BoldlyBuilding's Assets (Update & Harold Washington Library)

[boldlybuilding 873]

The base is done:

[wallacet 336]

What the heck do you do for a living that you're this good at modeling????

[boldlybuilding 873]

I'm mostly finished now. I just have some "clutter" details and a few other small things to do. I also need to work on the textures some more, like the specular maps. And I need to figure out which ways to flip the normals so they appear correct in-game. The tri count will make you cry, though. Despite my best efforts, it still hit 31,000 tris. It's a few hundred tris more than my 2 World Trade Center model... I can already hear cries of "you need to go back and redo everything in lower poly" and "more normals, make everything flatter!" Don't plan on going back, though. I just want to be finished already. Maybe in the future... Still, it's probably lower-poly than the best Empire State Building currently available on the workshop.

Anyway, here's a rough early test in-game:

[Koesj 659]

Dude, DUDE,

 

 

[Shroomblaze 320]

I like it, I don't have a problem with big tri count stuff, as long as the lod is small. I have a problem with those people who upload a 22k tri building and think its acceptable to upload that same model as a lod. I like the light placement on top of the building, great work! I also know very well what it feels like to just want a project to be done and over with already. I'm in that current position right now with this Brooklyn Bridge but I'm running into issues. Looking forward to your next project.

[Darf 1,439]

Looks great! Especially the texturework. My only gripe is the borderwindows, they are bit to reddish. Not sure if it's the lut.

[Judazzz 1,936]

My god that is just majestic!
Unfortunately it's way too big to scale with the stuff in my city, assuming it's scale 1:1 (so I'll have to resort to drooling over other players' screenshots), but that thing is just something else... Stunning!

[boldlybuilding 873]

EDIT about roof tiles:

I actually suspect now it's because I rotated some of the roof tiles to add variation. But maybe the game can't even handle that.

EDIT 2 about overall normals:

I wonder now if the way the normals appear has more to do with what direction the parts are on the texture and less what way the channels are.

What if an object that's placed upside-down on the texture, or sideways, will have its normals looking incorrect, even if the normal map has been "fixed"? In which case, I'd have to go back and redo stuff...

I have a love-hate relationship with this game right now.

UGH

The normal maps just won't work right at all, no matter what I do.

Does appear right with the original normals.

Flip the red channel = Horizontally the light is right, but vertically it isn't.

Flip the green channel and red channel = Don't know what it's doing, but it's not right.

Invert everything = even worse somehow.

I don't get it. It's like this game is incapable of handling normals in any way that approaches... normal.

And then there's this:

I'm using a tiled system on the roof. That is, I have a square set aside on the texture for roof tiles. I make a big surface made of these squares, then cut it as needed for the model.

Problem is, the normals don't appear on every square, only ones here and there....

[boldlybuilding 873]

To see how the direction of UVs/objects on a UV map affects the appearance of its normals in-game, I took one of the parts from the ESB and made 4 versions; one rotated the right-side-up, one upside-down, and two on their side facing left and right. These were all placed on one UV map, rotated those ways, and the normal baked in X-normal. I have no changed any of the channels, it's the original X-normal map:

The results are... confusing.

The one on the left is upright on the texture. That seems to be shaded correctly despite no flipping or inverting anything.

The one second-to-left is upside-down on the texture, but also appears correctly-shaded.

The two on the right, however, are sideways on the texture, and they may or may not also be correctly-shaded, their normals are barely appearing at all.

I don't know what to make of it.

[Koesj 659]

I'm running into tons of trouble with uv-overlapping normal maps on symmetry-modified geometry myself, so I kinda feel what you mean. And even then, when everything has its own, discrete uvspace, stuff still comes out borked.

Sometimes I just think C:S' importer messes up the tangent space  

[boldlybuilding 873]

Even worse, and similar to the roof tile, look at this...

The row of stonework in green has its normals working.

The normals for the stonework in red are not working, no matter the sun direction. I don't think they were working when the channels on the normal were flipped, either.

Also, thinking back, for the alternate roof tiles, I did not rotate their UVS, just the model squares themselves.

Likewise, I didn't change the UVs for these pieces of stone, either. The model faces are just rotated in different directions. And for some reason that's making the normals not work?

I have no frigging clue what's going on. I've noticed that my WTC has a similar problem. Some normals just don't work. Like part 6's plaza normals don't work at all, even though it has them on the texture. At least I think so. But for some reason... just doesn't work.

This game annoys me so much.

Me thinks instead of snow and a bunch of other features that problem won't be useful, they should try sorting out any issues the importer might have, or make things, you know, work in a way that's not confusing. But maybe it's just the engine that's weird, or I'm over-reacting and I'm just doing something wrong that I haven't come across in 8 years of modeling...

[Koesj 659]

What I think worked for me was copying the geometry at the subobject level and rotating it from there (in Max). Unity should have _no_ problems with rotated, mirrored, or whatevered normal maps: shadows and highlights should always be calculated on a per-triangle basis IIRC.

