Monkee_boy

So... My BATing in the past has been extremely limited - one abortive attempt to create a range of Dinotopian buildings and figures, an attempt to replicate a cool Jurassic Park project I saw on these forums a few years ago (New Rhodesia, anyone?) and some odd bits and pieces. Well, now I've graduated and I have a little time to spare before serious job-hunting begins, I've dusted off and reinstalled SimCity 4 and all the tools I can find, and have begun BATing like mad. My first project was simply to get a building from Google's huge sketchup collection into gmax (only partially succesful: Speer's Volkshalle was a failure, due to excessive poly count, unless anyone else offers to render it for me; and a simple model of the Cambridge University Senate House is now lotted and ready to go). With that achieved, I've moved onto something fairly ambitious for a first proper BAT: the Red Lion Hotel, Horncastle, with its attached Theatre and (for the sake of symmetry) two shops next door. This was partly inspired by an attempt to create an architectural model from some plans of the building I had: Unfortunately whoever drew the plans had no idea what they were doing - when I used them as a basis for the new exterior-only model below, I found that they nearly triple the area of the end rooms shown above - mucking up all my scaling. I had to start from scratch. Onto the eye-candy: I wanted the theatre to be accurately scaled. Working only with a couple of photos and a fuzzy google map for reference, it's taken me a couple of days' work to get this to an acceptable scale for my eye. Here it is before I'd added any of the details to the theatre yard. As you can see from these two pictures, there's something off about the scaling of the back of the butcher's shop (the white and blue shop-fronts). Although the front is properly scaled, the back looks quite a lot too tall... I think I'll leave it as it is; nobody but me will ever notice. Finally, a render of where I was when I left off ten minutes ago, with the rather dickensian-looking yard that runs behind the pub to the theatre. Updates to follow!

They're kind of connected all as one building - I've lotted it on a 6 x 18 lot to match the real size of the railyard so it's not too bad! As you can see, I seem to be having a problem with props spontaneously disappearing (levitating cargo!) re-orientating themselves, and the trains 'disappearing' the tracks underneath... if it's not one thing, it's another... I'm about to install a different skin for the default carriages - British Rail pullman green...

A couple more shots before I import it into the game: Oh, and a couple of shots of the original building (demolished about thirty years ago) to show how, erm, "creative" I've been with the design. It didn't really match the ground-plan I had (which was from 1888)...

Just a quick update to prove I'm not dead - I've had a lot on my plate so not much time for BATing! People posted a whole bunch of pictures on the local history group on Facebook, so I gave in and finally made a start on Horncastle Station: There's a goods shed to go in, to the left.

Ha, the other day I was worried to discover that when someone started talking to me about bats, I thought first of the building architect tool, and only after a while worked out they meant little furry flying creatures

Haha, something else to figure out! I may be able to help you out with that..... There must be some good techniques out there for generating auto foliage... what do you suggest? (quoteception!)

Haha, something else to figure out!

Now, this one I should definitely be able to release if its nightlights work - it isn't a W2W. Enjoy: Horncastle Manor House. Hit me up with problems and suggestions! The nightlighting for the french windows, for example, is wrong, and there's some detail missing from the roof of the extension. How can I make my gables look less... abrupt... when there isn't any overhang?

Jawdropping!

Having had some problems (like that above) with only having a mental plan of the layout of these BATs, I decided I'd best work out once and for all how wide each building ought to be, to make the road layout match the real thing as closely as possible. Having the dimensions of all lots planned out ahead of time will mean I can skip around and BAT whatever buildings take my fancy, rather than working outwards from the marketplace as I was doing. I was holding all that info in my head, but thought you might be interested to see the process behind my BATs so far: Where possible, I attempt to expand or contract buildings so there will be as few as possible in a 'unit'. Each colour coded group will be lotted together, and then at a future date possibly separated, so the individual buildings can be lotted as discrete units for other people to use. The above picture is very simplistic, simply to work out the comparative scales before I go on to make the buildings in BAT. It uses the 1:1.5 scale. Off screen to the right (where the river disappears into the bright yellow squares) I've discovered I have no choice but to build some fractional angle canal! That'll be a fun problem to solve, and also pretty much commits me to building at least part of a one-tile-wide British Canal system. First, I'll have to learn how to make good looking water in Max (any good tutorials anyone?)

Explain what you mean please, I don't believe I understand. Houses have a lot of shingles if that's what you are talking about. I think skyscraper's right - the tiles could do with being overscaled or more indistinct. They're maybe a bit sharper than you'd expect. It might not be realistic but as someone said to me before, it's how it looks...

