darn42

This isn't really a tutorial, but I was thinking about this a bit, and I kinda wanted to write something about it. EDIT: Some pictures aren't working because I couldn't figure out how to show pictures from STEX previews. I will update with the pictures when I can. Edit:Edit: Fixed almost all of them. - - - - - - Composition in a BAT So this is a pretty broad topic, that until now, I haven't really thought about in regards to BATing, but a lot of the rules shouldn't be ignored. -Color Theory -Silhouettes -Levels of Detail -Areas of Visual Activity, and rest -Direction, both visual and artistic Most of these are, for a large part, taken care of when doing a recreation. The architect has already thought about the colors, and levels of detail, and the silhouettes, and pretty much everything listed. That's their job. To convert a 3d space into something that is pleasing to the eye on a large scale. Our job is to translate that into a very limited, orthographic view. Because of that, the number one rule is even more important. Everything in a piece of art contributes to the overall impression of the piece. It's like expressions. If someone is smiling, but their eyes aren't in it, you can tell something is up, but not quite exactly what. But if you cover up just their mouth, or just their eyes, what you take away from that expression changes completely. I'd like to use Seraf's building he's working on right now as an example of how much a small change in something small changes the entirety of the building. (if you don't want me to use this as an example, I won't, but I figured you wouldn't really mind) In this update, he changed the material on 4 of the plants on the second floor. If you cover up the half that has the old material, you get an overall impression that is completely different than if you were to cover up the other half. The colors and the lighting of the bushes changed slightly, which changes how they interact with everything around them. It's so apparent here because of the large contrast in colors between the facade and the plant. Eyes are drawn to contrast, and so when there is anything out of the usual, care has to be taken in how it is presented. This kinda brings us to what color theory is, which I'm not going to go deep into because there are literally books on it and they are free on the internet. But really, I'll condense some information. Color theory is basically how colors interact with each other. I'm sure you've all seen the color wheel, and the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. Certain colors look good together, and some don't. Colors across each other on the wheel tend to provide very high visual contrast, whereas colors next to each other in the wheel tend to blend together. Another important concept is that of dominance. One color has to be dominant, or it will look off-balance. By dominant, I mean taking the majority of space on the building. This image shows it pretty well. Dominant color Sub-dominant colors Accent Dominant color Sub-dominant colors Accent These simple geometric diagrams are actually very pleasing to the eye because of how their colors are arranged. If we look at some images of some BATs that I have found particularly nice looking, we can see some patterns. Aphrodite's Garden by JasonCW UNAM Libraray by Harishna (where did he go?) Philadelphia City Hall by Debussyman I can't seem to find this one anywhere besides on STEX. All of these share some common traits. -They have a limited Palate of colors Jason's has, in order of dominance, Red-Orange, White, Black, Grey, and Green Hamish: Orangish-brown and many variations of it, (the mural has green, white, yellow, blue, black, red), white, silver, and yellow Debussyman: White, Black, Light and Dark Blue. -No Color goes uninterrupted for a long period of time Jason has geometric color changes, Hamish has lots of different objects colored differently, or detailed textures. Debussyman has, on the bottom, lots of details, and at the top lots of color variation. -This is the most relevant point to people doing recreations. Every color included goes well with the dominant color. If they were paint swatches and you overlapped them, the saturation, hue, and tint all complement the dominant color. The high contrast colors are kept to a minimum, and the low contrast colors are more present. Even in hamishes, where there is practically every color at once in that mural, they are all unsaturated, and almost grayed out so that they don't overpower the orange. It's still very colorful, but it looks very nice as well. -And the most important, I think, is that every color references the dominant color. In every single one, for almost the entire building there are no additional colors that are not bordering the dominant. Look, there will be some of the dominant color next to every single change, except in one spot for every one of them. The ground floor for jason, and hamish, and the spire in debussyman. Then, there is whatever accent color, next to a sub-dominant color. - - - - - - - - - - - Do what you want with this color information. The third point is very important. Everything should look good with the dominant color, no exceptions. Don't let anything overpower it. If it is a color that is far from the dominant color on the spectrum, desaturate it and change the hue a bit to make it closer to the main color. - - - - - - - - - - - I've written a lot already, so I'm just going to this one next section, and I'll combine Levels of detail, and areas of visual activity and rest. These are what you are going to encounter while modeling mostly, and while texturing a little bit. For levels of detail, there are three sections to know. Large details, the shape of the facade; medium details, stuff like windows and other architectural elements; and the small details, which are things like wires on the roof, or security cameras, and especially textures. Each of these has a very specific piece of importance. The large details show us something we can recognize. It looks like a building because of the large details. The medium details are where we start showing what the building does, what it's purpose is, and most importantly, what it's aesthetic is. For these, the size isn't what determines them, but the importance. These are the majority of the details, and most time should probably be spent on these. If you do only large and medium details, the building will probably look 90-95% done. For my jeweler's building, all of the stonework and gargoyles are medium details. Finally the small details--which are my favorite because of a neurotic band director who ended up making us really really good because of his fixation on the details--are there to convince people it's real. This is an illusion, and any good illusion can successfully trick people into thinking what you want them to think. Be neurotic. Put some life into the building. My purpose in this section is to tell you how important the small details are, and how to make them. It's hard to put into words... Tell a story with them. Texturing is the best example of this. Do you have an AC unit or exhaust anywhere. How long has that been there. Was there another one before that in another location? All of these affect you textures, because over time that exhaust stains where it opens up just a little, and it just keeps adding on. You can do similar things with modeling. Paying attention to references is the most important part there, though. Leave no detail unacknowledged. It doesn't have to be accurate. If it's tiny enough, a slightly modified box can do the trick for most details like that. But do not ignore anything. That's what adds the life to your building. But really, as has been said before, the texturing is the most important small detail you can have. Now for areas of visual activity and rest. This one is going to be short, but, basically, make sure that there are areas that someone can subconsciously look at for a while to try and decipher everything that is going on in that location. Busy window reflections, cornices, gargoyles, intricate textures, some sort of interesting pattern. It doesn't have to be a noisy kind of detail, it just needs to be small, and in between these areas of detail, there should be spaces with little to no detail. Contrast is nice. Don't overdo it though, it's the same idea as with colors, the blank space should complement the details. I'm going to use Reddonquixotes most recent submission for this, because I love it. Look at the facade. At every point going up the building you can find something busy, the reflections, the mullions and at the top, the spires and roof junk. But at the same time, your eye can rest on something not so busy. The tiles, or the dark crevices of the windows or the interior of the steps. There's details everywhere, but they don't detract from the overall shape of the structure because there's some calm, easy shapes right next to them. - - - - - - - - - - - I'm not actually sure what I just did right now... Just kinda felt like writing a post like this, and got too far to change my mind about it. It's really more to organize my ideas on the subject for myself than anything else, but tell me if you'd like me to do something like this again if I feel so inspired. And a TL;DR Make sure everything looks good together.

