BAT - Getting Started Guide / FAQ / Resources / Help

[BartonThinks 3,416]

1 hour ago, mattb325 said:

Phillipbo's tutorial is as good a place as any to start. Particularly since the versions of 3dsMax available are no longer compatible with BAT4Max.

From someone who was around at the time the tutorial was written by Phillipbo and a Maxis employee I can honestly say the tutorial is perfectly reasonable for making buildings in SC4. It is how I started.

The tutorial is no good for making models for true 3d games, or even sc4 automata, so if your ultimate goal is to model for newer games then you are best searching for 3dsMax polygon modelling tutorials on youtube. There are plenty available, and polygon modelling is available in gmax. However, if you are just looking to make SC4 models, then splines and meshes are just fine. I still use them to this day if it means saving time.

If you've installed the BAT plugin for gmax, you already have one. Made by maxis and it was the pre-cursor to the Phillipbo tutorial. It is a R$ house (incorrectly labelled as a R$$ house) and it lives here:

C:\gmax\gamepacks\BAT\Sample Model

Using this model will immediately give you an understanding of scale. It also comes with a few maps that Maxis used on their buildings, so you have game-compatible textures from the get-go.

Detail is key to making SC4 models, and the more you put in, the better the model will be. In SD Gmax, the smallest visible details are generally 0.1m. In HD, you might get 0.07m or so.

I will always recommend making your own textures rather than just downloading a bunch from textures.com. Doing it from scratch will help you understand what works best in game and avoid the often over-saturated and/or grainy look that comes with many custom content models that just use found textures.

A good tutorial for understanding the colour shifts of textures as they appear on your monitor vs how they end up appearing in game is here:

https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=5229.0

A good resource for making textures quickly and easily is here:

 

 

Thanks so much, Matt.

Phillipbo's tutorial was indeed immensely helpful. Clearly a lot of thought went into covering as many of the basics as possible. For the moment, I'm just focused on props and buildings, so Gmax should have me covered. I'm guessing polygon modeling is something I can figure out at a later date, but if I get halfway-decent at BATing, it seems like something I'll want to look into.

I completely missed the sample model included with the BAT. That's already a big help. There were a few sections of the BAT Essentials tutorial where it seemed like the modeling method was chosen for the sake of the tutorial, rather than a best practice for modeling certain types of elements, which threw me off. It's very helpful to see where the tutorial differs from the sample model.

The two threads you shared re: textures are also remarkably helpful and exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. I'd definitely like to make my own textures -- I'm just a bit clueless about how to get started. Thank you so much for sharing those links.

One follow-up question, and one that almost definitely betrays how much I have to learn: When people talk about making textures from scratch, how "from scratch" are we talking here? I've always assumed that a lot of these textures are based off of downloaded textures or photos of real-life materials which are then heavily Photoshopped to make them suitable for BATs. But maybe I have this wrong, and most high-quality BAT textures come from a truly blank canvas?

[Barroco Hispano 26,731]

@BartonThinks You can make textures from scratch in substance designer but that would take a long time.

What I do with the few buildings that I have posted is use a nice tileable texture and add the details with a mask in the subtance painter. By the way, I use two UV Channels (The first for the tileable texture and the second for the mask).

Tileable textures:

Tileable textures + mask:

 

[Jasoncw 11,841]

@Barroco HispanoHe can't do any of that because is he using gmax.

@BartonThinks Yeah, you would be using textures from textures.com and other places and then putting them together in photoshop. Some of your texture editing might be taking a clean texture and adding other textures onto it to add grunge, and some of your texture editing might be customizing the texture to fit your building specifically. Those types of changes depend on the situation. But I would say the most important editing would be adjusting the brightness of the texture, and adjusting the color and saturation of the texture. Off the top of my head, the only texturing work that's really from scratch, in my experience anyway, was manually drawing block/panel lines, and manually painting their variation (so drawing lines and using the paint bucket tool with a bunch of different grey values), and painting stuff that looks like ornament when you do a preview render of it.

Overall though, what you're asking is too open ended, there's so many little things. But if you post your progress in your thread then it'll be easier to notice things and give useful advice. I 100% promise you you'll be making great BATs in not too long.

