darn42

So the day view is all rendered out and ready. Here is a preview of the night lights. I have a ton of kinks to work out and perfect but this should be indicative of the facade illumination in the future. As for the windows, there's going to be a lot more work on them and their distribution. I don't really have as much experience with window lighting yet. Btw, opinions on the ambient lighting from the base?

No, of course I didnt actually think about it that way

I'll take out a little green. The real building is, I agree, a lot more red than I have it. Probably too big of a difference atm to call it artistic license for a recreation.

The green however was on purpose. That's just my stylistic preference. I'm not a big fan of reds. That much is definitely staying how it is. Thanks for the input though. Here's just a minimalist render of it to show more of the details.

I love being wrong and people catch me and say, "hey, you idiot, you did something wrong" before I go off and make a mistake. Thanks Red, this looks so much better now. I didn't add too much in photoshop. Mostly just some ambient occlusion stuff because I realized that the biggest details missing were grime around the modeled details. The Facade I saw was mostly clean except for some little dustings. I'm going to change the trim on the middle section, it's too close together and it's strangling the building in that spot, but other than that I think I am satisfied Would you guys say it's ready for nightlights then? I'm gonna export anyways, it's a quick one.

I needed that. I stopped looking at it objectionally because I was excited. Thank you.

It'll be 4x4 if I can't figure out how to make a couple parts overhang.

And now it's time for nightlights!!! I decided to keep no window shades, it ended up looking worse with them installed.

After one of the most productive days in my life, I present you, the Jeweler's building almost fully modeled and almost fully textured. Gotta do the ducts, the stores, the blinds, the walls, import the runners for the walls and then she is complete. Best thing is, because it's just a brick wall, and almost all of my details are modeled, I don't have to rely on fancy materials. Render time is 5 minutes for a z5 atm

This is gonna be so awesome.

And now, all of the major modeling is done! After just a few tweaks and additions--one being importing those trimmed bricks in a safe manner--texturing will commence! My list atm is: walls inside, window blinds, fixing the bat4max rig, texturing, importing the bricks. During texturing, I will also add life to the shops at the bottom. Enjoy.

I have a new update, though it may look a bit worse than the last one. I had to get rid of the trim running up an down the sides for now. I was very stupid when I made it and ended up with a several groups that ended up having over 16000 objects and 1.5 million polys just for some brickish looking things. It woulda been fine if there were like 100 objects, but noooo, I had to group at the beginning. Anyways, I merged those into a new scene so I wouldn't lose them but they aren't there right now. Also, I'm having a bit of a problem with the BAT rig so the preview renders are manual and the lighting isn't right, but I am close to done with modeling. I've got all but one part of the stonework modeled. Going to add clocks, hvac vents, small metal bits and a couple other misc. things very soon. Enjoy. Texturing will happen very soon

Something about the blue logos looks off. I couldn't find a good night picture of the building in a quick search but you might want to rethink the self illumination you have. I really don't have much reference but it seems like the blue is just what color it does. I think something illuminating the wall behind the logos would look good.

Hey guys, this is my tutorial thread. I will be posting all my big tutorials in here before they make it to the omnibus then deleting them, and I will be posting all the smaller tutorials I make to help out individual people here as well. I really hope these tutorials help you guys out. Making pretty much all of them helps me out and I enjoy doing it. 3ds Max Mixed Modeling tutorials Modeling: Part 1: This has some basic poly modeling techniques and some very basic spline techniques Part 2: Advanced spline techniques Part 3: More advanced use of modifiers Project files Hosted on mediafire. Feel free to rummage around in the scene to see my meshes. Part 4 Using various tools available. Especially the graphite modeling toolset Part 5: Intro to particle systems. Make realistic falling water. Texturing: This teaches how to create realistic textures without the use of 3rd party photo editing programs like photoshop or gimp. edit: first tutorial is on omnibus, replaced it with this post.

Selection Settings Here is I think one of the most important things to know. Sorry it's a video but that was the best for this topic.

Simply gorgeous nightlighting.

Thanks again for the support I'm glad this progress is being enjoyed. Seraf: It's just a random zoom I picked, but it's probably close to HD. T Wrecks: That's an awesome idea I think I will do just that. So today is going to be my day to write some tutorials. I will post them in my dedicated tutorial thread later in the day, but first I have some stuff that is relevant here. I haven't done much to add to the building. Very little, but I'd like to show some of the closeup wireframes of the details I do have so you all can see that this isn't as meticulous as it looks like from afar. The most time consuming part for me is the measurements. I use a surprising amount of algebra when I'm getting the proportions down, but the modeling is usually straightforward. Here are all the wireframes: From afar: The tippy-top: The vents were made with an easy poly modeling technique that makes that kind of pattern on any quadrangle. The oblong circular details were just beveled scaled and tapered from a cylinder. The rest was box modeling or a swept spline. Cupola: I will detail how I did this in a tutorial. More of the cupola: A little further down: Mostly lofts and a little bit of poly modeling. The Lion's heads took 30 seconds in zbrush but would be much more difficult in 3ds max. And further: These were simple sweeps of a spline that I used a symmetrical bend and a taper modifier on to add some dimension. This thing: I broke it up into several objects and grouped it together. The helixes are the "spring" object available in the dynamics section of the create tab. The row of circles: Just some leaves placed and symmetrized (I made a word) about a circular hole. The dimensions for the hole were made from the facade. The horizontal runners across the walls: All of the small bits are instanced and I made a few different sizes of backplate. It's a really small detail so the fewer the polys the better. Those are all the major details on this so far. The most important part of making all this that made it feasible to add this detail are the ways I instanced the details and placed them along the building. I will definitely make a dedicated tutorial for the selection modifiers and placement modifiers I used. Anyways, I hope this demystifies some of the details on the building.

