Urban Vibravant's BAT Lounge

[Hotwheeler 409]

It`s so good to see that everyone is coming back to show their newest Projects.This really motivates me to dust off my Savegames of SC 4 and start playing again.

I`m still not a Fan of modern Buildings and Highrises but i really love how the Facade has different Layers and Materials.

[Urban Vibravant 814]

@Thin White Duke I was actually missing a floor in that area so I added it, gave it a slightly different texture, and added some props next to the windows. The reflections might be a little strong but I think it works. Let me know what you think!

@JP Schriefer Thanks!

@Jasoncw I'm glad I didn't lose it either and yes this will be available for download eventually. 

@Aaron Graham 

@Hotwheeler Contemporary High rises are my favorite, but I'm glad you like it!

 

Now, I think I've got everything completed for the day view. Obviously, if you look at the very bottom I haven't finished the sub-level concrete walls for uneven terrain. I want to know how deep I should make it and if I'm doing it right. I know it's hard to see but it does go below 0 meters.

I would like to get everyone's final thoughts about anything they think can be improved. (glass, color, texture etc..) There are a couple things I wanted to get your opinions on but I'll wait until I receive some feedback. Thanks everyone!

[Fantozzi 4,068]

1 hour ago, Urban Abstraction said:

I'm glad I didn't lose it either and yes this will be available for download eventually.

You know, in this sentence the word 'eventually' did scary me.

But ...

"Hope is the last thing that dies in man" (François de La Rochefoucauld)

1 hour ago, Urban Abstraction said:

I would like to get everyone's final thoughts about anything they think can be improved. (glass, color, texture etc..)

I can't give any constructive critics, to me it looks perfect. It might be, ingame along with other buildings it may look to bright. But it's impossible to judge without comparison.

The elevated road access/driveway - not shure how this works ingame. Looks like it has a border where it should connect to the street? Maybe to remove the base and do this by lotting?

But to me these are niggling remarks. For me, there's only one big issue about this bat. That's the word 'eventually'.

[T Wrecks 10,210]

@Fantozzi: Remember that "eventually" = "in the end", not "possibly". (It's a frequent "false friend" between German and English, because in German "eventuell" means "maybe", "possibly", "depending on the circumstances" etc.)

As for the building, I think the topmost roof is very white. It will probably stand out a lot.

I'm not quite sure why you are modeling below ground, tbh. You can simply make it so that the lot will get a lot foundation automatically, and that should do it. Or does part of the lot go below ground level?

[Urban Vibravant 814]

@Fantozzi Sorry, maybe I should have said 'soon'. I was really tired and wanted to get these pics rendered and uploaded before falling asleep. Please don't be scared! . The brightness I won't worry about until I put it in-game. The street isn't elevated and after reading what @T Wrecks said I believe I can get rid of those subwalls all together.

@T Wrecks Maybe I'm overthinking those sub walls. Ive seen a few bats where they Bat the ground plane when they could have used the tiles in lot editor, thus leaving a base that looks like it's hovering off of the ground. And having walls would fix that error. I'll wait til I have it in the LE to see how it turns out.

The roof I agree does look a bit too bright. I would probably weather it but on google maps it's very white and clean. I don't know if I should change the color's shade or just touch up with more weathering. And it's possible the material I used can lose some reflectivity.

[matias93 7,535]

Same thing with the roof, the underground wall and the false cognate here :V

Maybe for the street access a way to do it to match uneven terrain would be to model it as an slope, being sunken in normal circumstances and appearing gradually while necessary; this is the same method some BATters use to add access stairs to slope-tolerant buildings.

[Urban Vibravant 814]

@matias93 I actually thought about doing it that way for the street. I'll keep that in mind because I don't really know how it's going to turn out until I export it. I'm wondering if I should go ahead and put it in game to see if everything works out before starting on the nightlights.

[Thin White Duke 4,072]

Sorry for the late reply. I thought it was supposed to be a two floor atrium, but your solution is better than the one I'd pictured! It looks brilliant! I'd say that was the finishing touch. All this needs is nightlights!

[Urban Vibravant 814]

To the ones that prefer the roof be not-so-white. Here's a slight touch. I brought down the brightness by 50% and contrast by 10% which seems to fit into the building better. At first glance it doesn't look like I changed anything so really look at the color differences, especially the small roof in the center. Overall it's a very light grey and not white.  Let me know if this color works better!

@Thin White Duke Great to know! I'm gonna go ahead and export it to make sure everything lines up and looks correct, then start on the night lights 

[Thin White Duke 4,072]

Tiny details make massive differences. How much better are you gonna make this?

[matias93 7,535]

I would say that the roof passed from being a "you forgot to texture those pieces on your model" to a "the roof of the building in that aerial photo is very white", so, a heavy win for realism!