You might want to post them as embedded images rather than links. Just hit the icon with the tree in the text editor, and paste the url. It will make it a lot easier for people to give you feedback.

It makes a big difference. This is gonna be one hell of a BAT once you replace all those and tweak the back brick texture a little bit.

Do you want to post your material settings?

Ok, I'm done. I made one that would be a full sized tree, and one that would be a bush. It's I think 2 meters in diameter, vs. 2 feet in diameter. I made these with the tree you just showed me in mind. The geometry on these is completely unrealistic for sc4, I mean, it's possible, but I used very small leaves for effect, 1" x 2" rectangles for the leaves, and scattered them around 2 different sized spheres. Then for a second layer in the canopy I scaled it down and rotated it around. As you can see, the big one gets really dark, the small one doesn't get nearly as dark. These are the most important parameters. I didn't realize some of the top ones got clipped. Basically, use reflections in the middle (really, whatever the leaf you are doing looks like), and for these leaves, I used very low transparency. The thing to keep in mind is to turn on translucency and give it a weight of 1.0. This makes it so there isn't any actual transparency, it just works on light and shadows. What really makes this material work, though, is putting the translucency shader in the shadow slot. This changes the color of the shadows to whatever you set to be the translucency settings. The more transparent you set this, the more the light penetrates, and the more your leaves essentially are.

