gascooker

Please PM STomnibus if you have any questions about this article. The aim of this document is to explain some of the methods you can employ to improve your gmax textures. It should help you make your buildings appear more realistic and get them to sit more comfortably with the original SC4 style and pallette. Requirements and notes about this article You will need a copy of photoshop 4.0 or greater and the ability to squint your eyes so the world appears blurry. Although most of the concepts in this document are fairly obvious, there are few people making custom SC4 content who seem to be using them. Furthermore, it must be stated that this tutorial is design led and consequently any photoshop settings, decisions and values are subjective. This ain't science, this is art. You should be familiar with the following specific photoshop terms: tone; hue; neutrals; saturation; and highlights, shadows and midtones. The world is a big fat tonal gradient In real life, light bounces off an object onto other objects, changes colour and then gets reflected back onto your original object, absorbed, twisted and refracted and then eventually enters your eyes. The result is: what your brain knows to be the face of a pure white cube, is actually made up of a complex web of tonal gradients and colour casts. In 3D computer modelling this can be simulated using ray tracing. This is an advanced method of determining light interaction, such as reflection and refraction and although may yield realistic results, is highly computationally intensive. By understanding a few basic concepts of how light behaves you can side-step the need to use ray-tracing in gmax, thus saving you years of rendering time, but still get your textures looking more realistic. The white cube on the left is a normal gmax rendering but the equally textureless cube on the right shows subtle tonal gradients and colour casts that would perhaps occur in real-life due to the mechanics of light. Other than black holes and supernovas, nothing much else in our universe is made of flat colour. In terms of SC4, none of your prominent textures should be tonally flat. They should all have some form of gradient tone. Dodging, Burning and Sponging There are three tools in photoshop which will allow you to do this: the dodge tool, the burn tool and the sponge tool. Think of them as brushes or live painting tool equivalents of the brightness-contrast, HSL and Levels sliders. Here are the photoshop tone tools: Using the dodge and burn tool is similar to painting with the airbrush or paintbrush tools. Select the Dodge tool. You will notice that a set of options for this tool appear on the toolbar. Select the brush you want to use from the pulldown brush menu. You will nearly always need a very soft-edged brush, with hardness set to zero. Tip: you can alter the size of your brush with the [ and ] keys dynamically while painting. Depending on the texture you are working on, select the range you want the tool to effect, ie, if you want to make something dark, lighter, then select "shadows". The tool will then lighten all of the pixels it considers to be shadows. If you want to lighten the midtones or highlights, select these instead. You can see how it effects the tonal range in the image below. The exposure setting will give you control over the tool. Choosing a low value such as 10-20% will effect the image less, each time you paint with it. A lower setting will mean you will have to dodge the image several times to get it how you want it. A high setting will likely bleach out the entire image to white in one stroke. The airbrush mode button will make the brush act like an airbrush. (You should be experienced in using airbrushes if you want to use this tool - I recommend you use the brush tool as its more precise) The burn tool works in exactly the same way, except it will darken your image. Making a gradient pitched roof texture If you look closely at pitched roofs in real-life they are not tonally flat. If you look at the pitched roofs in SC4, they are not tonally flat. In real life light tends to be reflected more fom the higher points of the slope. However, depending on the material and its surroundings it sometimes can be reflected more from the lower points of the slope. The important lesson here is that it is not tonally flat. To create a more realistic roof, open a flat roof texture such as the standard MAXIS rooftiles file: MaxisPitchedRoof.jpg. It has no tonal gradient. Select the dodge tool and choose a large feathered brush. For the best results in SC4 always select highlights as the range as this will also desaturate the image and prevent any need for the use of the sponge. (This tonal-saturation effect will be discussed in greater detail in another document dealing with photoshop Levels and white-point capping) Move the brush back and forth over the top of the image to lighten it. Then, select the burn tool, and with a large feathered brush move back and forth over the bottom of the image to darken it slightly as shown below. Sometimes when the burn tool is used, the texture may become too saturated. If this