ardecila

Originally posted by: SimFox Looks good!Could you elaborate a bit on the advantages of modeling in SketchUp as apposed to MAX?quote> Hmm.. SketchUp is a lot faster and more intuitive. The main advantage is the powerful AutoSnap in SketchUp, which senses cardinal directions, midpoints, endpoints, perpendicular, parallel, circle centers, points on edge, and more. The program eradicates the difference between splines and meshes, so you can go draw edges with the Pencil Tool and they are automatically converted into faces if they are coplanar and enclose an area. This will also work on an existing face, where you can etch edges. Another life-saving tool is Divide, which will take an edge and divide it into equal segments. You can do this with splines in Max but not with mesh edges, where it would be most useful. Oh, and it has a Protractor tool to measure the angles between edges. It's basically a 3d system that's optimized for drawing complex rectilinear shapes like buildings extremely quickly. If you were modelling curvilinear shapes like animals, people, or autos, it would be extremely difficult to use SketchUp. Disadvantages that affect me: No powerful Lofting tool (although it has a simple one) Poor material/mapping system No way of instancing geometry to save work No Array Tool

Originally posted by: patriots_1228 looks great, fantastic job! GE sketchup has much better renders than gmax lol.quote> No, this is actually 3dsMax. I do my modelling in SketchUp and then export to Max to do renders. Jason, I'll see what I can do about getting an SC4-angle shot. This is shaping up to be quite the lot. As it stands, the station covers 5x14 tiles, and yes, it is at proper scale. I will need to add some more tiles to the length of the lot to allow for the switches before the terminal tracks... probably about 4 or 5 tiles, so we're looking at 5x20, roughly.

Okay. Haven't touched the BAT for awhile, but I got back to it so's I could wrap up Grand Central Station and my other 'L' station, which nobody's seen yet. Here's my progress on Grand Central. I just need to do a roof texture and add some roof junk, then light it up.

GoaSkin - I'm not sure if you saw this, but I made it awhile ago. It unfortunately required me to create a puzzle piece for Heavy Rail under Blank Ground. It could easily be modified and made wider to accommodate platforms and an above-ground station house. On top of that, I'm currently working on an Elevated Rail terminal station and a Heavy Rail (on the ground) terminal station.

Originally posted by: mightygoose ardecila... did you get my PM??? and on topic you guys this is an awesome project.quote> Yeah, I got it. Unfortunately, I don't think I can help you out. I barely have time to work on my BATs maybe once a week, so I couldn't do anything very quickly. I mostly do historical styles anyway.

Originally posted by: Creathir ardecila,SketchUp Pro is $500... I would not consider that "a couple of bucks", though it is a LOT less expensive than 3D Studio Max.quote> Yeah.... I paid nowhere near that much. I also have 3dsmax, which I DID pay $300 for (education version).

Simple. I bought the Pro version of SketchUp for a couple bucks, and it allows me to export to 3ds.

Originally posted by: patriots_1228what program are you using?quote> SketchUp.

Hey there! I posted several pages back that I would start Tower of Terror. So, here's my start.... I'm in the midst of AP studying right now, so I haven't worked on this for awhile, but I thought I should post something.

Originally posted by: Jasoncw Andreas: I'm sorry, I mean I'd like to know how to make a prop that lets shadows fall on it. You can see in this screenshot that the shadow from the tree can be seen on the dirt.quote> I think it just has to do with the settings in the S3Ds. I spent a long time last summer trying to get night-lights to show through a shadow that's already falling onto an object. It never worked, no matter what settings I tried, unless I raised the prop above the level of the shadow, but that destroyed the realism.

Okay... I'll take on the Tower of Terror. I rode it 5 times two weeks ago, and there wasn't much to do in line except look at the scenery. I'll also make a properly-scaled Hollywood Tower Hotel, without the crumbling walls and things. This can be a legitimate CS$$$ building. By the way, CWLGAMER - you did the college intern program? I've been considering that, but a few days ago, I randomly ran into a woman in a candy shop with a bunch of horror stories about her experience. How was your time, and how do you get assigned to your jobs?

Originally posted by: marcszar Here's another: A former Chicago skyscraper reminiscent of Ham LLC: quote> Lol... that's Holabird & Roche's Marquette Building. It's not "former", it's still there at Dearborn and Adams. Over the years, it had an extra bay added to it (by the same architects), an extra story, and had the cornice removed, but it was restored in 2004.

Yeah, that, or you can use a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer.

Hmm... First of all, you need to work with your label material. Right now, you have a flat bitmap. It needs a higher specular level, and also a bump map. Doing a little Sharpening on it in Photoshop would do a world of good. For the bump map, use a mix map. One half of the mix will be a horizontal gradient, with one end a few notches higher than the other. When wrapped around a cylinder, this will create the seam where the end of the label overlaps the other end. This avoids having to use geometry to represent the seam. Map offsets can be used to shift the seam to any place around the can. The other part of the mix map should be that noise map I mentioned.

You're missing a little white water tower on the left side of the building. But other than that, it looks great! My only other suggestion would be to vertically exaggerate the arched top of the windows on the left half. Right now, it looks like they just have a flat top. Perhaps this will look better once you vertically-scale the whole building, though.

I like how Manhattan College is in the Bronx - although I'm sure you never hear the end of it. Come to think of it, "Bronx College" might not attract students quite as much.

I hate to steal a tiny bit of the thunder here, but I thought it was the most appropriate place. That's real, guys - and there's no retaining wall lots on either side. The train is actually 10 meters below grade. This is just 1, 1x6 open cut lot, connected on the ends to an upcoming puzzle piece (which will not be in the new NAM, unfortunately). The only defect is that the ground plane occasionally covers up the train - toggling underground mode fixes it.

Hmmm... well, AutoCAD is set up very differently than Max. AutoCAD, you type a lot of commands (it has a command line) and it responds very quickly. It has innovative tools that help greatly with scaling, and any time you need to check the dimensions of something, there's a whole menu of Dimensioning tools. PolySpline might be worth checking out, although I think it's still faster to run both AutoCAD and Max at the same time and import between the two.

Yeah - Jason, I used to disregard Snaps, too, and do things by typing-in or the Move tool. But then I took an AutoCAD class. In CAD, if you don't use OSnap, you end up with some seriously messed-up stuff. Now AutoCAD is actually an integral part of my BATting technique. Whenever I get a setback, I go back into AutoCAD, where the line-based tools are very powerful, and generate a new floorplan. Then I import it into Max and extrude it to get the walls. It's a very fast way to do modelling, so long as you have good pictures of the building and you know what to do. Long story short - Align tool and Snaps are the greatest thing since sliced bread. There's no shame in using them.

Hmm.. Well, you could try making a new document with a size of, say, 40x40. Then apply noise to it. Then, resize the image to the size of your concrete texture, making sure you make the resampling set to "Nearest Neighbor". Then reduce the contrast a bit and overlay it over the concrete texture. This will give you a big grained noise. You can reduce the size of the grains by enlarging the original size of the noise document.

Make an Ellipse spline in the profile you want at one point around the rib. Then use the Lathe modifier to revolve it around the center of the tower and get a tube. Or, create a torus object in the radius you want, with a small tube radius. Then non-uniform scale it up so the cross-section is elliptical.

SimFox, you are truly amazing. Would you mind sharing the bump map you used on the glass?