[mattb325 28,880]

6 hours ago, BartonThinks said:

When people talk about making textures from scratch, how "from scratch" are we talking here? I've always assumed that a lot of these textures are based off of downloaded textures or photos of real-life materials which are then heavily Photoshopped to make them suitable for BATs. But maybe I have this wrong, and most high-quality BAT textures come from a truly blank canvas?

Like jasoncw said, altering textures from textures.com or one of the dozens of other texture sites is one way to do it.

Seamless, tileable textures are readily available these days.

When I started batting over 15 years ago, you couldn't really get any textures (websites that had textures on them were rare - if I recall there were only two real players: mayang and sysdebug, and the sites that existed certainly didn't host seamless textures), so things other than bricks/tiles had to be created from the outset. There was simply no other choice: I would start with a 512*512 square in gimp/photoshop, bucket fill it with a desaturated colour and then add noise + gradients, and what we used to call the broccoli effect (which was a broccoli shaped brush) to add dodge and burn across the surface.

It helped that I was teammates with gascooker in the bsc as gascooker was a professional graphic designer who helped me see how awful my first attempts were and to how to train my eye (and the curves on any photoediting software) to the desaturated, warm and peachy sc4 palette.

Making a 512*512 plaster wall texture only takes about 5 minutes, and, especially using gmax, the knowledge and skill-set that you gain really is worth the effort. 

There is a steep learning curve in 3d modelling, but making the splines/meshes of the physical model really is only about 30-40% of the total process: texturing takes another 30-40% of your time (night lighting being the remaining 20+%)

Just for laughs, I've attached a truly ordinary brick texture from Mayang.com from way back in 2006 to show you what was around back then. Use it if you dare...I'm sure there are some really old bats on the STEX that have 

[BartonThinks 3,416]

Thanks, @Jasoncw and @mattb325. Extremely helpful information, and it's doing a lot to dispel some of my doubts around texturing.

 

Also, for anyone else who's getting started with Gmax and happens to stumble on this page of the thread, I figured I'd collect a few additional links that aren't on the main page but which I've stumbled over the past few days and have found helpful.

Gn_Leugim's lighting tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h92dnx7t3RM

Gn_Leugim's custom LODs tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChSQ3VFZ1QU

JBSimio's lighting tutorial: https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=9551.0

Debussyman's classic architecture modeling tutorial: https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=14690.0

JMyers' custom foundations tutorial: https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=536.msg294366#msg294366

[Djohaal 121]

Ok, so I need some help on why my render won't light up at night. 

I'm on BAT4Max on 3dsmax 2012 with Autodesk hotfixes 1 and 2 applied, doing an HD render. I have two scenes set up, one for daytime lighting and one for night time. The night scene has no light objects as its entirely lit trough self illumination and final gather.

The model renders fine and both FSHs get merged properly, however both in simcity4 when exported as a landmark building it doesn't light up and the individual S3d files in the reader also fail to swap to the night texture when I toggle it in the S3D viewer, even though the FSHs are there.

I'm attaching the .sc4model file. 

THEGG-0x5ad0e817_0xedefb473_0x70000.SC4Model

[BartonThinks 3,416]

Quick Gmax question regarding materials: Is there any real benefit to using bump maps?

I noticed that a number of the standard maxis textures include bump maps. However, the bump maps don't seem to have any effect on the materials when they're rendered. I can see the change in the material editor. However, when I preview a render or export a model, there doesn't seem to be any difference between a material that uses a standalone diffuse map and a material that uses a diffuse map plus a bump map.

I haven't seen people using bump maps in Gmax tutorials or BAT threads, so I'm assuming this isn't a feature I need to worry about? Or is there something I'm doing wrong and there's a good reason that Maxis included bump maps with their sample textures?

[Djohaal 121]

2 minutes ago, BartonThinks said:

Quick Gmax question regarding materials: Is there any real benefit to using bump maps?

I noticed that a number of the standard maxis textures include bump maps. However, the bump maps don't seem to have any effect on the materials when they're rendered. I can see the change in the material editor. However, when I preview a render or export a model, there doesn't seem to be any difference between a material that uses a standalone diffuse map and a material that uses a diffuse map plus a bump map.

I haven't seen people using bump maps in Gmax tutorials or BAT threads, so I'm assuming this isn't a feature I need to worry about? Or is there something I'm doing wrong and there's a good reason that Maxis included bump maps with their sample textures?

 

I believe that the base Gmax renderer maxis bundled with the BAT does not supply bump maps.

