gottago

Came out of retirement to comment on this new game, as almost no one here has said what I've thought was glaringly obvious. So, here goes nothing: I've played about all the city builders out there and I must say that after bulding out three cities to a pop of +60K I am decidedly underwhelmed by CS. The game is barebones and repetitive and simply doesn't scale. It is lacking in almost everything, and the one thing nearly everyone on this forum obsesses over--traffic management--is borderline broken. If the scale of CS could fuse with the playability and UI of SC13, then this might be a game that could hold your attention. As it is now, it is a snooze-fest. First, there aren't any goals. Nothing scales. There isn't even a city government, a city hall, or anything beyond the most basic services. You have a small police station, and a large police station. Plop it down (money's no problem, the game runs itself as long as you've got electricity, water and garbage collection) and that's that. Buildings turn a brighter pastel green. Yipee! Honestly, beyond managing red bottlenecks on the road chart, what IS there to do in this game? For all its unpardonable faults--the most glaring being postage-stamp city plots--at least SC13 had an engaging, goal-oriented POV. For example, your university researched techs, and the campus expanded as population and knowledge grew. There were specialized industries (where the heck is hi-tech? Entertainment? Tourism is nothing but a statistic about visitors), trade depots, recycling centers, extraction industies with specialized, growable buildings, and a polished UI. In short, though there was woefully little place in which to do it, there was comparatively a lot to do. Here, it's the exact opposite. Honestly, why do you even want to buy more than 3 tiles? You just face the drudgery of having to fill them with endlessly repetitive blocks of residential. commercial and industrial. In 4x4 plots, tops. Over and over and over again... By all accounts, the launch of this title was a great success, but CO has to work very hard to flesh out this game--deepen it and expand it--and not be content with the bare minimum. I hope to see major expansions and many updates that add transport options and expand the variety, depth and playability of the game. Fingers crossed...

You definitely stopped at the right spot--it looks fantastic. Great work!

The texture looks better warmer but I agree with SImfox that it went a little too far and it should be more neutral. Simplest way to do that is just to desaturate by +/- 20%. The coping is still lavender, though.

Hi Amthaak, glad the post helped. The tower looks great, and the glass is spectacular. , The wall texture still looks too dark--try lightening it another 15-20% and dropping the blue a bit--it's a bit too strong right now.

Wow, much better--that looks really great!! I'd just say your roof texture is too dark/black. Most stuff in sc4 has lighter roofs and this will stand out in a negative way. What about a medium grey texture, or copper standing seam that has weathered to verdigris? It may not be what's on the original, but could be quite handsome.

