to get me on the way with creating a more classic-style building  

In other news, below is what it looks like right now when you're zooming in. I'm pretty happy with the copper roof as-is, and have moved on towards filling up my texturemap for the inner parts of the building. Everything's still a WIP so if you guys've got good ideas, please let me know!

[ethansprang 41]

On 4/5/2016 at 0:24 AM, boformer said:

I still don't think that this is the right approach. There are so many possible angles and sizes... but I don't have the time and motivation to work on a better solution.

There are now quite a few angled buildings in the Workshop.  A few modders have made them in a range of angles, but you're right this means LOTS of buildings, e.g. every 5 degrees! 

To avoid angle-asset-overload I tend to settle on a few angles and just use those, especially a 3-4-5 Right Triangle because it makes the zoning and road snapping look so much better (53.1 and 36.9 degrees).

The other thing that helps variation is to realize that these smaller buildings are invariably corners with only two sides exposed and the others obscured by adjacent w2w buildings. That means you can have more than one "front", and so a ploppable, freely rotatable building can actually satisfy two or three angle variations depending on orientation. It is also possible that smaller angles can be combined to make larger corners, e.g. 45 and 30 combined to a 75 degree corner, but this would require extra attention to roof details.

 

[Matthias King 348]

Looking better all the time. The extra detail work to the roof makes it look a lot nicer as well.

[Prosper Merime 128]

I miss your creativity.

[Koesj 659]

Haha me too, I'll try to get back in the game  

[Koesj 659]

Learning to work with materials I haven't really mastered yet (WIP):

[Matthias King 348]

Oh, that's a nice looking building. Right up my alley. Tall, shiny skyscrapers are nice, but I love these kinds of buildings and I'm always excited when I see something like these hit the workshop. How far along are you on this? It looks pretty good now.

[Darf 1,439]

Looks off to a nice start. I'd extrude the top windows or atleast adjust the texture. I think the white stone also thinks a bit to white. Dirty it up a bit and adjust the color tone to a bit more yellowish. I also think the roof looks a bit weird like that.

[Koesj 659]

13 minutes ago, Darf said:

Looks off to a nice start. I'd extrude the top windows or atleast adjust the texture. I think the white stone also thinks a bit to white. Dirty it up a bit and adjust the color tone to a bit more yellowish. I also think the roof looks a bit weird like that.

Excellent suggestions! I hope I can avoid extruding those windows since it'd add 1200 tris to a 2200 tri model with the way it's set-up now. I've got a 120 pixel high strip tiling across just four quads along the top (the eaves work the same way), which I'm pretty happy with, because the rest of the model is pretty geometry-heavy.

The stone's definitely too white, I've been messing around with it for some time now and I'm learning a lot of quick photoshop skills I didn't have before. The last iteration had some noise, motion blur, and faceting going on plus a darkening and indeed some yellow colorization. Good call on what needs to be done  

Because of all the tiling I'm still experimenting with dirt and grunge; different color bricks seem to work out nicely at least. 

Regarding the roof: I saw just this kind of setup on a real-life example, and I'm liking it a lot as a drainage solution...

[Darf 1,439]

1200 tris!?!? I guess you got them floating infront of the back plane I guess? Than I would try add a shadow to the texturemap and use the normal map. Less specular would also add a bit more depth.

[Koesj 659]

9 minutes ago, Darf said:

1200 tris!?!? I guess you got them floating infront of the back plane I guess? Than I would try add a shadow to the texturemap and use the normal map. Less specular would also add a bit more depth.

70 windows times 10 tris for the extrusions is 700 alone? Then I'd need to build the walls around it as well...

 

e: to clarify, here's what's up. I'm not really willing to extrude those windows at the top is what I'm saying. So like you're suggesting I'm looking for ways to deepen them on the texture map alone:

 

[Avanya 2,605]

Looks very nice! Definately gonna grab that one when it's finished. I'd say it's not too bad with the top windows - a bit of shadows on the texture and a strong normal map should have them looking good.  As for the white I don't think it's too far off. A bit darker would let the bricks show better, but I'd go for a light grey instead of yellowish.

And great to see you modeling again - love your stuff!

[Prosper Merime 128]

10 hours ago, Matthias King said:

I love these kinds of buildings and I'm always excited when I see something like these hit the workshop.

Me too! Such buildings need more. And this building is awesome. 

As already mentioned, too white. Sometimes I make the model darker in the asset editor, not to touch the psd file.

And such a roof, I also saw. Just please more details: ac unit, ducts, roof exit etc.

[Koesj 659]

Thanks for the kind words and the suggestions folks!

Regarding the top windows and the stone texture in general, right now I'm tweaking a ton of values to see how well they work out in-game (with vanilla settings/color). For example: cranking up the normalmap doesn't look particularly good, but to me it's still surprising to see how much depth you can get out of a flat texture

Will keep testing things out until I'm reasonably happy.

[Matthias King 348]

That looks sharp. I can't wait until this is done. I have a historic district to finish and this will fit in nicely.

[Prosper Merime 128]

How much attention to normalmap. Thumbs up!

[Koesj 659]

Speaking of attention to the normal map: I was quite irritated by my entrance because I couldn't hand-draw a nice texture, and consequently didn't work on this little project for a couple of days.

Now I'm trying to do something cool by rendering normals and AO from a quite complicated neoclassical ensemble to a flat texture. It might not work out in the end - I've got the nagging feeling that I'll need to spend some tris to make it look good - but at least it's better than the horrendous solid-color stuff that I had as a placeholder before...

 

[Koesj 659]

Well whaddaya know, it doesn't even look bad.

 

[Matthias King 348]

Wow, that looks fantastic, and those bricks, whatever they are, normals or textures or whatever, look super sharp. And that entrance looks really good too. It turned out very nice.

I seriously need this for my Historic District.

[Darf 1,439]

Looks quite nice, but still doesn't look too old (don't know  if you're going for that). For the white stone I'd pick something like: http://www.textures.com/download/brickfacade0042/72852 or http://www.textures.com/download/brickfacade0054/110131

[Koesj 659]

I wasn't talking about the stone looking nice

But I'm going for a recently refurbished/possibly newly-built asset, so grime like in that second pic is out. It's plaster as well, not marble or anything; gotta figure out how to make it look good.