Aarsgevogelte BAT's

[cmdp123789 710]

It looks absolutely astonishing! I love it...!

[Bombardiere 591]

I downloaded this building to better see how it looks in the game. In my opinion it is badly overscaled. Buildings by Dutch modellers tend to be big and I don't have city using those buildings, but I plopped this in my Paris city. In my opinion Xannepan's w2w should be guideline and your building does not fit in to this scene.

Now that I can look the building closer, I think that it has a squashed look. Have you adjusted the height 133 % to overcome flatness which isometric viewpoint the render causes? The window sizes look to be bit off. For example the ones in the light well look to be two times bigger than windows on Xannepan's buildings. The only ones which look natural to me are the ones on the back. The side which you have the threes.

 

[Aarsgevogelte 1,235]

2 hours ago, Bombardiere said:

I downloaded this building to better see how it looks in the game. In my opinion it is badly overscaled. Buildings by Dutch modellers tend to be big and I don't have city using those buildings, but I plopped this in my Paris city. In my opinion Xannepan's w2w should be guideline and your building does not fit in to this scene.

Now that I can look the building closer, I think that it has a squashed look. Have you adjusted the height 133 % to overcome flatness which isometric viewpoint the render causes? The window sizes look to be bit off. For example the ones in the light well look to be two times bigger than windows on Xannepan's buildings. The only ones which look natural to me are the ones on the back. The side which you have the threes.

 

Well, I'm sorry for the problems you experience. The scaling might be a bit off. Though, in real life, the building is actually quite big. Also, I want it to be a w2w building, so I need to make some concessions when it comes to size. The windows on the inside are the exact same windows as on the right side of the building.

[Harry's Place 918]

It looks ok for me, i also have some polish buildings that are at the same scale as this one so it fits ok.

[cmdp123789 710]

The thing is, its all a matter of "objectives" when it comes to this building. See, the building is indeed overscaled now that we have a way to compare it ingame with some other lots, but at the same time, we should ask the author first if this was to be a true recreation or not. If it was a true one, the building should fit in a 1.5 - 2 x 3.5 - 4 lot.. which means that right now is off by 2 tiles on the side, and by a tile in the front.

Height wise, I don't know, I saw different pictures and the hotel seems to be very big compared to the buildings around, so I might say that it looks a little too tall, but it wont make too much of a difference.

My advice: leave it as it is. We have a great batter here, doing some incredible buildings. We can further discuss this and agree or not on the size, but at the end of the day, we have new content, and it looks good.

If you are interested, maybe a re-scaled version could be uploaded which fits the real life building's dimensions, or if you don't feel like it, just don't do it and move on with your next project. Whatever you choose, I personally wanna thank you for your work.. but yeah.. think about the scale, might help clear some confusions in the future. 

[Aarsgevogelte 1,235]

13 hours ago, cmdp123789 said:

The thing is, its all a matter of "objectives" when it comes to this building. See, the building is indeed overscaled now that we have a way to compare it ingame with some other lots, but at the same time, we should ask the author first if this was to be a true recreation or not. If it was a true one, the building should fit in a 1.5 - 2 x 3.5 - 4 lot.. which means that right now is off by 2 tiles on the side, and by a tile in the front.

Height wise, I don't know, I saw different pictures and the hotel seems to be very big compared to the buildings around, so I might say that it looks a little too tall, but it wont make too much of a difference.

My advice: leave it as it is. We have a great batter here, doing some incredible buildings. We can further discuss this and agree or not on the size, but at the end of the day, we have new content, and it looks good.

If you are interested, maybe a re-scaled version could be uploaded which fits the real life building's dimensions, or if you don't feel like it, just don't do it and move on with your next project. Whatever you choose, I personally wanna thank you for your work.. but yeah.. think about the scale, might help clear some confusions in the future. 

Thank you for your kind words. The thing is, 3ds max was becoming very slow near the end, so I honestly don't feel like going back to that project. It is very tedious. Also, it is indeed not a completely accurate representation. Anyway, I'm still learning.

