pxljce's building(s)

[pxljce 17]

TL;DR

I created my first building for Cities Skylines (Actually it's my first building ever for anything ever, did I mention ever? So be gentle m'kay ...) and have problems, would love to have some feedback.

Problem 1:

If you look at the model you'll see that the roof is divided into four panels (in my madness I thought it gets viewed a lot and should be high quality and the only way I could fit it on the maps was to chop it into four and overlay them on the UV). The pics don't show it for some reason, but when you zoom out along the three edges it shows white lines. This is only at mid to far zoom distance(before it goes into LOD model, which I still have to create) and at certain angles close up. Now my attempt at fixing it was checking the normals in 3dsmax to see if they went screwy (they seem fine), extending the diffuse texture further along the left and right side of each panel and doing the same with the normal map. Nope, still not working.

I might have to redo the mapping to accomodate any suggestion for changes anyways at which point I'll just make the roof one panel which will solve the problem. But I might want to have texture set up like this in the futurre and would love to know why it's not working.

Problem 2:

My normals went bat$%&^! (bit of an exaggeration, but some of them where weirdly angled instead of straight on) when I collapsed my model in 3dsmax. So I had to manually go in an adjust a bunch of them. My process was as follows:

Created one half using basic box and extrude/inset etc modifiers and mirror/cloned it to the other side. When done I made the clone unique and bridged the two halves. Crazy bridging meant I had to reset something (can't remember what exactly, but the internet said so and it worked). Tried bridging it again and success. Made sure that all faces were assigned smoothing groups and all touching faces where not in the same smoothing group for sharp angles all round. The end, I think. I'm happy to attach my model if anyone is brave enough to want to look at it. I would love to know what I did here that made that happen so I can avoid it in future.

Need some feedback:

 

Of course any feedback is welcome, but areas I'm not sure about/need advice on is the following;

• Is the ledge above the front door/ under the windows too thin? It looks like it should be thicker, but I've been staring at this thing so long I don't know anymore ...
• Should the front roller door be wider; it's the same width as the back one, but it feels like it should be wider still. Also should they be inset a bit more?
• Should the rim around the roof be a bit thicker? Again it looks a bit skinny.
• Is it just me or is the entire building a bit boring? It's supposed to be part of a modern medium RICO industrial park with metal fencing around and industrial parks are not the most exciting looking thing ever, but currently ... idk it lacks something.
• Chevron thingy over the bigger roller door? Keep it? Ditch it?
• I used the cim model to try and judge scale for the building, but is 6.3m sloping up to 7.3m a goodly height for a small double story industrial building?
• The front glass door doesn't work for me, should I replace it with a door similar to the one at the back of the building but without the vent at the top and a different texture.
• I'll be using variable props mod for dumpsters/pallets/etc. out back and planters in the front. Also will be using roof ducts etc. from Avanya's collection of rooftop props or mix and match with Shroomblazes ones. One thing I'm missing is a spotlight over the roller doors like this one (There's a standard one in-game but it looks odd):

• Is 736 tris acceptable for a building this size? (It's just short of 4 squares wide and a bit more than one deep) Should I have left out the insets for the windows etc. etc.and just used a normal map for it instead? Oh and the texture maps are 1024x1024 and I think the lod would work with 512x512. Too much? Too little? Too soon?
• I'll be creating my lod model without the insets anywhere (so basically just a box with one edge raised slightly higher) or the ledge over the front door and using a normal map to give depth. Would that work ok?
• Lighting ... I followed this awesome detailed lighting tutorial by Cool_Z and it works great (I still need to do some work on my illumination map, but in principle it works). But here's the thing and I don't know if it's just me. Why are industrial assets lit up like xmas trees? I'd like my industrial buildings a bit more shy, retiring and a little bit less Elton John. In my mind most industrial buildings (with the rare exception) would be unnocupied and therefore unlit at night. What I'd like to do is just have lighting around the industrial park like the bollards in front of the building from this Modern Lighting Pack and maybe the bottom row of windows lit. Maybe. Thoughts? Ideas?
• And finally the specular on the back windows is funky, I know from this tutorial by Cool_Z that I can somehow fix it with alphas, but would there be any other way to resolve this?

And breathe.

 

[Avanya 2,605]

Hi and welcome! Always good to see new creators pop up. I work in blender, so I can't help with the normals, but I can give some feedback. Overall I'd say you're doing very well for your first building - it looks good and the amount of detail is good for a CS asset (in my oppinion at least  ). Some larger pics wouldn't hurt as details are a bit hard to see here, but then again there's alot we can't see in the game anyways.  