[Jasoncw 11,949]

Yeah white in the game and in things in general isn't usually actually very white. You could even go a little darker with the roof and it would still look white. 

SC4 isn't realistic so it's ok to do things that are non-physical, but in general about 0.75 (RGB of about 191) or so is like bright white computer paper. You should be cautious going above that. This is something I've been guilt of too, but I try to remember to pat attention to it. Although like I said SC4 is non-physical so sometimes you want little areas to be super bright or super black.

[Fantozzi 4,068]

5 hours ago, Urban Abstraction said:

Let me know if this color works better!

In my opinion the smaller details on the roof bunch out better. It's like they sharpened, gained contour. 

[CT14 2,486]

The little Le Corbusier that lives in my limbic system is making quite a ruckus right now for this building.

[Urban Vibravant 814]

So apparently 8 gigs of RAM can't handle this project. While trying to export it I got 2 "Insufficient memory" and " code 8" errors and a computer crash. :/

I made sure all other programs weren't running and closed out anything taking up alot of memory in Task Manager.

The poly count is 6,860,353.. probably because all of the plants.

I'm glad everyone likes the roof! 

If anyone has other ways I could get this working I would greatly appreciate it! It could possibly be fixed by changing some rendering settings but I'm not sure which ones to change.

Thanks guys!

[matias93 7,535]

I remember that once read in a Dev thread that some rendering configurations cause unnecessary memory load, but I cannot recall more. @Jasoncw will surely know more about the possibility to fix this

[Jasoncw 11,949]

It's been a while since I've had to worry about memory so I don't recall the more extreme ways of making it use less memory. 

But in general, everything in your scene in one way or another has to get loaded into memory. 

1. The model, yes, so reducing the number of polygons would help. To be honest your plants aren't really that big and lush, so you could easily replace them with something simpler (objects with noise modifiers even). 

2. Textures can be a big one. When it starts rendering it converts all of the textures into some kind of internal bitmap format. For this reason it doesn't matter so much what the file size is, what really matters is the pixel dimensions of the textures. Reducing the resolution of really big textures could help. If the textures aren't gigantic though I wouldn't worry about it. 

3. Final Gather also has to be saved to memory while rendering, but you don't really want to lower the rendering settings. 

What's supposed to happen when you run out of memory is it's supposed to start swapping things in and out. I don't know why it crashes when there's not enough memory but it does and always has. 

[Urban Vibravant 814]

@Jasoncw ohhh wow I can't believe I didn't think about "noising" grass! Great idea!

And there are a ton of textures that can l lower the resolution to without it being noticeable.

Yeah I think I can greatly reduce the memory usage. Hopefully this works.

Thanks Jason!

[Urban Vibravant 814]

Ok so I got it exported! (Thanks again @Jasoncw) 

All I had to do was shrink the floor texture's pixel size. I was using 11 textures that were about 2000x1500 pixels and reduced them to 150x150px.

The only question I have before starting the nightlights is about the 133% scaling preference.

Does anyone still follow this? Because this building is 672ft tall and compared to Reddonquixote's Chrysler building and  Xyloxadoria's Shard, (both being just over 1,000ft) My bat seems to be 850ft tall. I did a height test a few weeks ago by photoshopping it into sc4 and put it next to the chrysler building (Not using the 133% adjustment) and it topped out at the red line in the picture. Which is the real life scale between these two buildings. So it kinda tells me Reddonquixote and  Xyloxadoria didn't scale theirs 133%.

I'm leaning towards not using it, then again I hope it doesn't turn out looking stubby. Thoughts?

[matias93 7,535]

And what about the horizontal proportion? Is this building of a similar width of the Chrysler or the Shard buildings? If not, maybe your problem could be with the overall scale of the building (something I get the feeling of, because of the proportion between the balconies and terraces on them)

[JP Schriefer 5,591]

Considering this picture is in zoom 3, I did some comparisons rendering 2 boxes twice with the height of the Chrysler Building (318,9m to the antenna) and with yours (204,8m) , first without scaling by 133% and then scaling it to that. I could notice the Chrysler Building is really 133% scaled and yours has more than 204,8m. Make sure you're doing right conversions between ft and m.

[Urban Vibravant 814]

Good lord.. it's overshot by 36.5m (48.6m with 133%). Luckily @matias93 it is as wide as the chrysler building's base IRL so it's good horizontally.

@JP Schriefer Thanks for pointing that out! And yeah the feet/meters conversions can be tricky to not mess up. (I'm American lol) I'll strictly use the metric system from now on.

I should be able to get away with just scaling it vertically to the correct height, right? That is (204.8m * 1.33) = 272.4m.

