Das Model

[kaimai 1,040]

10 hours ago, Fargo said:

Out of all the roof textures above, I would say I am most partial to 2 LaSalle. It seems to strike the right balance of brightness and pinkish hue. But I would like to hear others' feedback.

I think my favorite is 111 W Monroe (?) but this may just be a general cool vs. warm bias. 2 LaSalle is also quite nice though.

Amazing work in general—I have to try to get Blender working because trying to run 3DSMax on OSX is incredibly cumbersome. What exposure settings are you using?

[Fargo 542]

On 5/18/2025 at 12:12 AM, kaimai said:

I think my favorite is 111 W Monroe (?) but this may just be a general cool vs. warm bias. 2 LaSalle is also quite nice though.

Amazing work in general—I have to try to get Blender working because trying to run 3DSMax on OSX is incredibly cumbersome. What exposure settings are you using?

I think you are referring to this one. Interesting, personally I thought it could go warmer and perhaps a bit lighter.

Re: settings, I am glad you asked. These are the scene and render properties I am using right now:

^ Original Pic Name: Bildschirmfoto 2025-05-20um15_00_03.png

Per jasoncw on the original BAT4Blender development thread at SC4Devotion, I am using the BAT4Max sky color (0.56, 0.56, 1) for the world color in Blender. It just occurred to me I could change the sun color in the object data properties of the b4b_sun to match the sun color in BAT4Max as well, if anyboy can share what it is. In BAT4Blender it defaults to (1, 1, 1).

On 5/17/2025 at 3:07 PM, Bobelboy said:

What a joy to look at this thread and the progress you have made. Especially since I was in Chicago in March. Looking at your post was like a flashback and I see myself running through the Loop again looking at so many great buildings. It is one of the most fascinating places architecturally. Please continue your wonderful work, it is highly appreciated!

Thank you. I hadn't really grasped how important Chicago was in the development of modernism before I started this project. I will definitely be looking at the city with new eyes when I return.

On 5/17/2025 at 1:11 PM, Ct1999 said:

Woo! This is really good! Am I crazy? Did you just model every frame and panel of the building? If it is true, I can imagine how much effort you have put in.

Thanks! Yes, it is very tedious and time-consuming, but it allows me to adjust the dimensions more precisely, and is necessary for the bevel effect that I use on the materials to make the panels look distinct. Hopefully the results speak for themselves. Thankfully, working on so many models concurrently has made my workflow much more efficient.

[Ct1999 4,198]

1 hour ago, Fargo said:

Thanks! Yes, it is very tedious and time-consuming, but it allows me to adjust the dimensions more precisely, and is necessary for the bevel effect that I use on the materials to make the panels look distinct. Hopefully the results speak for themselves. Thankfully, working on so many models concurrently has made my workflow much more efficient.

Well, that is madness. Actually, I tried this method 2 years ago during my time of depression.

which is this building:

This is one of my early works, which still didn't pass my growable test after 2 years.

I would say using such a method can really accurately make the panel or gap, and put material on each object individually. But the disadvantage is that when there is a small mistake, it will be painful to correct it. So... I'm barely using this method anymore, unless I feel it is necessary for me.

 

One more thing, did your work get exported from Blender? I only using it to sculpt the model. But I am really interested in its rendering system, It will be interesting to see that some other style than the realistic style can be done for SC4. (Maybe Ghibli, Cartoonish, World of Warcraft.... I don't know it will be funny to something like that.)

[kaimai 1,040]

2 hours ago, Fargo said:

I think you are referring to this one. Interesting, personally I thought it could go warmer and perhaps a bit lighter.

Yes! I do like it as is, although also see where you're coming from in this closer shot. Could be a few shades lighter, I think I also just rly like the weathering/color variation pattern on that one. But as I said, possibly a personal preference thing for cooler colors.

