ardecila

Thanks for all the glowing praise! SimFox: The building appears dark because the lighting rig is shining onto the left side of it, which means that the two sides shown in the render do not get lit at all. I didn't bind the lighting rig to the handle when I rotated my camera. I plan to brighten the lights in the train shed a little bit, but I am working off of this night photo. marcszar: Thanks! I didn't know you were still around. I don't know if you're from Baltimore or what, but I've considered doing the B&O's Camden Station (now has a sports museum in it) because I have the plans for it. gws57: I'm gonna visit my library later today (mostly to get the new Preston/Child book) but I'll check out that issue of Trains that you mentioned. Might be some good reference. My next project will probably be Wells Street Terminal, an actual CTA station. Google it - I think you'll like what you see. Jasoncw: Hmmm.... I'll see what I can do. benvolio: Actually, I'm kind of a font geek. It was fun tracking 'em down.

Yes.

Okay... zoom 5, night render, 'mutilated' 1963 version: I know it appears a little dark... the lighting rig is rotated wrong, which is why the building's shadow falls toward the bottom of the screen. I realized this mid-render, but I decided I would show it anyway because the shadow of the neon sign is just too cool. So, I plan to narrow the parapets like Jason and SimFox suggested, then I'll probably render it while I am away this weekend at Notre Dame. Any last suggestions?

Originally posted by: ILL Tonkso Its a great Medium Sized station that oozes in detail. Are all the details modelled? or bumped?quote> Oh, no, my friend, it's all finger-lickin' good, modelled Romanesque detail. Actually, I did use normal maps for one portion to avoid ridiculous polycounts, but you can't see ANY of it in the game anyway, so it was a pointless waste of time. In other detail news, today I worked on the neon lettering that gws57 suggested on the last page, for the 1950s 'mutilated' version. I'm taking his word that the lettering was blue - I can find no empirical evidence as to the ACTUAL neon color. I also made the sign in Photoshop, which involved tracking down 4 seperate fonts, and then trying to find free fonts that look similar.

Hmm... I did some testing last night after I increased some of the multipliers. Apparently Final Gather is what made the image too bright. I don't know if that makes sense, though. I just tinted the lights with a blue value of 189 (0.74*255) to see if they now appear white. I'm rendering right now.

Okay... weird. I switched to the old-style camera rig and the night view appeared properly, although the shadows looked horrible because it was the old rig. I switched back to the new rig and now the night view appears properly dark. Unfortunately, the "global lighting tint" is a bad method for night previews because it is applied to all lights in the scene, even the night lights. Now my slightly yellow colored nightlights are appearing blue. So, in the below rendering, please ignore the blue color of the lights. I plan to make the clock face much brighter, and I will add some lights near the end of the train shed that you can see through the glass wall.

Okay... I need a bit of help here. I'm currently trying to do night previews, but the renders look nothing like the night views I expected - they are far brighter than the night views I am accustomed to from SC4. I followed the instructions in the Mega FAQ, but the renders are still very bright. However, the brightness looks correct in the viewports. Is this an effect of my lighting rig? I certainly cannot turn it off or the render will be pure black. Also, I have no Logarithmic Exposure Control, just Automatic or Pseudo Color.

Thanks! I have a thing for historical CTA stations. The new Howard Street is gonna look pretty cool once the renovation is done, with the new glass canopy and all. My personal favorite is Wilson Avenue, though. Once I finish Grand Central, I'm gonna finish up another L station that I've been working on slowly. The modelling is basically done on that one, just needs some texturing, small details, etc.

Also... about the music.... rather than trying to build a whole set of music, just include a simple player that supports mp3, m3u, and mpeg streams (Internet Radio). However, include this as a later, optional plugin. The initial feature set of the game should be city-building and nothing else.

Originally posted by: Jasoncw Hawkpride147: NONE of the BAT models, or their source files will be usable in any new game in any way. quote> I think you're being a little overzealous on this one. Maybe I'm just an overachiever when it comes to Max, but I would feel perfectly comfortable putting my buildings in a 3d environment, because I design them to look good that way. As for building styles... all of the custom content now has wildly differing styles and model quality, yet many players are perfectly happy to put a textured box office building next to a highly-detailed porkissimo building. Unity in building design is not a total necessity - not that it's impossible. Between you, me, Don Miguel, marcszar, and others, we have enough vintage Northern-City buildings for a tileset. There are quite a few Parisian/German/European batters that already have enough buildings for a tileset. The Japanese community has enough for a major tileset as well, but involving them would be a significant language barrier. 3dsmax is an extremely versatile tool and I see no reason why it cannot become the tool of choice for the content of ST1000. If it is the tool, then why not save some time and use the buildings we already have?