occurs you will need to use the sponge tool to correct this. It works in exactly the same way as the dodge and burn tools, except you must choose saturate or desaturate from the range menu. feathering is photoshop term used to describe a the process of softening the edges of an image in the foreground so that it blends into the background image with less contrast. A feathered brush is a brush with a low hardness setting. Feathering a selection will soften or blur that selection. When using these methods in texture creation, the size of the texture must be considered to prevent tiling overlaps in gmax. Therefore, it is likely that textures will need to be customized for each building you create. You will need to use the UVW map gizmo to line textures up, and ensure that tiling doesn't create a repeat of the light top bit, half way through your roof. This roof texture has no gradient and resembles nothing like the intentions of the original SC4 designers' style. It is flat, harsh and unrealistic. Most of the user-created BATs appear like this. This roof texture has a subtle gradient. Already the building is starting to resemble the SC4 pallette and style. Although it still requires a bit of adjustment, the gradient brings the building to life. Even the slightest tonal difference can make a huge impact. This roof texture is in reverse, yet still fits into the SC4 palette. It is darker at the top and lighter at the bottom, unlike most SC4 renderings. However, the principle of the gradient tone is what achieves this, not necessarily its direction. In fact light is so unpredictable that anything goes. Using Gradient Masks to stop your walls looking like Supernovas If you look closely at the walls of buildings, and in particular tall buildings, they are not tonally flat. If you look at the walls of buildings in SC4, they are also not tonally flat. Once again, In real life light tends to be reflected more fom the higher points of a building. You can see this below: We can use the dodge and burn tools to create a gradient tone and simulate ray tracing, however, in this instance a gradient mask will also do the same trick and is better for larger scaled textures. Create a new photoshop document of similar proportions to the wall onto which it will be applied or open an existing wall texture. As you can see the texture shown below produces a flat unsuitable render in gmax. To remedy this we are going to create a gradient mask effect. In photoshop, duplicate the texture onto a new layer, by using the pull-down sub menu at the side of the layers pallette. Then, select the layer so it is highlighted and press the "add new layer mask" button at the bottom. The new white box linked to your new texture layer is where the gradient mask will live. It will partially hide or show the layer called "background copy", whose appearance we will shortly change. It works like a greyscale alpha channel. Anything drawn in white on this layer mask will reveal the layer, anything drawn in black will hide the layer, and anything in between black and white will show the linked layer as translucent. The mask/layer icon indicates whether you are currently working on the layer mask or the actual texture. The screen shot below shows the mask is currently active. A paintbrush icon will appear when you are working on the actual layer artwork itself. To work on the mask select the mask thumbnail and to work on your actual texture click on the layer thumbnail. Ensure you are working on the mask by selecting the mask thumbnail. Now make sure that the foreground and background colours are set to black and white and finally choose the gradient tool from the toolbar. Draw a line with the gradient tool from the bottom to the top of your image, like shown below. The gradient mask is now complete and can be seen in the thumbnail but nothing has changed to the texture! " I want my money back, its rubbish!", I hear you cry... To see the effects, select the layer thumbnail to return to working on the actual artwork on the layer called "background copy". Choose Brightness-Contrast from the IMAGE > ADJUSTMENTS sub menu. You can now make the whole layer darker and because of the mask, the image will grade from light to dark giving a gradient tone to your texture. How dark or light you make it is up to you, but subtle effects will work best as fake ray-tracing and coarser effects will make the texture look dirty. If you drew your gradient the other way round then the top will get darker; remember black is masking, white is revealing. The below image shows the improvement in the gmax render: (no .acv colour correction or white-point capping has been used in this render - hence the yellowness!) There are many other applications of using gradient masks and their editability makes them invaluable, ie if you don't like the tonal gradient, just redraw the mask. You can use short ones to generate floor reflections, or radial ones to give the appearance of light-glows that gmax just can't cope with or even to apply subtle colour casts to areas of your textures. In summary, use some bloody gradients on your textures, for god's sake!