2 hours ago, Fargo said:

Re: settings, I am glad you asked. These are the scene and render properties I am using right now:

Per jasoncw on the original BAT4Blender development thread at SC4Devotion, I am using the BAT4Max sky color (0.56, 0.56, 1) for the world color in Blender. It just occurred to me I could change the sun color in the object data properties of the b4b_sun to match the sun color in BAT4Max as well, if anyboy can share what it is. In BAT4Blender it defaults to (1, 1, 1).

As far as I can tell, the sun in BAT4Max (or more accurately Mental Ray) is just a D65 illuminant, i.e. pure white. The BAT4Max settings are 

The only relevant parameter w.r.t. a color value would seem to be red/blue tint, with 0.02 being more red. I assume in Blender the Color Management profile should be set to match (the Mental Ray tint slider is -1 to +1 whereas the Cycles tint slider is -150 to +150, so I guess that's +3 instead of the default value of +10?). The standard (1, 1, 1) value should then produce similar results to BAT4Max. "Saturation" in Mental Ray ranges from 0 to 2, and "Softness" ranges from 0 to 20, but I'm not sure what those settings do or what their Blender equivalents are.

[memo 1,439]

On 5/20/2025 at 3:01 PM, Fargo said:

It just occurred to me I could change the sun color in the object data properties of the b4b_sun to match the sun color in BAT4Max as well, if anyboy can share what it is. In BAT4Blender it defaults to (1, 1, 1).

When I worked on BAT4Blender, I've looked through the BAT4Max scripts to find useful settings, but couldn't really find usable information. BAT4Max seems to contain multiple rigs for different versions of 3dsmax which all use different settings, so it's probably easier to just try to match the colors visually, rather than copying the settings verbatim.

[philforhockey51 4,203]

Everything is looking great, glad to see you are enjoying the efforts you put in to create what you wanted, looking forward to more releases

[Fargo 542]

@philforhockey51 @kaimai Thank you for the compliments!

On 5/20/2025 at 4:56 PM, Ct1999 said:

One more thing, did your work get exported from Blender? I only using it to sculpt the model. But I am really interested in its rendering system, It will be interesting to see that some other style than the realistic style can be done for SC4. (Maybe Ghibli, Cartoonish, World of Warcraft.... I don't know it will be funny to something like that.)

It is indeed exported from Blender. I use the Cycles renderer, which is one of two renderers that comes with Blender. The other is Eevee, which is intended for rendering images in real-time, whereas Cycles is optimal for one-and-done renders such as BAT exports. Of course there are other third-party options available but I'm not familiar with them. I'm also somewhat limited in what I can do because my computer is old. For example I am unable to upgrade past Blender 3.x.

------------

Preview dump incoming. I am using the same render settings as before, except I have switched to using the Box type pixel filter instead of Blackman-Harris. This avoids the aliasing issue with window frames and other small architectural elements that I have noticed in my previous renders. 30 LaSalle and 230 W Monroe are closest to completion so they will probably be my next releases.

30 North LaSalle

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230 West Monroe

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200 West Monroe

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125 S Wacker AKA Northern Trust Bank

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180 North LaSalle

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Harris Bank Addition I

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Florsheim Tower

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101 South Wacker

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Brunswick Building

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Metcalfe Federal Building

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IBM Plaza

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Harris Bank Operations Center

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Ameritech Building

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I forgot the name of this one

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I have the next few summer months off so I hope to be releasing regularly! During this time I will also hopefully be making forays into other cities as well. Cities like New York and Minneapolis but also smaller American cities that otherwise aren't known for tall buildings. This Twitter thread inspired me a few months back. I'd eventually like to expand internationally. I've got my sights on buildings in London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Vienna.   If there's anything midcentury modern or post-modern from those cities that people would like to have in SimCity 4, I'm all ears.

Btw, can anyone help me identify this city? The image is a still of a stock video from a James Brown music video. I'm interested in the modernist buildings on either side of the picture. ChatGPT kept insisting it was the Civic Center in Los Angeles which it definitely is not.