• Ledge: I'd say it looks good as it is, but it wouldn't look weird if it was thicker - If you feel it's a bit too thin, then make it thicker. You can always make a new save in 3dmax and make some changes. That way you'll have the "old" one to go back to if you don't like it.
• Roller door: I think it's a good size, but again wider can work too. Very much like before - experiment and pick what you like best.
• The look: I suggest adding some grunge to it. It really helps give buildings a more realistic and interesting look. Textures.com has some really nice decals - bottom decals should be able to work with your texture setup.
• I like the chevron
• Size: That seems like the right size
• Tris & texture: That's a good tris count for the size. Below 1000 for a building is almost always good, unless it's really simple and really tiny.   As for textures you could probably make the main texture 512x512 - alot of smaller buildings in the game have that size - and you have a good UV map for a lower res texture. And remember textures can also be 1024x512 (I kept forgetting that for the longest time :P). As for LOD textures I'd say 512 is too high. I've seen alot of ppl do them, but considering that the basegame growables often have that size for their main texture, I would recommend something smaller. 128x128 should be just fine for a building that size. 
• LOD: You're definately on the right track. Here you can test if the ledge will be visible by using the lowest settings in the game and seeing how visible it is before it switches to the auto lod. I usually try and keep the outline of the shape, which can include bits like the ledge that stick out. And btw awesome to see a new modeller remember the LOD!
• Lighting: What I do for my industrial stuff is keep some windows with the neutral color, so they never light up. Some of them I don't even give nightlights, when I think it should be closed at night. Other places that make sense to function at night, I put light where workers would be. For example the office or break room windows I keep dark or on a low color, while the work area is lit up much more.
• Speculars: I suggest zooming out some more - about where you'd play the game - and see if you notice it. I found that in many cases it's just because we can zoom in more in the asset editor that we notice. Ofc large glass buildings have it much more visible, but for house windows and windows like these it's often not visible in the game unless you're using a zoom/FP mod and kinda looking for it - and then you'll see it on some of the default buildings too.  

 

Hope you can use this feedback and I'm looking forward to having this in my city and seeing what else you come up with

[pxljce 17]

Hey, thanks for the welcome and the great feedback. I'll upload some larger detail pics and updates made to the textures/geometry (when those happen).  After resizing the maps to 512x512 I can't see a noticeable quality change(when zoomed out) and the file size is way smaller so I'll definitely go with that. It's the same as with the speculars, you just spend so much time zoomed in that everything looks worse than it actually is. Especially as I'm new to this and don't really have a good point of reference yet.

I'll test out the lod/ledge thing as you said and see if it's needed or not, once I'm done tweaking the building and adding some grunge. Maybe use colour variations to make it more/less grungy in the growable version, like on your awesome gas tanks.

With the lighting I'll probably keep it as is, with just the bottom row of lights on; or maybe just one set of windows with a high chance of being lit and the other with a low chance, but definitely not all of them or the back ones.

Oh and the chevron stays then!

[Matthias King 348]

It's looking good so far. Avanya's definitely a good person to be giving you advice, so you're in good hands.

And for some reason, something about the way this building looks makes me want to see a modular, outdoor storage unit set on the workshop.

[boformer 3,169]

64x64 or 128x128 is enough for the LOD texture. Also try to target 100 or less tris for the LOD mesh.

I would move the 2 garage doors further away from the corners. I would also add some lines to the texture to make the walls look like concrete elements (with proper normal map).

[pxljce 17]

10 hours ago, Matthias King said:

It's looking good so far. Avanya's definitely a good person to be giving you advice, so you're in good hands.

And for some reason, something about the way this building looks makes me want to see a modular, outdoor storage unit set on the workshop.

@Matthias King Thank you. Yup he's given some great feedback and makes even better assets for Cities Skylines.  Something like the pic below? That's the South African version (tagline: get spaced ...  ). Maybe it would be better to do the storage units individually as one building and RICO them and then a main admin/security building? Sounds like a possible next building(s) after this one is done... 

9 hours ago, boformer said:

64x64 or 128x128 is enough for the LOD texture. Also try to target 100 or less tris for the LOD mesh.

I would move the 2 garage doors further away from the corners. I would also add some lines to the texture to make the walls look like concrete elements (with proper normal map).