The last one was WAY too salmon. Also, I added a ground plane so that the building will slightly darken as it touches the ground. Otherwise, it looks just like it's floating there. This is why the big trend 6-9 months ago (maybe still today) was to add gradients to textures - to visually "ground" the building. Jason, I will maybe add a blue-sky-with-clouds environment map for the windows to reflect, but I'm not gonna tint them blue like some suburban office park. Your suggestion about the parapet walls is noted, but I'd rather darken the coping than narrow the walls. The whole point of this building is that it is a "heavy" masonry building - it was one of the last major buildings in Chicago NOT to use a steel frame. Consequently, the walls at ground level were 5 feet thick to carry all the load. It makes sense that the parapet wall would be thick, too, especially since the crenellations below the cornice stick out an extra 1'6".

Needless to say, some tweaking is needed?

Originally posted by: Jasoncw Judging from the black and white photos I've seen (the one on Wikipedia), there is white edging along most of the roof, like how you have on the tower. The white looks to be too white for the game though. From the same photo, the stone around the base seems to be about the same value as the brick. For the brick itself, I haven't seen your changes yet, but when I make my colors I start by sampling color photos, and I tweak it from there. The brown color in the picture above would probably look really nice in the game. The window frames on the very bottom look nice. They could be darker though. The window areas elsewhere though are visually confusing. I bet the waiting room will look really nice. Which mental ray filter are you using? For some reason the station looks blurry. It looks like you might be having uvw mapping problems with your brick texture?quote> Okay... lot of things to answer here. I'll start with the filter question. I normally use Lanczos, but I forgot on that render so what you see is the default Box filter (eww). The stone at the base is Connecticut brownstone. Most of the building, however, is common brick faced with brown terra cotta. I have a piece of a Grand Central Station brick that I plucked from the still-vacant site, which I've used to match color on the brick. I agree on using a larger UV map, but I don't want the bricks to be ridiculously large either. The sliding windows on the upper floors look muddy because of a) the incorrect filter and b) the dark wood floor texture I used. The waiting room on the first floor has a light-colored tile floor, so it contrasts with the frames. To fix this, I will probably just add an environment map and raise the reflectivity on the windows.

Zoom 5 Render Since this rendering, I have made the bricks more red and added a bump map that gives them a little bit more "pop". I also noticed how visible the waiting room floor is at zoom 5, so I've started modeling some simple benches and columns to go in there as shown in the photo below. When I'm done, it'll make some nice night views.

First of all, from the ONE screenshot you've seen, you can make absolutely NO judgement. That shot has ONE type of building in various positions, as well as one ferris wheel and a couple of tents. Twisted Mill will sell 0 games if that is the entire building set. Wait for better shots to come out before dismissing the game. ---------------------------------------- Also, look... the game market right now demands a transition from orthographic to full-3d. Even SC4 took a risk by choosing not to do 3d, and this was 4 years ago. I mean, seriously, think about it. The single BIGGEST requested feature in a SimCity game is full-3d. Streets of SC tried to do a little bit of that, and AFAIK, it sold fairly well because people WANTED that. However; computers today are still not powerful enough that we could create a 3d game and insert stuff on par with our high-quality BAT models. Computers aren't powerful enough, so you make a bit of a tradeoff in building quality and you start simplifying your building models and using textures to represent much of the detail. As zzsim brought up, Roller Coaster Tycoon did the same thing by transitioning to 3d, and the game succeeded wildly. AND - before bringing up racing games or other games that feature highly-detailed cities - remember that the cities in those games don't need to be flexible because you can't edit them. That's a whole different ballgame. Don't forget that computer power is always increasing. Right now, PS3/360 games are near the forefront of graphics quality, and there's some very promising stuff there. I see no reason why SimCity 6 couldn't feature more detailed buildings. OR, if the bones of Societies are strong (meaning that the program can handle it) we might even be able to create our own realistic buildings, available to the people who have powerful-enough computers to run the game with such things. Lastly, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The fact that this game is full-3d allows for so many more possibilities. Since buildings theoretically can be rotated to any angle, the game may allow curved or diagonal streets. Many camera angles would become possible, allowing for street-level shots or skyline shots that are so lacking in the SC4 City Journals. Terrain wouldn't have to be restricted to a rigid grid, allowing for real curved coastlines and land. Bridges could be laid at any angle. There are so many positives that could come out of this, it amazes me that people are complaining.