^ Original Pic Name: Bildschirmfoto 2025-06-23um09_33_53.png

[IDS2 3,345]

Fantastic previews, keep them coming! Very interesting Twitter thread, by the way. I love those buildings that stick out like a sore thumb. I spend a lot of time just browsing google maps, and every time I come across something like that I wonder how it got there.

I've been hoping you would eventually set your sights on Minneapolis so I'm looking forward to some more local representation 

Also, congratulations on a stunning first release! Job very well done.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

On 5/20/2025 at 11:43 AM, kaimai said:

Yes! I do like it as is, although also see where you're coming from in this closer shot. Could be a few shades lighter, I think I also just rly like the weathering/color variation pattern on that one. But as I said, possibly a personal preference thing for cooler colors.

As far as I can tell, the sun in BAT4Max (or more accurately Mental Ray) is just a D65 illuminant, i.e. pure white. The BAT4Max settings are 

The only relevant parameter w.r.t. a color value would seem to be red/blue tint, with 0.02 being more red. I assume in Blender the Color Management profile should be set to match (the Mental Ray tint slider is -1 to +1 whereas the Cycles tint slider is -150 to +150, so I guess that's +3 instead of the default value of +10?). The standard (1, 1, 1) value should then produce similar results to BAT4Max. "Saturation" in Mental Ray ranges from 0 to 2, and "Softness" ranges from 0 to 20, but I'm not sure what those settings do or what their Blender equivalents are.

The color of the sun is automatically determined by the angle of the sun, presumably based on scientific information, and can't be controlled directly. Since it can't be controlled directly, the nonphysical tuning allows for some nonphysical/subjective/artistic adjustment of the presumably scientific automatic sun color. Basically SimFox made the sun slightly more red and saturated than it would be in real life. Except that the lighting rig in SC4 isn't based on real life sun angles, so who knows what the sun angle corresponds to. It could be something like March 11th at 10:23 AM in Helsinki. So basically it doesn't mean anything to us. 

The pixel filter is definitely a problem. Pixel filtering takes the various rendering samples (which aren't aligned to the pixel grid of the render), and weights them according to a curve, with the curve scaled to the size of the filter. Box is a flat curve (all the samples within the pixel are averaged together weighted equally). The other two are bell curves. So samples which exist near the center of the pixel are considered to be the truest sample for that pixel and are weighted more strongly, and the further away from the center of the pixel you go they're weighted lower and lower in the final average. BAT4Max uses Lanczos, which is sharpening filter, meaning that as you go further out, those samples aren't just weighted less, they're negatively weighted, exaggerating the contrast between nearby samples/pixels and creating a sharpening effect (like sharpening something in Photoshop). There are other sharpening filters but Cycles doesn't have any. And the filters it does have can't seem to be sharp without being pixelated. I've tried seeing if there are Blender add ons which add more pixel filters and it doesn't seem like it. Box (no filtering) is the worst and isn't normally used so it's bad that it's the best looking one. 

Also all of the BATs are looking great.

[RomanFox 28]

On 6/27/2025 at 7:21 AM, Fargo said:

@philforhockey51 @kaimai Thank you for the compliments!

It is indeed exported from Blender. I use the Cycles renderer, which is one of two renderers that comes with Blender. The other is Eevee, which is intended for rendering images in real-time, whereas Cycles is optimal for one-and-done renders such as BAT exports. Of course there are other third-party options available but I'm not familiar with them. I'm also somewhat limited in what I can do because my computer is old. For example I am unable to upgrade past Blender 3.x.

------------

Preview dump incoming. I am using the same render settings as before, except I have switched to using the Box type pixel filter instead of Blackman-Harris. This avoids the aliasing issue with window frames and other small architectural elements that I have noticed in my previous renders. 30 LaSalle and 230 W Monroe are closest to completion so they will probably be my next releases.

