BAT - Getting Started Guide / FAQ / Resources / Help

[EffTheGrid 3,677]

12 hours ago, AP said:

You can also group them, but to my experiance adding the "nite_" tag to a group does not lite all members of the group up. You could combine all objects you want to lite to one object, which in my experiance is very unhandy in case you want to move one window later or such.

This sounds like a viable method for me. I model absolutely everyhting within sketchup, so I guess my goal is to have the fewest steps in Gmax as possible---the more prep work I can do within sketchup (the UI I'm familiar with) the better haha. My fear however is that groups and components within skp are degrouped during the 3ds conversion, as Gmax seems to treat identically textured adjacent planes as contiguous (correct me if I'm wrong?) so this I'm sure is another consideration when texturing within skp.

What is the process of consolidating the panes into one object, within Gmax?

I think this is my route, as all the modelling should be done by this stage.

Thanks again for your very detailed help!

(see @tariely, I'm trying)

[AP 3,588]

33 minutes ago, Sloppyjoemess said:

This sounds like a viable method for me. I model absolutely everyhting within sketchup, so I guess my goal is to have the fewest steps in Gmax as possible---the more prep work I can do within sketchup (the UI I'm familiar with) the better haha. My fear however is that groups and components within skp are degrouped during the 3ds conversion, as Gmax seems to treat identically textured adjacent planes as contiguous (correct me if I'm wrong?) so this I'm sure is another consideration when texturing within skp.

What is the process of consolidating the panes into one object, within Gmax?

I think this is my route, as all the modelling should be done by this stage.

Thanks again for your very detailed help!

(see @tariely, I'm trying)

The process is basically following the numbers in the screenshot: [If anything is unclear let me know]

(The objects you want to connect do not have to touch each other, they can be far apart)

After step (5) you can pick objects in the views (7) that will then be listed under (6), sorry for that mixup

[EffTheGrid 3,677]

Mostly all clear! Just not sure what to do at this dialogue box. 

[AP 3,588]

30 minutes ago, Sloppyjoemess said:

Mostly all clear! Just not sure what to do at this dialogue box. 

hm...I would assume the items you are trying to connect have multiple different textures?

[EffTheGrid 3,677]

1 hour ago, AP said:

hm...I would assume the items you are trying to connect have multiple different textures?

Yes and no. I'll explain.

Separate textures:

Scenario 1 (see above) I textured everything by hand, so I can select individual objects to light up. What option should I click?

or

Scenario 2 (see below) I extruded everything you see from one image, so the whole front is the same texture (I assume this is how the ugly effect was created) Would I first need to create unique textures for each window? or is there an easier workaround I'm not thinking about? They are already separate planes, but same material. Which option should I click?

[madhatter106 3,903]

On 2/19/2021 at 1:00 AM, AP said:

I think unfortunately there is not...I hope to stand corrected by someone. What I usually do is add "nite_" before multiplying the window so then every copy of the box already has this naming convention. You can use the "select by name" option to select your shapes more easily.

You can also group them, but to my experiance adding the "nite_" tag to a group does not lite all members of the group up. You could combine all objects you want to lite to one object, which in my experiance is very unhandy in case you want to move one window later or such.

@Simmer2 @mattb325 these pros might know better...

There is a way of doing this in gmax, but I found that it requires a little forethought.  In a number of the things that I have BATted in recent years, I have been starting with the building as a single object, then slicing and dicing my way through it to create windows and whatnot.  I will divide and separate out pieces of that object if I need them to be textured differently, or if I need to do a lot of work on them.  (Many times, it's the rear wall of the building that gets this treatment.)  It's a form of polygon modelling and I have found that it's much cleaner than the BAT Omnibus tutorial of separating everything out into individual objects and splines.  With one lone object, I just need to be careful about selecting the appropriate sides/polygons that I am working on at the moment - but it makes "big picture" adjusments and tweaks easy early on in the process.

