darn42

I like the website and I love your designs. That Michigan Pavilion thing is genius and beautiful. Seriously, good luck with everything. I feel like accepting payment for BATs might be controversial, but I totally support it.

When I find I get bored or frustrated with BATing, I like to work on more personal projects in max that don't have anything to do with Simcity. More artwork than anything else, it's more relaxing and fun for me after spending so much time in orthographic views. That's just what I do. I just hope that if you do take a break that you definitely come back You will be sorely missed in the time you are gone but if your hobby is a chore it is no longer worth doing.

I forget if particle systems can be converted straight to geometry. I know that you can do so with the "mesher" compound object. PBGV you are technically right (the best kind of right) but it's not during rendering, it's right before it during the translation period. It will increase rendering time by being lots of geometry to calculate refraction for. But it tells you two different parts at the bottom of the screen, rendering time and translation time. If the translation time is very long, it is worth converting to a mesh, if it's the actual rendering time then a rethink of the materials will probably fix the problem. Potentially using a simpler water material for the spouts could help. Btw, if you ever have lots of geometry, convert to an editable mesh rather than a poly. The way it stores the information and renders it uses less computing power and speeds up both renders and viewport performance, but if I remember correctly, it raises ram usage, not positive about the ram thing though.

Just thought I'd put this here, I just found out about this and it's pretty helpful. This is in the mental connection rollout of most materials. For any object that has an opacity of 1 or a transparency of 0, check this box. It is off by default because using it when those aren't true it messes stuff up. Anyways, it lowers render time, sometimes significantly. Enjoy.

That looks perfect. Soooo much better.

Pretty much.

Yea, that helps, thank you so much for taking the time to explain that for me. Also, the nightlights on the fountain, I'm not sure I like how the streams are illuminated. It looks like they are glowing, and they wouldn't glow like that without some sort of powerful light under the water. I think you should switch to transparent water if you aren't already and add some light objects under water with a self-illumination material put on them. Btw, for the water, use refraction at max difference in the "advanced rendering options" menu to set the color, and in the same menu, check the "solid" checkbox under glass/translucency. even though the water is just a simple plane, the way that max calculates refraction, you get accurate bending and colors with that checked. This will make lights you place under the water render really nicely.

Ok, so I understand how the material works now, but I'm still having trouble imagining how you would make the bricks over the arches as an image. Get a reference of the building to photoshop to use for making the bricks in the right spot... do you render out a normal brick template (or something similar) then replace the stuff over the arches with bricks you draw yourself?

Are you using proxies for the furniture and instances for the lights? That will help immensely with memory usage. Just to make sure everyone is on the same page, proxies are an object called "mr proxy" that takes a model and materials saved from an external file or from somewhere in the scene and acts like a viewport stand-in for that object. The beauty about them, is they both use very little computing power in the viewport, and the model that is referenced is loaded once upon rendertime, and then is just duplicated with minimal memory usage. They are located in the mental ray tab of the create menu. You can find a lot of good documentation on how to use them online. Do this for the office furniture and potentially any flora you use. Instances will do something similar but to a lesser extent. If you want to lower the computing needed for lights, there are a few things you can do. First of all, all interior lights should be standard lights, which you are already doing, but it might be worth using spot or direct lights. Omni lights are essentially 6 spotlights, so a combination of 1 or 2 spotlights in lieu of an omni light could greatly improve rendering time. Regardless, make sure to set the far attenuation. This limits the distance the light works, preventing the calculation of light of negligible importance that is far away from the light. Also, use ray-traced shadows, the calculation time isn't too much more than shadow maps but it decreases rendertime by a whole lot. Or on the flip side, you could save the shadow maps made by the interior lights to a separate file and access that over and over again, it would increase ram usage, but you'd only have to calculate the interior lights one time and it would be quick rendering from then on. I don't know exactly how to do that because I've never needed to, but it might be worth looking into. Another bit that will decrease rendertime if ray-tracing the shadows, though increase ram usage or vis-versa, is to increase or decrease the max quad-tree depth in the standard light. Increasing it decreases the amount of calculation needed to create the shadows, but the way it does so uses more ram. One last bit about the lights, there's an option to turn off specular or use ambient only in the advanced effects rollout, I've never experimented with that, but for interior lights I can't imagine specular being useful for interior lights, since the materials inside are going to be bare-bones, and if they aren't it should (no reflection, no transparency except for maybe blinds). Turning it off might help rendering speed and memory. That's a lot of information, but I hope it helps. I'm really really excited to see how this turns out. Also, 24 gb of ram?!? Do you have a rendering farm in your house or something? I've got 8!