The aim of this document is to explain the process of colour correction from photoshop to SC4. It will show you one of the many procedures that can be applied to fix this problem and give more predictable rendering outputs. Requirements and notes about this article You will need a copy of photoshop 4.0 or greater and preferably two non-colour-blind eyeballs, attached to a small to medium-sized brain. The details shown in this article are specific to photoshop CS, however, as little has changed in the numerous upgrades to this version, (with the exception of the useless "leopard-skin brush" and the "automatic wedding invitation template button"), most of the info should apply to earlier versions. I am going to explain the calibration process in detail so you can see some of the more powerful aspects of photoshop and use them in other situations. Some words and concepts have specific meanings in photoshop and will be accordingly defined. Don't be scared of this, you already speak "gmax". The wonderful world of colour We all know the problem. You make a texture in photoshop, render it to SC4 and it doesn't look like your original texture. The reason for this is that photoshop and gmax are effectively working in different colour spaces. For the purpose of this exercise, colour space is a term used to show how colour, is described or modelled. The easiest colour model to understand is CMYK. ©Cyan, (M)Magenta, (Y)Yellow and (K)Black and is used to describe the colour of light-reflecting objects such as squirrels, chairs or paintings, and is widley used in printing. It's like mixing paint in a primary school art class: mix 50% Cyan to 50% yellow and you get green. RGB is the most difficult colour model to understand and is used in light-emitting devices such as monitors, gmax and in the dubious lighting effects of 1970s discotheques. Colour is defined as having ®red, (G)green and (B)Blue components or channels. Its like having three coloured spot-lights shining onto a surface. If you shine all three at once you will get white, turn them all off and you will black. Shine only the red and green lights and you will get yellow. a channel in photoshop is used to describe each of the colour components that make a colour space. ie: the red channel is said to be a component of the RGB colour model. Under no circumstances ever use the CMYK colour space in making your textures - they are intended to be seen on RGB monitors playing RGB SC4. Ever wondered why your RGB digital photos come out the wrong colour when you print them to your CMYK inkjet printer? Calibrating your eyeballs Before you even think of doing anything related to this article, you need to make sure your photoshop is calibrated and set up correctly. You should only ever have to do these things once in your life: 1. Ideally you should have run the Adobe gamma set- up program which starts up when you first install photoshop, so both your eyeballs and the lighting conditions of the room you are working in are taken into account. (See Adobe's help files on this issue) 2. Make sure image interpolation is set correctly in the photoshop preferences (CTRL-K) to bicubic(Better). Sometimes low-level re-sampling can adjust colours. 3. Obviously, make sure any textures or new documents you are working on are in RGB format! Finding the gmax colour shift Create a new photoshop document: We are going to create a "control" texture which consists of 5 RGB "grey" or neutral strips. The colour of each strip is very important and must be entered numerically in the colour palette or colour picker. Use the marque tool to draw the rectangles, set the colour you need, then hit good-old SHIFT-F5 (or choose FILL from the edit menu) to fill the selected areas to end up with the texture below. You should note that the "lighter" the colour, the higher the RGB values; 0 0 0 is black, 255 255 255 is white. Also note that Photoshop describes tones, that is, how light or dark a colour is, in terms of shadows, midtones and highlights. These terms are used throughout the program in various adjustment functions. Neutral is a specific photoshop term used to desribe a colour whose individual components are set at equal or nearly equal values and does not neccessarily mean grey. Save the texture as a JPEG with the following settings. It is important that quality is set to maximum as no colour distortion will occur at JPEG setting 12. Now import the texture into gmax, make a large cube and apply the texture with a UVW map. Using the gmax preview function, render a view of the cube at HIGH quality to the screen. (South is my personal favourite).Take a screenshot. Go back into photoshop and paste the screenshot into a new document. (you may want to use a coloured neutral background so you can easily see the colours). Delete all of surrounding screenshot mess as we are only interested in the side face of the model. Drag your texture file into this document as well. Make a rough selection of the model's side face to include all of the strip texture including the black bit. Copy it to a new layer (CTRL-J), scale it up (CTRL-T) and place it near your original photoshop texture, so you end up with the following: Oh dear. What a disaster. You can now see the colour shift. (if not please consult your nearest optician). Contrary to popular belief, the gmax colours are not just "lighter": t hey have been mapped to a different colour space. I can tell you from experience, using only my highly skilled eyeballs, that there is roughly a 10% shift towards yellow, an increase in luminosity (lightness) and a general saturation (colours moving further apart in the midtones).This offset effect