So for example, I have a rectangular shaped building where I have delineated where all my windows are.  They are all sliced up and extruded inwards, and in previews it looks like an untextured monochromatic BAT.  Then I select all the window faces and separate them into another object - so now I will have two objects (the body of the building and the windows).  From there, I can select the specific window panes on the window object and further separate those out, so now I would have three objects - body, window panes 1, and window panes 2.  I could add the "nite" prefix to either of the window pane objects, and voila - only those panes light up at night.  This of course requires using a nightmap, but I have made a custom one that has enough variation that it "cheats" the windows (especially if they are small enough) with different color and level of lightness and saturation and "interest" of texture, so they don't look like flat pale yellow (or blue, or green) surfaces at night.

[20huskies 4,693]

11 minutes ago, madhatter106 said:

There is a way of doing this in gmax, but I found that it requires a little forethought.  In a number of the things that I have BATted in recent years, I have been starting with the building as a single object, then slicing and dicing my way through it to create windows and whatnot.  I will divide and separate out pieces of that object if I need them to be textured differently, or if I need to do a lot of work on them.  (Many times, it's the rear wall of the building that gets this treatment.)  It's a form of polygon modelling and I have found that it's much cleaner than the BAT Omnibus tutorial of separating everything out into individual objects and splines.  With one lone object, I just need to be careful about selecting the appropriate sides/polygons that I am working on at the moment - but it makes "big picture" adjusments and tweaks easy early on in the process.

So for example, I have a rectangular shaped building where I have delineated where all my windows are.  They are all sliced up and extruded inwards, and in previews it looks like an untextured monochromatic BAT.  Then I select all the window faces and separate them into another object - so now I will have two objects (the body of the building and the windows).  From there, I can select the specific window panes on the window object and further separate those out, so now I would have three objects - body, window panes 1, and window panes 2.  I could add the "nite" prefix to either of the window pane objects, and voila - only those panes light up at night.  This of course requires using a nightmap, but I have made a custom one that has enough variation that it "cheats" the windows (especially if they are small enough) with different color and level of lightness and saturation and "interest" of texture, so they don't look like flat pale yellow (or blue, or green) surfaces at night.

Agreed on the objects vs the splines.  Work is far easier and more efficient in my opinion using that method.

[AP 3,588]

On 31.1.2021 at 5:40 AM, Jasoncw said:

@AP You need to make smaller LODs in order to decrease the size of the render area. In my theater marquee prop example from earlier, you can see that even though the overall building is a 2x4 BAT, the part of the BAT that was rendered was only a small rectangle, because it only renders the areas it needs to cover the LOD. That image in the example is a .FSH file. For bigger BATs each view will have several large .FSH files, which tile together to complete the image. Because of the way that the files work, there's a limit to how many of those .FSH files each .SC4Model file can have, which means there's a limit to how big the building can be.

With your LODs, you have very tall LODs in the middle that are just enclosing air. You also won't be able to put props on the deck with those LODs, because the top of the LOD (the actual 3d geometry that the prop will be placed on) is hundreds of meters in the air. Your LOD needs to conform snuggly to the deck.

Also, the LODs are the in-game geometry and that is what, when your cursor moves over it, highlights the building. If you've ever had a BAT where you've accidentally selected or demolished it, even though the cursor isn't near the actual building itself, that's why.

Making BATs that will be interacting with props requires very particular LODs. You have to make custom, non-box LODs which snuggly conform to all parts of your model that will interact with anything in the game.

This is the LOD for my Oakland Tribune BAT (https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/30779-oakland-tribune/) and you can see how in general the LOD conforms to the building's shape, because I didn't want people to accidentally click on or demolish it. But then if you look at the street level there's a canopy. The sim props have to go underneath the canopy, which means the LOD had to very snugly fit the shape of the canopy.

@Jasoncw I have one last question regarding the fitted LODs... how to do that properly

This is obviously not how:

I guess I need to know the naming convention? or does it need to be one giant mesh that I form around it?

