kd5rax

As good as you are at textures, I'm thinking that with geometry improvements, your going to greatly improve. Honestyl, for it being nothing but a texture, the first is actually not all that terrible. I think you'll improve, just practice on geometry, its your weakpoint, you dont really need to practice your texturing at this point cause its already rather good for a begginer. What you might try to do is make an entire building out of geometry, with the only textures as just flat color... I know it sounds intimidating, but its the first real step into bat. Edit: about the price of 3d max, student discounts really really help... and theres plenty of versions that you can start with a 30 day trial in one version, and when in runs out, upgrade to another 30 day trial, and so on starting at max 5 you have a good 3 months of 3dmax for trials... I did that in my early days of using 3ds max

Yay, a patch for halo 2 with a new storyline. Microsoft got smart recently and decided to sell its patches. As if they wherent making enough money

The manual export is a great idea... Too bad itd take a really really long time to slice and dice for 1 WTC... There are almost 400 folders in the output section.... 400 images to slice would take a very, very long time

Are you still on the computer that you downloaded them on and have the old version still installed? Your buildings will not be on the cd but if they still reside in your plugins folder theyll still show up. If your moving it onto another computer you can copy your plugins and move all your buildings too. Im not sure if this is the right place for a question like this though...

Autovino: Its a good thing you dont do really really tall and poly intensive buildings (perfect examples, Jin Mao, Burj Dubai, Shanghai Financial Center). Before too long your going to want a nicer computer... It sounds like your either stuck with agp, or possibly even pci (without the e), which really wont go all that far... Simfox: Thats a fairly decent card, but yeah, not for 3d modeling cause it doesnt have the unified shader architecture.... I just got an 8800, and even though its not a workstation oriented card, it handles the viewport rendering of 3dmax flawlessly. Very nice processor too... I shoulda gone quad... I went with the e6750. My 8800 was only $250 and it was well worth it...

Simfox: What Nvidia card do you have? Autovino: Woah, thats an old aging card... Poor thing. If you intend to run that monitor at its native resolution with the kind of stuff you're doing, you should look into a newer card. If you have Agp I'd reccomend a Nvidia Geforce 7600 gt or ATI Radeon x1650 pro... If you only have PCI, well, you might end up having to compromise your monitors resolution with card performance and run it at a lower setting.... I can help out with computer related issues as I've recently built my own computer (this thing is a MACHINE) and I'm pretty well caught up on current hardware. What kind of computer do you have?

Very true, but theres gotta be a way to get a shadow that fades a little more gracefully...

Not only are there the black lines, whats up with the shadows? they definately dont have the smoothness and sharpness of the second render....

it seems like it would be less troublesome to just have it all in one scene... I like the looks of 3, but I think the building style dictates 1 or 2... Probably 2, its a commercial lot that would be trying to draw attention to itself with an outrageous yet none revolting color.

Well, it was not technically "automatic" per se.... The way I got there was this.... I made a wall of individual steel plates. Then using the random rotation script in the bat4max, rotated them randomly on the z axis by +- 7 degrees. Then I selected them and applied a single uvw map to them all. In the setting of the uvw map, I set it as a plane, rotated it to where it was defined by only the yz plane, then set its width to cover from the very ends of the farthest outside plate edges. Then simply applied a gradient map (with a filter) to it. Now the plate colors was from black to white depending on its y position. Render a high resolution version of it and apply it to a wall of the same width and height as the original steel panel wal, and you have an instant over 1000 poly wall with only 2 polygons. The main use of the technique could be used on building facades to give them slight rotational difference in the plates. Or an ultramodern facade with intentionally rotated plates. Although it does result in some quality loss, in the low res version of the simworld, it makes very little difference quality wise, and for me it yeilded significant performance gains.

The only thing I've ever gotten the bump to work excellently was the base of the second version of Freedom tower (aka World Trade Center tower 1 as its now usually called). It mimicked the random rotation of the steel plates. Each plate had its own gradient field (the gradients where randomly generated and oriented to be rotated along only the axis perpendicular to the ground plane with an offset from the building side of +-7 degrees), and the gradient fields were then stacked in a pattern. Not only did this method yield (at least in ingame renders but definately not standard renders) better looking results than a bunch of randomly rotated steel plates, but it reduced render time and poly count (which for me WAS a big deal back when I had the old, slow 32 bit laptop, if I over a certain number of polys, itd slow so much it would basically crash). I say all of that to say this.... Bump mapping does have a place in sc4, but in this case after thinking about it I think you are right, bumping the edges of a tile in a low res setting like sc4 is not the most effective way to acheive the errr, effect. For an example of how the tiles looked with the bump map, just look at the freedom tower thread. It especially handled reflection better than many individual tiles.

lol... sorry... I forget that im the new one around here again since Ive been gone so long... still very impressive stuff. I was looking at his earlier designs from like a year ago and didnt notice they where a year old... I still say that transparent windows and interior lighting can add a lot to these buildings

Verrry nice. Only thing i can add is make the tile line so smal that they could only be seen in zoom 5 (like in real life you couldnt see the division untill really really close) and then make the division a bump map and have it indented instead of color (that way it replicates the way the light would reflect of the edge.)