That tree is full sized, though. You are right, though. It does get pretty dark, but after going through an entire tree with very dense foliage. The biggest problem is that they look out of place, regardless. This is all about illusion. Usually, reality is the best magician, but sometimes it doesn't work out well. I would have had my example done but max crashed on me cause I did something stupid... I'll have it for you in like 5 minutes. I'll edit this post.

The main thing wrong with the topiary is the way they are interacting with the light, which looks very unnatural. Because it's such a defined shape that has a lot of variation in lighting, normal techniques probably won't work for the modeling/materials of them. Look at this picture Notice how far the light penetrates? It gets darker on the shadow side, but not significantly. The only really dark parts are on the interior of the plant. On your plants it gets almost complete black on the shadow side, which makes them look so out of place. Usually that's not a problem for foliage in sc4 because it's far away, and you can't tell, but you definitely can with such small shapes so low to the floor. One second, the tutorial for the leaf material I was going to show you got 404'd so I'll have to make a quick one, which will completely relieve the problem with the topiary (I think).

Everything looks very good except the round topiary which look out of place. They are too saturated, and the shape and shading just don't look real. The only other thing I see that looks strange is the gradient on the dark brick. What were you going for there? There wouldn't be too much car traffic in the back of the building, or really anything that would produce such a dense smoke stains. Even if there were, it probably wouldn't make the bricks more saturated, but less saturated as it darkens. Also, it wouldn't be quite as linear as you have it. If you want to keep the gradient, change it from the color burn or whatever you have it right now to a black and white gradient and make the change a little bit more subtle. Maybe add some noise to it.