Thanks for the support everybody. I didn't even realize gold stars on posts existed Update Time! (There's your warning T Wrecks) The Details And the Preview Anyways, I haven't gotten as much done as I'd have wanted to because of my busy schedule, but I needed to get an update out before I go on vacation. Right now I think I've gotten most of the stonework detail that is going to be done on this building. It's mostly repetitive on the bottom half so I'd say that I'm about halfway with modeling since I still need to do all the ducts and wires and other miscellaneous, non-stone stuff. Look for that in a couple weeks. Also, remember, I will explain how to do anything I've done if anyone asks for a tutorial. In addition I have some specific tutorials I have in mind that I will probably also do--the leaves on the cupola, the circular holes, and most important, selection modifiers and tools.

I don't think photometric lights would be necessary. I think I posted about this in another thread some time ago, but you can get similar results with omni-lights with a fraction of the computation time. Since this isn't close up and we don't really see the edge of the falloff (which is where the photometric map becomes important like with car headlight spots) but all we really see is the diffuse of the light. For omni lights just set the falloff to inverse square, mess with the color but keep it pretty unsaturated and close to white, set the far attenuation (which limits distance calculations happen). Also, since I believe you have something like 32 gb of ram, increase the max quadtree depth a little which speeds up ray-tracing at the cost of RAM. I'm not sure what you mean by the mr portal. I get that would be a way to set the color of the light (and thanks for introducing me to the blackbody shader ). Are you trying to say have them isolated from the windows and place them like rectangular lights on the ceiling? I can see how that could work, but it would only be able to do ambient/diffuse shadows since it doesn't cast any direct light itself. I still think that would be too much render for the viewing distance regardless.

Can you post a picture of what the problem looks like?

Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated. I was going to keep this a secret until I finished it but I don't want anyone to think that I'm gone for good. I've decided to continue work on the jewelers building but without the step-by-step. I reached the detailing phase and I realized that it would be the most tedious thing I've ever done to document the entirety of detailing... So instead, I'm going to post closeup photos as I go and take requests for tutorials on individual types of detail. Like this: I've done the cupola so far today. It takes a while to get to this much detail but I'm trying to be as faithful to the original as I can. Anyways, any requests for tutorials on individual parts of this are welcomed. (ex. the floral bands on the cupola, the sunflowers, or the arrangement of anything) And in context of the rest of the building. As you can see, this is such a small but major piece of the whole building which is just as detailed throughout so you can see why I'm opting for this way. - - - - - - - - In regards to previous buildings. Rendering is by far my least favorite of this process considering how time-consuming it is and how often something goes wrong. I will try to get onto that as soon as I'm able but it's just such a detestable process to waste hours on a failed render that it's low on my list. I am truly sorry for that, but it is the nature of the problem and myself that is making it as annoying as it is. Btw, Andisart, feel free to do any buildings you want that aren't already in progress. Anything that isn't already in progress is up for grabs.

It's just such a very specific job for people that want something very specific. I can't imagine asking anyone but a log-house designer to build a log-house.

This is really off-topic and in response to something from the original post. But "custom log house designer" is one of the most awesome, as well as the most oddly-specific profession I have ever heard of.

How you create the leaves also makes a difference. Renderers hate alpha maps. The cutout slot in A&D is the most efficient to use, but it still hates it because it adds a ton of computation in terms of shape. Usually, you can get by with deleting the alpha/cutout at this range with good results and less render time.

I'm not seeing the same glass for your version as the real version, and I think that has less to do with material than the model itself. What I see that you modeled are very thick panes of glass, and that is making the refraction very distorted. From what I can tell of the pictures you showed, the glass is completely contained in the beams that hold it up, so either make the glass significantly thinner, maybe like 3-4 cm tops, or just use thin geometry. In the first picture you can kind of see how thick the glass should be by looking at the indents on the frame. The material itself looks just like a low refraction glossiness version of glass like you seem to have already. Side note, I think it would also look better if you put the diagonal cut along the vertices of the squares so it doesn't seem like such an abrupt ending.