Any Suggestions?

[plan9 6]

Hi,

Since I've downloaded just about anything and everything I've come across from the STEX, I thought it'd be only right to give something back.

I've been missing a nice hospital with a realistic coverage radius, so thats what I decided to start with.

It's a loose representation of the hospital in the town I grew up in Norway and will sit on a 10x8 lot. The basic layout is pretty accurate, but I've tried to optimize it for SC4.

The only thing I'm planning  to add is an antenna tower in the NE corner of the highrise. but my problem is I don't know how to approach lighting and I'm still struggling with texturing since I don't have photoshop on this computer.... yet.

Any suggestions / pointers to how i can improve on it before i upload it?

Thanx

[Glenni 1,447]

wow!!!another norwegian on the site!!!cool!!!and from a county i  know well too!!!!!møre og romsdal fylkes sjukehus looks awesome!

[Simen 1]

Yay, more norwegians to bother... eeexcelent

Anyways, nice hospital, I really like it, hospitals seem to be what we norwegians do nowadays, eh glenni?

[Jasoncw 11,941]

It's looking really good so far. Depending on how soon you're getting photoshop, I'd wait to finish it. From the picture the textures look fine, but in the game the white might look funny, and maybe some other things that need to be fixed will show up.

I'm exited to have this in my cities. Right now hospitals are things that I try to hide away so that I don't have to look at them, but this BAT might change that.

[tag_one 133]

this hospital looks really awsome. I agree with jason about the walltextures, they look a bit too plain. but further it's a masterpiece! great first post BTW

[Kwakelaar 92]

Welcome to Simtropolis Plan9, as already stated by the Norwegian mobsters , and what wonderful first post.

This is a well made BAT, the placing of installation units and the use of rooflights is looking very realistic (which is quite rare) and you have a good roof texture. I can almost not belive that this is your first 3d model, is it? Anyway if this is your starting point you have a serious talent for it.

Looking forward to see more of your batting.

[plan9 6]

Hey

Thanx for your comments guys... appreciated.

Just thought I'd give an update since i now consider myself finished with the nitelights. I've changed a couple of other things too but nothing drastic. The omni's are driving me crazy since it now takes 15 minutes to do a draft night preview... Ther are plenty of things I'd like to tweak with them .. but every time i do a new preview, the lights come out differently even though i havent changed them.... beats me.

anyway... a night and day preview:




and the night one:



I'm still looking for a decent (white) texture for the walls, so if anybody could help me out, I'd be thrilled.

I only have another week or so till I go back home, where I dont have an internet-line. and i'd really like to have uploaded it by then...

Thanx again for your comments =)

[Jasoncw 11,941]

If it takes that long, you might have added too many lights onto a big building. Also, make sure that the "cast shadows" box is checked.

[plan9 6]

there's about 300 of them... all with cast shadows checked

[Jasoncw 11,941]

!!!

holy cow!

Off the top of my head, I wouldn't go over 30.

Here's a texture that I made, hopefully it looks good.  To use it, select everything in the scene that's going to use that texture, and put them all in a group (it's on the top bar).  Apply the texture to the entire group, and then give the entire group a box uvw map, and fit the box to the size of the building.  That way everything will scale evenly across all different sizes of shapes, instead of getting squished down on small objects, and everything is consistently darker at the bottom and lighter at the top.  To do this, you can hide all of the non white objects untill you have nothing left but the white ones, or if you used some kind of naming or coloring system you can select things that way.

[sparkythepenguin 90]

Another thing you may want to look at (that may save some time) is to look at all the objects that the light is shining through. When I first started out, I just made windows and roofs a mesh with a UVW map on it. That made light shine through as it has a thickness of 0. This is what I suspect is the problem. If your windows walls or roofs are just a mesh with a UVW map,this will always happen regardless of whether you checked "cast shadows" or not.

So if this is the case, I'd suggest redrawing the object that it is shining through. While it is a spline, extrude it and give it a thickness of .1 or something small like that. So long as the thickness isn't zero, it'll be enough to keep ligh from shining through it.

-Hope this helps out!

[Jasoncw 11,941]

To elaborate on what sparky said, if you make a plane, and rotate it around, you can see that it only has one side.  geometry is basicly made out of planes, so if you put a light inside, the light will shine through it, since there is nothing to block it.  By doing what sparky said, your making another plane that faces the light, so that it blocks it.  That's why I thought the shadows box was unchecked.

I hope that made sense.

[2ch.net simplayer 180]

You must be joking! That can't be your first BAT! Too good.

[plan9 6]

I decided to do the entire lighting over.... whoopie! .... what fun!

No seriously.. all walls (inner, outer, roofs etc.) are at least 0,4m thick. Mostly extruded splines. windowframes 0,10m and doors 0,05m .. so i dont think that is the problem.

Jasoncw: Thanx a million.. I think that texture will do nicely. I made a quick test.. came out a lot better tan the other ones ive tried till now.

Here's a pic of it:

http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/5043/ssmrnewtex7fw.jpg

[Jasoncw 11,941]

That's really weird.  Are the lights still having problems?  Maybe the lights start having glitches when you have 300 of them.

[plan9 6]

well... that took a few hours..

same thing happened again. lights act as if they're not checked for shadows even though they are. I even tried adding more objects between the light and the spot i wanted to keep dark... but, no luck. weird thing is it only starts happening after say the first 100-150 lights. sometimes its ok, sometimes it's not *shrug*

I'm gonna leave the 2 large walls of the highrise unlit, allowing the rest of the model (nearly) lit as i want it to be. The glitches started a little while befor i came to them... you can still see some of them around the balconies on the highrise....