[Jasoncw 11,841]

@DjohaalI'm not an expert at .SC4Model files, but the instance numbers for the day .FSH and night .FSH are very different from each other. To me this suggests that in the process of exporting things you've mixed things up. Or if not, there was possibly a glitch somewhere. Either way, I would reexport it from scratch.

So delete your .SC4Model file, and delete the gmax file. Go into your day scene in 3ds max and export the LODs. Import them into a new fresh gmax scene, and export the .SC4Model file, with the HD option selected. And then do the day and night exports from your two scenes, with the HD option selected, and making sure that you've selected the same correct .SC4Model file each time.

@BartonThinksBump maps are not really useful for BATing. I don't remember whether or not bump maps work in gmax, but either way, at the scale SC4 is at, that kind of surface stuff doesn't really make sense. Just think about how tiny the little groove the mortar joints have on bricks, or how tiny the roughness of the bricks themselves have. At the SC4 scale those surfaces are essentially flat. The other issue is the way that bump maps work. Bump maps affect a surface's normal direction. "Normal" in the science sense of the word, so, the direction that is perpendicular to the surface. With a bump map, even though the modeled surface might be perfectly flat, the direction that the normal is facing will not be 90 degrees. But lighting is so rudimentary in gmax that what the surface normal is isn't a big deal. There's also stuff about how bump maps are processes and rendered and the rendering resolution that also makes bump maps not very useful for BATing.

There are also normal maps, which are a different kind of bump map, and they work better (even though the issue of scale and how relevant the surface detail is is the same) but they're not available in gmax, and they're harder to make (usually you make normal maps by generating them from 3d geometry, but with BATing we could just use the original 3d geometry to begin with).

Anyway basically you can just ignore bump maps in gmax. You can also ignore specular maps and all of that other stuff. You just need your diffuse texture. And sometimes you'll need to change the opacity of the material.

[BartonThinks 3,416]

13 minutes ago, Jasoncw said:

 Bump maps are not really useful for BATing. I don't remember whether or not bump maps work in gmax, but either way, at the scale SC4 is at, that kind of surface stuff doesn't really make sense. Just think about how tiny the little groove the mortar joints have on bricks, or how tiny the roughness of the bricks themselves have. At the SC4 scale those surfaces are essentially flat. The other issue is the way that bump maps work. Bump maps affect a surface's normal direction. "Normal" in the science sense of the word, so, the direction that is perpendicular to the surface. With a bump map, even though the modeled surface might be perfectly flat, the direction that the normal is facing will not be 90 degrees. But lighting is so rudimentary in gmax that what the surface normal is isn't a big deal. There's also stuff about how bump maps are processes and rendered and the rendering resolution that also makes bump maps not very useful for BATing.

There are also normal maps, which are a different kind of bump map, and they work better (even though the issue of scale and how relevant the surface detail is is the same) but they're not available in gmax, and they're harder to make (usually you make normal maps by generating them from 3d geometry, but with BATing we could just use the original 3d geometry to begin with).

Anyway basically you can just ignore bump maps in gmax. You can also ignore specular maps and all of that other stuff. You just need your diffuse texture. And sometimes you'll need to change the opacity of the material.

Thanks, @Jasoncw. That makes sense. I've had a bit of a crash course in normal maps already after trying to use some 3D scan textures from Textures.com and discovering the albedo textures were a lot flatter and darker than I had expected.

One trick I found (which probably isn't news to experienced BATers and Photoshop users) was to convert the normal maps into black and white and then apply them as an overlay layer on top of the albedo textures. You need to fiddle around with the brightness and contrast a bit for some textures for it to work, but it's allowed me to make use of some really nice seamless 3D textures while playing around in Gmax.

[Djohaal 121]

1 hour ago, Jasoncw said:

@DjohaalI'm not an expert at .SC4Model files, but the instance numbers for the day .FSH and night .FSH are very different from each other. To me this suggests that in the process of exporting things you've mixed things up. Or if not, there was possibly a glitch somewhere. Either way, I would reexport it from scratch.

So delete your .SC4Model file, and delete the gmax file. Go into your day scene in 3ds max and export the LODs. Import them into a new fresh gmax scene, and export the .SC4Model file, with the HD option selected. And then do the day and night exports from your two scenes, with the HD option selected, and making sure that you've selected the same correct .SC4Model file each time.

