donoteat makes buildings or something (K4s RELEASED | Pennsylvania Station WIP)

[donoteat 478]

Howdy all,

 

 

Finally got a computer that can run skylines without it looking like a slideshow. Decided to fire up the old Blender and give a go at making assets.

 

 

This is Suburban Station from Philadelphia. (the suburban trains terminated here, the station itself is certainly not suburban)

Six tracks, underground. Direct underground pedestrian connections -- no more tedious under/overpasses. 

 

Still needs a lot of work, might be able to release this week, though.

 

Questions for y'all:

a. How do I get trains to stop in the right place? Right now they stop halfway in the station, and not centered on the platform. The platforms are long enough, I think.

b. Is there a way to display transit lines underground? With 6 tracks to choose from it's really difficult to figure out where I'm putting lines. (I might reduce it to four tracks for ease of use if not.)

 

EDIT: for reference, ~5500 polys and currently a 1024 x 512 texture sheet which will probably increase to 1024 x 1024

[Judazzz 1,936]

Nice!!!
Exactly the kind of building this game is lacking (large, non-skyscraping, pre-WW2 American buildings)!

Oh, and welcome to Simtropolis, obviously! 

[donoteat 478]

Third question: is it possible to update your model in the asset editor, rather than creating a whole new asset? I fixed some normals and want to just re-import, not re-do the whole thing...

[Koesj 659]

Every change in the underlying geometry/texture files necessitates a complete redo of props and such, or at least it has been that way for me 

[donoteat 478]

that's godawful, all right, good to know at least, thanks

[boformer 3,169]

8 hours ago, donoteat said:

 

 

Questions for y'all:

a. How do I get trains to stop in the right place? Right now they stop halfway in the station, and not centered on the platform. The platforms are long enough, I think.

 

You are probably using the default subway station template, right?

[donoteat 478]

I'm using "Station track tunnel" from Extra Train Station Tracks and placing it using "More Network Stuff." The template was the underground train station from the workshop.

 

EDIT: I broke down and violated America code, and read the instructions. Apparently the station segment must be one long segment. Works fine now! (except the center track which I cannot select to add lines to)

[Mr_Maison 2,426]

8 hours ago, Koesj said:

Every change in the underlying geometry/texture files necessitates a complete redo of props and such, or at least it has been that way for me 

There's a button at the bottom in editor (use existing props) that you can click so you don't have to redo the props every time you make edits.

 

donoteat- Welcome...and all the best in your model creation endeavors.

Can we see more angles?.....look kinda huge to me in that first shot but I may be looking at it wrong. Other than the scale question, it looks really good.

[Simulanten 681]

5 hours ago, Mr_Maison said:

Can we see more angles?.....look kinda huge to me in that first shot but I may be looking at it wrong. Other than the scale question, it loo

I agree - it's going to be one of my favourite assets. But I'm not sure about the scaling either. Keep it up!

[Turjan 1,048]

8 hours ago, donoteat said:

EDIT: I broke down and violated America code, and read the instructions.

Don't worry. That  code is universal .

[DaHindi 11]

An underground train station? Great. But might be a bit to big for my cities

[donoteat 478]

your wish is my command

 

 

Re: Scaling issues. It's 1:1. My reference was the original Graham Anderson Probst & White design (construction?) documents, signed Feb. 18, 1929. 

Here's the real thing, for reference:

("Suburban station" by Spikebrennan at en.wikipedia - Own work (User:Spikebrennan). Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Suburban_station.JPG#/media/File:Suburban_station.JPG)

Still missing some ornament and I have yet to work on lights -- might get to it later today depending on the HW situation.

I still can't get the middle pair of tracks to work. If I start a line at the middle pair of tracks, it works fine for trains leaving, but I cannot get the line to return to the station. Trains leave, go to their destination, then despawn and respawn at the middle track of suburban station. Anyone know what might cause this? I can't assign trains to the middle pair of tracks using the "shift" key, I have to click normally -- but I do have to use the "shift" key for the other two pairs of tracks.

 

 

[Darf 1,439]

Scale looks right to me, it's just that normal building scale is pretty out of line. The top ornaments add a lot of character to the building, you should def.  include those. There's also a frame above the first 2 rows, but I can already see this going to be a polygon monster.

[Matthias King 348]

Looks good so far!

[donoteat 478]

Well I have a bit of an update but not much to show. Had to work on the weekend, ironically enough to free up time later in the week prepare a bid on the real version of this, so not much done on the virtual version...

-Ornaments have been added, but not textured

-Center track still does not work

-Pedestrians go directly from track level to one of two entrances rather than make use of actual pedestrian paths? They walk via a path I never laid out in the editor directly to the surface, then walk across the street, into an underpass and back into the station to continue using the underground pedestrian network. 

 

For reference, I plan to make the following once this is done:

 

Underground freight station (Pennsylvania Railroad freight house, 31st and Chestnut Streets, Philadelphia PA)

Elevated freight station (St. John's Park Terminal, New York, NY) (southern end of the High Line, incredibly this building still exists though this part of the viaduct doesn't)

(This way you can have a functional, easy-to-build concealed or at least elevated freight network and no one can accuse you of being unrealistic.)