30 North LaSalle

  30 N LaSalle (Reveal hidden contents)

 

230 West Monroe

  230 W Monroe (Reveal hidden contents)

 

200 West Monroe

  200 W Monroe (Reveal hidden contents)

 

125 S Wacker AKA Northern Trust Bank

  NTB (Reveal hidden contents)

 

180 North LaSalle

  180 N LaSalle (Reveal hidden contents)

 

Harris Bank Addition I

  HB Add I (Reveal hidden contents)

 

Florsheim Tower

  Florsheim (Reveal hidden contents)

 

101 South Wacker

  101 S Wacker (Reveal hidden contents)

 

Brunswick Building

  Brunswick (Reveal hidden contents)

 

Metcalfe Federal Building

  Metcalfe (Reveal hidden contents)

 

 

IBM Plaza

  IBM (Reveal hidden contents)

 

Harris Bank Operations Center

  Opcen (Reveal hidden contents)

 

Ameritech Building

  Ameritech (Reveal hidden contents)

 

I forgot the name of this one

  amalgamut (Reveal hidden contents)

 

I have the next few summer months off so I hope to be releasing regularly! During this time I will also hopefully be making forays into other cities as well. Cities like New York and Minneapolis but also smaller American cities that otherwise aren't known for tall buildings. This Twitter thread inspired me a few months back. I'd eventually like to expand into internationally. I've got my sights on buildings in London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Vienna.   If there's anything midcentury modern or post-modern from those cities that people would like to have in SimCity 4, I'm all ears.

Btw, can anyone help me identify this city? The image is a still of a stock video from a James Brown music video. I'm interested in the modernist buildings on either side of the picture. ChatGPT kept insisting it was the Civic Center in Los Angeles which it definitely is not.

I looked up that distinctive brick building with Google Lens and landed on 109 N Main St (Claridge House Condominiums) in Memphis, Tennessee. This still looks like it comes from a flyover shot heading south along Main St between what are probably 170 N Main (Memphis Claim Agent building) on the left and 167 N Main (IRS building) on the right. The plaza and Main St areas have clearly changed a lot since the video was shot, so there's still the possibility that I could be wrong.

If I'm wrong, let us know what video it was. Might help pinpoint it a little better.

- R

[Hanson784 165]

I'm blown away as someone from Chicago - fantastic and incredible work. So many BAT's I wanted to have in SimCity 4 for more than a decade: the IBM Building, 311 Wacker, Leo Burnett, the Prudential Building, the Metcafe Federal Building, etc.... Planned on making some of these myself but procrastinated on getting started and prioritized my laundry list of NYC BAT's... which I need to start finishing and releasing finally since the Flatiron Building has been sitting around almost finished for 10+ years now)

Planning on making some Chicago BAT's like the Daley Center, Art Institue, Marshall Fields, the RR Donnelley Building (77 West Wacker Drive), One Chicago Tower and an accurately scaled Merchandise Mart (which would be basically mega project due to its size and the fact that it would need to be transit enabled since it's connected to a CTA L station). Seeing all your projects has inspired me to fire BAT back up....

Also really great to hear you're branching out into other cities eventually also like New York, lots of filler international and postmodern buildings to choose from.... just don't burn yourself out. 

Tested out 3 & 4 Michigan Plaza in my Chicago recreation and they look great btw.

[simmering 2,607]

On 6/27/2025 at 1:21 PM, Fargo said:

Btw, can anyone help me identify this city? The image is a still of a stock video from a James Brown music video. I'm interested in the modernist buildings on either side of the picture. ChatGPT kept insisting it was the Civic Center in Los Angeles which it definitely is not.

 

On 6/28/2025 at 5:10 PM, RomanFox said:

I looked up that distinctive brick building with Google Lens and landed on 109 N Main St (Claridge House Condominiums) in Memphis, Tennessee. This still looks like it comes from a flyover shot heading south along Main St between what are probably 170 N Main (Memphis Claim Agent building) on the left and 167 N Main (IRS building) on the right. The plaza and Main St areas have clearly changed a lot since the video was shot, so there's still the possibility that I could be wrong.