[cmdp123789 710]

Exactly my point.. just make sure next time you let people know in advance your intentions, or ask about scaling.. I don't know, to me in this particular case makes no difference, looks good - I download!

[FrankU 354]

Your work is outstanding! Thanks a lot.

[Bombardiere 591]

The scale is a big issue in SC4. The Maxis itself has not been constant with it. A tile is nominally 16 x 16 metres and even though not all buildings follow this, I use this as a base line. Although my buildings are not good examples as I tend to small models.

 

This hotel is big, but not that big. I used Google earth and my very rough estimation is that is 30 x 60 meters. So about 2 x 4 tiles.

I used Cogeo's Model Tweaker program and took away one third from length and width. However I let the height to be what it is, so it would compensate the SC4 render's squashing effect.

 

This is only a personal opinion, but now the size is more suitable in SC4 environment. Especially the windows have now right proportions and look more natural to my eye. However, I admit that these are Paris building. I don't have a Dutch city to compare with Dutch buildings. In my opinion many user made Dutch models are big, so may be your building does fit better there. Then again Xannepan's Paris buildings are not smallest in the SC4 scale, so I think those are good target for an Euro model.

 

Off course, doing that has destroyed your beautiful building.   

 

I understand that you may not want to redo this. Honestly, I would not do it myself either. I think it is best to learn and move on to new project.  You clearly are a very capable 3D Modeller, much better than I am.  Therefore I want to encourage you, not discourage. 

 

By the way, the flagpole. An idea for possible future project. May be you could model the flag, such Amsterdam or Dutch flag. as a prop. If the prop is top of the building and above the building LOD, then I don't think it would conflict with the building LOD. This way people could choose which flag to use and remove it if they do not like it.

 

Cheers.

 

 

[Bipin 3,402]

While I don't use these sorts of buildings too often, thanks for revitalizing the European W2W style of BATs; it's a group that has not received as much attention as it deserves.

[Aarsgevogelte 1,235]

 

I created this building. I was absent for a while. It's just that sometimes I feel like creating a building and sometimes I don't. Anyway, what do you think of this building? Is the scale acceptable or is it too big? The colors also seem a little 'cold' to me, but only in comparison with other buildings from the ST Exchange. I still have to create the night renders. By the way, the building is based on a building from Amsterdam that sadly doesn't exist anymore.

 

 

 

[_Michael 2,681]

Wow really nice. I think the scale is good but I'm not sure about the colours. Look slightly odd to me. 

[Odainsaker 2,134]

These are all beautiful buildings.

The latest I think does look overscaled in comparison to its surroundings.  Consider how the building on the left side has 6-7 stories yet is much shorter than your 5-story building, while on the right side, a 6-story building is barely half as tall as your 5-story building.  For many of the surrounding BATs, several too with grand windows or piano nobile, floor-to-floor heights look roughly about 1.5x the height of my cursor hovering over the image, but yours are distinctly almost 2.5x my cursor height.  You can also use cornices and façade moldings from each story and see how they align...while each building can be unique, often there are commonalities and harmonies between buildings of similar style, scale, era, standards, and construction type.  It's actually pretty cool both in real life and in BAT neighborhoods when these horizontal elements do align.

As an alternate comparison, here is how it might look with your building reduced in scale to 75%:

As it didn't fill the tile at the reduced size and stretching the walls to fill the wall-to-wall gaps would be too extreme here, I had to add a few bays.  Another option that doesn't alter too much of your building would have been to just make another, narrow building that could have filled the gap.  I also brought the building forwards on its lot so that the wall planes of the façades align with the façade wall planes of its neighbors, maintaining the uniform wall-to-wall discipline that all these buildings naturally have as part of their style.  Over time, many wall-to-wall BAT creators have adopted an informal standard of a 1.6 meter setback from the street-facing tile edge for their façade walls.  This is a setback of 2 paver squares in a Maxis pavement base texture in the Lot Editor.  By adopting the same informal standard, your building will very easily fit right into the already established wall-to-wall environments of most wall-to-wall BATs.  For those interested, this streetscaping element is often called a "build-to line" rather than a "setback," as setback requires something be pushed back to make uniform front space, whereas "built-to" requires it to be brought forward to maintain a uniform street wall across properties.  Suburban houses with front yards often have legally defined setback lines, while dense urban buildings often instead have legally defined build-to lines.