So the BAT school crashed and burned because no students ended up sticking with the program (besides like one person) so I am releasing the content I made for my class and the basic assignment outlines. Very little of what I have up to this point was specific to architecture, but was for modeling purposes. The idea of these assignments is to attempt to make the object pictured without help, go through the tutorials, then try it again. That's probably the best way to learn many of these techniques required. The first assignment was: Try it out, here is how to do it my way. Second assignment: My way: Assignment 2: Lamp Solution Here is the finished lamp wire frames. Not as complicated as it looks. I'll start with the most simple shape. The tippy top box. Not too big of a deal. I used taper, you could also use outline or scale on the top square. I do however have all of the edges selected because I want to soften the edges a bit without turbosmooth since this is such a simple shape. After selecting all of those, a simple chamfer in the edit poly rollout will help with that. The reason I did this is because it is 1) Metal and 2) made for a more closeup rendering. Later we'll discuss rendering metals, but because of how reflective they are, round corners are very important to define the edges in a way that looks realistic because of the light it catches. Let's move on to the base. To start, it's just a simple box. Then, we'll select a ring of edges. You can select one edge and click "ring" underneath the selection buttons, or you can use the hot-key (alt+r). I suggest getting used to the hot key for both ring and loop, it comes in very very handy. After selecting the ring, connect the edges. Because the feet of the base are not in thirds with the gap, but rather wider, we will use the pinch function given in the windowed version of connect to spread it out. Select the other ring and connect again. Settings will be saved in connect so it will be perfectly symmetrical. Now, if you look closely at the picture, you see the extrusion in the base is wider than the feet, so we can either outline or scale the center square made from the connect to achieve this effect. Now extrude the feet and the extrusion on top. If you look at the picture, you can see the edges are not sharp, but pretty soft. Especially on top. We'll do turbosmooth for this instead of chamfering because of how smooth some of it gets. If you add a turbosmooth, though, I'm sure you notice that the edges get really funky and turn almost circular. Turbosmooth and most other smoothing functions use support loops to decided how sharp or soft an edge is. No loops = a circle. So we have to add those. The swift loop tool is by far the best for this. Accessed in the graphite modeling tools, it is highlighted in the next picture. It basically does a ring select and connect in the same function. To make placement of these loops easier, right above the edge select click, show cage. This will show those orange guidelines. Keep placing those support loops wherever the edge is harder. Generally on corners, you need 3 loops to make the corner close to 90 degrees. Now we will do the lamp column. Starting with splines, very similar to the lamp exercise, pretty much exactly the same really, we will create a lathe for the very base. The only difference is that some of the vertices need to be bezier corners. Then like before, cap. And in my case I want to add a bit of a bevel to the top instead of using splines to do that. Note: Mine was too wide here, so I adjusted the lathe to be narrower at the top Now we add a bevel to be the actual column. If we notice, though, the column is skewed to one side. I'm not sure if anybody noticed that while making it. That was why I chose this lamp, it was an exercise in perception as well as modeling. Anyways, we can skew it just by moving the top to the right. Then there is the lip at the top. The process I do for this is a windowed bevel with 0 extrusion. Then I extrude, then If it goes back in, I switch back to the windowed bevel and switch the negative sign. For the last part, an inset is also easy to do, but the bevel is already set to the exact amount outwards which is why I do that instead. But here, that wasn't necessary. Then there's the last part of the column that has a slight lip then goes almost straight up. Inset, extrude. But then I noticed it's not centered, so we can select the top face, hit "grow" which is near the ring and loop select buttons, and it will select all adjacent faces for us. Then move the selection offcenter. Afterwards, I forgot this picture, but just inset or bevel inwards to get the lip, and extrude again. Follow the same process with edge loops you had before, but since it's circular, we only need to do horizontal loops. Then turbosmooth. That's it for the column. - - - - - - Now the chains. These are nice and simple. Create a geosphere with low resolution. I like geospheres whenever it's only the shape and no extra modeling because they are faster to render than normal spheres. Anyways, create the sphere, then, under the tools dropdown menu, click array with the sphere selected. This menu will pop up. Play with the settings a bit, but we want 1D movement in negative z, and we want instances. Preview to see how close together they will be. Make 'em touch. Then, select them all and group them together. I have the two clicks visible at the top left of the screen. That's all the chain is. - - - - - - - - The lamp shade was pretty easy except for the frills. Basically, the first steps are 1) create a cylinder with lots of subdivision 2) inset into the middle for the rims (I'm not sure what to call the edges) 3) detach the middle portion. Then, select all the middle edges and perform a windowed extrusion so you can easily adjust the settings. Now this is the trickier part to think of, not that hard to perform, though. With rotate tool selected, click and hold the highlighted button and a menu will drop down. Select the middle one. This is how the transform gizmo will affect the objects. This particular one goes off of selection center, not individual pivot points. P.S. in the picture I don't have the rotate tool selected, I had to do it a second time after I took the screenshot. Then