RRetail Development

[RRetail 7,906]

Still no guesses? Maybe I'll just have to SPIT out what it is. (Seriously I'm running out of hints.)

Just as a heads up if you didn't see my status update, there will be a period of 1-3 days where I will not have access to the computer soon, probably within the week.

[blade2k5 1,523]

You mentioned tooth and service so the first thing that comes to mind is a dentists office.  So that's my guess.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

My only guess is that it could be a Gentle Dental, but where I'm from they don't have a unified store design.

But one thing for sure is that you'll want to look at aerials of the building you're recreating, or that you're referencing from. I know you're not done yet but you'll want to check the thickness of the walls in the real life building.

[RRetail 7,906]

Good guess on the dental office. It is indeed is a dental clinic chain aka Aspen Dental. (Seems like they've been popping up in any decent-sized town around my region.)

As for the walls, I've been going with a general 0.3 thickness as that seems to work nicely.

[blade2k5 1,523]

1 minute ago, RRetail said:

Good guess on the dental office. It is indeed is a dental clinic chain aka Aspen Dental. (Seems like they've been popping up in any decent-sized town around my region.)

 

Don't think we have these in Wisconsin yet, at least I haven't seen any, then again I rarely ever go to Milwaukee or Madison, may visit Wausau since my son lives there and Green Bay, well, because of the Packers, but pretty much stay in the rural areas of the state.  Much quieter up here than down south.

[RRetail 7,906]

Just now, blade2k5 said:

Don't think we have these in Wisconsin yet, at least I haven't seen any, then again I rarely ever go to Milwaukee or Madison, may visit Wausau since my son lives there and Green Bay, well, because of the Packers, but pretty much stay in the rural areas of the state.  Much quieter up here than down south.

They may come to you soon enough assuming a nearby city probably has a population of 10,000 or so. 

 

[blade2k5 1,523]

7 minutes ago, RRetail said:

They may come to you soon enough assuming a nearby city probably has a population of 10,000 or so. 

 

I wouldn't be surprised if they did.  There's quite a few cities here in the Badger State over 10k.   Oh, nice BAT so far and the first I think to do dentistry type establishments.

[Evanjs 602]

44 minutes ago, RRetail said:

Good guess on the dental office. It is indeed is a dental clinic chain aka Aspen Dental. (Seems like they've been popping up in any decent-sized town around my region.)

As for the walls, I've been going with a general 0.3 thickness as that seems to work nicely.

 Closet one to me is about 1 hour away. Look just like it cool.

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Wow, that turned into a really nice BAT! The main roof texture isn't quite there yet IMO and the roof juk looks somewhat unfinished so far, but other than that it's really cool. Maybe that blue canopy could do with a slight desaturation, but that's about it.

[Krasner 1,062]

Dental clinic chains. I had no idea this could actually exist Othwerwise, nice to see you go on in BATing, looks great. I have nothing to add that @T Wrecks hadn't already said.

[RRetail 7,906]

So, better textures are needed for the roof details. Time to go searching I suppose. 

[DavidDHetzel 1,816]

This will be under healthcare right?

[RRetail 7,906]

2 hours ago, DavidDHetzel said:

This will be under healthcare right?

Why didn't I think to do that? Yes, I will be sure to move it under healthcare. Thanks for the brilliant idea.

[RRetail 7,906]

I'm comfortable enough with gmax at this point to say I will pursue further projects.

The first of these projects, though will be to redo the Sears Auto Center from scratch. It is indeed way to small.

Other future projects entail making custom shopping centers from scratch for both more rural towns and more populated areas. I do still plan to do the occasional relot of my previous work or combination of existing stuff to make shopping centers or a mall as well.

I'm shying away from restaurants as @Ceafus 88 has told me he enjoys making restaurants.

 

[DavidDHetzel 1,816]

@RRetail I thought it was fine, I don't think a redo is needed.

[RRetail 7,906]

It is when you see what I'm working on behind the scenes. 

[T Wrecks 10,209]

19 hours ago, RRetail said:

So, better textures are needed for the roof details. Time to go searching I suppose. 

I guess you should be able to find a better texture, probably something that resembles tar paper or whatever the roof material is. However, it might be difficult to find a texture that will fit like a glove. In the long run, you can get far superior results with a bit of image editing. Then you can take a stock texture you found as a foundation to build on, and tweak it to your liking using some editing tools. A free software application like GIMP is sufficient - basically anything that allows you to import/exports PNGs, has some basic editing tools, and - most importantly - allows the use of layers and changing the opacity of layers.

For example, you could use a brick texture, add a layer with an old-style advertisement on top of it, set the layer with the advertisement to some degree of opacity, maybe lower saturation, delete some small parts, and then you'll have a brick texture with a faded old advert on it that has partly peeled off. You're not likely to find anything like that in the precise size and style that you need "out in the wild", ready to download.

This can be applied to the roof, too: You could take a birds-eye screenshot of your BAT in gmax and use the roof contour as a stencil to "punch out" a part of a pre-made texture that will fit the roof exactly. Then you could apply some smudges and dirt right where you want them, and the resulting texture will look like an organic part of your building rather than a pattern that matches more or less.

[RRetail 7,906]

I see what you are saying, but most retail related things (unless they are old buildings) are generally pretty clean and neat. A couple of brown patches or slightly different shade of color would probably do the trick. Something of which I could do in Paint.

[T Wrecks 10,209]

The "old advert on brick" scenario was just an example. You could do the same to compose a roof texture like this one.

• You could pick a generic red texture.
• As a next step, you could add a texture that looks like a slightly irregular surface in a layer on top of your red texture, take all colour out of it, set it to really low opacity - now you'd have a red, slightly irregular looking texture.
• Finally, you could use a generic rust texture as your third layer, fade/erase it in some places and then play with opacity until you have something that looks pretty much like in the satellite photo, only adapted to the shape of your building.