I think you are right, @RomanFox. Here is a shot from Google Earth:

  

So the modernist building to the right is then the Odell Horton Federal Building. The one to the left is likely part of the Memphis Police Department. I could not find any architectural information about it, but Google Maps says so and this photo supports that:

[Kel9509 1,357]

On 6/29/2025 at 10:27 PM, Hanson784 said:

Planned on making some of these myself but procrastinated on getting started and prioritized my laundry list of NYC BAT's... which I need to start finishing and releasing finally since the Flatiron Building has been sitting around almost finished for 10+ years now)

Holy smokes!  THE Hanson784?  I love your work!  It's great to see some veterans BATters still around!  Maybe you know what happened to the old NYC in Simcity4 blog that hosted some older buildings?  I believe some are lost:

https://nycj.blogspot.com/

On 6/29/2025 at 10:27 PM, Hanson784 said:

Seeing all your projects has inspired me to fire BAT back up....

YES!

[Hanson784 165]

On 7/15/2025 at 8:53 AM, Kel9509 said:

Holy smokes!  THE Hanson784?  I love your work!  It's great to see some veterans BATters still around!  Maybe you know what happened to the old NYC in Simcity4 blog that hosted some older buildings?  I believe some are lost:

https://nycj.blogspot.com/

YES!

Yep, I'm still around here from time to time - almost 20 years later (which is crazy to think about since it feels like only a few years ago since SC4 was released ) Anyway, i need to update hosting for the models I made, since the links went down probably a year or so ago. Going to put the downloads on Google Drive so they can be downloaded once again. Will probably make an update to the blog with how my SC4 recreations (NYC, LA, Chicago, London, etc..) have been coming along recently since I still work on them periodically.

[Fantozzi 4,067]

Huh ... this post from June 27 ... revealing the hidden content ... this was really fun. This was like opening a large chocolate box looking and looking unable to decide which piece to take first. All look so nice. 

Thank you! 

 

They say when the muses kiss their chosen men, this ist the typical outburst of creative power what happens then. 

[ACEfanatic02 259]

On 6/27/2025 at 11:24 PM, Jasoncw said:

The pixel filter is definitely a problem. Pixel filtering takes the various rendering samples (which aren't aligned to the pixel grid of the render), and weights them according to a curve, with the curve scaled to the size of the filter. Box is a flat curve (all the samples within the pixel are averaged together weighted equally). The other two are bell curves. So samples which exist near the center of the pixel are considered to be the truest sample for that pixel and are weighted more strongly, and the further away from the center of the pixel you go they're weighted lower and lower in the final average. BAT4Max uses Lanczos, which is sharpening filter, meaning that as you go further out, those samples aren't just weighted less, they're negatively weighted, exaggerating the contrast between nearby samples/pixels and creating a sharpening effect (like sharpening something in Photoshop). There are other sharpening filters but Cycles doesn't have any. And the filters it does have can't seem to be sharp without being pixelated. I've tried seeing if there are Blender add ons which add more pixel filters and it doesn't seem like it. Box (no filtering) is the worst and isn't normally used so it's bad that it's the best looking one. 

To defend Cycles slightly here:  given the lack of filters with negative lobes, I'm willing to bet Cycles does filter importance sampling.  Since each ray is really expensive to compute, you place them (stochastically) so that the density of samples matches the filter.  Then you sample less in areas that are unimportant, so less work is wasted on rays that contribute very little.  The math gets a bit messier than this, but like all importance sampling techniques it requires the weight (probability) of all samples to be non-negative, so sharping filters do not work.

I've played a bit with using a sharpening filter on the image in the compositor instead.  Needs to be really subtle to avoid ringing artifacts, and the exact amount that looks good is going to vary, so more investigation is required.  (It does solve the softness, but can't solve moire issues and will in fact make them worse.)