I'm gonna try an export over night since i fear it might take a few hours.

Here's what the final nitelites are gonna look like:

Hmm... looking at it now, I think I could have saved me a days work just deleteing some from the old save =(

[tag_one 133]

omfg those nightlights are really awsome. I'm getting sillent of this beauty you should be work for NDEX or BSC IMHO I can't wait until this one is on the stex

[sparkythepenguin 90]

Now that night shot looks 100% better! One thing though about the daytime shot... Some BATers have had some problems with how the game's natural day light hits the interior courtyard walls. The walls in your courtyards look a little off. The courtyard walls facing the light source should  have a some daylight illumination. Nothing custom LODs can't fix. Jason could probably explain that better than I.

And have you added a base to the main hospital block? It looks like it is supposed to be on the ground, but where it meets the smaller building, it looks like it s ground floor is higher than the other building's ground floor. I could be wrong, as I haven't seen your latest progress from another perspective. Although I do think the main block would look cool up on concrete stilts...

Edited for grammar mistake...

[plan9 6]

I think I'm bordering on insanity here... those lights have now taken longer than the actual building.

I've tried everything... even with the save from that last pic I posted the lights act differently for every export. What makes it worse is that it takes 2 hours before the High Quality Export gets to where I can tell if everything is as it should. So you can see how this is eating away at me....

I'm gonna try 1 last thing and if that doesnt work, to h**l with it....

I'm gonna divide the building into 2 or 3 parts hoping that that way the light count for each part doesn't exceed whatever limit there is before everything starts going all wonky...

sparky: the 1st floor of the main block is hard to see from the angle of the pics because of the overhangs...

[T Wrecks 10,210]

Dividing the building into several parts is probably a good idea... it's not that noticeable with ploppables anyway because you can set the props to be previewable, so you will see the entire building before plopping it. With growables, it looks a bit odd when one part of the building grows out of the ground, and once it's fully grown, another building pops up right next to it.

[bixel 1,224]

Looking good. Especially for a 1st BAT. Rock on!

[Jasoncw 11,941]

even 100 nitelites is too many, and that's where the rendering problems are probably coming from. For Simmars I had done all the furniture inside a building, and then I did all the nitelites with omnis, and it was full of rendering problems. Someone in the BAT workshop mentioned that having too many lights can cause the problems. At the max, I would only use 3 lights. By looking at the picture you could probably do most of the lighting with 15 or 20 lights.

I think sparky means to add a normal (not a night) light in each of the courtyards to make it brighter. The glass is making a shadow fall on everything.

[plan9 6]

Well, that worked... kind of... out of 118 lights on the lorise only 3 got messed up. Luckily enough the fault is only visible from an angle that the hirise will cover...

Got a couple of ingame pics of it:

And I changes the ones in the courtyard to permanent ones as pointed out by sparky & Jasoncw... Looks a whole lot better in the dayrender, though the light in the daytime would come from above...

Just hope I'm as lucky with the hirise because there are 171 lights on it ATM and I'm gonna try re-adding 30-50 more...

[Jasoncw 11,941]

The thing I don't like about spliting buildings is that the shadow from one building doesn't fall onto the roof of the other.  But that can be fixed by keeping part of the building in the scene, outside of the LOD, with a new texture that is completely invisible.  The other part of the building will still cast a shadow onto the lower roof and walls, so it will match up better in the game, but it won't be visible.  The hidden part of the building can be replaced with a few very simple shapes so that they don't add to the render time.

30-50 lights is alot to begin with, and that's how much you plan on adding? oh boy .  but if it works it works.

the lot's looking nice so far too.

[plan9 6]

i considered that jasoncw.. so i did the split at a point where there was only 1 light that would go from 1 to the other, and made the necessary adjustments.

The lot was actually made before the BAT'ing started. But I'm afraid it's a bit too heavy on dependencies. 8-10 of them to be more precise. I'll play around with it a bit and see if I can't cut it down to 5-6.

The previews of the modified hirise is looking good from all angles, even after i added the 58 new lights. I'm gonna do the export of the hirise overnight.

[plan9 6]

ah... sorry... now i see... didn't think of that... dam!

Outside the LOD? I'm afraid I don't follow

[Jasoncw 11,941]

http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/9968/transbat7wv.jpg

I made a drawing

1. What the scene actually looks like.

2. How it renders.

3. This is showing a transparent texture being put on the green box.

4. How it renders.  The green part doesn't show up at all, but its shadow still does.

5. This is just a top view.  If you were rendering the blue part, the LOD would only include the blue part, and the green part would be outside of the LOD.  The LODs need to be seamless so that the building looks seamless when the two parts are put together. They can be tested by a quick draft render.  The LODs can be changed just like anything else in the BAT.  For this, I'd convert them to editable polygons, and I would modify the LOD for rendering each section.

[Dale Kent 28]

Awesome tip Jason! I think I'll be using that one in the future.

[sloppet 3]

plan9: that's a really nice building there!

[plan9 6]

Thanx jason, I got it...

Did a render of both parts ovrenight and it's safe to say that the lighting problem is fixed...

But... as always whan you fix one problem, another one presents itself:

I'm guessing this had to do with the LOD's.