I've re-rendered and now the model seems to be correct from inside the reader. The trick was to while in 3dsmax, click on the button to choose the gmax output twice, once in my day scene and one again in the night scene. 

Sadly however I passed it trough the plugin manager into a landmark and it unfortunately still doesn't light up a night 

[Barroco Hispano 26,731]

@Djohaal If you export the night version twice you must delete the old fsh's manually in ilive reader.

[Djohaal 121]

Nevermind, it was some operator stupidity. Now it has lighted itself up properly in SimCity. Go figure. The having-to-click-again-in-the-target-sc4model-button fact remains however. 

[Jasoncw 11,841]

37 minutes ago, Djohaal said:

I've re-rendered and now the model seems to be correct from inside the reader. The trick was to while in 3dsmax, click on the button to choose the gmax output twice, once in my day scene and one again in the night scene. 

Sadly however I passed it trough the plugin manager into a landmark and it unfortunately still doesn't light up a night 

3ds Max has no idea what is going on, it's just two 3ds max scenes and there's no connection or understanding of any SimCity stuff. The scripts use the LODs to create images that are the right size for the .SC4Model file, but these are still just images. Any scene you export from needs the target .SC4Model selected, because the end of the .SC4Model file has the type, group, and instance (TGI) IDs at the end of the filename. It uses those numbers to correctly name the .FSH files so that when they're inserted they properly link up with the building.

[Djohaal 121]

19 minutes ago, Jasoncw said:

3ds Max has no idea what is going on, it's just two 3ds max scenes and there's no connection or understanding of any SimCity stuff. The scripts use the LODs to create images that are the right size for the .SC4Model file, but these are still just images. Any scene you export from needs the target .SC4Model selected, because the end of the .SC4Model file has the type, group, and instance (TGI) IDs at the end of the filename. It uses those numbers to correctly name the .FSH files so that when they're inserted they properly link up with the building.

Yeah, I assumed (wrongly) that because the target field carried over in the BAT export window between the two scenes that the maxscript knew I was pointing it to the same target. It does render, but injects the FSH all messed up it seems.

[Jasoncw 11,841]

1 hour ago, BartonThinks said:

Thanks, @Jasoncw. That makes sense. I've had a bit of a crash course in normal maps already after trying to use some 3D scan textures from Textures.com and discovering the albedo textures were a lot flatter and darker than I had expected.

One trick I found (which probably isn't news to experienced BATers and Photoshop users) was to convert the normal maps into black and white and then apply them as an overlay layer on top of the albedo textures. You need to fiddle around with the brightness and contrast a bit for some textures for it to work, but it's allowed me to make use of some really nice seamless 3D textures while playing around in Gmax.

Yeah it's an interesting situation right now. There are a lot of resources like that, but they're not really suited towards gmax. Back in the day, since there wasn't really much fancy rendering and material stuff going on, textures had a lot of different information in them. A lot of lighting and shadow and reflections were included in the textures. A lot of textures were just photographs of things. But, for example, if you have a wall, if you take a photo of the wall, the photo of the wall also contains the subtle reflections of its surroundings, and also the color from the sun. And the photo does include the wall's variation in reflectivity and glossiness/roughness, but in an indirect and static way (in the same way that a photo of a mirror will capture the fact that the mirror is reflective, but having a texture with a static reflection image in it is not the same as having a reflective material).

Nowadays all of the renderers are converging on a standard way of doing materials where each aspect that affects the final appearance of something is separated out into different maps. So the albedo texture is going to be darker because it doesn't contain any reflection information. It's flatter because it doesn't have any shadow information (so for example, an old school brick texture would have shadows where the mortar joints are, but nowadays (and for typical rendering situations, which BATing isn't) you would have a separate displacement map so that the mortar joints had actual geometry and the shadows in the mortar joints would actually be shadows). The new textures don't have much surface variation because they're just describing the color, and there are separate maps for roughness/glossiness which is where a lot of the variation you see in real life originates.

So yeah, what it means is that to use new textures in something like gmax, you have to undo all of the hard work someone did in separating each aspect into different textures, and you need to combine everything back into one texture again.

[BartonThinks 3,416]

42 minutes ago, Jasoncw said:

So yeah, what it means is that to use new textures in something like gmax, you have to undo all of the hard work someone did in separating each aspect into different textures, and you need to combine everything back into one texture again.

I'm slowly figuring out how to do that, lol.

