madhatter106

I rather like the "podium" being a little wider/longer when this building is translated into gmax. I gives the opportunity to drop in a couple extra HVAC and roofjunk tidbit details. The window texturing is great, especially for gmax.

The ground plan is inspired in part by @Aaron Graham and his fabulous NYBT buildings. The elevation details are copied from a building picture in my swipe file. And the penthouse detailing is copied from a building I saw while zooming around downtown Los Angeles on Bing Maps a while back for inspiration. So it's a Frankenstein Monster of sources. For anyone wondering, this next (forthcoming) office pack will have either twelve or fifteen buildings in it - including the twelve 2x2's and 2x3's and 3x2's already showcased. If it goes to fifteen buildings, it will have the little slender 1x2 with the great Greco-Roman façade details that I still have yet to finish and texture, as well as a couple of other 1x2's that I haven't gotten to the point of sharing yet. Almost all of the initial twelve are rendered - they just need to be PIM'ed, lotted, modded, query-written, and tested; the stuff I don't want to do at the moment, but will have to force myself to do. (Because BATs finished and sitting dormant on my hard drive unshared are pretty much useless to all, including myself.) I could possibly save the 1x2's for a later pack - indeed I had considered really doing a bunch of these, because we need more 1x2's that are taller and better than those awful Maxis shoeboxes, and it's a BAT size and configuration that seems to be off a lot of prior BATters' radar. As far as custom content available over the past decade or so on the varies exchanges and sites online, the thing that amazes me is that despite the camp/kitsch factor inherent in the Maxis style, not many BATters have taken a shot at doing Googie buildings. Indeed, a search of the STEX for "googie" turns up less than I had anticipated, which amazes me, as they would fit in so well with what Maxis was trying to do with SC4. (As well as being just outright fun in their own right.) Some of my early CS$ little guys were toeing the line or on the periphery of Googie, but not blatantly full-tilt. So I got to messing around in gmax for a couple of hours, having fun diving into the whole aesthetic of it, and doing far too many searches online for tidbits of inspiration. The great thing about living in Los Angeles is that there are a few of these Googie style buildings still standing. Not as many as there should be, though... This one will require a lot of effort when it comes to detailing and nightlights. The interiors near the windows will need to be modeled, so you can see the tables and booths and seating and stuff in the night views, but if it's done right, it will look dynamite.

Milos Forman, award-winning director, dies at 86. Forman's two Academy Award wins were for directing One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus.

Thanks for the input, all. I do like the original (left) version, though I am a sucker for lots of rooftop patio details, and the right version would allow for that. Will continue to mess around with it. Here's the last older style building with the penthouse add-on, finally textured and lit. This was a bit of a chore. Tempted to keep loading in details.

Herein lies a problem with Maxis not adhering to a set scale with their models, coupled with the fact that sims themselves are apparently 4.0 meters tall - single story buildings often look squat or squashed when using real life dimensions. I've found in my many years of BATting "little things" like this that often you need to "cheat up" the height a little bit, so they don't look too squashed. It's something that comes up from time to time in BAT threads, and indeed I was just making this comment about a BAT that @IDS2 was showcasing in his thread a day or so ago. In looking at that picture in an attempt to translate it to SC4 dimensions, we can assume that the door height is a little more than the height of a sim. However, if a sim is 4.0 meters high, that makes our door even taller, so as a rule of thumb, I use somewhere around 3.75 to 3.85 for my door heights when I BAT. (The sims can stoop a little when they enter my buildings, haha). But let's just say that it's 3.5 for better maths. If the door is 3.5 high, from the ground to the top of the transom (but excluding the transom window) just above the door, then we have approximately the same distance (in other words, another "door's height") between the top of the door itself and the top of the building - that is, the transom window and the remaining architecture above it to which the overhang is attached is also 3.5 high. So, in totality, this could effectively be BATted at a height of 7.0 meters, and still be in keeping with the reality of the source material. Even just looking at the door in the picture, you can see that though the building is single-story, the height of the ceiling inside the "office" (as well as in the area of the garage doors where the cars are serviced inside) is well above a single floor. This, in addition to whatever HVAC and AC and electrical space wedged between the interior ceiling and the rooftop itself would be enough to get us to a height of 7.0 meters. So, essentially, our maths are the same, @T Wrecks - indeed, a doubling of the door height. I just used the (near) height of the sims walking past the buildings to arrive at my result. In effect, this little gas station is close to being a two-story building - it just happens to have a very tall single story inside. Even in the multi-story office buildings I have been working on of late, I rarely use a ground floor height shorther than 6.0 meters or so - partly because it looks too short and squat, and also because many of these buidings have large lobbies at their entrances, which are substantially taller than a single story. So even though the upper floors (past whatever mezzanine might exist) may be BATted at 4.5 (or sometimes 4.25 if I want to drive myself crazy with the maths) per floor, the ground floor is significantly taller than that.