Hi Amthaak, I'm answering your PM about texturing here. You said you were using the Max material library texture maps (as for terminology, what everyone calls textures are "maps') for everything so far. Generally, unless it's a small object, you'd do best to forget the default Max texture maps and instead build a library of your own, and make object-specific textures from them for each important element of your model. Some of the arch/design maps are good, but almost every texture you'll end up applying will need to be tweaked for color/saturation/tone, and have weathering applied to make it harmonize with the others and mimic the RL building. Otherwise they will simply be schematic, plastic-looking textures, because they are made mostly for use in schematic presentations and are just the starting point for making an architectural model look realistic. You've obviously mastered modeling, but for the BAT to really be a success, you also have to master textures and Photoshop (or Gimp) and spend as much or more time working on them as you do detailing your model. It will pay off big time. Two of the best websites for good arch'l textures are arroway.de and cgtextures. Both have tons of high-quality textures that you can DL for free--so go through both of them and grab everything you think you'll ever need and then organize it all by material--stone, brick, metal, roofing, pavement, etc.--so you can actually find it again and use it. It also helps to make a special folder just for the BAT you're working on and put your specialty textures in there for easy access and reference. Arroway supplies full texture maps--diffuse, specular and bump--and load them all in the ME; the specular and bump maps are pretty much worthless in gmax but they'll make a difference in Max, even at the small scale of sc4 BATs. You asked about the roof and your basic stone texture, and I went back through the thread and found pics of each. Here's the roof from an earlier post: I hadn't actually seen it before I posted, and have to admit I've never seen such a near-pristine roof before--it looks like you could eat off it, it's so clean!--but I suspect such immaculate, perfectly detailed roofs are some sort of Oriental corporate/arch'l fetish. Bref, the textures you have on it now are pretty good, color and tonality-wise, but need more reflectivity to give them a sense that they are metal. The photo is shot on an overcast day, but you can see that the material (some kind of anodized, bronze-colored sheet metal) already gives off an even, pretty noticeable sheen, and this will be even more reflective in the bright sun of SC4. (As for the two pictures you posted above, they must have been taken years apart and the roof was redone between them--it's impossible that one material could look so different in two photos, and you might as well stay with what you have and ignore the other one.) Don't apply matte as you're doing now, but use the standard specularity and glossiness sliders in the ME to tweak the reflective qualities of the texture. (Stay with the default blinn checkbox; it's easier to deal with than metal, which I've never had any success with.) Specularity is overall reflectiveness, and glossiness sharpens and intensifies highlights. You can see from the pic that the roof material has a fairly high specularity and fairly low glossiness, so set specularity around 30% and glossiness around 15%, perhaps more, and do a test render to see what happens. (I set the "base glossiness" to 10--what "shine" a dull material would give off, since just about any material will have some gloss to it, and apply that automatically to almost all textures, even matte ones, to get some automatic contrast going on. Glossiness is pretty potent, so raising it a bit does a lot). If it looks funny, tweak the percentages in the sliders until you get good effect that gives you some real highlights--a sense of sun striking and reflecting a lot of light, but without burnout. The stone floor should also get higher specularity and especially for the big central portion it would be worth it to do a 1-to1 texture like you did for the big roof panels and weather it slightly around the edges and where other elements are on top of it to give it more interest. The texture of the lower level of roof flashing on top of the cornice is too dark and could be lightened 10-15% and given a higher specularity; start out around 20%, with default glossiness, and play with it from there. About the basic wall texture, here is another photo from an earlier post: Unfortunately the facade is in shadow--it'd be great to find a shot like this in full sun, btw--but you can see that the building is basically entirely made of a pale grey stone that is fairly cold (more blue than yellow), and that this stone was used for both the walls and architectural details and window surrounds, since there's no color difference between them. Your wall texture is far too dark--it's a medium grey--though the tonality and the scale of the individual blocks are good. If you can't find another that is closer in tone and does not have dark grout lines, you should run it through PS to lighten it significantly (work mainly with image>reglages>correction selective, and begin by lowering the levels of black in the grey and black components independently of the other colors, rather than just using luminosity/contrast, as this will alllow you a lot more fine-tuning; then you can use luminosity/contrast at the end to tweak it, and you might have to drop the overall saturation as well). This should also help to reduce the intenstiy of the near-black grout that outlines the stones, and it can be further reduced by dropping the amount of black in your blacks (I know it sounds stupid) when you are in correction selective. The combo of mental ray and the sc4 lightrig in Max has a tendency to make renders of light-colored models dull, flat and pastel and washed out, so it's good to exaggerate any contrast you have in light textures and give them high specularity to mimic the effect of bright sc4 sunlight. (I used an off-white plaster texture for my last BAT; initial renders were an ugly flat, dull grey, and I had to lighten the texture to near-white and push up specularity to 50% to get a decent-looking effect of light walls with a sun-struck look--the material ball in the ME looked totally burned out with brightness, but the render looked great). Basically, the facades are pretty clean and have more openings than surface, and the BAT is large, so there's not much point to weathering the wall texture; it won't show much. The sills and coping stones and the tops of the window frames and cornices are going to catch the most soot and are easier to deal with, so make separate textures for them using your lightened wall texture as a starting point. For the cornices, you can pick out a small section about 6 blocks long and 2 high (it doesn't have to be big, but long and thin) and remove the stone courses by using the selection box tool to highlight a thin strip just next to the coursing line and then copy/pasting this and nudging it on top of the dark line to cover it over with stone texture that will blend in seamlessly. You can finish it off with the clone tool then you'll have a basic stone texture that has the same tonality as the original without the coursing lines. Save this, and you can use it to apply to all the small architectural details and the columns, none of which have joint lines. (If the stonework is too notecable and you're getting a patchwork look on these elements, then copy of the texture and apply a gaussian blur to it to make a version that keeps the same tonality but doesn't show individual stones.) Make another copy of the first, unblurrred version and apply some muddy greys and sepia tones to mimic the dirt that will collect and streak on these elements. Add a few somewhat darker vertical lines 2-3px wide to highlight a few of the joints between individual stone blocks, spaced widely but pretty evenly apart, with the last one falling at the left or right edge so that it will tile correctly, and you can use this for your cornices. When you dirty up a 1-to-1 texture, as you did around the edges of the big open expanse of roof, use a variety of muddy greys and earth tones, and some of them should be lighter than the base texture as well. Build up the dirt using the paintbrush set at around 10-15% opacity, and vary your brushes and their scale in pixels. For really dirty roofs, starting with a first overlay layer of smudging, copying it, and then applying a gaussian blur to the original overlay layer is a great way to start; adding noise ("bruit" in the "filtre" rollout) is also a handy technique. It's good to work using layers and save a copy as a .psd so you can tweak and go back if things don't work when you test render. Since you modeled the actual grooves (rustication) in the ground floor stonework , you can apply the same base texture without lines to these elements, but you'll doubtless have to make a bigger version in photoshop so it doesn't look blurry and end up tiling. Just copy the texture and make a new blank file that is 6 times as high as that texture (there are 12 courses of stone on the base) and at least twice as long, and paste the smaller texture as often as needed, align all the copies, flipping some of them to get random variations, and smooth out the result with dodge and burn and smudge until you have a big stone texture that doesn't tile internally. You may have to reduce the size of the file as it might then be pretty huge, but it's worth the work as the variiations in stones should nonetheless be preserved and noticeable in renders. Since there are a lot of openings on the ground floor you shouldn't have a problem with it repeating on any of the base elements. Actually, after writing all this out, I realize that for such a big model, there are relatively few textures--you're lucky! But do spend the time to find/make specific textures for areas that show disproportionally. For example, the green fill between the awning and the facade needs another texture since right now it calls a lot of attention to itself. And also the long whitish block at the center of the roof, the stairs there, and the other elements like it all should have appropriate textures applied to them--light concrete with some soot splash on the base and other such materials.

