madhatter106

I like the flatbeds, and the variety of products on them. Deep down, secretly, I would love to see one with something totally absurd loaded on it - like a set of large rubber duckies, or something like that, riding around my cities in-game...

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG! I love this little guy! This is exactly what I was trying to do a while back with one of my midrise office packs - as much as I do like some of the Maxis 1x1 towers, I think we need a lot more of them for the game, as they do tend to repeat a lot (some more than others, depending on the circumstances). This one is great! I especially like the roof details, it makes it a bit different and unique. I'd be curious to see what the other sides look like, as they all seem a bit different. Glad to see this thread active again.

Is there a way for the rating software to eliminate or at least lessen the impact of "outliers?" In that, if someone has a file with (let's say) 50 ratings at the given moment, does the forum software average over all 50 of the ratings? Or does it take the majority and factor out a certain number of them (such as the highest two and the lowest two)? In that later case, if a single user had an axe to grind and rated a file with a 1, but the majority of the other reviews were 4s and 5s, it would disregard that 1 rating because it was an outlier? I am sure there is a mathematical term for what I am describing, but elementary school taught me to hate math with hours upon hours of long-hand division and multiplication. So math is not my strong point. Taking all of the reviews for an average (among other things) is the reason I detest Yelp - apart from their odd filtering algorithm, it seems to take every rating into account, and being a small business owner, it's frustrating to see that rating of 3 with the explanation basically amounting to "it was a great place, but I was really in the mood for Korean BBQ, and they didn't have that, so I gave it a 3." (Yes, I have actually had this happen.)

"If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style." - Quentin Crisp

Well I know what I am voting as BAT of the Year in this year's Trixies...

This. A thousand times this. Yes, I create this content for no monetary gain. Yes, I choose to allow the distribution of said content on this site. In its current form and format. But I do not want that content distributed by this site in any way in which I haven't given an affirmation, whether I have been contacted for three weeks, three months, three years, three centuries without response, or whether I have been credited under the title of "the fabulous madhatter106" or just "that guy over there in LA" without having given the thumbs up. Is that pride of ownership? Sure. Is that attitude or approach "obsolete" or old-fashioned? Maybe, but I don't really care. But I refuse to be told what my attitude towards this should be. As @T Wrecks says, you can't just decide without the full-throated support and acceptance of those content providers whose work you might want to include in this. Jumping up and down and saying, "I want it, I want it, I want it" like Herman Munster doesn't negate all the hours of effort and toil and work that these content providers put in to give you the content, or make their intent in sharing any less valuable than someone's desire to click the download button.

Well done, both are very deserving!

Awww, shucks, I'm blushing here. As far as residentials, jmeyers2043 did an excellent set of American suburban houses. You can find them at SC4Devotion. If I recall, they may have a couple of fairly common BSC dependencies for their lot textures and props, but they are well worth it, and really give some good variety to the lesser density residential zones. In fact, all of his stuff is great; I cannot sing the praises of his custom content enough.

I love the balcony patio detail in the front. That makes this for me, and gives the building a real "life" and reality. Sorry to hear about the computer issues - I used to have things backup automatically to an external drive with my old desktop, but now that Dropbox exists, I have everything there, including texture files.

Did you know that prominent defense attorney F. Lee Bailey was one of the founding publishers of the men's skin magazine (and Playboy copycat) Gallery?

Oooooooh lensflare! Love little generic buildings like this. We need more of 'em.

Working in gmax would never do that. Welcome back, O Legend!

Trying to follow along here... Is it possible to completely avoid prop pox by not using dependencies that modify original Maxis prop exemplars? And if that's the case, is it a matter of identifying said dependencies and either a) avoid using them, or b) modify them such that they use custom props with the intended modified properties, instead of with the original (though modified) Maxis props? Ie., does prop pox happen with custom props, too?

Pushing this one around in gmax for about three or four hours, and I don't know if I like it or hate it... Lots to be done if I do end up finishing it. I don't know if the water tower is too much (though it fits right into that spot perfectly). I'm going to be tempted to add water towers to all my BATs now, I love 'em. Maybe I should height restrict them? But then it would make me want to BAT taller buildings....