 

And then probably a multimodal, bus/tram/elevated/light(ish) rail terminal. (69th Street Terminal, Upper Darby, PA) (someone code freight trams so I can do 72nd street freight terminal too)

[boformer 3,169]

For an elevated/underground freight station, new track types have to be added to ETST.

[donoteat 478]

That oughtn't to be a problem if I use the console to add the regular old train station track and adjust the height though, right? It'll look ugly, but it'll be hidden inside a big boxy building so no one will be the wiser...

EDIT: tried just that, worked fine at least for sunken tracks, didn't even need road anarchy to connect them either

 

This has been slow going, but pedestrians now happily transfer between the station tracks and the underground walkways. No idea why it works now, and not before.

All I need to do now is get the night lighting done and clean up some texture bits, do a quick LOD, and get that middle track working, and it'll be release ready.

[Matthias King 348]

Will this building be mod-dependent?

[donoteat 478]

On 2/2/2016 at 4:43 PM, Matthias King said:

Will this building be mod-dependent?

Very.

 

All right so I found some time to work on specular and illumination maps.

 

Looks like garbage, if I do say so myself. How can I get rid of those outlines around the windows? For reference, here are my texture sheets:

(diffuse)

(illumination)

(specular)

[donoteat 478]

1 hour ago, AJ3D said:

The background of the illumination map needs to be at 128 grey.

uhhhh

[donoteat 478]

Tried 192, still lit up at night. Tried a 192 grey stroke around the windows and I'm still not happy with the result. It's definitely better, but just not good.

 

Do I have to do this with polys? Please tell me I don't have to do this with polys, it's already 18000 tris and I don't want to go higher...

 

EDIT: tried 192 stroke around the windows on the specular map, I think it's marginally better but still not great if you're looking from more than 300 feet or so away. I don't know what to do... this might be as good as it gets.

[Darf 1,439]

Take a look at Zed's night light tutorial:

https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/69212-tutorial-detailed-nightlights/

[Ocram's Razr 964]

Good luck, Don O'Teat! I like your work so far!

[Feindbold 1,190]

Looking great!

This should be a allmost working _i map, its just a 2 click shop, so you need to delete all the borders around your windows (I started doing this on the window below the word suburban, so you see what im talking about) everything 192 grey will be not lit, thats why you need to delete these sightly brighter grey borders, they would cause slightly permanently lit up stripes between your windows. (I would leave them on the writing though, they might create a small glowing effect)

Small tip: allways use .png as fileformat. Opening and saving a jpg once in paint or save it on low quality with photoshop will ruin your _i map, as the compression will create these one pixel wide borders. This wont happen if you use .png. Also as texture filesizes are completely irrelevant for the importing process, .png is allways the better choise.

[donoteat 478]

Ok, so it's only been... 6 months?

University kind of got in the way, especially when one of their affiliates tried to tear down my 140 year old house to build borg cubes for students. (the historical society stopped them, but I still had to move...) That's all done and over with now.

In the mean time, I've finished all the modeling I feel like doing on the building, but the light map still looks like crap. (At work right now, can't post pics.) And trains won't offload passengers there -- or rather, they do offload passengers, who then attempt to go to the pedestrian connection, get confused and turn around, and then board the next outgoing train on the same line. I saw one train successfully drop off passengers and half of them went out of the building -- but the other half just re-boarded the train.

Could someone explain to me what is going on here? What is the difference between all the pedestrian connections available to me? Do I need to do some voodoo to get the pedestrian connections to hook up with the underground platforms?

[Darf 1,439]

Ah I wonder where this project went, looked very promising. Interesting story about your house. Up here everything atleast a 100 years old would be a lot more worth than some apartment building.  Can't help you with the pathing, since I havent got any experience myself.

What's wrong with your illumination map?

[donoteat 478]

All right guys, good news, the transportation links are working!

Six platforms, all working fine, what's more, folks will walk directly into your underground pedestrian network so you can destroy the street life at ground level and drive storefront commercial establishments out of business for lack of foot traffic! (I'm looking at you, Edmund Bacon...)

 

Still a couple glitches, all there is to go, however, is to do a LOD, fix those few glitches w/r/t the pedestrian paths forcing the creation of tunnel entrances, probably extend the platforms out so they'll comfortably take a standard size American commuter train, and then fix the goddamned light map, and then I can release!

[Ocram's Razr 964]

Good job, Mr. Don O'Teat! I look forward to using your station!

[donoteat 478]

Could someone explain to me why, even at exactly 192 grey, it still does this once every randomized light cycle?

 

The whole building is lit up yellow. It goes back to only window lighting as the randomized cycle continues, but I'd prefer it not to happen at all...

Normal:

I did double check, all non-lighting areas are precisely 192 grey. Here is the illumination file:

[Darf 1,439]

Than it might not be completely 192,192,192. Could be compression, but for me the background is 176,176,176.