The model looks great but it looks like your ornamental stonework --the banded limestone base particularly, and also the window frames--are just a color and not textured. Most of the materials look flat and schematic, particularly the roof and the stonework details; perhaps you are just starting work on the textures and the grey stone wall texture is the only one finished so far, but if not, you should work more on them, making textures for specific areas and weathering and aging them too animate the building and give it life. About the roof textures: it looks like the specularity for all the materials is set to default; there's no variation in light/reflectiveness. The stone floor is going to have a different reflectiveness than the metal roof coping, which will be more reflective than the flat roofing, and so on. Right now it all looks like the same material but with different tonalities and colors; there's no "life" to it. BTW the palms are fantastic.

This will be a very beautiful set and it's another great project, I love Scandinavian classicism personally. Overall the models look really good, the facades are very well detailed, but on all of them the roofs look too schematic. As the saying goes, "SC4 is a game of roofs," so spend a little more time on them and give them more detailing, it will pay off handsomely. Check out your buildings and ones like them using Google Earth and MS Virtual Earth and study the roofs for appropriate details. The first one, for example, the break in the mansard roof, when it changes from one angle to another, that "hip" should have some relief and a band introduced to highlight it, as you can see in your reference pic. You can also see that the material used is standing-seam metal, which is great for giving the roof more interest, and you could either model the ribs by using array or "draw" them on with the appropriate texture. There's also an escape ladder and snow spikes set into the slope and details like this will also give it more life and are very easy and quick to model. The same sort of details will also help the others, and the flat roof on the corner building needs roof junk--hvac, vents, chimneys, etc.--and the low, white parapet would have the same material as the roof itself, and would have metal coping to keep out moisture. The dome is about 10-15% too small and should be moved forward so that it sits directly on top of the vertical centerpoint of the circle made by the curving corner--the wide, flat setback is awkward there, and architecturally incorrect. On all your models, you also need to add metal flashing on top of all projecting stone elements--parapets, the tops of window frames, pediments, etc. It is done in real life to protect the stonework from moisture, and it will make your facades look much more realistic, and will add a contrasting texture/material that will enhance the realism of your wall and stone textures by way of contrast. Right now the facades look both detailed and yet also schematic, and this is a very good way to improve them easily. (You have done a bit of this with the ached window pediments on your corner model and that area looks very convincing--do it on the flat parts as well.) And I agree with Simhotoddy, the textures are too schematic and the colors are off--much in the same way as with your canal project. If your textures aren't good, Max mental ray renders will accentuate flatness and pastel tonalities, making models look too much like models and not actual buildings (I assume this is why Debussyman wants a scanline render). The textures need signs of age: dirt, cracks, joint lines between stones, soot being splashed up on the walls above the tops of window sills and pediments, etc. to bring the models to life. And like the bridge project, they are all too cold and lavendar, and need to be warmed up with more yellow, to kill the pastel tonalities caused by Mental Ray and the SC4 light rig. Actually, the model is only half the work; getting your textures right--and making specific texture variants for specific parts of your model and tweaking them to get them right--will take as much or more time as the actual modelling work. If you don't know them, check out these sites for textures: arroway.de and cgtextures. Both have tons of free, high-quality architectural textures for download. Phew! A long post, filled with lots of "criticism." But the comments are just a reflection of the quality of the project, and wanting to see it reach its full potential. Great work.