increases towards the highlights and midtones, but effects the shadows less. You should in the very least notice it is lighter and more yellow. You now have two options: You can note this in your head and remember to make your textures, darker, less yellow and more desaturated. Point proven, end of story. Or you can take this issue further and get the problem fixed once and for all. Fixing the gmax colour shift You will now need a pen and some paper because we are going to take some accurate colour readings with the most under-rated photoshop tool of all: The Eyedropper and his faithful friend The Info Pallette. We are going to fix the colour shift so that textures apearing on the front face view of a SC4 model will match their photoshop originals. The shaded and roof parts will dealt with in another document. Now, we already know what the RGB colour values of our original texture are, as we chose them. All we need to do now is use the eyedropper to read the values of the gmax texture. Record all of the five RGB values on paper, by holding the eyedropper over each colour. The RGB value will appear in the info pallete as shown above. The following tables show how the colours have changed in my gmax: As you can see from the numbers, if gmax was rendering the textures only "lighter", then they would have all increased proportionally by the same amount. They do not. The darker colours have altered by less. Look at the black - it's unchanged. The midtones have altered most, and the white only slightly. And on top of this, the red and green components have increased in value and the blue component has decreased! "Oh my God, how ever I am gonna fix that, the values are all over the place!" I hear you cry..... Welcome to Photoshop Curves Fortunately, this is all a piece of cake for photoshop. What we are going to do now is create a mapping curve so photoshop "knows" what gmax is doing to its colours. The principle behind this is that we are going to work in reverse, ie; apply a set of changes to the gmax texture to get it back to the photoshop texture. We will then be the proud owners of a set of offset values. We can then apply these to all of our textures, let gmax ruin them by the offset value and end up with what we wanted, because photoshop pre-empted it. There are, as usual with photoshop, hundreds of ways to do this. All of the colour / mapping functions are found in the IMAGE > ADJUSTMENTS sub menu. They virtually all do the same thing in different ways. Curves are most appropiate for our current situation. In your photoshop sketchpad document containing the gmax and photoshop textures next to each other, use the rectangular marque tool to roughly select all of the gmax texture image you scaled up. Then, open a new curves window. (CTRL-M). This is what a curves window looks like: We are now going to add in our values from the colour readings we took to the input and output boxes to create a curve. 1. Firstly we are going to adjust all of the red components of the RGB colour space. Select this from the pull-down menu. Make sure that "RGB" is not selected (the default) or you will be working on all channels similtaneously! Using the colour readings table we created we are going to map the red components: 0 to 0, 68 to 64, 138 to 128, 209 to 192 and 255 to 255 The first colour in our strip (black), requires no adjustment. (0 to 0) 2. The second colour (dark grey) does. Add a point to the curve by clicking on it roughly on the dotted grid point. 3. In the input box, type in the value of the gmax red component for this strip: 68. In the output box type in the colour it is supposed to be: 64. Translated into English, we are saying to photoshop "the gmax red colour component of value 68 should be 64" Now onto the next strip: the mid grey... 4. Still working in the red channel, add another point on the curve for the medium grey strip colour. 5.In the input box, enter the gmax colour reading 138 and in the output box enter the value it was supposed to be before gmax ruined it: 128. 6. Repeat this until all the red components have been mapped and you will end up with a red component or channel curve like shown. Translated into English, we are saying to photoshop "the gmax red colour component of value 68 should be 64, the gmax red colour component of value 138 should be 128, and the gmax red colour component of value of 209 should be 192" Now we need to move onto the green channel. 1.Select the green channel from the pull-down menu. Using the colour readings table we created we are going to map the green components: 0 to 0, 67 to 64, 134 to 128, 201 to 192 and 255 to 255 The first colour in our strip (black), requires no adjustment. (0 to 0) 2. The second colour (dark grey) does. Add a point to the curve by clicking on it roughly on the dotted grid point. 3. In the input box, type in the value of the gmax green component for this strip: 67. In the output box type in the colour it is supposed to be: 64. Translated into English, we are saying to photoshop "the gmax green colour component of value 67 should be 64" Repeat steps 2 and 3 until all the colours of each strip have been mapped to create the green channel curve. Now you should be getting the hang of this. It may seem tedious but once we have finished you will never have to do this again. 