madhatter106

Did you know that acting icon James Dean was the first actor to be posthumously nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in 1955, for his performance in East of Eden? He did not, however, win the award, and thus did not set a record for an Oscar for Best Actor win after death. That distinction would go to Peter Finch, for his unforgettable performance as Howard Beale in the film Network in 1976.

Couple more for the first bunch - 1x2's. Here's a yoga/dance studio, and a glass/mirror supply store. I need to stop BATting and start exporting and all that...

Yes indeed - I am a huge fan of the old Dateline NBC "To Catch a Predator" series, and I had an episode playing in the background on my computer just now. The next person is looking forward to an upcoming new release at the movies.

* receives a 20-cents-off coupon for Heinz Ketchup * * inserts a frozen Eggo waffle *

Soup kitchen.

I can't tell from the previews, but it looks like the storefronts are modeled flat with the full texture applied to the front - walls, doors, windows, glass all as one single texture. I think this doesn't do justice to their designs; doors and windows should be slightly inset, etc. A little more modeling and separating textures, and they'll really shine.

Hate. I remember working a grocery store job in high school, and the tourists would drive up from New York City (it was a 90 minute trip) and stay locally over the weekend. They would always ask me "what there was to do around here," and my reply was always, "well, New York City is an hour and a half away, there's lots to do there." Movie musicals.

I would have to say Pandora, as I haven't ever used Spotify. Cats or dogs?

I don't think I have boring days anymore. Which is not to say that all my days are exciting, it's just that as an adult, I never find myself bored. I would suppose that there were certain days during my childhood that I would have considered "boring" - anything involving appointments like doctors or dentists, stuff I didn't want to do. I do remember taking the SATs (twice) in senior year high school, and being bored out of my mind. What was the make, model, year, and description of your first car?

Oration

What is the German translation for "omg these BATs are full of amazing-sauce?" (I wasted five years in French class.)

What I'm saying is that you would create a "dummy shape" of the building; from there, you can figure out what the proportions for each wall segment are. Then you can go ahead and make individual walls with windows (as per the phillipbo tutorial) using the measurements and dimensions from the dummy shape. The approach you are using right now, it's going to make modifications and refinements very tedious. If one wall is too narrow or too wide, you are going to have to mess with multiple splines in order to fix it, because narrowing or widening one wall means you will be affecting the other walls around it. Regarding the balconies, you can create them as splines with the curves before extruding. It just takes creating multiple splines, joining them, a bit of welding of vertices, etc. I must say (and this is not to denigrate your abilities or enthusiasm), this is a very complex building to be making for a first BAT - especially since you are also learning the ins and outs of the program (gmax) on top of it. My advice that I always give first time BATters is to start with something small, so you can learn the program and learn the workflow, and figure out the problems and pitfalls and benefits and shortcuts of doing things certain ways. I wouldn't want to dissuade you from attempting this building, but there's a lot of work in this one; when I first saw the picture, it took me several minutes to figure out everything that's going on there, and how I would break it down in my approach to BAT it. However, you are off to a good start; my take is that utilizing the approach that the phillipbo tutorial describes will mean that when you start looking at it in preview renders (which, let's face it, are the only thing that really matters in the long run, because those show us what it will look like in-game) and start tweaking things, it will be much more laborious.

If you create the spline in the top view, when you go to extrude it, it will be upwards (that is to say, along the Z axis). You are already doing the converse in the front/side views with your walls - just imagine you are creating a "roof" in the top view in the building's shape (which you ultimately will have to do anyway), but just extrude said roof spline to the height of the building, add your balconies separately, and then see how the massings interrelate. Then push and pull and tweak and modify to get the desired effect. You would be working from general (the shape of the building in total) to specific (whether this wall is shorter than that wall, and how much the wall next to it sticks out.) Something I learned in college long ago - when Leonardo DaVinci sits down to paint the Mona Lisa, he doesn't start out by painting eyelashes, he figures out where she is on the canvas first, heheheheh. Here's another bit of advice that may come in handy for this BAT in particular, but I would also recommend to BATters in general - don't be a "slave to the measured reality." That is to say, if you create a building exactly from real life in gmax (or max, for that matter) and it doesn't look quite right (or as good) in the preview render, you have the liberty to tweak it and refine it and cheat it a little to get it to look better. I make reference to the marquees for my theaters in my earlier post - there is no way that some of those marquees would be so shallow or narrow, or sit so high up the front façade in relation to the doors underneath them. But without cheating or modifying them in gmax, they wouldn't look as good, regardless of their lack of reality. We're "stuck" with the perspective angle that SC4 boxes us into for playing the game, so you have to model to that angle's strengths and compensate for that angle's weaknesses. If this means that a recreation is not exactly 100% accurate, then so be it; if it doesn't look right, or good, in-game, there's nothing wrong with modifying it to maintain the spirit of what you're doing so that it looks great when it's grown or plopped.