To this point, I've only had luck applying the Normal Maps to the Albedo maps using the overlay method I described above. That's generally been good enough that I can use the recombined maps as a basis for my texture, and then tweak it accordingly (weathering, dodge/burn, etc.). That said, there have been some cases where I wasn't thrilled with final results.

Are any of the other maps (Height/Ambient Occlusion/Roughness/Metallic) especially useful for 2D textures? And are there any rule-of-thumb strategies for recombining them? Or is it more of a case-by-case thing in which the maps and techniques you use for a given texture really depend on the texture itself?

[Barroco Hispano 26,731]

@BartonThinks The most important thing is to multiply the ambient occlusion texture over the albedo. You can also convert the normal map to grayscale and then mix it as an overlay (I do this for my terrain textures).

Albedo

Albedo + AO + Normal Map

I think this way you can simulate the effect of the normal map on gmax.

[BartonThinks 3,416]

Thanks ton for the tip, @Barroco Hispano. I just tried it out with a couple of textures, and applying the AO map made a clear and noticeable improvement. Really appreciate it!

[Djohaal 121]

Can GMAX at least unwrap UVWs? Making a surface you can paint in photoshop would help with doing fake ambient occlusion. Or if one is going to put that much effort into it, might as well get a student license for 3dsmax. 

[BartonThinks 3,416]

On 7/9/2021 at 11:42 PM, Djohaal said:

Can GMAX at least unwrap UVWs? Making a surface you can paint in photoshop would help with doing fake ambient occlusion. Or if one is going to put that much effort into it, might as well get a student license for 3dsmax. 

Gmax has a UV Unwrap feature, but it doesn't work the same as 3dsmax. Basically, you're confined to using a single material, and UV Unwrap simply allows you to adjust the position and size of the map for different planes. Helpful in a number of ways, but not nearly as helpful as the 3dsmax version.

I would 100% be using 3dsmax if I could. Unfortunately, the only versions available on a student license are no longer compatible with BAT4Max. If that wasn't an issue, I'd probably shell out the $250/year that they're charging for an indie license. I briefly looked into options for acquiring an older version of the program, but it seems there's no way to go about that without breaking the law and/or risking malware. So, Gmax it is.

[N1_2888 306]

Hi!

You may know Mas71's stairs. I like them very much, but unfortunately the smaller one lacks a mirrored version. So I BATted new stairs following the design of those from Mas71:

As far as the self-illumination of the lantern bodies is concerned, adding the night lights was quite straightforward:

I've switched off the light at the top of the rendering to show the difference.

So far, so good. But when it comes to adding a surrounding flare, things get a bit complicated. I put an omni into the lantern body which makes really ugly shadows. To illustrate this, I've increased the light intensity:

On SC4D BartonThinks has kindly provided a solution – and advised me to ask here, if there is an even better, i.e. easier way to add a flare that causes no unwanted shadows.

[Jasoncw 11,841]

@N1_2888Near the top of the light's settings is a button labeled "exclude". If you click on that, a menu will come up that has a list of objects that you can exclude from casting shadows. So maybe you would put the omni inside of the lamp and then exclude the lantern body objects. This way other objects, like the stairs and the railings, will cast shadows, but the lantern won't. If you want there to still be a small shadow directly beneath the lantern, you could put a cylinder inside of the lantern (so it wouldn't be visible in the render), to make the shadow.

You can also get creative and put lights where they don't exist in real life. You should still try to put lights inside of the lanterns, for most of the lighting. But after that, you could make more lights that are higher up, to create more ambient lighting. For this you could even turn off "cast shadows". The idea is that you'd be making lighting the same way that photography/movie studios do lighting, with additional lights that don't correlate with a literal light source, but help create an artificial artistic impression of the desired lighting.

[N1_2888 306]

Thank you! Regrettably the "exclude" setting doesn't work in gmax. And to your second paragraph: That's certainly worth a try! But first I want to add flares the way BartonThinks suggested. (Night lights are a science of its own, especially if you work with buggy gmax. )

[BartonThinks 3,416]

2 hours ago, N1_2888 said:

Thank you! Regrettably the "exclude" setting doesn't work in gmax. And to your second paragraph: That's certainly worth a try! But first I want to add flares the way BartonThinks suggested. (Night lights are a science of its own, especially if you work with buggy gmax. )

I'm glad I'm not the only one who's had trouble with the "exclude" feature. It was one of the first things I tried, but I couldn't get it to work in any configuration.