I couldn't find the floor height anywhere so I "eyed" it as best as I could. Course we all know being a little off with each floor results in the whole building being dramatically affected.

 

 

[Fantozzi 4,068]

8 hours ago, Urban Abstraction said:

Does anyone still follow this? Because this building is 672ft tall and compared to Reddonquixote's Chrysler building and  Xyloxadoria's Shard, (both being just over 1,000ft) My bat seems to be 850ft tall. I did a height test a few weeks ago by photoshopping it into sc4 and put it next to the chrysler building (Not using the 133% adjustment) and it topped out at the red line in the picture.

For me, personally, the overall size of the buildings compared to each other hasn't to match exactly - it's not a mathematical relation, more a visual in my opinion. To me the relation of the stories seems more important. If you put a three story house next to a five story house and you see the proportion don't match, one must have been made for dwarfes or the other for giants to live in. So if I compare the single floor height yours might be a little bit overscaled.

To my knowledge skyscrapers 133% rule isn't a rule of scaling (between buildings) but a recommendation for adjusting distortion, so for a correction of the axis of a single bat.

"Depending on whom you ask, the recommended scale factor varies a bit, between 1.25 and 1.50.
Obviously, the shorter the building, the higher the recommended scale factor would be." (RippleJet in 2009)

But regarding general size the problem is - what to compare with what? I think, in sc4 there is nothing that can be used as a folding yardstick. Many of the maxis stuff don't fit each other in scale. So even if you do a mathematically correct scaled building - you always end up with aesthetics, with the question: does it look right? In the given environment. And this environment isn't consistent. The sims, the props, the buildings, nothing matches mathematically, but more or less: by fantasy. It's a perfect example for a fictional/artistic space - doing tricks on perspective. So imho - you start with maths like a guiding path but the final tweak you'll do more the artistic way - by sense. Maybe.

I think - resolution matters on this. And therefore, for the games very own 'realism' you overscale the very small things a little and you underscale the very big things a little - as scaling down means also to loose visual details and scaling up means to gain visual details (in the render). And I'm pretty shure - psychological this matters how we see things in SC4 and therefore mathematical correctness isn't everything.

Lately they've been talking about a 'post-truth' in politics. Well, in SC4 we had this since 2003. The buildings have a 'felt realistic size'.

No big help this post, I know.

[EDIT]

If there is no defined measure and things differ, I think normal process is finding an average. So one has to compare with - don't know, just guessing - 20 different buildings from different popular batters and also the base game and to find a compromise. So the right size - in the 'post-truth era' - might be more a matter of negotiation than of maths?

 

[EDIT2 - rewrote this post in parts]

[T Wrecks 10,210]

Ah, good to see a solution was found. I was about to say that the floors in your building look pretty tall compared to RDQ's Chrysler Building. Turns out they are pretty tall. So yes, simply scaling along the z axis (height) should do the trick. The question is whether the base is more accurate height-wise, i.e. whether you should include the base/podium in the rescale or not.

[Urban Vibravant 814]

@Fantozzi Generally if you measure everything correctly, it shouldn't need to be adjusted and it will look correct pretty much every time. But I understand what you're getting at.

@T Wrecks Yes I'm including the base in the scaling. And the height of it is pretty accurate. Modelling the base was the last part I worked on and came up with its height based on where it topped out against the building IRL. I looked at as much detail as possible to get the best accuracy.

I'm currently doing another export with the correct height so I should have that up here for you guys in about 6 hours! 

[matias93 7,535]

1 hour ago, Urban Abstraction said:

in about 6 hours! 

[Urban Vibravant 814]

YEEES!! The height is perfect! Thank you guys for all of your help so far! 

All I need now is the transit-enabled driveway, which I have no idea how to do. Which software is used to make it?

I think one of you wanted to know if this building would be too bright compared to the others, as it turns out, it fits nicely. 

[JP Schriefer 5,591]

Looks very nice!

I've no idea how to do the transit-enabled driveway, but surely someone will help you.

[matias93 7,535]

It's done with the SC4Tool if you want a simple access (the method is really obvious and graphical), but it would involve some programming if you want more sophisticated pathing, as to make the cars to go round the  median and roundabout you traced.

Also, bear in mind that if you transit-enable all three tiles, the game will understand that your lot is meant to be driven across, and will move traffic through it, likely causing unncessesary congestion. Either increase the traffic capacity to a high level (lets say 64000) or avoid to transit-enable the whole route.

[Urban Vibravant 814]

@matias93 I'm only looking to make the street connect to the driveway and the cars would disappear after they turned into it. Thanks! I'll check out the sc4tool and if it isn't too complicated I might program it to use the roundabout. 

@JP Schriefer LMAO that llama! Glad you like it! haha