1.Select the blue channel from the pull-down menu. Using the colour readings table we created map the blue components: 0 to 0, 62 to 64, 123 to 128, 188 to 192 and 249 to 255 When you are finished save the curves as a .acv file somewhere convient on your computer. If you did all of this while your gmax texture enlargement was selected you should have witnessed the colours returning to very near their original intention. Take colour readings with the eyedropper to prove this. You are now the proud owner of a very important .acv file! Testing and using your .acv file Now that you have created your special gmax colour shift file it can be re-called and applied to all textures that you wish to display correctly on your SC4 models. To test this, open your original strip texture file used in gmax. Open a new curves window (CTRL-M). Press the load button and locate your .acv file to import your curves. Hit OK to apply the colour shift. You should notice that photoshop moves your colours by the offset values to pre-empt gmax. They will move towards blue (opposite of yellow) and get darker. Save your strip texture as a JPEG - maximun quality or setting 12. Now re-import the texture into gmax, and render your model to screen.Take a screenshot. Go back into photoshop and paste the screenshot into your photoshop sketchpad document and extract a slice of the model image to compare to your previous textures: If you take colour readings, then you should have a near-perfect match. Some of the values will be one or two increments out. This is likely to be because when taking the screenshots the colours are transplanted to another RGB colour space (Windows) before being pasted into photoshop's RGB colour space (Adobe RGB or sRGB). For the purposes of SC4 this really is irrelevant. More importantly you will notice that the white strip does not match. Gmax will always offset pure white (255 255 255) to this colour cast as in the game white (255 255 255) is used as an alpha channel, and is reserved to display the LODs, i think. You will also notice that the top of the model has a different colour cast. This is because of the lighting effects used in rendering. You may want to create a special .acv file for roof items, but be careful not to offset the textures so much that any 3D form is lost. I find that for pitched roofs the .acv file used for the side also works. You can use your .acv file in a number of ways and even integrate it permanently into photoshop. If you use templates to create textures, you may find applying an adjustment layer will rid you of the need to ever load your .acv again. If you use photoshop Actions to output textures directly to your gmax material libraries, then the .acv can be incorporated into these scripts. I use my .acv file as a general colour correction tool. However, it should be noted that this does not exempt you from making sensible design decisions when scrutinizing your textures. There are a few other tricks which you can use to get your BATs matching the SC4 pallette which I will need to explain in another, hopefully shorter and less technical, document.

For once, I find myself agreeing with you DEV. A bit of thought goes a long way in keeping the STEX pick 'n span. I recently uploaded a prop pack whose elemnts started to appear about 6 months ago in my gmax. My ego wanted them on the STEX immediately, but my sensibility allowed me to wait and be patient until the prop pack was full and useful to ST members. I think that useability is a major issue. Most seasoned creators seem to take this into account. Take PEG: he uploads stuff in well organised releases. This is what I called well thought out end-user cleanliness. It is pure design at its best - not just the BATS, but the user experience as well is considered. When the STEX starts to get littered with ego-posts, it diminishes the overall quality of ST. I do, as does every BATTER and LOTTER enjoy the fact that my/their stuff is used and appreciated by others, but posting a load of crap for attention-seeking aims, doesn't even fulfill this side of a post. The STEX is a place for finished items. As Dwds pointed out above, the forums are for learning, experimenting and geting that ego boost that so many peeps seem to yearn...

The STEX is getting more and more like the official site as of recent times. This is a shame. I especially feel for Dirk who has to host it, in terms of cost and bandwidth. While, i don't claim to be any kinda judge 'n jury on STEX stuff, there is an increasing amount of ego-posting going on. So called beta Lots, for a start. Well how about a bit of testing and finishing? For me a beta stex post is paramount to an ego trip, a service that is already fully supplied by ST in the form of our own threads in the forums. I always thought that STEX stood for Simtopolis Exhange, not, Simtrop Ego Extension, but as of recent times, it makes you wonder whether some form of editorial control needs to implemented as the community seems unable to censor itself anymore, even by the general rules and qualities that this site holds so dear.

This is the most UK CJ i have ever seen! Love what you've done with the UK shops, I hope they weren't too much os a PITA to grow, as the game doesn't like them that much, despite mine and barby's best efforts. The street with loads of R$$ terraces from UK terraced pack 05 looks almost identical to Camberwell Road or Brixton Road in Sarf London!

I think this is to do with an old ID conflict that early version of BAT tended to corrupt. Since downloading the patched BAT, or gmax v1.2 this has stoppped happening for all users. Because MAXIS buildings are showing through yor model, it suggests that you are using old version of BAT. A re-render using new BAT is best solution.

its not cheating to use shortcuts at all RP - in fact its sensible. Whats the point of rendering hairline cracks in a plaster wall if the entire wall ends up only 4 pixels wide. Looks about the same level of detail on my stuff. BTW - they look fabulous in game.