I have a question, how do you make the bricks over arches? Is it modeled or a custom texture to fit uvw mapping? If it's a texture, would you mind showing us how to make a texture like that. Just gotta say I love when you have updates 'cause everything you do is impeccable, it's a shame you don't have more time.

Time for a bit of necromancy. After a week of hard work and a 15 hour render, I finally finished the block of Chicago I was working on so long ago to print as a present for one of my sisters who lives near there. There are a few noticeable errors but I couldn't stop the render once I noticed them, when I finish the buildings for in game I'll fix them. Now that there's a max 2014 fix, I will ~finally~ render out some of my buildings for simcity. I hope you enjoy.

First, we’ll create a circle centered at the origin around our fountain, make it pretty large. Add a surface modifier with lots of subdivision and add an edit poly. Then, select the loop around the circle, it’ll only select 90 degrees of the circle, hit select similar to select all of the sides around and delete them. Then repeat ‘til you get a shape like mine. Now we’re going to model some tiles into the plaza, we could do this with texturing, but I want to show you guys this technique you can use to model it. Once you get that shape of plaza, select all the edges. Then, in the polygon modeling dropdown, select “generate topology.” You can then select any of the different procedural topology maps it can change your mesh into. I chose “cross.” This changes the topology of your mesh Making this tile pattern I have would be very difficult to create otherwise. Once you do that, select all the edges again, and chamfer them just a little bit. This will be the grout or the cracks in your tiles. Then, select all the big faces, you can use select similar to make this process easier. Then, extrude just a little bit, about the height of the tile you want. Once you do that, press “grow” once and detach your tiles, this will make texturing easier because then you only need to do one texture per object, and you already have everything you want different selected. In the next step, I’ve decided that I want this park to be by a lake, and have a path running around the lake, just like one of my favorite parks near my house. To do this, we will use a heightmap. I have prepared one for us to use, it’s no spectacular thing (this is my first time making one) but it gets the job done. This is it. I made it in gimp. A heightmap is a black and white image that gives a height based on the brightness of the pixels in a certain spot. Black is the lowest point, white is the highest point. As you can see, the big black spot in the middle is going to be the lowest point. To put this into geometry, create a large plane with lots of subdivision. I used a 5kx3k foot plane and divided it into 500x300 polygons. Note: I have all my objects scaled up 1000% because it makes it easier for me to model things like that. Also, it gets rid of jagged edges on closeup renders. Once you have your plane created, create a material with the heightmap on it. Apply it to this plane. It will probably not fit right. If it doesn’t, apply a uvw map and make it fit (rotating it and using the fit button will help you). Once it fits and is oriented correctly, apply a displace modifier to it using the heightmap again. Make sure to select “use existing mapping” this will line up the displacement to your material you put on the plane. Then, pull up the strength value til it looks right to you. Next, we’ll create the lake in the middle. To crete the waves, just add a bunch of ripples and some noise at different spots. Change up the size and the frequency of them. When you’re done doing that, you should have something like mine. But when you look at it, it looks kinda weird for a lake. Lakes have a lot of placid spots in them. So let’s use some graphite modeling tools to fix that. Go into an edit poly and use the flatten tool. Just drag it around randomly at a decent size and not too strong of a setting to flatten out some areas. You can also explore the other freeform tools in graphite modeling that you have as well, they are pretty useful. Once you flatten it out, we change the bump map on the water material. Go down to the bump map bitmap slot and click it. You get these options that I have. Set them about what I have and maybe experiment. This will completely change the look of the water to be more of a lake. Note: If you want to change the color, you have to change the reflection color. Diffuse color does nothing. Here we are starting to create the paths going around the lake. Just create some splines going around it. Then, create a plane of to the side. I made mine about 6 feet across. It doesn’t really matter how long it is. Apply a path deform modifier from the world space modifiers to the plane and pick your spline to align it to. This modifier takes your shape and aligns it to the shape. Convert this to an editable poly by right clicking the stack and selecting “collapse to” Now, we must somehow make it fit to the terrain that we made, but how are we gonna do that? More Graphite modeling tools of course. In the freeform tools, we will use the conform brush. This will take geometry from one object, and align it with another, as you can see in the picture. Just left click and run over each part you want to align. To get a better fit, add a turbosmooth modifier before you conform. After you conform it to the shape, with the move tool ,just bump it up a single click on the arrows after you hit f12 or at the bottom so that there aren’t any faces sharing the same space. Continue making your paths and conforming them to the shape. Once you’ve done them all, attach them to eachother by using swiftloop and bridge and moving around vertices to get your desired effect. At this point, I am thinking that I will have a gazebo on the hill, one at the left part of the lake where it dips in, and on the top part of the lake where there’s a small hill/cliff. Now for the garbage. I’m going to just show you pictures along the way and see if you can figure out how to model it. I am not going to use any new techniques during this. Let’s call this a test kind of. Hint: border and bridge Hint: Pinch the connect to fix the NURMs If you have learned from these tutorials, you will have hopefully been able to recreate