At what point do we have to get off SimCity 4's lawn...?

"“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” - Winston Churchill

Is there anything we can do on our end?

@mattb325 - thanks for the insights, I will be playing around with that glass texture on that building. Working in gmax doesn't help, and I must confess that I have little patience when it comes to figuring out window glass. Though I expect if I delve into it, I will manage to come up with something. Thanks also for the info on the creating objects from edges - I played around with it a bunch just now, and it seems that with gmax, getting a "pretty" mesh is probably impossible as you mentioned; one can cheat and have the mesh thickness a certain amount and multiple sides (say 8 or 12), but anything less than that is going to expose the shortcomings of the program, and look horrible in the render. I did do a lot of tests with selecting certain edges in a certain order, and found the results differed every time. I suspect the proper way to do it would be poly-modeling a shape, but I wanted the "down and dirty" quick way - though in the long run, the trial and error and troubleshooting greatly added to my time. Over the past few years, I have been greatly concerned with getting the number of objects in a BAT model as low as possible, to allow for more precise modeling, as well as the ability to do some trial and error (ie. pushing this wall one way and lowering this row of windows that way, etc.) that doesn't involve making the same change in multiple objects. For example, using one object for all the window frames of a wall, or one object split into different faces, for glass for an entire wall's worth of windows. I think (one of) the greatest "sins" of the BAT Essentials tutorial in the omnibus is the reliance on splines for a lot of things - individual walls, individual panes of window glass, etc. They're fine when you just start out and are learning, but once you're up and running, there are more efficient methods in terms of time, object count, etc. Someone should write a BAT 2.0 Essentials tutorial. (Not volunteering here, LOL). @Jasoncw - ahhh I had no idea. Never knew that. But it does make sense, given the results I've been seeing with playing around the with lattice work in gmax. @DavidDHetzel - oh no no no, those are dummy gmax place-holder colors. I only textured the roof and the HVACs/details because I find that the BAT doesn't have much life until you have done that. Kind of like when I used to do costume renderings - I had to do the face/head/hands and fleshy details before I did any painting or detail work on the clothes. The red will definitely be toned down, though still red - this building (somewhere in North Carolina) had deep red window casings, something which I was drawn to and which gave it life. @Aaron Graham - hey Aaron, here's some water towers for ya! I looked at the tallest buildings I had been BATting lately, and figured some might need a little help with their water pressure. The Deco one and the pink/peachy one I thought should be ritzy enough to hide their water towers within structures, but the one on the right I couldn't resist leaving exposed to the elements...