rotate. This will create that overlapping bit that basically defines the frills. However, they aren't supposed to be super sharp corners at the end, so select one of the extruded edges, then click the highlighted function in the graphite modeling tools. It's called dot-ring selection and it basically selects every other/every other-x amount of edges in a ring. Default settings is every other. Chamfer those edges just a little. After this we need to get the variation that they have a lot of in the picture. Select all of the top vertices, then go to selection in the graphite modeling (Instead of modeling). There is a random selection toolbar. You see a cursor button above a downward facing arrow. Click the arrow and there should be a cursor above a green sphere. That is the select within current selection button. So it takes what you have and when you click it selects the determined amount/percent from your selection. With percentage selected, do so. Then, rotate the vertices you have left. Do this several times in both directions for both top and bottom half. Then it is finished. Third assignment: This one was difficult for me to make accurate in the time-frame I had to do it, so I just made one that illustrates the principles needed to make something like this. * * * * * * I have not documented every step for these leaves, in between steps I make small corrections, added lines for shape, and just generally used the transform tools to tweak the shapes. * * * * * * There are 5 leaf shapes to each of the individual details. A bottom that has a bit of a curve, the one I made already; 3 Almost identical sets that are stacked on top of each other; and the top, flat leaf which I have not been successful in making yet. We will start by making the first of the ascending sets. The first step is to create a plane, the subdivision doesn't quite matter yet because you can add it later. Hold shift and drag and edge that doesn't go to the top of that plane to the left. This is going to become a separate section and will create the hole you see. The shape I have doesn't really matter at the moment, it will be drastically changed later. Now you'll see that I dragged another set of edges on the right side as well and I continued to drag on the left side a few more times. With this next step we define the triangle shape for the fan of the leaf. Select target weld click on the circled vertex on the right, and then click on the next vertex to it's left. This should make a triangle. Then, drag the top segments out and then, with either swift loop or the connect tool, create these 2 loops, then select the top segments of them. Use the split function, outlined in red. This splits the line segment (the opposite of weld) and they will be our leaves later. move them around like shown and then select the whole leaf area. There is an extrusion downwards that I didn't do earlier, to remedy we have to get a little fancy, extrude... ... and select a face from the extrusion, then shift+click on the next one around the ring. This selects the whole ring. Deselect the part that is attached to the original shape and delete. Now we will add a bit of a ridge to each leaf. Connect all of the rings on the leaves and move them backwards a little. Next, we want to soften up the ends of the leaves. Select the vertices shown, and in the red box, there is an option that says "edges." Select it. This constrains all movement to an edge. Then we can just move with the transform gizmo and it will move the vertices along the outside edges. Now we want to add a bit of shape to the fan, so select these middle segments, then connect 'em. Use the scale tool and scale down the new lines. Then move it so the left edge is in line with the rest of the left edges. After some tweaking of the cups. To add some bend.... I use face selections and move that selection backwards or forwards. Then, deselect a layer and do it again. By layer, I mean I have 4 selected right now, I would deselect the bottom 2 polygons and smooth out the transform. Unsmoothed which would be how I would present it in a Simcity Render... And with a turbosmooth. Then for the other 2 sets going up, we can shift drag to copy the entire object, and just tweak it a little. Add a symmetry modifier.... And then we can add the last ascending set, which is more bent than the others. For this I will add a bend modifier. Notice the "limit effect" and the shape of the gizmo. The orange box stops curving about halfway down. There we have the completed leaf. I am going to leave the way I distributed them around the column up for personal discovery still. It has to do with array and working pivot. I hope this helps you all in your making of the column. I know it isn't the most clearly put and a lot was left out, but I included everything that I did that was different and new. And Part 2 of tutorial Corinthian Capital: Part 2 Ok, so we made the leaves last time, now we are going to finish it off with one of the most useful tools I've ever used. Loft. Mine ended up looking like this: It's not terribly accurate to the reference, I'm afraid. I don't have the time for tweaking the shapes that I would like to get it accurate, but it resembles it, and this is mainly for the modeling tools more than anything. So we are going to use a tool called "loft" which I will explain how to use as we go, but it is a very powerful tool that basically extrudes a shape along a spline, with the benefit being you can modify the shape along the spline parametrically. The first step is, I'm sure you can remember, to create the spline. Because this is a continuous curve, I create 4 vertices per "circle" in the spiral and add extras if I think it will help the shape. 