Dazzer

Quick update - not much time at the moment. Tidied textures Added Garden Walls, Satellite Dish, Carport and Access hatch to roof (also needs some junk there too) First draft night lighting completed (see below). Comments appreciated. Dazzer

Just a quick gmax question. I created a rectangle and made it an editable spline. Then I attached 4 additional rectangles (Windows and doors) to this. I then extruded by 0.4 to get a 'wall'. ASfter that I converted to editable poly and attached uvw map and uvw unwrap modifiers. When I went to edit the uvw map I get: Notice the extra edges for all IDs? (middle shot) as compared to ID3 (bottom shot) Is this what I should expect to see? It's not too bad for a simple wall but with more complicated polys the extra edges are causing me headaches. This was a test (which is why the wall looks rubbish!) I did following problems I encountered working on another model and I am certain that the only actions I have conducted were those described above.

Originally posted by: T Wrecks Originally posted by: Dazzer For anyone interested in a CHEAP and powerful image editing tool, try Serifs Photoplus PRO - free trial download and £10 for the full version. They have deliberately made it to look like Photoshop and it has alpha channel masking and layers. It has dodge, burn and sponge tools as well as many other effects.quote> Why not use GIMP? It's free software (open source & free of charge), it is extremely powerful, and if you cannot get used to its UI, simply download the equally free alternative UI called "GIMPshop", which will make it resemble Adobe Photoshop. You'll have the tools you mentioned and many more, plus you can not only export to JPG and BMP, but to dozens of other formats like GIF, PNG, TIF, TGA... it can also open and edit photoshop files (PSD). Originally posted by: Dazzer 2. I'd like to have a single texture file for the entire model - is that how other BATters generally do things or do they have a seperate textures of each object (or group of objects)?quote> I don't BAT, but as far as I understood, the best way in most cases is to use one texture for each wall / rooftop surface, which will be an object or a number of objects covered by one UVW map. quote> Thanks for the heads up on GimpShop. I downloaded and I am playing around with it. I tried to use Gimp a few times in the past but gave up because of the UI. Originally posted by: T Wrecks Hm... concerning that Arab house (a very nice model, btw!) I'd say the gradient is just about right in terms of intensity, but it points the wrong way! You see, a gradient is used to fake the effect that further towards street level, less light reaches the house due to other buildings or similar obstacles. This is why the house should appear slightly darker towards the bottom and slightly brighter towards the top. Since the textures are drafts anyway, I won't comment much. The overall colour looks ok to me - maybe a tad too saturated. I'd really like to see how this little gem will proceed!quote> I originally had the texture gradient reversed - darker at ground, lighter higher up. But because the roof is quite light too I wasn't overly happy with the effect. Will try again the right way round this time. I agree with the color saturation and will desaturate a tad when I've worked out how to use GimpShop. Originally posted by: mntoes Everyone is going to vote for all 3 of your choices...lol, and I am know you would do them justice. I'm sure you don't need telling but never be tempted go for a quick turn-around alone you may take a look at your work later and think "if only i'd done that" and regret it. A good Bat takes time something that you have shown you can give. (sorry didn't mean to sound patronising here). On the subject of lighting Zero7 gave a pretty good explanation of how he does his lighting in my thread. Follow the link below it was very useful to me. Regards Mntoesquote> I saw that in your thread I've also seen another night lighting tutorial that does things in a slightly different way. I will try both methods to see what I like best - I suspect it will depend on the size of the building. The advantage with going with the high density housing estate is that the buildings are quite small. For example a one bedroom starter house is 5m x 4m by 6m high + a small garden. I was able to rough out a pretty accurate model in about 2 hours (without textures etc). OTOH I am concerned about the scale beacause a) I'll have to LOT clusters to fill lots with minimum dimensions of 16m b) They may end up looking too small - even if they are accurately modelled. Not much progress atm - real life has intervened and I'm starting to get rumblings from my missus about the amount of time I'm spending "doing your stupid models" lol. Can anyone recommend a good quality prop pack with susburban garden props - I don't want too many dependencies when I get to finally release my LOT(s). Dazzer

Originally posted by: mntoes Very nice work. I honestly like the marble steps and would keep them. Can we have a night view please?quote> Thank you Night lighting next I've already thrown in a couple of omni's to check I can render properly with the BAT - which I can. I've read a couple of online tutorials and will experiment. I need to decide between two options; - Adding internal walls and then placing omni's and spots in the 'rooms' with windows I want to night light or - Using alpha channel masking I think I also need to work a little more on the texturing - going to experiment with a grunge layer and high,mid and low light layer as well. I want my first release to be the best I can make it - upfront learning curve should hopefully result in faster future turnarounds. My next project was going to be the Technicolor film processing lab on the Bath road near Heathrow. It had a big tall chimney with the "Techicolor" logo emblazoned on it vertically. Sadly I discovered that it was recently redeveloped having been on the original site for over 70 years. I was actually planning on going out today to take some photos. No luck finding any on the web either. I have three candidates for my next project: 1. SAP's UK headquarters in Feltham: and Might be a bit ambitious for my second project though 2. Bedfont lakes business and residential parks: Again possibly ambitious and there would be 8 or 9 buildings in the set. 3. High density 80's and 90's 1,2 and 3 bedroom back to back and terraced houses and maisonettes. There is a local estate with about 15 different styles of newish 'rabbit hutch' residential buildings. I could possibly knock these out relatively quickly as many of the models would be very similar. The downside is that typically they are much less than 16m wide so I would have to do them as clusters of 2 or 3 together. (but that might not be a downside either). Also I'm not sure if these have been done before. I couldn't find anything similar on the STEX but I vaguely remember possibly seeing something similar a few years ago - maybe a BSC member.