Texturing for both is gorgeous. Truly beautiful. I love the added details in them both, like the flagpole and the roof junk. I find that with single story buildings like the firehouse, I have to "cheat" them a little taller in their modeling so they don't look too squashed. Even if the measurements are correct, I end up stretching them a bit (so to speak) so that visually they don't look too short.

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Found a modern office building pic in the depths of my swipe file, and was messing around for an hour or so to come up with the following. There are two "variations" that I ended up with for the upper floor; the one on the left is very similar to what the building looks like in real life, whereas the one on the right is something that I was messing around with and thought might look better (and give me the opportunity to do some great little patio details). Which works better? (I doubt I would have the energy or devotion to do "both," though.)

Banned because of Chicago.

Wade Wilson, because Ryan Reynolds. Anthony Hopkins or Anthony Perkins. OR

How big is the plug-ins folder for Kieran's cities...?

of rancid sauerkraut.

@benvoliothefirst - ZOMG a three-year old? You don't sleep anymore probably, let alone play SC4...! Finally forced myself to sit down and texture this one, which was modeled about the same time I became fixated on putting water towers on everything. I loved the modeling but was not looking forward to the texturing, as it's really...well, really brown. The original building is pretty brown, too; thankfully it had these great burgundy window and door frame casings, which really gave it some personality. This one I really like. An interesting little building, and I bet it would look great in-game.

Steven Bochco, television writer and producer, dead at 74. The innovative television mogul behind such hits as Hill Street Blues, LA Law, and NYPD Blue.

Linda Brown, symbol of landmark school desegregation case, dies at 75. The unanimous US Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka rule state-imposed public school segregation as unconstitutional.

@T Wrecks - the height of the water tower was bugging me, but I think even with a shortened version of it, it still dominates the BAT. So I nixed it, and I think the result is much better without the tower overpowering it. @mattb325 - yeah I like the little added "penthouse," I saw something like it in my research and thought, why not...? @Jasoncw - yeah the notching in the cornice is weird, and is partly a result of my horrible eyesight and misreading a research photograph. It felt weird BATting it that way, and I should have tried to find a corroborating source photo to doublecheck it. Ah well - but curiously enough, I did see a building in downtown LA a couple of months ago that did that with the cornice, for some weird reason. I wish I could remember where it was... Refining the last one, still needs bunches of details...

I do find in gmax, however, that sometimes (depending on the size and height of a BAT), the window that opens while the rendering happens is strangely "off." It might seem too tall or too narrow or too wide, or what have you. I find that it's with BATs that are wider than one tile, and BATs which are more than three or four storeys high; not always, mind you, but just every once in a while, with seemingly no rhyme or reason. It's not something that happens in the preview renders, but once you have pressed the "render" button, every now and then it will seem like it doesn't fit. Since I know to check the LODs before I render, I know it's not that as an issue; and I must say that 99.99% of the time, the BAT is fine and needs to be rendered just that one time, and not on a second try. But every so often, gmax gets a little confuzzled when it comes to the window size while it renders.

I'm astounded someone had never done a BAT of the Bradbury Building. Glad to see that such a BAT master has taken it on as a project! Sad to see that the bookstore building is gone. However, the slightly taller building just two doors down from it is looking pretty va-va-va-VOOM for a future BAT project...!

Re: the hotel Yorba...

I've said it elsewhere, and I'll say it here - @jmyers2043 has some of the best stuff in this regard; over at SC4Devotion, you'll find little packs of goodness that he has BATted and lotted and modded. Commercial, residential, industrial (including some great farm sets). In my humble opinion, it doesn't get better than his stuff!

Did you know that scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California believe that an "anomaly" in the software for NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft was causing the vehicle's computers to be stuck continuously rebooting, and most likely causing it to cease communications?

What a delight to find so many of my little midrise office BATs popping up in here. Beautifully done! I wish my cities looked as good as this.

Did you know that not a single frame of footage from the actual movie is used in the trailer promoting John Waters' transgressive underground black comedy film Pink Flamingos?