4 per rotation is what's needed to make the shape, though. Then we convert to bezier and edit to make it smooth. Then, for later, we will create the little spiral thingy on top with the same process. We can now start the loft process. I already have my "path" but now I need the shape that goes along the path, another spline. If we look at the reference, it seems to be a T shape going around the spiral. So we will make something similar. First, I create 2 rectangles. Then I copy and drag the smaller rectangle straight down. (you can hold shift while transforming it for this). Then, I am going to do a spline boolean operation. The spline video covered this so I won't go into detail. You have to be in element mode and you want it on the settings I have to create the result that we want. Afterwards, I didn't take a picture of this, but go into vertex mode, and weld the extra vertices together if there are extra vertices from the operation. Then edit the shape to be narrower. If you select two symmetrical halves of the vertices and make the transform center be selection center (it is highlighted blue in the dropdown on the above picture) you can use the scale tool (the transform has to be set while scale is selected) to equally transform the vertices from the point of symmetry. Select vertices and select the chamfer tool (highlighted in blue) to split them into 2 vertices each with a line connecting them. Now that we have the shape, we can actually loft it now. Go to the solids menu and select compound objects from the dropdown. I have loft highlighted. With the path spline already selected, click loft, and when the rollout comes up, click "pick shape" which is the spline we just finished making. Click on that spline. It will then extrude the shape around the path making a solid. Nifty, right? I know you can already see the possibilities with this tool, but it gets better. Note: if your shape isn't the correct direction, I cover that later. The first thing after making a very geometric, non-round shape on a loft you should do is to go to skin parameters, and set shape steps to 0. Also, you usually want to turn off adaptive path steps just a little lower in that menu. Our next step is to edit the scaling along this extrusion, now this is the power of loft. Click the "scale" button and a curve editor will pop up. This will probably be your first time seeing one of these in 3ds max. It works very similar to splines. First thing, is there will be a box highlighted yellow, this locks the x and y direction together so one curve affects both of them equally. We don't want that. Click it to turn it off. Now we get to editing it. To edit one curve at a time, click either the green or red lines. Drag one of the default points up or down to determine which direction it is. Right now, we are going to work on the long side. I circled the 2 buttons we will use for editing, the normal hotkeys don't work. So there's the create point button on the right, and the move button on the left. Pretty self-explanatory. And, just like splines, when you select a point and right click it, you have the option of making it bezier. I made it get smaller as it goes in to the middle and that's pretty much it with this. Now we will work with the other direction. If we notice, it kinda flares out when it goes to the middle of the shape. I made I a curve like that to represent that flare. Now, we see there is a kinda skew to the shape that we want to get. Surprisingly, skew will not help us here, but twist will. Twist rotates the shape, skew does some very situational thing that is hard to explain. Anyways, it's the same process as with scale. I wanted to just get a bit of a twist so I didn't go higher than 20 degrees of rotation. To zoom in like I did, making the y-axis smaller, I highlighted the zoom tool in the curve editor box. This just works vertically. Next step is to get the symmetry on. I used the symmetry modifier for this. If you click the symmetry modifier name itself, it should turn blue, and if it does that means you are now editing the mirror itself. You can move and rotate it however you want. Conversely, you can instead add an edit poly underneath the symmetry and move/rotate the object around the mirror. Now we will loft that smaller shape we made earlier that spirals upwards. The shape I made for it is just a single curved line, and I will demonstrate why this being used is awesome. First, the loft itself. Mine was not lined up the correct way. To fix this, click the "+" next to loft in the modifier list and click on shape. Then do a marquee selection over the entire lofted shape because we don't know yet which side is the beginning or end. The only thing selected will be the shape used to create the loft. You can freely rotate or scale it. If you rotate it, it changes the alignment. Mine was off by 90 degree so I rotated it 90 degrees. I can shell the shape I lofted, and also, give it more geometry by adding more shape steps. But this is also the cool part. If you look at the reference, it changes concavity halfway through. By dragging on end of the vertical curve down to -100 scale, I can flip it halfway. It's bowed one way when it starts, and bowed the opposite way when it finishes. Nifty, eh? Then the other axis. In this last step I went back to the original path spline and edited that as well to better fit the environment. And that is the spiral. If I wanted to spend much more time on it, and get it better for super closeups, which would involve welding all the outside parts to the inside parts. Anyways, now I will show you how to distribute things in a circle. First, we want a centerpoint to rotate around. Mine is the center of the pillar. To make this a viable spot to rotate around, we need the working pivot to be there. Select "edit working pivot" in the hierarchy tab. It will give you an axis to move. Using the align tool, with the settings shown, click the pillar. It will move the working pivot point to the bottom middle of the column. Now, when we say "use working pivot" it will now automatically transform from that spot. Great for scaling or rotating. Now, select what you want to rotate, and in the tools menu click array. This brings up this dialogue with the important parts circled. Basically, what this says is that it will do an array totaling 360 degrees of rotation, in those 360 degrees it will evenly distribute 4 instances of the object you have selected. By clicking preview you can see what will happen when you click ok without committing to anything. - - - - - - - For the middle spirals I just reused the old spirals for the middle ones reorienting the symmetry and scaling them down to fit. - - - - - - - - - - - - Wireframes smoothed Unsmoothed I will also post any tutorials I make for the remaining student. Feel free to ask questions in this topic.