the garbage can pretty well. Now we’ll do the bench. I am tired right now so I’m not going to model it perfectly. I spent a lot more time on the first bench to get it perfect but I can model it enough to show you all the methods used. Download that image to cheat like me if you want. The tedious part of this was to get the proportions of the details right. Since I could just make my bench 90 degrees and just trace it, it was much easier. To set up an easy reference image, make a plane, add the image as a texture, add a uvw map with a bitmap fit of the correct image, open object properties and uncheck frozen in gray, and freeze it. Bam, you’ve got a traceable reference now. Basically, just make a bunch of lines that trace the pieces and then attach them. Make a chamfered rectangle (make a rectangle then editable poly it then chamfer the vertices) as your loft shape. Then make all the splines into lofts. In my first one, the lofts had all been edited in the curve editor, but I’m only going to do that to one of them to show how it’s done. Here we have the curve editor. What we do for this is edit each axis of scale individually. The x axis scales the shape we are lofting along whatever the x is and y curve scales it along y. In my case, the y curve was the one controlling the scale of the longest side. The way I have my curves set up is that once the shape hits the loop-d-loop, it starts to grow, then when it gets to just near the tip, it drops off fast Then, on the x curve, it’s flat all the way until it hits the point where the y drops off, then it too drops off to get that effect. Next we create the frame. Create a spline then loft your chamfer box you already used around it. Make sure it is a copy instead of an instance when you make the loft. Then, you can scale down the shape in the shape dropout of loft til it looks like a chamfered square. You only need to make it aobut half of the bench as we will be using a symmetry modifier. Ok, just create a chamfer box and orient it around so it looks like it’s sitting on the frame part we created last. It’s pretty easy, just might take a little bit. I am not going to do the ornate detail at the top again, hard to get motivated to model something when you already have it done (I have no idea how those tv cooks do it!). Just use the same technique as before, except you only need to model half of it and then attach it before the symmetry. There we have the bench. My perspective render of what we’ve got so far. Pretty cool lookin huh? Now we’ll start the modeling on the gazebo For this, create a cylinder about the size you want the gazebo. Then, create two lathe’s from rectangles, one of them should be closed and will be the circlet roof thing. You will have to move the lathe axis to align with the cylinder you created. For the bottom one, turn down the degrees of rotation the lathe does then rotate the whole object to get it so it opens to the path. Now we will start the pillars. Create a box, make the dimensions even numbers. We are going to scale it up manually by 1000%, so take the dimensions of your box and add a 0 to them. Then, scale it down with the scale tool to 10%. We are going to be doing some stuff with graphite modeling tools that won’t work on something small like this originally, but if we make it scaled down, it should work. Then, inset it a bit on each side and chamfer the vertices of the stuff you just chamfered. You should definitely be able to make this simple shape out of the box. Rotate the boxes around the circle. I used the array tool (in the tools dropdown at the very top) to do this. Enter 72 degrees in the z axis rotation box and set amount in “1D” to 5. This will create even spacing of the your 5 boxes. Make sure they are instanced. Then, if your lathe on the bottom is not perfectly fitting, change the degrees to 288 and rotate to fit. Convert to quads. Similar selection on graphite modeling really helps here. Also, you have to chamfer the border on top and bottom to get the chamfered vertices you made earlier into quads. We are going to do some sculpting, and we only want one part sculpted, so detach one side of the faces, then add a turbosmooth with a few iterations. I added some loops before I added turbosmooth or detached it because I figured out I needed to detach it after I started. Find the pushpull brush in the graphite modeling tools under freeform. Alt+leftclick/drag is to push in. You can create some really intricate patterns using this technique. Patterns that would normally be impossible. When you sculpt, have a symmetry modifier out so that you know what it will look like. Push out your geometry you want to create first, then push in around it to give it more of an impression. If you’ll notice, that scaling trick we did worked. If you tried using a brush on something this small without it being scaled down, even a .1 size brush would be much too much. If you have any too hard of edges, just use the relax brush on a low setting to bring it down. Note: Size of brush is shift+ctrl+leftclick/drag, power is ctrl+shift+alt+leftmouse Create a cylinder on one of the boxes. A very short one, then use bevel and extrude to create this pillar. Once it’s done, attach it to the box to get it all around the gazebo. Once that’s done, create a spline for the details at the top of the pillar. Use a series of symmetry to get the corner on the base holding up the loops (45 degree angle symmetry) then two more to copy it to all sides. Then, make your line into a rectangular geometry, convert to editable poly, chamfer the edges, and have it attached to the base thing. Use the same technique as you used on the bottom for this. It’s easier to just use connect on all the edges and add a ton of edges that way. Still detach it first though. Ignore my sculpts on the other faces besides the front. I was mistaken when I did that. I fixed it though. As you can see I did this around the lathe, but I figured out an efficient way of getting 360 degree coverage that looks good. Change the lathe amount to only 36 degrees and do an array of 10 of those all 36 degrees separated. I just did a random pattern with push and pull and I think it looks pretty good. Now just add those supports for the benches. Should be cake. That’s pretty much it for this tutorial. Our gazebo The view of the lake from the gazebo The park all in one view. It’s turning out pretty nice