I would suggest approaching this BAT a bit differently than the way one would do it in the phillipbo tutorial. At least for starters. Instead of modeling each individual wall as its own spline at first, the way the tutorial describes, my first suggestion would be to find the general overall shape of the building and how the massings interact. That is to say, figure out what the building would look like "in ground plan" (ie. from above) and then figuring out how tall it would be, and then figuring out how those balconies and twists and turns and angles are affected by the preview zoom. I say this because looking at the source photos, I am going to guess that if you model those balconies as deep as they are, the overhangs from them are going to cut off or eclipse a very good portion of the doors/windows/walls that are underneath and inset from them - that is to say, all the work you are doing now will most likely not be seen, or you won't see very much, maybe the bottom 20% of them. I find that any substantial overhang is enough to eclipse a vast majority of what is underneath it when you look in the preview (which, let's face it, will be the "reality" in SC4). And if you can't see it in any of the preview renders, you won't see it in game. I would figure out the wall lengths and widths, then try to create a single spline for what you are doing now in the top view of gmax. Then extrude it to the proper height, and then create a balcony spline in the top view, then extrude that to the proper height, and then array the balcony spline, just to see how much (or little) of those interior balcony windows and doors you might see. It might end up being a case of vastly shortening the depth of the balconies, because they might cut off too much of those walls; I have done something similar in my movie theater BATs - I had to "cheat" the marquees either higher or narrower, so that they wouldn't completely eclipse the front entrances. The benefit of creating the basic plan of the building in a single spline to figure out the dimensions is that you can move and modify and push and pull vertices and segments to get the desired effect, without having to redo multiple splines; for example, if you realize (or decide) that a wall is too short in the beginning stages, you can just select that segment and move it accordingly. If each wall is an individual spline, you would have to adjust multiple splines to do this - shortening one, lengthening another, etc. as they are all interconnected and related. It's like one big movable object that can be manipulated, rather than a set of objects. Then, once you know that your dimensions are good and that it will look right (or "good" because "right" and "good" may be mutually exclusive) in the preview, then you could break it down into individual splines, just like the tutorial describes. As for me, I'd do what I described, but keep it as a single big extruded spline; then convert it to an editable poly, then carve it up with the slice plane to get my window and door recesses. I would keep the balconies as separate objects, arrayed to the proper incremental height.

Did you know that there were two historical persons with the name of Jefferson Davis during the American Civil War, one for each side? The more prominent one, Jefferson Finis Davis, served as a United States senator and former Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce before becoming the president of the Confederacy. The other, Jefferson Columbus Davis, was a Union major general who served with Sherman during his infamous March to the Sea.

Director Jonathan Demme dead at 73. Best known for directing The Silence of the Lambs, for which he won an Academy Award in 1991.

Verdant.

I have a BFA in Drama with an emphasis in costume and scenic design. I did a year of Fine Art (conceptual, 2D, 3D, etc.) but switched to Drama at the end of my first year, and was able to do my essentials for the Drama degree in three years. I worked in film and TV costumes/wardrobe for over fifteen years, but currently not in that field. What I jumped into is a much longer story... Have you ever had surgery? If so, for what?

Retainer

I thought it was gonna be sushi...

Change scares me.

Not really a bug, but did the font suddenly change for the forum messages on the site? Or did I press a button somewhere on my end and change something? Or are my eyes going bad?

I did indeed know that! I had been listening to a lecture in which Ballard described the visits to the Scorpion and the Thresher, but didn't realize that 1968 (the year the Scorpion was lost) also had three other submarines disappear. Did you know that Academy Award-winning actor Rod Steiger portrayed fascist leader Benito Mussolini twice, the first time in the Italian film Last Days of Mussolini and the second time in Lion in the Desert? This second film was funded by the Libyan government under Muammar Gaddafi, and was banned in Italy a year after it was released.

The music store either needs a little bit of extra signage or some extra little front detail work. Just one little bell or whistle to add, which will make it complete. I do think I should lop off some of that cornice, it does look super heavy and clunky. I have a couple of corner store style BATs on my list in my mind; they'll be included or concentrated in a pack down the road. I think the first set of medium wealth commercial services will be all the 1x1 and 1x2 single storey BATs so far. A second pack will be 1x1 and 1x2 multi-storey (up to a max of three, I think), and a subsequent will be larger lot BATs, such as 2x2 and that like. I expect the corner stores will be in that latter pack. That is, if I can ever get past the BATting stage and dump them in the Plugin Manager and lot and test them... EDIT: added aforementioned details.

* receives a battered, torn, dog-eared copy of the 1997 Thomas Guide for Los Angeles * * inserts a packet of McDonald's ketchup *