For other posters' reference, this was the configuration I used.

All of the lights are free spot lights with a falloff of 175 and a hotspot of 173.

In the first screenshot below, there are 16 lights with a multiplier of 0.25. This creates a bit of a starburst effect due to the overlapping shadows/lights. In the second screenshot, I tried to minimize the starburst effect by using 32 lights with a multiplier of 0.1125.

Is there an easier way to get rid of the starburst pattern that doesn't require as many lights? Or would this require a lighting setup similar to what Jason described, where the lights are rigged outside of the scene itself?

[N1_2888 306]

I think 128 spot lights per lantern are pretty enough in order to get rid of the starburst pattern:

And now some additional lights hovering over the stair as Jasoncw suggested?

[BartonThinks 3,416]

8 minutes ago, N1_2888 said:

I think 128 spot lights per lantern are pretty enough in order to get rid of the starburst pattern:

And now some additional lights hovering over the stair as Jasoncw suggested?

Oh wow, that looks great. Honestly, I think you're good to go with this setup? Might be worth seeing what it looks like in-game at this point.

[madhatter106 3,903]

On 7/11/2021 at 6:42 PM, BartonThinks said:

Gmax has a UV Unwrap feature, but it doesn't work the same as 3dsmax. Basically, you're confined to using a single material, and UV Unwrap simply allows you to adjust the position and size of the map for different planes. Helpful in a number of ways, but not nearly as helpful as the 3dsmax version.

I would 100% be using 3dsmax if I could. Unfortunately, the only versions available on a student license are no longer compatible with BAT4Max. If that wasn't an issue, I'd probably shell out the $250/year that they're charging for an indie license. I briefly looked into options for acquiring an older version of the program, but it seems there's no way to go about that without breaking the law and/or risking malware. So, Gmax it is.

Unwrapping UVWs in Gmax is kind of a pain, but definitely doable.  The trick I have with it is that while it might be efficient on the modeling side of things, it becomes less efficient on the texture-making side of things in Photoshop (or whatever program the kids are using these days for textures).  Since you can only have one texture/material per object, you now are saddled with having to put some extra work in on the texture side of it all, in order to properly unwrap.

For example, if you were to create an entire single object that was a house (four walls, roof, doors), you now have to create a single texture that encompasses and includes all those different things - walls, roof, doors.  And then unwrap each side so that it denotes which part of the texture it corresponds.  This is kind of a pain; instead of a roof texture, a wall texture, and a door texture, they're all a "house" texture, and have to be created thusly in Photoshop beforehand.

Somewhere else in this thread was a mention of polygon modeling - a technique that I've sort of adopted on my own Gmax projects of the last several years.  When I use polygon modeling, I will detach and separate certain faces or sides or areas based on what they are and what texture they might be receiving.  I will create the "cube" or shape of the building, then carve out the windows (and then detach those faces) and then inset the flat roof, and then detach that face.  So you then can assign those different textures to those different objects (window panes, rooftop).  It's kind of the reverse of the phillipbo tutorial - instead of crafting each individual wall separately, you start from a whole object and then break it apart.  Conceivably you can do the same thing and get the same effect with unwrapping the UVWs on a single object, it just requires more preparation on the texture side of things...

[BartonThinks 3,416]

@madhatter106 A version of the editable poly method is what I've been using so far. That said, I tend to do as much modeling as possible before detaching any of the faces -- i.e., I'm still using the Phillipbo tutorial methods for most objects. But when it's time to apply textures, I will detach anything that requires a separate texture.

I know the first method you described (compiling multiple textures into a single map) is/was commonly used by modelers for Microsoft Flight Simulator. Most of the YouTube tutorials I've found for Gmax use this method. I've found detaching faces to be a faster and simpler solution, but that could just be my inexperience/ham-handedness with the UV Unwrap feature.

Good to hear from a longtime Gmax loyalist. 

[AP 3,588]

Modelling below the surfaceline:
Is there any way to model below the 0-Line (surfaceline of a lot)? I had this question for a while and there must be some sort of solution, considering some  seawalls and other bats appear to be below the surface line of a lot like these CDKN sidewalls:

I tried just modelling in the negative z-region of GMAX, but when exporting the model it seems to lift it up and use the lowest point as 0.