Sorry about my absence as of late, life is busy, but I just came across something that I had to post. http://www.epab.bme.hu/grafika/Reference/Pps/mr_for_architectural_visualization.pdf Its a 35 page white page on mental ray lighting rendering and material production. It helps to demystify a lot of the more confusing and technical aspects of the renderer. I recommend everybody looks it through, it's worth the time.

So, as many of you know, I have taken a hiatus from BATing because of a stupid exporting problem in 2014; anyways, I started a new project, saw reddons thread, and decided to do something similar; in that order. Since I'm going to be doing this process anyways, I downloaded 2012 again, and imported my current project into that. I am also going to be looking into how much fixing and tweaking my previous projects would require from a backwards save. Again, I credit this idea completely to reddonquixote, I'm totally copying him, and I think that me explaining my process will help both myself and others. I will probably go over a lot of things he does, but I am just going to be doing my whole system. If I mention a tool and don't explain where it is, or you don't see it where I have it. Just google it Without further ado, I present the Jewelers Building. (a little bit more of ado: this was in progress before I decided on this so I already had a little bit done) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The first step in any BAT is collecting reference material: pictures, heightmaps, floorplans, etc. One of my biggest resources for dimensions is Google Earth. It's ruler tool is accurate to about a meter, a few percent in terms of BATing: great! Just locate your building and, using the ruler tool, find some nice horizontal places to measure. My building is about 45m x 50m in it's footprint, and has many other recesses and stuff that I also measured with the same process. Take note of all these measurements. Next, if you can, I like to get my hands on some orthographic drawing of any direction. I found this one: With this, I can refine all my measurements I took earlier. This, however doesn't have any readable measurements on it. Oh no! But we can still get all the good stuff using photoshop or gimp. Using the ruler tool there, we can set up a ratio using the known height of the building, and the height in pixels and any distance we can imagine on the orthographic view. With all of these measurements, we can start implementing them into the prototype. This, I already did, and it requires a lot of use with the tape measure tool in 3ds max. After using these to make the prototype, I came up with: Now at this point I had already started working on medium sized details on the roof but there it is. It's a very simple shape, but it has very accurate dimensions, and everything I make will be based off of this model. Let's now continue/start working on the medium sized details. It doesn't matter where you start, just that you start somewhere. For this particular model, I decided to work on the gazebo at the top first because it looked like something I wanted to work with. As for the main shape, I started with a cylinder with enough subdivision for each section and extruded out or up and beveled. Etc,. Now, what I have left on the gazebo is the dome. First is to start with a sphere. I looked at some pictures of the dome: and tried to figure out how much subdivision I needed on the sphere. When I looked I saw that there seemed to be a 3:1 ratio between the center parts, and the ornamentation. Also, things like this generally come in 16s, so 16 x 4 = 64: my sphere should be subdivided 64 times. I also chopped it down and deleted the bottom to be a hemisphere and deleted the top part where it starts being vents. Now I want to make the recesses in the dome. This can be done very easily and very efficiently using just a few steps. Start by selecting a single horizontal running edge, change the dotgap value to 3 (this will insert 3 spaces between every select edge in a dot loop, 3:1 ratio ) Hit the dot loop button, and you have a nice loop around your hemisphere selecting every 4 edges. Now we hit the ring button or ctrl + r, and this will select all of the ring going vertically. Once we have this, we can ctrl + click on the polygon subselection and this will transfer the edge selection over to polygon selection. Now we shift + click on any polygon on the bottom ring and the top ring, and this will extend the polygon selection all the way around there. The last selection trick is to invert the selection. Ctrl + i will invert our selection. Now we have something nice to work with. Just a few insets, bevels and extrudes and now we have some recesses, just like we wanted. We go to border selection now, select our hole from the deleted top, and cap it. Now we use inset and bevel tools to approximate the shape of the top terrace. Whenever there is a rounded part, we do not round it. We make it as sharp a corner as possible for a new step... We select the loop of edges on the sharp corner (ctrl + L) and then open the windowed chamfer tool (the dark grey box in the button next to the chamfer tool). With this, we can increase edges, and change our distance of chamfer. This will make a nice curve depending on how many segments you want. Now we want to add a sort of exponential looking curve to the top part. So we select the ring at the top... ... connect, and scale the loop we get down. Make it nice and small so when we chamfer it'll be the right type of curve. Make sure when we chamfer from one side to another, so that it overlaps the sides Once we chamfer, we'll have overlapping edges and vertices, so let's fix that. Transfer edge selection to vertices, and grow it a few times. Then do a weld to merge all the vertices together. Now we will add the metal tubethings that I can see at the top. First we select the loop we want then do a dot ring with a dotgap of 1. These will be the splines that make up the metal tube things. Click on the create shape from selection button, and switch it to linear. Then we just adjust the values for the spline, make it renderable and viewable, etc. Let's make a quick lip at the top of this, and we are done with the medium sized details at the top of the tower. There we go

...

Have you tried rebooting max? I know that happens to me when I leave it running for a while.

That boat looks fantastic! The details and modelling are really top notch. Great job. I also love how the shard is going Just some high level critique on the boat cause I know that at this point you want it; I don't see anything modelling wise that could be improved, but the render could be much improved. I think I found something similar enough to look at materials Almost everything looks good. The seats aren't as shiny on yours but that looks much better imo. The two main things are the floor of the boat and the siding of the boat. They aren't translating too well. On you boat the reflection looks much grainier and diffuse than it should. It looks very glossy in this reference. Maybe rethink the glossiness and sampling of the reflections. The floor of the boat I honestly don't know what you could do. I'd look up fuzzy materials cause it looks like it's supposed to be fuzzy. Right now I can tell what you were trying to do, which is good, but it still doesn't look like the short carpet it should be. I honestly think a big part of that is the hardness of the edges you have. Maybe add an advanced rendering effects fillet on it. I think that might help translate it a bit better without changing other parts of the shader. Anything else to change would have to be maybe a bit with falloff or maybe a bit with bump/displacement. The reflectivity and stuff right now fit very well. Quick thing, the bottom of the boat looks like it should be brushed metal. Maybe bump down the anisotropy on that part of the material. Seriously awesome job though. It looks really, really, really good.