Something along these lines. Theoretically, this technique has limitless applications, and you can always go back and change something. Need a blue, slightly less faded roof texture? Just replace the red base layer from the example with a blue one, set the rust/dirt layer to even lower opacity, save as a new file, and there you have it.

[DavidDHetzel 1,816]

This would probably work better for you. At least in terms of using such a Light colored building.

[RRetail 7,906]

I personally thought Aspen Dental's roof was decent. I'm also not really sure how to do what you are suggesting as I don't have GIMP.

[metasmurf 705]

Quick and dirty edit, and I'm on my laptop with a mediocre screen, but I'd do something like this

 

 

[RRetail 7,906]

Oh so, slightly darker. Thanks for helping me to understand. I'll keep that in mind next time.

[metasmurf 705]

The problem is that when exporting from bats (only in gmax? I'm not sure) textures get over saturated and colors blown out. See the histogram here

 

So I just lowered the highlights. The blacks color in this picture in this picture are dead pixels, because it's blacker than black. I fixed that in the first image I posted but didn't bother to here.

With a few tweeks the highlight clipping is gone

 

Saturation fix for the blue/cyan color only

 

So, it's more to it than just just making the textures darker. Most of this stuff (though not done the same) should be possible in GIMP. Maybe someone can point out to tutorials, I think there were some by gascooker at least back in the day?

 

[RRetail 7,906]

One of you folks would definitely have to either walk me through the process or give me a link to a tutorial because I'm still not quite understanding. I have downloaded GIMP.

[T Wrecks 10,209]

1 hour ago, RRetail said:

I personally thought Aspen Dental's roof was decent. I'm also not really sure how to do what you are suggesting as I don't have GIMP.

Whoa, whoa. Hold it right there. Let's make no mistake here: Aspen Dental's roof is decent. The entire BAT is more than decent, it's really good. I don't want you to feel bad about this BAT in any way because there's no reason to do so. This is all your work, and it's absolutely good, and you can be rightfully proud of it.

I'm not mentioning all that stuff to suggest that anything about your BAT is bad. I'm merely trying to contibute some ideas and possible techniques for you to take into consideration (or not) for the future if you feel like it. I'm doing so because I think you have what it takes to become even better if you want to, and hoping that you might like the prospect of some new tools at your disposal.

In the end of the day, though, this is your hobby, and you should pursue it to have fun and take something out of it. It's cool that you're doing this, and it's super cool that you share your work and maintain this thread so that people may comment and make suggestions, but ultimately you don't owe us anything, so please don't feel pressured in any way, okay?

Take it easy, one step at a time, and only if you actually want to take that step. I've probably been ahead of time by a few steps, but I do tend to get carried away sometimes when I see things that make me feel enthusiastic.

 

[RRetail 7,906]

Ah. Thanks for clearing that up.

[DavidDHetzel 1,816]

1 hour ago, metasmurf said:

Quick and dirty edit, and I'm on my laptop with a mediocre screen, but I'd do something like this

 

 

Gonna disagree here, and say that I wouldn't go with gray. I'd say either a dark slate color or an off white roof would look better.  This looks more Gravel than Tar Paper

Also @RRetail  you should go after the free Photoshop CS2 that adobe offers. GIMP is an ok photo editor, but its a LOT more clumsy than Photoshop.

[twalsh102 1,601]

If you aren't already doing so, I think you owe it to your self to seek inspiration for what looks "right" from real life, using Google Maps or Google Earth.  Using Google Earth, and doing a quick survey of roof tops of commercial areas around where I live, colors for flat roof buildings range from almost glaringly pure white through the complete gray scale to almost black, plus beige, tan, and other not-quite-white and not-quite-gray variations.  My take from that is that there is no one color within the ranges mentioned above that looks more "right" than others.

Something else that  caught my eye was the the darker the color of the roof, the more obvious the seams were for the tar paper roofs.  The brighter the roof, the more likely those types of details tend to get washed out.  That would imply that the darker colors would be more difficult to imitate with a texture and have it look "right."  I would think that a gravel-covered roof would be the hardest to try to get to look "right" given the zoom levels we deal with in SC4.

On the subject of roof junk, while the mantra sometimes seems to be that the more roof junk, the better.  But how realistic is lots of roof junk?  What I see in aerial/satellite views ranges from lots of roof junk to almost none regardless of the size of the building.  So again, there is no one correct answer. 

I tracked down the location of an Aspen Dental office in Amarillo, Texas, and took a look at it in Google Earth.  From overhead the roof is a uniform off-white to light grey color with no obvious seams showing.  Of course with brighter colors, what one actually sees is going to depend on time of day, and weather conditions.  What appears to light to medium gray one day when there are clouds masking the sum, might appear as glaring white another day with the sun directly overhead.  If one were to do an aerial survey of Aspen Dental offices across the US, it wouldn't surprise me to see a large variation in color/shade/saturation.  There is not much more roof junk than what shows on your current model.

Of course, trying to translate something you like the looks of in an overhead photo, into something that approximates that look in a texture on a model is always the challenge.  As others have already said here, you are already very accomplished with what you've done with this model, and certainly have the makings to join the masters of this art if you keep at it.  I think @T Wrecks expressed things very well in his last post and I can't better what he said.

[RRetail 7,906]

All right you folks have asked me to make a Toys R Us. But here's the question, which style should I pursue? You have the next 24 hours to choose.

(I'm not giving the option of the 2000 style of store since Simgoober already has made that at a realistic size.)

Option A:

 

Option B:

 

Option C:

Or should a combination store with Babies R Us be pursued?