More on topic:  all of these buildings are looking great, Fargo!  I might suggest playing with the shader editor a bit more, it's a really powerful tool for making materials a bit more realistic.  As an example:  you can use the Ambient Occlusion node to isolate corners and blend in grunge, or use noise (with object-space mapping) plus a subtle overlay blend to make a surface look more weathered.

[Fargo 542]

Previews

I realized it's been three months since I posted an update. In the meantime I've been chipping away at various works in progress. Here's two models that are approaching the home stretch:

125 South Wacker

Following @ACEfanatic02's advice, I've experimented further with creating material masks for subtle surface wear. 

1 South Wacker

I remodelled it from scratch after my initial attempt a while ago and am now getting down to the finer details. Textures are a work in progress.

A progress report on this project I began a year ago

I've made another color-coded aerial view of the Loop to visualize my progress towards recreating downtown Chicago.

Green = completed Yellow = significant progress; base, roof junk and night lights remain Orange = modest progress, i.e. four walls and a roof Brown = started but no significant progress to share Pink = will start modelling when the rest are done Purple = may do eventually, but no plans to start as yet.

The future

My goal is to complete all of the yellow-coded ones within 6 months and the orange ones within a year, before tackling the rest. It's an ambitious goal for sure, but I don't think it's totally unrealistic if I have the right motivation. To this end, my plan is to set up a Patreon along the lines of those by other BATters to offset some of the costs (read: the espressos I consume in the coffee shops where I get most of my work done) associated with modelling on this scale. The idea is to follow the early access model and release one BAT per month to donors, before I upload them here within a reasonable timeframe as the ST guidelines specify. In any event, I'll continue to upload straight to the STEX regularly, while reserving my more involved works for prerelease on Patreon. More details forthcoming.

[Fargo 542]

Previews incoming…

Firstly, progress updates on 1 S Wacker, Florsheim, and 200 W Monroe.

God willing and the creek don't rise 1 S Wacker will be available on Patreon mid-November. 200 W Monroe should be hitting the ST Exchange soon.

Although I indicated in my previous post that I was going to finish up more of my WIPs before pouring effort into new projects, at a certain point I found it too hard to resist.  In addition to eight BATs previously begun, you will find first previews of three buildings by the late great Helmut Jahn.

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[ACEfanatic02 259]

I think the glass may be a little too reflective, especially on 1 S Wacker.  Looks more like metal than glass on the shadowed side of each view.  In street view you can clearly the offices through the windows, so they're not nearly that reflective IRL:

The bands of opaque and transparent windows would break things up a bit, make the building look a little less... dystopian, IMO.

[Fargo 542]

On 11/1/2025 at 8:48 PM, ACEfanatic02 said:

I think the glass may be a little too reflective, especially on 1 S Wacker.  Looks more like metal than glass on the shadowed side of each view.  In street view you can clearly the offices through the windows, so they're not nearly that reflective IRL:

^ Original Pic Name: image.png

The bands of opaque and transparent windows would break things up a bit, make the building look a little less... dystopian, IMO.

You were so right about the glass on 1 S Wacker. Does this look more correct?

[Fargo 542]

Further progress on 1 S Wacker, featuring interior blinds and support columns

[ACEfanatic02 259]

That looks a lot better!  I like the blinds.

A few more nitpicky suggestions:  the bump noise on the glass is a little intense.  I'd maybe reduce the scale on the noise texture a bit, maybe halve it, to reduce the noise frequency.  If the panes are separated (i.e., not a single sheet of geometry), you can also play with the Random Per Island node to break up the noise per window pane.  I'd also suggest playing with the coat roughness (assuming you're using the coat for tinting).  By bumping that, you can soften/mute the reflections higher up the building without needing extreme noise in the normals, which looks a bit more natural.  The advantage of doing this with coat roughness (instead of base roughness) is it will have less effect on the transmission, so you'll still be able to see through the windows correctly.

Again, nitpicking, it looks great already.  But prominent reflections tend to look a bit jarring in-game where they don't actually correspond to anything.