[20huskies 4,693]

@AP this worked for me. Done by one of Simtropolis’ own....

 

[AP 3,588]

13 hours ago, 20huskies said:

@AP this worked for me. Done by one of Simtropolis’ own....

 

That's it, great stuff!

Just wanted to assure that the plazer can click things behind the tower and the rotor star more easily. The giant LOD box that was used before made that impossible.

[Propfam 2,291]

Will the existing signs updated automatically? What will happen if I plopped a custom sign then I deleted the mod? Will it like flora?

[EffTheGrid 3,677]

Hey friends. Question: why does my model look like this at some zoom levels

and like this at others?

tried exporting 3 times, started from scratch every time, can't figure it out.  

arte interpretif

[madhatter106 3,903]

8 hours ago, Sloppyjoemess said:

Hey friends. Question: why does my model look like this at some zoom levels

and like this at others?

tried exporting 3 times, started from scratch every time, can't figure it out.  

arte interpretif

Looks like the silly BAT Texture bug.
There's a little file to download and add to the gmax folder.
Per instructions from the file section here - "to install, copy the files into your Gmax scripts folder (C:\gmax\gamepack\BAT\scripts\), overwriting the existing ones if prompted."
Once added, you'll need to re-render the affected BATs, but you won't have the problem any more going forward.

The download is at -  https://community.simtropolis.com/library/maxis/sc4/tools/BAT_Texture_Problem_Fix.zip 

  Edited March 1, 2021 by madhatter106  
added details

[EffTheGrid 3,677]

15 hours ago, madhatter106 said:

Looks like the silly BAT Texture bug.
There's a little file to download and add to the gmax folder.
Per instructions from the file section here - "to install, copy the files into your Gmax scripts folder (C:\gmax\gamepack\BAT\scripts\), overwriting the existing ones if prompted."
Once added, you'll need to re-render the affected BATs, but you won't have the problem any more going forward.

The download is at -  https://community.simtropolis.com/library/maxis/sc4/tools/BAT_Texture_Problem_Fix.zip 

Thanks for the link. Rebooted my PC and rendered the project again... sadly, same result.

What else might it be? Worth noting I re-rendered the .3ds as well. Could it be a texture issue within the model? I'm stumped.

I appreciate your help. I personally hope you'll make something triangular one day  

[Rott 2,351]

Does anyone know what setting I need to mess with to get the light to not bleed into the distance as much, Im using Target Spotlights, I have one placed at (1) and you can see it goes right through the sign and lights up spots at (2) and (3), not to mention some lights at the front are bleeding through the back door of the building...

[20huskies 4,693]

On 3/1/2021 at 11:49 PM, Sloppyjoemess said:

Thanks for the link. Rebooted my PC and rendered the project again... sadly, same result.

What else might it be? Worth noting I re-rendered the .3ds as well. Could it be a texture issue within the model? I'm stumped.

I appreciate your help. I personally hope you'll make something triangular one day  

@Sloppyjoemess try refitting the LODs (BAT menu far right)

[20huskies 4,693]

1 hour ago, Rott said:

Does anyone know what setting I need to mess with to get the light to not bleed into the distance as much, Im using Target Spotlights, I have one placed at (1) and you can see it goes right through the sign and lights up spots at (2) and (3), not to mention some lights at the front are bleeding through the back door of the building...

@Rott have you tried checking the cast shadows box on your night lights?

[rsc204 21,821]

On 01/03/2021 at 11:49 PM, Sloppyjoemess said:

Thanks for the link. Rebooted my PC and rendered the project again... sadly, same result.

You would appear to be having ID conflicts, note the update MadHatter linked you to, is intended to avoid just such problems.

However, simply installing the fix won't change anything, the ID's given to a model are generated when you open a new 'session' in SC4BAT. Ergo, even though the same ID problems should no longer occur, since the ID didn't get changed, the problem still appears for any files you started on before applying the patch.