Ok, sorry for the wait, time is short and it turned out I didn't have my method concreted yet. There were some wrinkles I had to rollout to make it work right and I had to compromise on the canopy leading into the building itself, it ended up not working like I hoped the first time and looked pretty bad. But I got it worked out and though the last part isn't 100% true to the building. In the end this is a less efficient way but probably a much more accurate one. without further ado.... - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I'm pulling a few references that reddon dug up earlier. This picture, and the aerial bing picture he grabbed. First I put the outline of the building just because it would be there in the real thing. Next I switch out my background picture for the aerial bing that will show me where to put my splines for the wings or whatever you'd call them. And I draw the widest one. Drawing the innermost one first might be the smarter thing to do but that's not what I did. If you do decide that, just do this process in reverse. Now, using the outline function, located right above the boolean section, outline a new spline to fit the next curve. Delete the end pieces, and using the create line tool, finish off that wing. Weld the open vertices and add clean beziers to them. Rinse and repeat until everything is nice and good. I added an extra spline as you can see representing the portion of canopy with no wing next to it. using the create line function again, draw lines along the window mullions from each far vertice. These will end up dictating how the windows look. Move all other vertices to be along these lines, but remain on their curve. Create a small, straight spline and loft everything along that. You will need to detach each individual spline within our big object to do that. Open path parameters and deformations. Turn off adaptive path steps; this will add more segments in places we use deformations, screwing everything up. In deformations, open the twist box. This will give us the curve editor. It's very similar to a spline. You can add points along the curve with the red line with a yellow star, you can move them with the move tool, and you can right click and make the beziers. You might need to figure out which end goes where, but on opposite ends click on the point, and give it a value of either -x or +x. In my case I chose 7.5 = x. This will give us the banking we want for the wings. On each additional curve, the dotted lines going up and down will represent vertices in the middle of the spline. These will correspond with the endpoints of the previous loft. If you are increasing the values at a non-constant rate (e.g. 7.5 -> 10 -> 15) make sure that you add a point on the dotted lines and give it the correct value for the previous line. The twist should match up between wings. Keep on doing the same thing. Until you are done. Now select all of these and make a clone-a normal clone- just in case you make a mistake. Create a new layer, the highlighted +, and that will automatically put the lofts you have selected in that layer. Hide the layer (it will be hidden when a blue lightbulb is in the hide slot for that layer, and check the checkbox for the default layer. The check means objects will be created in that layer. Now go into side view and select all of the edges. Connect them. This will dictate the angle of our windows. They slope toward the middle in steps but it's not that steep of an angle. Now before we do any more editing, add first a shell modifier then an edit poly modifier on top of the stack. This will allow us to remove any mistakes we made, or in the case, any purposeful edits. Now, the easiest way to select the middle section--since they aren't all one element-- is to click the box with a dotted rectangle around it. It is highlighted blue next to the transformation tools. This means that only polygons and edges you select entirely in a marquee will be selected. Select all the middle polygons. Delete them, then select two of the end pieces from the shell. We want to make sure any loop selections we make will be entirely just one side. These caps will let the loop selection continue onto the other side. Using the select similar function in the graphite modeling toolset. In