A suggestion for the modular sets where you take on model and instance it onto other parts of the building, like the one you just showed us. Look up the "ambient reflection/occlusion" map. You can do some pretty cool stuff with that for modular stuff. Set spread really far to simulate different materials at junctions or dirt. Experiment with it a little.

I should also include this. These should almost be compulsory for anyone who has not seen a series of basic 3ds max poly, spline and miscellaneous modeling tutorials. Perfect for beginners. They were what got me started learning 3ds max. http://www.3dtotal.c...86#.U1ftb_ldV8F

If you want them driveable it is my understanding that they have to be a certain kind of model that requires a different kind of modeling than what you are doing right now. Poly limit is 500 for vehicles, right?

I'm not sure what that problem is, but something I usually try when weird stuff happens to try to run the file as administrator. I doubt it will fix that problem, but it can't hurt to try. Also, schriefer, don't change the environment map for simcity because it will change how the building interacts with stuff above, not just below. It will look out of place in game because of it.

My bad, looked like a circle from the picture he showed us. I do, in fact have an easier way, though. Edit: read the bottom edit real quick before reading this. That's after I tried it myself. So, keeping that shape that you made for red, you don't need to do anything with the top, you just need a path around. Add an edit poly modifier, select an edge on the bottom of that ellipse you made (make sure there is no cap on the bottom) and hit the "loop" button which has a hotkey of alt+L. This will select all the edges around the base. Alternatively you can go to border selection mode, select the bottom, then go back to edge selection mode. After that, hit "create shape from selection" or "create shape" and pick linear. Smooth would work in this case but I still like to stick with linear. Then, I forget the physical location of this tool, I think it's in the tools dropdown, but the shortcut is shift+I. This opens up a menu with a dropdown and something that says instance/copy/reference etc. With select path, select the spline you just created with the create shape tool. With select object select the column. For the dropdown, do "divide evenly, no objects at ends" and make sure instance is checked. Once you do that, up the number of columns until it is the correct amount. With this, I forget if it automatically reorients them along the curve or not, I'm doing this from memory, but I think I did this for something similar before. Don't worry if they are facing the correct direction or if they are oriented on the spline perfectly correctly, you can easily change that. If they are off the spline or rotated 90 degrees the wrong way or something. You can go into the edit poly of one of the columns or the original one, select element, and transform it how you please. This will move all of them closer or farther towards the spline, and because of the nature of this tool, it should be uniform the transformations that are needed to correct it. Hopefully that helps, if not I have one last trick I can show you that should definitely work. Edit: I just got home so I'm doing it myself. You have to select the object you want to copy along the path then hit pick shape. You don't want to do divide evenly, no objects at end, you want to do "divide evenly, objects at ends" When you are rotating the element, it might not rotate on the right axis. Set the pivot to be at the bottom of the column, then when you are rotating set rotation space to be world center, and the axis type to be gimbal. It does still do something a bit wonky after doing the spacing tool, mine got flip-turned upside down halfway through. To fix, I will show. After spacing: Select all the upside down ones, click make unique and no: Repeat the process you did to get the others upright in the first place: You don't need to make it unique to do this, you can, again, do the gimbal rotation by pivot point just in object selection mode if they were just upside down, but some other problems could arise that may make making them unique necessary.