@boformer Yup I should fit in way below 100 for the LOD (I hope) and will test 128x128 and 64x64 to see which one works best. Yeah, I was thinking something's not right with those garage doors. I'll move them in a bit and widen the front one a bit. And probably as a result widen the entire building a bit too. For the concrete I was thinking maybe something like this:

or

Either of them would bring in a bit more of the grungy look that Avanya suggested. If I use the second one I might only do that as the bottom half and do the top half painted maybe ...

[Matthias King 348]

Something like that. Here's another picture:

[pxljce 17]

Ok so after some minor things (so minor I can't even remember why I did them) and re-doing the UV and doing the lod and fitting it all into 128x128 without weeping ... much ... I have a soon to be growable level 1 or 2 industrial building. If I can get the asset editor to play nice (it's not a happy camper when I go in with all my mods/assets enabled to place the props I actually want).

Stats so far:

MAIN Tris: 728; Textures(d,n,i,s,a): 1024x1024

LOD Tris: 20; Textures(d,i,s): 128x128 

I tried to reduce the main diffuse from 1024x1024 to 512x512 but nope, it looked terrible. So I compromised and looked for a way of reducing the file size as much as possible. At least I remember reading it's the file size that makes larger textures slow the game down ultimately.

Some initial discoveries. Saving directly to png from Photoshop gives huge file sizes. Instead using Save for Web and Devices you end up with a png half the size on average as saving to png. There's a minor difference in quality, but for half the file size ... I'm still messing around but I'm currently sitting at just on 533kb for ALL textures combined (main+lod). Now I haven't investigated other buildings, but I'm pretty sure that's a pretty reasonable size? Yes? Yes!

Either way on to some pictures:

From asset editor (The lovely yellow green colour of the walls is because there's not daylight classic, no LUT, no nuffink) and the blinds on the front window ... alphas meh >>>

Spoiler

And some from in-game:

Spoiler

And lastly LOD:

Spoiler

Now it's on to sub-building enabler, RICO and a nice medium industrial park all packed full of this building. Back to back; side to side, all huddled together in some nice industrial smog.

[Avanya 2,605]

Looking very good (both the model and the stats  ). As far as I understand large textures take more for a graphic card to render, and they can only do so many textures. So for example lots of buildings with too large LOD textures would tax the graphic card (while being totally unnecessary). LOD textures aren't pretty, but they're also viewed from far away, so the extra detail isn't even visible.

I'll look forward to having this in my cities!  

[Judazzz 1,936]

Very nice, can't wait to see this released!

[pxljce 17]

Thanks @Avanya & @Judazzz I'm still busy trying to get the alpha mask on the front windows to work correctly (but I might just give up on that one and leave it as is) and messing around with reducing the diffuse to 512x512 without it looking smooshy when you zoom in.

Yeah I just kinda think of the lod as a icon representing the building in game and that makes it all better.

Also working on making a small industrial park with the building using boformer's sub-building enabler and then to make it into a RICO industrial building. After I've got that done I can try and figure out how to get the asset editor to work so that I can decorate it with custom props. Currently it crashes with all assets/mods enabled so I'll probably have to go through and deselect everything and then just select the custom props/mods I need to decorate the growable and RICO industrial park. And then publish both on the workshop.

This is roughly how the industrial park(18x8) will look (quick mockup in Photoshop to see building layout):

I'll probably do a fenced version and unfenced for people that that want to place them side by side and use the essential MOAR beautification to fence the bigger combined park.

[Avanya 2,605]

For handling assets I love the Improved Assets Panel mod - it gives you categories. So I disable all, then pop in the prop category and hit enable all. That gives me all my props to work with. It also lets you search, so you can find the asset you're working on.

Yay for an industrial park!  

[pxljce 17]

Thanks @Avanya I have the Improved Asset Panel mod installed, but completely forgot that you can do that. Low screen resolution on my laptop = super tiny crammed little icons. So I selected props and some mods I'll need and SUCCESS.

I'm using your small shed at the back of the building and some of your roof vents for starters. The growable will use Prop Probability Changer to cycle between your sml/med/lrg chimney/vent and full/empty skip. Hmmmm maybe also an on/off for the shed at the back. Awesome recycling drop off center btw.  Downloaded it and can't wait to use it in-game.

[Avanya 2,605]

Hehe. I know the feeling, those icons are tiny! But damn I couldn't live without that mod!  Always nice to hear my stuff is useful and tyvm!