Lovely lighting on those bungalows!

Merci monsieur. I may release this as a standalone test-case in the next few days. Is there anything I should read before uploading to the STEX? One more for the album... Unfortunately, I've mucked up again - these BATs were to fill a 2x4 space and I've made them conform to 2x5. Which explains why they seemed a bit stretched, and means I'll have to shuffle things around again. Also, as you can see, I have now set back all buildings from the edge of the lot, and none of them now overhang. Still no nightlights in these ones though. P.S - this thread hasn't been about the theatre BAT for a long time. How can I change the thread name to "Monkee_Boy's BATS" or something?

No progress on working out the nightlighting issue yet, but here's another shop for your delectation (these are getting faster and faster to finish - this would have taken me about a week once upon a time!) Mortons is now one of the largest printers in the UK, publishing hundreds of niche magazines. They started out here, however, in a printers-stationers in Horncastle Market Place. They now occupy a large complex on an out of town industrial estate - a job for another day. This old shop was also occupied by Curry's and WH Smith at various dates, but fell down one dramatic day in the 70s when the building to its right was being demolished (needless to say, incompetently). Nobody was hurt in the collapse but the town lost another much-loved landmark. To add insult to injury, the building that replaced it is about as attractive as a builder's bum. These two buildings - HSBC to the left and this one - demonstrate exactly the point someone made earlier about scales. Damn, I've just noticed that ridge of tiles on top of the roof. Better go back and add those on...

Thanks. I went very carefully through every option looking for it and couldn't see it - there was a left hand drive option but that didn't seem to include it. I'll uninstall and try again UPDATE Okay I'm an idiot, feel free to delete these posts or whatever to protect my precious reputation as a monster of intellect

Erm, I'm probably being incredibly dense, but how do I get the NAM with euro textures? I installed, then uninstalled and did a custom installation, but I didn't see the option anywhere during the process, and now I have US road textures. The documentation doesn't explain where I can get the euro textures to replace the US ones. *cringes in anticipation of inevitable backlash*

Let me explain: I'm a lazy, lazy man with a short attention span I'm reluctant to go back and change the buildings I've already done too much. I could just scale them to be a metre shorter... but I'm quite happy with them as close to the road as they are, generally. I may alter them to have the standard 1.6m step back when I get all the problems ironed out and release them (although as you've now pointed out, I may not be able to iron the problems out without first fixing the overhang anyway). I'm going to go and see if it causes issues when I alter the model's footprint and make it a building. If I can remember how to do that with reader... UPDATE Well this is just freaking weird. Altering the footprints didn't have any effect on the lot I edited at all. But suddenly the night-lighting is working in the model I didn't touch.

As I said before, I won't necessarily set the buildings back the full 1.6m - the fronts of buildings don't always line up as it is - but I've now withdrawn the shop-fronts back beyond the front of the lots so they no longer overhang. Assuming I did this, would it also be possible to reduce the footprint the game thinks a model has? I remember doing something similar when I had a go at a MMP once (the SimGoober canal water - it didn't work so well) but I'm not sure whether it'll work in the Lot Editor... Now this is bizarre. The prop-building on the left was fully functional with nightlights before. On adding a second building to the lot, HSBC, lighting ceases to function...

The only real reason is that many of the buildings overhang their lots at the shop-fronts (or else, they are exactly 16*16 and lot editor refuses to allow that they can be placed on a single grid square). I'll just check the GroundModel, but I suspect that the overhang thing may be the problem (though it doesn't seem to affect the above props, and it seems like a dumb problem!)

They're all props, including the ones that have working nightlights (with lighting set to 'true' in plugin manager)

Well, here's the updated punch-house and church. Notice that although they were exported with exactly the same settings everywhere, the nightlighting is missing from the punch-house and some textures appear differently. I'm not sure what's up with the nightlighting. I re-exported the night view a couple of times but there was no improvement... The eventually released building will be more detailed and won't feature the large grassy area attached. Much more pleasingly, I'll leave you with a fully-functional but qualitatively variable shot of a tiny portion of completed high-street: The building in the bottom right was exported HD; the building centre was exported SD; the upper left building was exported with gmax. The zebra crossing lights are a simple detail I'm quite proud of. Finally, a work in progress - one of the more ornate buildings in the market place, and a lot of fun so far!

Ambitious stuff, look forward to seeing how it pans out!

That last building's beautiful!

This is fantastic! Where did you get those field edges?

Restarting the computer fixed it second go round. It remains a mystery.