In hierarchy select affect pivot only, move it to the very center of where the stadium would be. Unselect affect pivot only. Go to tools, array, click the right arrow in the rotation row, select z-axis and type 360 degrees. Type in next to 1D however many columns are in the whole stadium, hit preview, if it looks correct, hit ok.

daaaang. That's an awesome picture. I've never had such a high quality reference for any building I've done. With the stuff simcoug found and that, I have plenty of material. I am just going to have to make up the roof when it comes time for that. Thank you guys so much.

Wow! You are a beautiful person, and that building is just as beautiful. I can assure you that this is going to be the next thing I work on. I am super excited for this. The mansard roof is especially awesome. I didn't realize there were statues framing the arches. That will be an interesting challenge, and it will be an awesome replacement for the Thompson center in my recreation Seriously, thank you so much for this. It is going to be fast one of my favorite ex-buildings. Shinkansen: That's a shame Personally, old buildings are by far my favorite. I am a sucker for ornamentation and bricks.

I do intend to. Its the original Sherman hotel. And if I get references enough to accurately recreate it I'll make it pretty high on the list because its unique and beautiful. I am going to have some very unproductive and some very productive days for a while. Senior year just ended and there's a graduation party every other day. Also vacation.

It's just a huge blob in the middle of downtown... some things might be standalone uglier but I think Thompson is ugly because it's so out of place. Especially since this was what could have been on the lot instead... It burned down and got replaced by a significantly less beautiful building, but still. Why waste an entire block on an anomalous, gigantic blob.

Realized I don't like keeping secrets and it's kind of pointless anyways. I won't be updating this thread in a while regardless, though. The goal of this next project is to almost completely recreate the loop. I've gotten the blockouts of all major buildings done and I've started the difficult part. Once everything has shape I'll show any further pics. And I'm sure some of you will recognize this view Anyways, I want to get to know all of Chicagos buildings for myself personally, and this is always the best way. My favorite building is the one I'm working on I think I've done the most difficult building in terms of shape already, though. Three First National Plaza was very awkward to get accurate. Also, you'll see the new version of chase tower already taken form as well. Anyways, what I hope to do in terms of Simcity after this, is of course to release most of the buildings, but and idea that I had for most of them, because they will be unfinished, is to give some newer BATers a chance to work on a building that's already got the most difficult part finished--proportions and form--and have a chance to finish and detail it. My very favorite buildings I will keep to myself though One thing I am wondering, though. The Thompson center is easily the most hideous building in existence, but the first building on the lot, I think it was Sherwood hotel? Was absolutely stunningly beautiful. If I can get reference for that building, I would definitely replace Thompson in my recreation and eventually release it on the STEX but it's hard to find, so I'd like to draft some help. Specifically, Vlasky, if you see this, you are amazing at this stuff, would you help find some old photos?

Those will all come, but I'm remaking most of them. Chase Tower has experienced so many glitches that it is not salvageable, so I'm using the shell to remake it. Daley center I am going to remake from scratch at some point. 333 Wacker I again need to remodel some parts of it, but it is the closest to release of them all. I do have a bit of a secret project in the works that I will be working on exclusively until it is done, however. I will post what that is and the progress I've made when I think it is ready to be revealed. I am positive you all will like it when it is finished, however.

Your bricks are looking a bit funky. Right now they have really thick, bold grout and the way it is set up, that doesn't look right. One of two things needs to happen. 1. Add a bump map to the bricks. Usually when the grout is that thick, the bricks themselves protrude from the wall. or 2. Make the grout a lot thinner. The night view makes it really noticeable because the light should cast shadows from the bricks when they are how they are, and it isn't. Great job otherwise. Keep it up.

IT IS LIVE! Enjoy Everybody.

I rather like the lighting now. Thoughts?

Some more progress. There's something I don't like about the night lights atm but I can't figure out what it is. Something just seems off. Any thoughts? Btw, vlasky, it's not really a light source, it's just a yellow box casting fg on the building to simulate street lights and cars and city life in general.