any version of max before 2014 it will look different, but it is still a tool in the same toolset. The select similar should be set to topology, face area, and edge count. Delete all of the caps that you just selected. Now we have to flip the normals on the top element. This is because of how the bridge tool works. It cannot bridge edges from one facing normal to another without doing some funky stuff in between. This way we can do it no hassle. Now, it helps to go into ghost mode (I forget the real name for it). Hit alt+x on the keyboard and it will make your selection translucent. Really useful here. Look closely at what I have selected. On the outside wing, it's the inside portion of the top half. On the next one in, it's the outside portion of the bottom half. Select one of the edges from those loops, and then alt+L will loop the selection all the way around. Deselect (alt+click) any of the edges on the inner wing that do not line up with the edges on the outer. We want this to be a 1:1 bridge. That's why we made the splines like we did. Now hit bridge. You may notice that there aren't actually windows where this bridge is, but it will give us the directional edges we need for other parts of the canopy. Also notice, how clean the topology looks. It's 1:1, and everything is facing inwards. That's why we were so careful when we made the splines with all of the guides and such. Do that for everything. Rinse and repeat. Do not do the inner loop to the building. After you do that, detach all of the window parts, just what we bridged, and click the white lightbulb on the edit poly. Now let's make those strut things. I just selected an edge on all of my windows down, then do a step ring selection. It is the darkened button in the graphite modeling tools box that is dropped down. Now we hit the create shape button, and make it linear. Select the newly created splines from the create shape and make them renderable; adjust their size and shape. There they are. Ignore the gross inner section. I tried doing the same method but on the building shape and it didn't work out. If any of the struts are crooked, just adjust them in vertex spline mode. Now let's do the middle section. I kinda skipped a step here cause I was figuring stuff out. Anyways. The step I skipped was I added an edit poly on the lofts (before the shell) and welded/connected the extra part I made and the inner ring. I deleted all the other rings but those. Then I did the same process as I did before to delete the middle. Now select the bottom half using element selection. And scale it down to fit inside the footprint of the building. This is the shortcut cheating thing I did that isn't accurate but I couldn't think of anything else that would have the right flow. Do the same process of bridging. Detach the windows from that and attach them to the other window object. Add some rings. Using the step ring selection, add these i-beams to the bottom. --Step ring select, create shape, sweep, choose the I shape, and adjust parameters. Here's what we have so far. But there's one problem. There is like a stepped part where there isn't a wing. Let's fix that. Add a bunch of loops to the rings closest to the edge, and select edges where it starts, where the other wing loses contact with this one. What we are going to do here is what is called a step selection. There are two ways to do this. With stepmode active beforehand, you can select one polygon, then ctrl+click another and it will select everything between them. Or you can have two polygons selected beforehand and steploop select and it will select everythign between them. like that. Delete those, then select the next section down, make it look stepped and keep deleting. Now loop select all those extra loops we made to facilitate the steps. We have to deselect all of the edges that are on the border of the object, but that's it. Alt+ click them to deselect. Make a clone of the window object and add a lattice. That's it. I hope it was worth the wait. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Something I forgot to add. To make the triangles at the end of the wings. Select the bottom vertice, then with the edge constraint on (it will only move along edges) just move it down. It will follow the curve.