Progress! Finally worked out what was going wrong - Some of my object local coordinate systems were out of kilter - so on each object I centred and aligned pivots to world then applied and collapsed a reset Xform modifier onto the object. That meant that all my objects projected correctly onto their uvw maps. So I've done a first draft texture of the model Standard: And a HD render: What do you think? Are the color gradients on the walls too steep? I also think the marble steps look a bit blah.

Originally posted by: tzotzil99 Cool, a Qatar house, I look forward to seeing what you do with it. Is the house supposed to be multifamily, or rather, multigenerational as they are in the mideast? Then it really might be more like our multifamily units rather than big single family homes. I second thingfish in that houses are tricky and your building might be easier to judge plopped next to small apartments of 2 or 3 stories. So far I like the taller version.quote> Originally posted by: zahrul3 If you want to look for textures, go to CGtextures then add a gradient like in gascooker's tutorial if it's a roof so it appears more real than comical. You can also get free textures from gMax and 3ds websites. If you want readied textures, daddyo has a ton of brick textures on the STEX while Odd from Sweden has great roof textures, most need a gradient but some already have. Gascooker's tutorial is avaluable on the ST Omnibus. You can photograph for textures but you need alot of photoediting and photography skills to make a good, balanced one. Some textures on google tile, you can use GIMP to straighten it out by reading Simhottodd's tutorial. Anyways, what is this supposed to be?quote> The building will be a Qatar family house. In real life it's an extremely spacious 4 bedroom house on two floors. It's situated on a compound with around 100 other identical houses and is mainly occupied by skilled/professional guest workers; doctors, nurses and middle managers etc. The model occupies a single 16mx16m square and I will lot it onto a 1x2 lot after I have finished texturing and lighting the model. I have already read Gascookers tutorial and have most of the textures completed - however I am finding the UVW map and UVW unwrap modifiers extremely frustrating. I want to texture each componant individually and planned to create a template layer with UVW unwrap that I could transfer to my graphics program. I think I know how I shoud do this but when I try and execute it I am not having much success - I may have to post a nuts and bolts help question with screen shots if I cant crack it this morning. For anyone interested in a CHEAP and powerful image editing tool, try Serifs Photoplus PRO - free trial download and £10 for the full version. They have deliberately made it to look like Photoshop and it has alpha channel masking and layers. It has dodge, burn and sponge tools as well as many other effects. Can Export to JPG and BMP. The major downside is that GMAX does not recognize it's native format. A couple of questions I do have: 1. Ive read that the most efficient scaling for textures is approximately 10 pixels per meter - ie a 16m x 16m wall should have a 160x160 pixel texture. Does this sound right? 2. I'd like to have a single texture file for the entire model - is that how other BATters generally do things or do they have a seperate textures of each object (or group of objects)? <----------- Currently frustrated.

Time for an update. I'm now considerably more proficient with the gmax interface and now I have more of a feel for modelling it takes considerably less time to get stuff done. Still an occaisional snafu of course. I think I've substantially finished the modelling - I plan to add a few decorative bits and pieces and hope to source some roof junk from the STEX. Below are the four standard output preview renders and I couldn't resist a HD render of what I think is the best looking view I have not added any texture's to the model yet; just used placeholders from gmax. I thought I'd wait for feedback on the model before before ploughing on with the texturing. ETA: My only concern with the model is that it is a little too 'boxy'. The model is a pretty close represention of a real house - which also looks a bit boxy from the outside.

Time for a quick update on my first project. I'm building a 1x2 R$$ based on a house my brother lives in, in Qatar. I've spent the time since my last post getting acquainted with gmax. (I have never used a graphics program other than pbrush and I generally have the artistic skills of of a brick!!!) The first model I built was crap - the isometric view meant that certain features were occluded and my scaling of object features was all over the place. So I took a step back and started measuring accurate dimensions from photos and from Google Maps satellite views. Then I decided to used primitive boxes to rough out the building - ensuring everything was in proportion. First with accurate real world dimensions and then with a 133% vertical scaling. Both models were then quickly whacked into test lots. Attached is a screen shot I took: Suurounding them are some Maxis default R$$ buildings. Which scale looks best? - (NB These are not completed models just rough placeholders to get a feel for scale).

Sorry to bug everyone - I've spent at least an hour on Simtropolis and Google searches but this one is driving me insane: - How do you remove all of the LOD's/Camera's in gmax? when I zoom to extents it includes them and zooms out way too far. TIA Dazzer

Originally posted by: mntoes You could try the extra cheats DLL from the stex. That should work I think. https://www.simtropolis.com/stex/details.cfm?id=21118 The command you want to use is "lotplop" regards Mntoesquote> Worked perfectly Looks like the render didn't take for maximal zoom-in's so will need to check SC4 Bat settings

Hello, I've been been playing SC4 on and off for several years and have finally decided to start a few projects. I have SC4 installed and fully patched along with other essentials such as NAM etc. I have also installed gmax and the other utilities necessary to make my finished Lots available to SC4. I have completed Phillippbo's excellent tutorial to get myself familiar with the programs and concepts necessary to start off. I have successfully rendered a model in the The BAT, used the Plug-in manager to associate it with the correct exemplar and then used the Lot Editor to create a custom growable lot. So just a few questions: 1) How do I test that the Lot is working properly - I cant seem to get the lot to grow - is there a way of forcing it to grow in SC4. The tutorial seggested making an RCI ploppable but a later edit appears to say that this is not a good idea. 2) Looking at the rendered images it appears to not be worth modelling detail smaller than approx 20cm real life size. Would that be a fair statement? TIA Dazzer