Originally posted by: JonM I agree about the pink. Your saying the land walls are too blueish?!quote> Fot the third time: Yes! The basic stone texture that you're using everywhere is ice-blue compared to the default Maxis paving texture (which is itself pretty whitish-pinkish). You're very far out on the cold side of the SC4 color spectrum--somewhere near cold lavendar--when you should be on the warm side: i.e., a good deal more yellow and somewhat less cyan. Basically, your textures are way too purple (cyan[++] and magenta[+]) and don't have enough yellow(- -). Hey, I ain't SimFox, but I sure do know a thing or two about achitectural materials, sc4 textures, and color relationships. I'm repeating this because this is a great project and it shouldn't be spoiled by poor textures, which are about the easiest part to fix, and all too often, unfortunately, the part that doesn't get fixed in the end.

Very well modeled, but the pink stone around the landings is, sorry to say, really off. In fact the tonality of all the stone is off--either too ice-blue or too flat pink. Seeing both stone textures right next to the default sidewalk texture really highlights this, and you should aim for tonalities that blend better with this texture, which is ubiquitous in-game. Also, are the trees being generated by the street or are they props? If the latter, they should be removed; they couldn't grow on a bridge.

It looks very good so far, a great project. As said before, the water is tiling, and also the color of the stone for the bridges and the seawalls is too cold and blue-ish--it could be warmed up. Also, what is that U-shaped, baroque building at the bottom of your pic?

lol! When it comes to textures, it's true, I have no mercy! The model blends in really well in-game but is still looking too dark overall in comparison to its neighbors. The roof especially. I guess your texture is meant to depict glazed terracotta tiles, which are pretty dark in color, but they'd also pick up a lot of light and reflections because of the high glaze. Either desaturating and lightening the texture you have or trying something closer to the texture on the roof of the Ananas Haus, but a step or two darker, would certainly be worth trying out.

Hi alj, great to see the BATting you mentioned. I like the model a lot--you should do a bunch of color variations, as this sort of building is everywhere in German cities. It still looks too dark, mostly due to the roof--the gradient looks too strong and I'd lighten the darker end and preserve the lighter as is. Also the base of the front facade and the window frames are reading black and should be lightened as well. The grime on the back roof doesn't look convincing, but rather like random dark spots you applied with the paintbrush tool. Look at some RL examples in Google Earth or Virtual Earth and you'll see that grime will collect and streak in certain ways, and with tiles it will collect beneath rows and below and around objects such as the chimney and dormers (as you did on the back roof) and that often it is whitish as well as dark, and it's always good to apply grime using different brownish and grey tones to get more variation and realism.

Thanks! Its a big (10x6) IM cable factory modeled on RL. I just hunted down the Max background setting you mentioned: "Don't antialias against background," which is unchecked. So, being a double negative, this shouldn't be happening. There are two other variables there, "Filter background" and "Use environmental alpha," both unchecked. Your other solution would not be good here because the LODs aren't all that tight. I'm pretty unhappy if I have to live with this, it ruins the illusion with a nasty render artifact.