Great job, I really admire how well you are doing this reddon. I do believe I know a way to make the canopy much more accurately in an efficient way, I'd be more than happy to make a post tutorial of the process if you'll let me.

Making Window Sashes There are two types of windows on this building. The majority are the single inset sash that are very typical, and then at the bottom are some angled multiple sash types that will have a very nice effect. First, we select one of our window objects. I have 2, one for the top section and one for the bottom section. They hold all of my window polygons. What we will do is select, on just a few of the windows, the side edges. Then we will hit select similar, hopefully getting all of the sides of the windows. We will then hit connect to create a top section and a bottom section of the windows. Then, while the edges are selected, move the edges up just a little itty bit. This will allow us to select the polygons with select similar without selecting the top half. Once we select those, detach them to element, and using the local axis, bring them back into the window frame. Go into border selection and select all of the edges. Create shape from that selection linear, and make the spline renderable with a reasonable value of width and height under rectangle. Now here's a trick for adding symmetry and other stuff. I would take the symmetry from the walls, by selecting the two under the stack, and right clicking -> copy. Now we go to our sashes and right click -> paste That's all there is. Now let's do the cool ones at the bottom. I'm using google maps as my reference, and I'm estimating the distance between the windows. There's one big window and 2 angled smaller windows. Connect the top and bottoms with 2 edges. Select the middle and bring it out with local moving. Select all the edges in the middle and create shape from selection. Make it a circle with few sides and a small radius. Now we detach everything that isn't the big window half. We will now make the sides into a normal sash window. That's all there is Making a Cool Arched Window This is a bit abridged, sorry, but I'll try and get the gist through. First I started with a box and I chamfered the sides with an edge value of 3 or 4 because it is rounded. Then, I made an arch with a spline and, using the shape merge compound object, I projected it onto my box. Using the slice plane and cut and weld, clean it up a bit. You can remove extra vertices by selecting them and (shift+backspace). Extrude backwards a bit. A few things here. I took the shape from my arch and made it into a sweep profile. Then, slap an edit poly modifier on top and create another shape from the inside of the arch on the sweep. Project that shape onto the window, convert to editable poly and delete the outside part of the projected area. Select all the edges and create shape again for window sashes. Making some ornaments Looking back to my last post, the reference I used, has this little ornament below a cornice. I will be making that right now. First, go into side view and make a spline near the shape of what we want. It doesn't have to be accurate right away, just make all the points necessary, then move then move them individually after creation. Create a simple rectangle about the width and length of the profile of our ornament. Select the original shape and select loft under compound objects and 'select shape' the rectangle. Now lower the shape steps under skin parameters to 0 and the path to the minimum needed to communicate the shape. Then go to deformations and click shape. This will open the curve editor. This will allow us to shape the curve however we want. Make yours like mine. Right clicking on a point will give the option to make it a bezier. Do that to most of them. Now, create rotate and scale a circle until it fits around the ornament. Loft this one as well. Now, this would look better softer and rounder, so add a relax modifer on top of the stack. Let's array it now. Located under tools. Holding alt while dragging on an arrow makes it go up in value slower. Hide everything but those ornaments, make them all unique (I forgot to make a picture so here's one from the internet) Now click the window next to the attach button. Then either click on one end and then shift click the other or use hotkey ctrl + a to select all of your objects and attach them all. Then use symmetry to add it to the other side. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - Now I will do the lions heads on the fence. The easiest way to do this is to make a 30 second sketch in zbrush. That's how I do it at least. It really doesn't have to be that accurate or detailed, just has to somewhat resemble what it is supposed to. All I paid attention to was that it has eyes a nose and a mouth. Then decimate. It now has like 300 polygons tops but still resembles what I need. Now just import and put it where I need it. Now that the lionshead is in place I made a little staff thing that sticks out, very simple bevel work, and organized that the same way as the other ornaments. - - - -- - - - - - - - -- - - - - - That's about it for this update.