The color is strange.  Nothing wrong with cool colors and blue buildings, but yours with its total blue shift almost had me wondering if the render was somehow wrong.  Somewhere Jasoncw has a good tutorial or post explaining how SimCity's colors tend towards the warm side, with sampled colors read of as white actually having a tinge of pink (arrg, I can't find this tutorial or many other things on Simtropolis any longer!).

I hope this helps, especially as I love this type of architectural style and can't wait to see this BAT in my cities.

[MushyMushy 3,617]

I think it looks very good! It represents a nice style that doesn't have a particularly large representation in the game.

I do agree with what Odainsaker said regarding the scale and all of that. Right now it looks a bit overscaled.

[T Wrecks 10,209]

When Odainsaker has posted before you, you know the job is done. So I'll limit myself to seconding his post and welcoming you back, Aarsgevogelte! It's good to see this thread has only been inactive, but isn't dead.

[JP Schriefer 5,590]

Good news you're back

I also agree with Odainsaker.

[Aarsgevogelte 1,235]

On 11/11/2016 at 7:29 AM, Odainsaker said:

These are all beautiful buildings.

The latest I think does look overscaled in comparison to its surroundings.  Consider how the building on the left side has 6-7 stories yet is much shorter than your 5-story building, while on the right side, a 6-story building is barely half as tall as your 5-story building.  For many of the surrounding BATs, several too with grand windows or piano nobile, floor-to-floor heights look roughly about 1.5x the height of my cursor hovering over the image, but yours are distinctly almost 2.5x my cursor height.  You can also use cornices and façade moldings from each story and see how they align...while each building can be unique, often there are commonalities and harmonies between buildings of similar style, scale, era, standards, and construction type.  It's actually pretty cool both in real life and in BAT neighborhoods when these horizontal elements do align.

As an alternate comparison, here is how it might look with your building reduced in scale to 75%:

As it didn't fill the tile at the reduced size and stretching the walls to fill the wall-to-wall gaps would be too extreme here, I had to add a few bays.  Another option that doesn't alter too much of your building would have been to just make another, narrow building that could have filled the gap.  I also brought the building forwards on its lot so that the wall planes of the façades align with the façade wall planes of its neighbors, maintaining the uniform wall-to-wall discipline that all these buildings naturally have as part of their style.  Over time, many wall-to-wall BAT creators have adopted an informal standard of a 1.6 meter setback from the street-facing tile edge for their façade walls.  This is a setback of 2 paver squares in a Maxis pavement base texture in the Lot Editor.  By adopting the same informal standard, your building will very easily fit right into the already established wall-to-wall environments of most wall-to-wall BATs.  For those interested, this streetscaping element is often called a "build-to line" rather than a "setback," as setback requires something be pushed back to make uniform front space, whereas "built-to" requires it to be brought forward to maintain a uniform street wall across properties.  Suburban houses with front yards often have legally defined setback lines, while dense urban buildings often instead have legally defined build-to lines.

The color is strange.  Nothing wrong with cool colors and blue buildings, but yours with its total blue shift almost had me wondering if the render was somehow wrong.  Somewhere Jasoncw has a good tutorial or post explaining how SimCity's colors tend towards the warm side, with sampled colors read of as white actually having a tinge of pink (arrg, I can't find this tutorial or many other things on Simtropolis any longer!).

I hope this helps, especially as I love this type of architectural style and can't wait to see this BAT in my cities.

Thanks man, your feedback is invaluable. You see things I simply didn't even think of.