[IDS2 3,345]

Agreed with ACE re: the glass noise. I think the reflectivity is fine, it's just the bump strength. Lately I've been working on a few buildings that have that dark mirrored glass, and it's a pain to get right.

Also really nice to see Accenture in the mix. I have a fun memory of getting lost in there a few years ago and eating a falafel that tasted suspiciously like it was cooked in one of the fryers at the Popeyes next door. 

Nice work!

[Fargo 542]

Thanks y'all for the feedback. Decreased the bump strength on the window. Will wait to separate the window panes to break up the noise until after I have finished modelling the base and interiors, since creating so many separate objects slows things down considerably. @ACEfanatic02 I would follow your tinted glass tutorial but I am not sure how to implement coat tinting in Blender 3.6, which I am stuck with so long as I am on this pre-2015 Macbook

I have been alerted that my growable lot for 2 N LaSalle is not functional, which comes as no surprise to me since I was brand new to modding growable lots and didn't really know what I was doing. Since I'll need to update it anyway, I am going to do a re-export that improves upon the materials:

Will eventually do the same for 20 North Clark as well.

[ACEfanatic02 259]

On 11/6/2025 at 4:58 AM, Fargo said:

Thanks y'all for the feedback. Decreased the bump strength on the window. Will wait to separate the window panes to break up the noise until after I have finished modelling the base and interiors, since creating so many separate objects slows things down considerably.

FWIW, if you separate all of the windows into a _single_ object (not one object per window) you should be able to use the Random Per Island input in the shader graph to offset the noise individually per pane.

[Fargo 542]

Lest you all think I’ve been doing nothing for the past month, here are previews for the updated 2 N Lasalle. After finally finding a close-up photo of the roof I was able to model the roof junk a little more closely to the real thing. I have also spent a lot of time tweaking the materials, especially the glass, and have added denoise and sharpening filters in the compositor, making for a much cleaner night render.

[Urban Vibravant 792]

@Fargo Absolutely excellent job! Love the detail of the roof junk and the rest of the building's textures and materials. It feels very real.

About the night render.. did you tweak the glare maps to make the light rays shoot parallel/in unison? I'm just wondering because usually the light rays shoot in different directions with the default glare maps. I can't recall if light sometimes does that irl, I just thought it felt different looking at it.

Also I'm not a fan of the blue lights at the bottom. It seems it's a blue neon sign that demands more attention than it should, especially if that space is closed for the night. And it just doesn't fit well with the rest of the building imo. I get that it's a Chase banner, but I'd tweak it more by trying a lighter (not brighter) blue with the white Chase logo, which appears to not be visible.

 

[Fargo 542]

@Urban Vibravant Thank you for the feedback. I took your suggestion and adjusted the Chase sign. The final result is below. (Note: for the MN preview I forgot to enable the glow/glare effects) 

These are the settings I used for the glare (with streaks set to 1 and angle offset at 45 degrees) as against the default settings. I didn't have any reason for setting them the way I did, other than I just liked how it looked. I don't know what would be realistic, so I am not wed to them.

In case you have missed it, 2 N LaSalle V2 has been uploaded to the STEX. Someone has informed me that I forgot to include the lot exemplars for the growable lots, so I have to fix that, oops.

I will hopefully be uploading its next-door neighbor 30 N LaSalle before week is over. Here's a preview:

I still have to add lights to the base. I am not really pleased with the way the lobby on the rear side of the building looks, so I'll be adjusting the glass, interior lights, and floor material. The interiors of the upper stories look a bit bare so I want to model some crude furniture. There are some planters at the base so I want to model those as well and include them as separate props.

[Fargo 542]

30 LaSalle is nearing the finish line. I did a test export to compare the glass and lights to some similar style BATs. Feedback welcome.

[IDS2 3,345]

I think it looks pretty damn good. I really like the way the metal looks. The little bit of shadow you see from the metal panels being slightly inset really sells it.