A Cool Quick Selection Technique This is something that is super easy to do, but also something I use A Lot. It is for selecting any plane of polygons or vertices or edges that aren't connected together. I will be doing this on a sort of fence thing on the middle level which has a bit of a "cornice" to it. I will be using the sweep profiles tool to do that, but that needs a spline. Unfortunately, I just select the top and convert to edge selection or do a loop selection because of topology on the top of the fence, so I will have to just delete the top. First go into side view and select all of the polygons on the top or next to the top. Then deselect the polygons that aren't the top. Delete the selection you had. In border selection, select the deleted parts, and convert to a spline. Select again and cap. How to Create an Enclosed Gazebo Start with a cylinder with enough sides. My reference: Has 4 protrusions which stick out. It looks like it is at a 3:1 ratio between circle and protrusion. That would leave us with a 16 sided circle (4 x (3+1)) But for looks sake, let's make it 32. Now we make the extrusions, just select and extrude. I'm using symmetry modifier here again and extruding the corner. Once you've done that you'll notice the protrusions are rounded, which they shouldn't be. Go into scale mode, and in the dropdown box select local (shown here this time) Scale the polygons in to be flat. Now we want to setup the rectangular columns. We will do two insets. One in the center circle, then one with what I have selected here. You will see why in just a few steps. Once we inset the second time, we select these polygons and extrude. You can see that it looks like the rectangular columns now. Now we detach a copy of the center circle, again you will see why in a moment. Select the columns and the center, we want the center so we will have a top to extrude and stuff with little effort later. Delete everything on the sides that we just extruded that isn't part of the columns. Now attach the circle we detached earlier. ( ) After welding the vertices together, shift click the broken spaces in the backs of the columns. Using vertex snaps, snap it to the top of the column. Weld that and you can cap the top. Now we have a completely seamless, relatively complex gazebo that we can add to later. And here is where I am so far. Everything done here I have explained the techniques necessary to make and I will not be going over anything that I have already explained. That would be redundant All of the "medium" details are pretty much done. I will now be moving onto the smaller stuff. Let's call it medium-small details

Looking nice. The building is especially beautiful. And it was only a minor aneurysm I get too specific with mah numbers in many cases; I guess it shows why you have many amazing products on the exchange, and I have a lot of lost projects.

I doubt he did that with any intention of stealing your idea. If he did, that's unfortunate, but I generally go by the assumption that people don't purposefully insult others like that, especially not in a community as friendly as this. Personally, I wouldn't get too frustrated over this, even if it's wrong. If it helps, those are very nice looking lamps; they are perfect, in fact.