Anyway, I made some adjustments. Some parts of the building look very excited, lol.

 

[Aarsgevogelte 1,235]

This is another building I'm working on:

[FrankU 354]

Wow, nice neoclassicist generic corner house.

Do you consider stand alone buildings too? Please?

[rathefalcon 395]

Stunning details! A very nice building

[Aarsgevogelte 1,235]

Does anyone know why this happens in zoom 1?

[rsc204 21,808]

Are you sure you don't mean Zoom5? Zoom1 is the tiniest one, with Zoom 5 being the largest. It's sort of important, since Zooms 3 through 5 have dedicated LODs, but 1&2 use a very simple box, since the objects are so small anyway, this is lighter on system resources.

Is the issue only happening in one rotation or several? It could be a rendering error which sometimes happens on export. Try re-exporting your LODs to a brand new file and see if the problem goes away.

[Aarsgevogelte 1,235]

1 hour ago, rsc204 said:

Are you sure you don't mean Zoom5? Zoom1 is the tiniest one, with Zoom 5 being the largest. It's sort of important, since Zooms 3 through 5 have dedicated LODs, but 1&2 use a very simple box, since the objects are so small anyway, this is lighter on system resources.

Is the issue only happening in one rotation or several? It could be a rendering error which sometimes happens on export. Try re-exporting your LODs to a brand new file and see if the problem goes away.

Yes, I mean zoom5, sorry. It happens in every perspective and it keeps happening. Thanks. I'll keep trying I guess.

[rsc204 21,808]

If it keeps happening, I wouldn't just keep repeating the export, something is wrong somewhere. First, if using 3DS Max, make sure that if you are using HD export in 3DS Max, that you are exporting the LODs in SC4 BAT in HD also (or SD if not using HD). If you mismatch them, it can cause problems with the larger textures.

If they are matched, perhaps the LODs are causing the problem, which can happen if they are too tight or simply don't fully cover the model. For simple LODs, use the automated function to re-make them. If you've used custom LODs, you might need to expand by a small amount on each edge to ensure it fully covers your model.

If that doesn't help, the UV mapping might be screwed up, which is an unfixed problem in SC4BAT. Details from this post:

On ‎11‎/‎06‎/‎2013 at 8:30 PM, Jasoncw said:

MY BAT IS DISTORTED

 

 

Open the .SC4Model file in ilive's Reader, and select the offending .S3D file.  Then select the Vert tab.  The v values, which should range between 0 and 1, are off. 

In this example, the v values needed to be doubled.  Due to some kind of export error they were only half the number they should be.  For example, the first v value in the list, 0.085938, needed to be doubled to 0.171876.

[JP Schriefer 5,590]

You can also try to import your model to a new scene using the merge option, but do not import the configurations of the environment of bat4max, you know, only the model and textures with its effects in case you did some.

[Aarsgevogelte 1,235]

Another one:

 

[JP Schriefer 5,590]

Amazing again!
Did you solve the problem you were asking for help?

[Aarsgevogelte 1,235]

22 minutes ago, JP Schriefer said:

Amazing again!
Did you solve the problem you were asking for help?

Yeah thanks, it's on the ST Exchange. 

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Great stuff in the making here! Remember that you'll need in-game pictures, though. Your stuff is really awesome, and it would be foolish not to have it on the STEX, but technically the rules state that you need to provide an in-game picture so that people can see what they are about to download. If you can't take an in-game picture for some reason, I'm sure folks here will help you out. 

[Aarsgevogelte 1,235]

2 hours ago, T Wrecks said:

Great stuff in the making here! Remember that you'll need in-game pictures, though. Your stuff is really awesome, and it would be foolish not to have it on the STEX, but technically the rules state that you need to provide an in-game picture so that people can see what they are about to download. If you can't take an in-game picture for some reason, I'm sure folks here will help you out. 

Do you mean in-game pictures or zoom1/2/3/4/5 pictures?

Anyway, I made an update.