Hence my feeling that there's something funny going on on either the exporting or importing side of things.

 

 

[Avanya 2,605]

42 minutes ago, boldlybuilding said:

To see how the direction of UVs/objects on a UV map affects the appearance of its normals in-game, I took one of the parts from the ESB and made 4 versions; one rotated the right-side-up, one upside-down, and two on their side facing left and right. These were all placed on one UV map, rotated those ways, and the normal baked in X-normal. I have no changed any of the channels, it's the original X-normal map:

The results are... confusing.

The one on the left is upright on the texture. That seems to be shaded correctly despite no flipping or inverting anything.

The one second-to-left is upside-down on the texture, but also appears correctly-shaded.

The two on the right, however, are sideways on the texture, and they may or may not also be correctly-shaded, their normals are barely appearing at all.

I don't know what to make of it.

I think what matters is the colors on the normal map. The first to both have red on the right side and blue on the other. The two that don't work have blue and purple. If you take the normal from the first one and rotate, I think they should all shade the same.

[boldlybuilding 873]

I'm going to try something radical and annoying:

I'm going to redo the UV map - or try to - so that if a surface is vertical on the model, it'll be vertical on the UV map, and right-side-up if possible, though that bit may not matter. Not sure about horizontal surfaces.

[Shroomblaze 320]

I've had problems with normal maps as well, the game is not very good at handling them. Like sometimes I get this fragmented, pixelated look. You know what come to think of it too I had the same problem as you possibly. before I had a vertical 1024x2048 map with normal. It was causing me so many problems, when I flipped my textures to a horizontal 2048x1024 my normal problem greatly went away. 

[boldlybuilding 873]

UPDATE:

The rearranging worked!

Pretty much all of the problem areas with the normals not working were because their UVs were on their sides. Instead, I rearranged everything so if a surface is vertical in 3D, it's vertical on the UV map, too. That solved the problem.

I wish people had mentioned this before, unless even the devs don't know that. It'd be good if someone made a nice, long ,but to the point checklist of every single consideration one needs to make when making assets for the game, so things like this don't get lost in the mix. As it is, what you need to do is spread all over the place in long tutorials with very few pieces of useful information in list form.

Anyway, for anybody else making assets, just take this into consideration when making your UVs.

Also, the normals seem good, but it still looks odd on one side or the other no matter which way I flip the red channel, depending on the sun angle.

[Shroomblaze 320]

1 hour ago, boldlybuilding said:

It'd be good if someone made a nice, long ,but to the point checklist of every single consideration one needs to make when making assets for the game, so things like this don't get lost in the mix. As it is, what you need to do is spread all over the place in long tutorials with very few pieces of useful information in list form.

I did start this guide and asked other modders to contribute. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=500036497

I've added you as contributor if you want to accept, you can edit the guide and add in photos. Would be great if you made an explanation for the normals thing. Be sure to write it without using I or my if you choose to contribute.

[GC_Vos 714]

The building looks really stunning! I'm surprised you've already nearly finished it!

The normals in this game still totally confuse me, to where I tend to just not use them. There's some assets where I did generate normals, and it ended up looking okay, but I think it took me 20 reimports before it did. I feel there's so many things you have to avoid in order to get them to look right, i.e. not flip them, not rotate them etc. It's a shame normals I could otherwise use in Unity or UE4 without problems require a lot of extra tweaking in CSL.

[Koesj 659]

Yeah that was a fun tip. Download unity 5, throw your .fbx in the assets folder, add the textures (to the model as well), and watch how the raw engine handles all that stuff fine. JFC Colossal Order.

[boldlybuilding 873]

9 minutes ago, Koesj said:

Yeah that was a fun tip. Download unity 5, throw your .fbx in the assets folder, add the textures (to the model as well), and watch how the raw engine handles all that stuff fine. JFC Colossal Order.

So the engine itself works fine, it's something CO did? I wonder why it works that way in CSL.

[Koesj 659]

Fess up, AJ! I tried exporting as .obj and reimporting into max - didn't work. In the end, I know the problem is me wanting to use mirrored UVs for normals which show up all wrong in Max as well. But! There are parts on the geometry where I get uniform shadows and highlights across symmetrical geometry/UV shells (z-up vertex normals) in-game, and parts where the vertex normals themselves seem flipped, leading to seams, tears, shadows/highlights facing the wrong way, and misalignment on the specular map even!

[boldlybuilding 873]

On another note, I subbed to the mesh info mod. Don't know why I didn't before, it's neat, and sometimes terrifying, to see the info on other people's models. As you know, it shows tri count, as well as weight, or a measure of the density of tris in a square meter. Here's what mine shows for the rough early test of the Empire State Building:

Note that it shows some of my other buildings; Tyson Center, WTC tower 2, my first CSL building (Fortune Cookie Corp), as well as the recent Chrysler Building someone else made. These are ordered from lowest to highest weight, since it seems logical that weight is more important than tri count overall (although it doesn't hurt to have less of the latter).

