Epic Lurker's Assets (released Dageraad Amsterdam Social Housing)

[Epic Lurker 108]

Yeah well the tricky part at the moment is to come up with a lod that looks even remotely like this without the benefit of this shader. My nice semi-transparent lod looks great but once you use it on a sub-building it gets completely butchered. I've noticed this before, horrible things happen to the lod of your sub-buildings. Does anyone know what's up with that?

[Epic Lurker 108]

Ok I've updated my station. Have a look at the transparent glass! I'm not happy with my lod but I couldn't resist pushing the update.

[Epic Lurker 108]

So I have done two quick tests that should be interesting to anyone planning to use the semi-transparent shader (which should be nearly everyone on this forum at this point) with interesting results.

First I wondered why the shadows of @Ronyx69's applestore looked so nice. So testing with a rectangle where the diffuse and the albedo is this image:

it looks like this:

So *smacks forehead* the shader does not affect shadows at all and everything at 50% albedo and higher gives full shadow, anything below gives none at all. Um... duh. So no surprises here.

Second, I tried to confirm my hunch that semi-transparency would work as the lod for the main building, but does not work as the lod for a sub-building. So I took my amsterdam central station platforms building and added my semi-transparent glass as a sub building. Now, as we zoom out, it shows this:

1. This is the full resolution building, just before it transitions to the lod. Note the semi-transparent glass.

2. We zoomed out. The lod kicked in, but our glass has disappeared!

3. We zoomed out further. The glass lod is now visible, but it is not semi-transparent.

Needless to say, this transition is visually jarring. With the glass disappearing and reappearing draws your eye. Not what you want.

Next I used the transparent glass as the main building and added the platforms as a sub-building, and it looks like this:

Ta-da! We are seeing the lod and it has semi-transparent glass. The transition as you zoom out is completely smooth.

So, if you have split your asset into two buildings so you can use semi-transparent glass, make the semi-transparent part the main building and the non-transparent parts a sub-building. You can now create lods for the two buildings as normal, and everything will look great!

 

[Jerenable 266]

I had the same thing in mind of using the glass a main building but great work on the shadow tests nice to see in detail how the shader works. Now we still need to know if the lods of props work with the shader.

[Ronyx69 2,413]

So I finally decided to test the lod of the rotors shader - I did multiple tests with the main building, but it still had the same problem - disappears, then becomes non-semi-transparent.

I thought maybe there's something weird about your station, so I got it to look into how the lod works for it, well it doesn't work.

It looks like you did that test in the asset editor? It probably does something differently with the main building there so it works there. (I assume because in the asset editor the main building isn't loaded like the others, it has an individual LOD, instead of one which has been added to the "group" lod and the lod texture atlas the game uses)

Your station has the same problem unfortunately...

 

So that settles it for now at least, the lod doesn't work for the rotors shader afaik.

[Epic Lurker 108]

Hey Ronyx! I didn't make the transparent glass the main building for my train station, because to do that I would have a building that would be way larger than the plot size. So yes, there is no semi-transparent lod on my train station.

I did do my tests only the in asset editor. I guess I'll repeat them and see if it works the same for me in game.

[Epic Lurker 108]

@Ronyx69 It seems you are right. It works in the asset editor but the same asset has the same problem in game as sub-buildings.

In other news, the asset editor has become even more unuseable for me. Now in --noWorkshop mode I can only view a building from a large distance. wtf.

[Epic Lurker 108]

Greetings! I've just released 'De Dageraad', a set of 6 RICO buildings that fit together so you can fill whole cityblocks with buildings of the same architectural style.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=950283141

I have no idea if something like this will be popular. I'm not aware of any other sets of buildings that fit together like this. It is rather Amsterdam-specific, and people may find it hard to use. But I had fun making it. Lots of smoothing. Let me know what you think!

 

[Lost Gecko 481]

I can't quite decide wether I like the architectural style or not but your assets sure do look great, you did a fantastic job!

[Turjan 1,048]

This set looks amazing in-game! Thank you very much for this.