Originally posted by: Jasoncw Can you also post a zoom 5 (check out the BAT - Mega FAQ for the preview specifics for that if you don't already have it set up)?quote> The station goes beyond the bounds of the viewport on the zoom 5 camera. Setting it to 795 pixels would produce accurately-sized images that only show half of the station. I suppose I could stitch two renderings together....

Okay... I'm about ready to render. However, I need some judgment on one last thing. Should I include the B&O sign or not? The station was originally built by the Wisconsin Central Railroad/Northern Pacific Railroad and it opened in 1890. 20 years later, in 1910, the Baltimore and Ohio bought the station and added their brightly-lit sign to the top of the tower. I'm inclined to leave it out, so the station is somewhat generic and can be used in any city. However, from 1910 to 1971 (when the station was demolished) the bright sign was a beacon that could be seen for miles from the south or west, so it's a landmark in its own right.

What happened to the small windowframes on the upper windows? Those were key to the overall look of the building.

Originally posted by: SimFox Which version of MAX and MR are you using? quote> Max 8, mental ray 3.4.4.9 That makes sense. The tracks are rectangle splines extruded to height 0, so they have two sides. The windows are procedural window objects, so they have a seperation between the face for one side of the glass and the face for the other. But the glass is thin, so the faces are close together.

Originally posted by: paulvmontfort @ Mightygoose: I don't use raytracing on this building. I use mental ray. I think it has to do with the thickness of the glass, glass material or the final gather settings.quote> It's the Final Gather settings. I'm having the same problem.. turning off Final Gather and using full GI instead removes the smudges but is totally impractical on my computer for large-scale rendering. I'm still fiddling with the Final Gather settings trying to eliminate it.

Originally posted by: SimFox But you can REMOVE edge! You sir have just saved me a whole lot of time and annoyance. About the Brazil thing: I still like the look, but you're right, it's not worth the extra time. I'm still learning new things about Mental Ray (like area lights ). The only thing I hate about Mental Ray is Final Gather, which I can never get to look right. In the rendering below, you can see dark spots in the windows and on the tracks. SC4-angle shot: Nighttime work-in-progress:

I was aiming for a higher render quality. There was a post on some 3d board that compared an architectural scene rendered in Scanline, Mental Ray, Brazil, VRay, and a couple of others. Brazil looked the best on the architectural scene, so I went with that one. I rendered myself one view of Grand Central Station with some recommended values plugged into the renderer. This took 18 hours (sleep/school) but the quality was worth it.

I was talking about the Render-To-Texture process. On a side note, and maybe SimFox, you could answer this: I'm considering using Brazil for my renders. Unfortunately, on my computer, it takes at least 10 times longer than Mental Ray to produce images with a similar quality to Mental Ray (sample counts are the same for lighting and anti-aliasing). Do you know any good ways to makes it faster? My materials are set up as regular Max materials, not Brazil materials, and my lights are not Brazil lights. Does it improve render times to use the Brazil materials and lights?

I dabbled a bit in that system... it was very confusing.

Originally posted by: SimFoxAs far as snaps go… all the options available in Sketch-up are also there in MAX…quote> Not quite.. the nice thing about Sketchup snaps is that you can only snap to things that are visible. Max snapping always irritates me because it allows snapping to points that are in different objects, far away from where I'm working and hidden by other objects. If you do need to snap to such a point in SketchUp, you can go into wireframe view where all edges become visible and available for snapping. I just tried out the new Editable Poly options. I never knew those existed! My favorite is the Bridge tool, which allows you to specify segments. I also love the Inset tool. Before that, I would always bevel and try to get a 0 extrusion height. One last question.. is there any way in Max to delete an edge and have the program automatically join the two faces? Also, can you snap while extruding?