kefka

I was thinking about doing Albert Kahns Free Press building, but the only good pictures I've been able to find are from emporis and http://www.freep.com/jobspage/club/321.htm. Does anyone have any other pictures? I won't be including the sign ontop, it's tacky

thanks I took a preview of the building and put it into a screenshot from the game, so I can't give a zoomed out shot of that pic, but next time I update the progress of the building I'll add in a pic of it at a normal zoom. I added some windows on the roof. that small red building is now called Monkey Dragon Coffee and Books which is what my sister named it since she is the occupant. I rendered it, but I forgot about something with the LOD, so I'll have to re-render it. After that it'll be ready to be modded and stuff.

congradulations! hopefully someday I'll have a 70,000 downloads thread

I think you should tweak them, render them, and release them. maybe you could do a house pack kinda thing?

cool stuff

I worked on the roof. that prop on the roof will be there, along with some people and table props. I'm happy with the green roof texture since I made it completely from scratch. I'll probably re-use it on another BAT in the future. The brownish roof texture needs a little work. I've been very sloppy with this building from the start, so there are odd bits sticking out, and some parts aren't textured the same as other parts and that kind of stuff. I realy need to do something about the windows. I don't know if I should put furniture inside and do nightlighting that way, or if it should just stay the way it is now and do night lighting the ugly way. I'm not sure if my computer will be able to render that thing plus alot of furniture inside .

ehh, faith based, I am their god and they pray I don't bulldoze them... or volcano them But realy, democratic, and the cities are more council based than mayor based. Sorry, I don't remember my government class very well. citizens petition things to the council, and the mayor leads the city council meetings.

geeze, this is alot more complex than I thought. I was just calling everything mod! [:0]

ussualy my cities make $2,000-3,000 a month, but then I go on a spending spree, and I stop caring about how much funding everything gets (I put it to alot more than it needs since I don't like checking it all the time). Then I loose money every month, but then I go back and lower all the fundings to where they realy need to be. I also lower the parks funding. Then I play it safe for a while. Then I notice i have $200,000 and the process repeats. I do alot of staring at my city so it builds up sorta fast. I think I make so much money becuase the stex buildings are unbalanced, but then I look back at my old cities and they are innefficient, so I think it might have more to do with me than I ussualy think. In my opinion the game gives you too much money. I think Zones should be alot cheaper, and roads, utilities, and police and stuff should be alot higher, which is more like real life.

no problem, any progess pictures? oh yea, and with the custom textures you can add details that are either impossible to model, or a waste of polygons to model (since the BAT doesn't do very detailed renders).

I think they're air conditioning boxes One thing I've noticed about your BATs is that they have an unusual paleness with them, while the maxis buildings are more bold and vivid (even with the $ ones). If you have photoshop or some other decent image editing program (with layers), then I have a few suggestions. Make all your large textures individualy. First, take a screenshot of a side view of whatever large surface you are texturing, in wireframe, in the BAT. Then open photoshop and the texture you want to use, select the entire area, and choose 'edit(I think)> define pattern'. Then make a new file, and paste the screenshot into it. Save the file as whatever you want, go back into the BAT, and put that texture onto the surface you are texturing. Here you will be aligning the texture to fit onto the BAT. Use the place or crop options in the materials editor to do that. now in photoshop, make a new layer, fill it with any color, and make a pattern overlay in the layer styles. Once there, scale the pattern to the size you want it. As you go along, save the file. Go back into the BAT, press the reload button in the materials editor to reload the texture, and do a preview to see how it looks. Back in photoshop, make a new layer, fill it with white, set the blending option to multiply, and add a gradient layer style. Set the gradients blending option to either multiply or overlay, and change the opacity to whatever looks best. There's an exellent tutorial in the omnibus about doing this that is more detailed. Now, open Sim City, and take a few screenshots of areas that you want your building to fit into, and put them all into a new photoshop file. when you do a preview render in the BAT, take a screenshot, and put it into the file, and delete all the black background and other stuff. now you can directly compare the building to the games without doing a full render. You can also compare changes you make to the building by putting the new screenshot ontop of the old one and toggling the layers visibility. Anyways, I hope you have photoshop becuase if you don't I wrote all this for nothing (unless someone else reads it). Maybe I should write a good version of this and submit it to the omnibus?