"The Empire State Building" is my test. 32k tris. It'll be a little higher once finished, but I'm hoping for under 35k. If it goes above that, I'll try to reduce it. There's also another possible thing that might shave off 6k polys, but I don't really want to resort to it just yet. Anyway, the weight isn't too terrifying, although it's up there. It's in the same range as my WTC 2, similar poly count. But the weight is interesting. Despite having so much detail, it's less than the Chrysler Building, which has far fewer 3D details, and weirdly enough, just one below the "best" Empire State Building currently on the workshop. That one's 10k polys less, but is about the same weight. And what's really terrifying is that they used the same model as the LOD.

(Oh and in case you're not familiar with the mod: Left is asset names, 2nd column is steam ID I guess, 3rd column is main tri count, 4th is LOD tri count, 5th is main weight, 6th is LOD weight, and then the texture sizes for main and LOD. Green weight is good/better, yellow is getting iffy, red is bad, of course.)

[merc187 46]

I use that mod every month to check out newest subscribed assets.  It's a real life saver.  There are so many models and assets that - sorry to say - are just dog poop when it comes to the optimization side of it.

 

I really want to see a "mod optimization", well - uh - mod, that can tell you the resource allocation or resource draw from mods.  I have no idea if that would be useful but it would be great to see which ones have a larger impact on performance etc.

 

BTW - Amazing stuff Boldly - following this chain and my jaw dropped seeing the amount of detail and work you put into the textures of that Empire State building.  Despite the tris and all the other (what seems to me, nitpicking) issues with the normal - hats off sir.  Hats off.

[boldlybuilding 873]

I've finished redoing the textures for the new UV map.

The new set includes better colors (I think) and specularity.

With the exception of a couple added texture details so far, everything was made within X-Normal and Quixel. X-Normal for the normals - made from hi-polys - and occlusion on the diffuse, and Quixel for the actual textures, made by applying materials to an ID map. The normals helped to add detail to those textures. In other words, almost no actual photographs are used as textures, everything's created from hi-polys/normals and materials in Quixel.

Here's a ton of screenshots:

[Judazzz 1,936]

Incredible!

[Nevermore2797 112]

Almost there...... 

[boldlybuilding 873]

It's not really fully related to this post, but I was looking for info on the antennas on the Empire State Building and came across an article on it from 1967. At the end of the article was this interesting and slightly haunting little tidbit:

“The world’s most unusual antenna site may not exist much longer. Recently, the Port of New York Authority has been planning the construction of twin 110-story skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan. Independent studies by Alford Manufacturing Co, and Jansky and Bailey have shown that the proposed towers would cause ghosting to some viewers watching some of the TV stations presently on the Empire State Building. Several solutions to the program have been advanced, one being to relocate antennas from Empire State to the new, taller structures (to be known as the World Trade Center).”

(Also interesting because now I'm trying to model the broadcasting arrays for Empire State, but I probably modeled some of those other aforementioned antennas when I made the World Trade Center.)

[wallacet 336]

4 hours ago, boldlybuilding said:

It's not really fully related to this post, but I was looking for info on the antennas on the Empire State Building and came across an article on it from 1967. At the end of the article was this interesting and slightly haunting little tidbit:

“The world’s most unusual antenna site may not exist much longer. Recently, the Port of New York Authority has been planning the construction of twin 110-story skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan. Independent studies by Alford Manufacturing Co, and Jansky and Bailey have shown that the proposed towers would cause ghosting to some viewers watching some of the TV stations presently on the Empire State Building. Several solutions to the program have been advanced, one being to relocate antennas from Empire State to the new, taller structures (to be known as the World Trade Center).”

(Also interesting because now I'm trying to model the broadcasting arrays for Empire State, but I probably modeled some of those other aforementioned antennas when I made the World Trade Center.)

That's actually really interesting.

[boldlybuilding 873]

NEW PROBLEM with normals.

Well, an old one, but with this game they're never fully solved.

For objects that had their normals baked in one direction, they only work when facing that original direction, it seems. No surprise for objects turned sideways. But take these two walls above. The light's approaching from the camera angle. The left side is displaying correctly under all conditions. That was the angle they were baked at. The right side is not displaying correctly, no matter the angle. Those objects were rotated 90 degrees from their original. Same for their other side. Mirrored parts are not affected, but rotated parts are, no matter how they're mirrored.

Why, and how can this be fixed?

I remember AJ3D saying earlier that they knew how to get normals working at any angle. Would that help here?

Also, this thing is fast approaching 38,000 tris as I apply the last details. I may need to resort to making the window rows and crowns entirely 2D, which would save around 5k tris maybe. But I don't want to do that unless normals are working correctly.

[naskko176 0]

Wow.....it's impressive, really nice !