@T Wrecks - yes, indeed, I agree - the model looked pretty blah and naked. Adding the water tower gave it the life it needed, and it is totally believable on there. This BAT went from "ho-hum" to "two thumbs up" for me just with that little addition. As for the windows, I know what the situation is here - they're pretty wide, so you get a lot more window glass that isn't held in shadow from the window frames, and this is one of the first times I've used an opaque version of a simplified Maxis glass texture; in the majority of my other BATs, the opacity was lowered on the glass, so they looked a bit darker and "vague," but I didn't do it on this one. I think I need to tweak the texture a bunch. I've been trying to avoid transparent glass, due to the pixel singe and burn that gmax sometimes does; this was discussed a while back in my thread here, sometime around October of 2011 if I recall correctly. As for the last BAT, yeah, this little fellow would work great on a corner! @raynev1 - thanks! I know that every know and then a real stinker escapes from my gmax vault, but I hope I release more whoppers than stinkers! Okay, folks, this has been driving me nuts. I've been trying to get the "create shape from edges" function to work (what I think is) correctly in good old gmax, and I've reached my wit's end. I've followed the lesson on lattice in the Omnibus here, as well as searched some threads both here and online, and I seem to be either missing something or no one has addressed this problem. See below picture to illustrate...I was going to put this in the BAT Troubleshooting thread, but not sure if it would be seen there... I created a yellow box standing 5 by 5 by 5, with two segments for length and width, and one for the height. I've applied the Edit Mesh modifier, then selected all the edges, then pressed the Create Shape from Edges button in the Edit Geometry menu. It gives me the option of the shape type being smooth or linear, and I select the linear option, and make sure that the Ignore Hidden Edges box is ticked. It creates the new shape as a spline (which I changed to white in the picture, to better see and differentiate it), and I then can go in and change the mesh thickness, etc. My thickness is 0.3 (I think?) in this example, with the number of sides input as 4 and the angle at 45 degrees. And what I get is the above result. Something is up with this - as you can see, I have a lot of edges of the spline which are twisted and tweaked, while some are perfectly normal looking. It's visible in all the viewports, as well as in the preview render (once you've added a UVW map so you can see the spline.) I've tried adding an Edit Mesh modifier to the new spline, and moved vertices around but it only changes things (warps things where it fixes others), it doesn't correct the problem. If the mesh were rounded (let's say the smooth option was selected when you create the shape from the edges) or if the mesh settings were 12 sides at whatever angle (more tube-like than beam-like), it probably wouldn't matter. But this is driving me nuts, and I'm sure I am missing something. Or if there's a modifier to add that will "fix" the vertices or the mesh, I can't figure it out... Ultimately, the same effect could be achieved with several different objects stacked together (akin to something that you might find in the BAT Essentials tutorial, in that you stack a bunch of standard primitives together, like building blocks or Tinker Toys), but I want/need this to work properly, and it stymies me that it doesn't. One should be able to create an object from the edges without it giving you a very messy mesh as a result. So if anyone has any insights, I'd love to hear 'em...

I spent a chunk of time today reading and watching videos about urban water towers. It makes me only want to drink bottled water when I leave the house now. I decided to throw a few into the BATs for this set - here's the first one. It needs a few more struts in the support structure. I confess I had a devil of a time trying to get the "create shape from edges" function to work in gmax - it likes to skew a couple of the vertices and I can't figure out how to fix it. What seems like an easy function is a bit wonky - and my 700 page gmax tome only had a few short sentences about the feature... Here's another one from the swipe file - I stumbled across it and gave it a good shot, and it turned out rather nice. Needs textures aside from all the roof stuff. I didn't realize I was looking at a picture of the side of the building, which explains why the entrance is not in the center of the elevation - but it helps overcome the tyranny of symmetry that a lot of my BATs have.

Yeah love me some BATs with water towers (I think you had done some a while back, right?) But not sure - it seems like more of a residential midrise thing. Do commercial buildings also have them in the big cities?

Moar texturing. I recycled some old textures - I think I need to tweak the colors as they are too similar to other buildings in my canon, because of this... My, have the doodly-doos turned out rather nicely. On a texturing roll...

@Jasoncw - wait, it's not lime green? Ugh. I need to recalibrate my monitor... @mattb325 - yeah, nightlighting in gmax - "death by a thousand cuts" feels more like it. Especially with the news that these Intel chips are going to make all of our computers slower... @T Wrecks - I like this one, too; it's not a size (1x2 multistory) that is frequently BATted, and I do like the proportions as you have mentioned. I think this turned out so well because it was a near recreation, rather than derived from source images. There's a delicacy to it that I managed to not mangle entirely, especially in gmax. Forcing myself to texture what I have modeled, rather than modeling anything else. Here's one of the ones from earlier last month... My retinas are burned out, I need to look at it in different light on a different day. Plus I need to tweak the little Omni light in the front entrance in the night scene...

Messing around with another one - this was based off a building in Detroit, though I added another floor as it was looking too short. At least the front elevation is similar/derived from the source pic in the swipe file, but that's probably where it ends. Even with the extra floor added, this guy has ended up being substantially shorter than most offerings in the last couple of packs. It feels more like a BAT from an earlier volume of my offices, rather than part of what I have been doing lately, which have been much taller and grander. Still I like this little fellow...