When I make the terrain I ussualy have an idea of what I'm going to do. I have several meathods of ensuring good transportation, and as I come to an area I choose the one that works best in the space provided. Since I have several different meathods, it keeps everything looking a little more random. I use avenues as main streets, and I drag those out a far distance and build up along them. One of the systems I use which works very well is... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJ RRSRRPRRSRRPRRSRRPRRSJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJ ==MMMMMM====MMMMMM=========== RRSRRPRRSRRPRRSRRPRRSJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJ AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJ A= avenue R= residential S= street or road == railroad M= marrasts 1x6 train station P=park J=jobs as you can see, arranging it this way allows two blocks to use the same railstation. Also, the trainstation blocks the road going across preventing through traffic. Putting jobs down the line makes the rail the most direct route to get to them, so the sims will be more likely to use it. This can also be done with monorails, subways, or el rails, but regular railroads are the most convienient for me. putting bustops on the ends by the avenues is also an option, and since the bustop is directly along the way (if they still choose not to use the railroad) they will be very likely to use it. This isn't exactly a game experiment, so I think this should probalby be moved to the city building concepts forum (if it hasn't been moved while i was typing this).

A texture very similair to Simon Mannor is being used for the blind side of the new building. It looks nice with the red, and the white helps make it match other CS$$$ in the chicago and new york tilesets.

The red is too bright, making it a duller red would be better imo. The brick color gos very well with marrasts sea walls, but I think the bricks are too big. I would play with the uv maps to get the one that looks the best.

Thanks, you confused me with 'CBD' for a little bit, but then I figured out what it meant. T Wrecks has been modding Mary Arms/Hotel. I think it will be a solid release from all aspects. I've done a little bit of work on the new building, but nothing worth uploading a screenshot over.

Here's the new building (at a different angle from the other pic). There's alot of detail on this one that doesn't show up very well (I wish the BAT would render things at a higher quality). I'm very happy with how it's turning out. The first floor is a cafe, floors 2-4 area book store, the 4th floor also has a little lounge on it and the 5th floor is an apartment. If you look on the two walls with no windows you'll see a litle brick square pattern that I BATed on it. I also modeled the books on the bookshelves individualy, but you can't see. There is still some edging to do, and I need to find a new brick texture for the blind walls. I also need to add stuff on the roof. I made a nice looking thing for it already but it didn't match, so I saved it for a future BAT. T Wrecks is the official Modder for Mary Hotel/Arms (the first building in this thread)!

the building is a wall to wall building that is also wall to wall on the diagonal side. I can either include the road or avenue on the lot, making it easier to use, and better looking with props, but cuts off road access to the other side. or I can have the diagonal part of the building overhang the lot, which makes it harder to add props to the overhanged area of the tile. DuskTrooper: that's good to hear since they where realy good tutorials. besides, putting them in the NDEX forum makes them easier to find anyways. thanks for the support everyone

I'm not realy sure what I was going to do with that. yesterday I fiddled with having the road or avenue as part of the (transit enabled) lot. I was going to do this using tropods tollbooth template, but I needed to strech the lot out and that killed the ability for the road textures to connect on one side (although according to the traffic paths stuff traffic was still going through). even if I do get this to work it would mess up stuff on the other side of the road, but I would be able to add props to the entire area, where if it was a prop that overhung the lot I wouldn't be able to add props to that one side. There will be a growable of that one that doesn't overhang anything. the building is 5x2. wow, I have people who want to make lots for me and do stats for me . I started working on the stats for the first building in this thread (Mary Hotel (CS$$)/Mary Arms (R$$)) but I messed it up so now I have to restart. anyways, I don't think I have anything to do today, so I'll spend most of today working on that.

Welcome to page 3 Well, for the very first building in this thread I have everything done on it except the query is still the landmark query. I've been waiting for equinox's tutorial on this, but he took the finished ones down so I don't think he'll be finishing them anytime soon. I think what it realy comes down to is I'm lazy . I think I'll stop BATing and start moddig now I'll remember your offer