You can open a new session (file), import all the objects into the new scene, then re-export it. The Type/Group/Instance IDs are included in the filenames, for example:

MGB_QueensRdShop-0x5ad0e817_0x42d20e48_0x30000.SC4Model

You can quickly verify the new model has a different ID by comparing the old and new SC4Model files this way. Note, you must now update the references (Exemplars) to use the new ID or you'll run into problems.

It is possible to manually change the ID that is associated with SC4BAT file, in the Custom Tab after selecting Files / File Properties in the File Menu. However, I urge caution that doing it this way is a bad idea if you are not familiar with the ID system in use. Always use a randomly generated ID, never pluck them out of thin air, statistically speaking, that hugely increases the odds of conflicts, which are otherwise very rare.

 

[EffTheGrid 3,677]

On 3/5/2021 at 1:34 AM, 20huskies said:

@Sloppyjoemess try refitting the LODs (BAT menu far right)

Can I have a really brief tutorial? Been trying to make custom LODs for a while but keep getting stuck...

Extra shoutout for helping me with nightlights btw. I owe you 2

Thx Huskies 

 

[AP 3,588]

Did you see this? https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/74718-bat-getting-started-guide-faq-resources-help/?do=findComment&comment=1748923

[20huskies 4,693]

16 hours ago, EffTheGrid said:

Can I have a really brief tutorial? Been trying to make custom LODs for a while but keep getting stuck...

Extra shoutout for helping me with nightlights btw. I owe you 2

Thx Huskies 

 

@EffTheGrid here is what worked for me 

 

[Rott 2,351]

Anyone know why out of the blue I cannot snap to anything other than the grid. 2, 2.5 and 3 all do the same thing all of a sudden, also the target is way bigger than it should be:

If I changed anything it was not on purpose so why it's doing this all of a sudden is a mystery, it also didn't save properly just before it happened, hopefully I don't have to reinstall do I?

[AP 3,588]

You might need to adjust your snapping options:

Right klick the magnet icon on the lower bar, then opt out Grid points and opt in Vertex, then make sure you confirm with X in the upper right and don't accidentally click clear all.

 

[Rott 2,351]

Interesting, seems like I am able to snap to splines again so the suggestion worked, but I still have the large cross that snaps to the grid and I cannot reshape a new spline by free form dragging it. Hopefully this isn't an issue since I never do that anyway but thanks.

[AP 3,588]

7 hours ago, Rott said:

Interesting, seems like I am able to snap to splines again so the suggestion worked, but I still have the large cross that snaps to the grid and I cannot reshape a new spline by free form dragging it. Hopefully this isn't an issue since I never do that anyway but thanks.

hm, that is wierd indeed. Did you try just selecting "vertex" as only option?

[Rott 2,351]

Yeah, somehow vertex was not checked off even though I remember doing that as the guide instructed. Not sure how that would have been undone even if I did it by accident, that's not a window that seems like I would bring up accidentally, and that box even more specifically. Good old Gmax...

[madhatter106 3,903]

On 3/17/2021 at 6:28 PM, Rott said:

Interesting, seems like I am able to snap to splines again so the suggestion worked, but I still have the large cross that snaps to the grid and I cannot reshape a new spline by free form dragging it. Hopefully this isn't an issue since I never do that anyway but thanks.

If you want the marker smaller (or larger, for that matter), you can select the menu for the Grid and Snap Settings. 
The second tab for it will be Options, and when selected, you can change the size of the marker, the color of the marker, and whether the marker is shown at all.

[AP 3,588]

@Rott the option to turn default lighting back on after having placed a light source and the model goes dark is under the following menue: Customize > Viewpoer configuration > Viewport Rendering Options > Default Lighting

[rsc204 21,821]

I’m fairly sure there is a keyboard shortcut for this, try CTRL + L perhaps?

[Rott 2,351]

I have finished a lot I just need to add a custom sound query to it, I have made the file (I'm assuming it needs to be .wav) now I need to add it to the lot, how would I go about doing this?