dcbenji

The color palettes are not hex coded strings AFAIK, they are an actual PNG image (512x16 pixels large). I show this image in the tutorial. So I'm guessing you could just change the colors of the pixels in the palette to whatever you want. Currently, the only way to get a building into the game is to have it reference pre-existing palettes and material sets. The materials and palettes don't get brought in with your model, your model carries information with it that tell SimCity what materials and palette to apply to it. But when we do figure out how to import our own assets (really when Oppie figures it out I guess), we could start with one of the palettes as a template and just color pick the pixels within each block, swapping in custom colors. Or we could just pick a pre-existing color palette and use it as-is. There are tons of color options available, maybe what sets your building apart will be the design of the materials and the mesh more than a completely custom color scheme. Also using the palettes from the game would help your buildings 'live' in the design world of SimCity while still being able to have a custom aspect to them through custom materials and modeling (whenever we're able to import custom material sets anyway). -benji

No apologies, I'm not really talking to anyone about this. There's not enough of these sorts of conversations happending. Seems like most are sitting around waiting for buildings to get made :/ Good question. It would be interesting to see what SimCity does with a color control map that has a purple color. It may work, in fact I think that this is how it is made to work: palette colors being blended into one another. It's just that the artists don't take advantage of it. I fired the question off, we'll see if I get a response and i'll let you know. These two messages from Ryan Ingram may provide some more insight: "In the tintmap texture, r/g/b are masks on 3 palette colors. So if you had a tintmap that was (0.33,0.33,0.34), it means ‘blend (about) equally between all three colors in the palette entry for this material’. But the color control map for that color would be rgb = 0.33+0.33+0.34 = 1 rg = 0.33+0.33 = 0.66 ControlR = b/rgb = 0.34/1 = 0.34 ControlG = g/rg = 0.33/0.66 = 0.5 ControlB = rgb*0.5 = 1 * 0.5 = 0.5 The palettizing code in the shader will use this data to extract a color from the palette, which is approximately 33% of palette entry 1, 33% of palette entry 2, and 34% of palette entry 3. (This optimization is the reason for the 2x2 organization of the palette entries, since it lets you get all 3 palette colors blended, using only one sample into the palette texture) Now, the SimCity artists generally used pure masks over each channel with little to no blending, but the system allows much more sophisticated color blending if you want to take advantage of it. For example, you could make a generic 3-color plaid tintmap and tint the plaid with the 3 palette colors giving you many blended color combinations in the final result, even though there are only 3 colors specified. And another bit here: "If you just put pure red/green/blue in the palette, then the palette transform is an identity (except for the lossiness in the clamp of (r+g+b)*0.5 to 2 during the transformation from tint map to color control, so I guess you are limited to somewhat dark textures…) This could allow you to skip the ‘palettizing’ step and use more traditional textures—you still need to run them through that conversion I just specified though. And your buildings would be harder to create variations for, since any change in the palette colors could lead to some very odd color shifting." So it seems that you can have a paleete with RGB which would allow you to use more custom textures in your material set. This would probably be really useful for plopables and/or landmarks. (Please let me know of any 'progress' you or anyone is making when applying the information I've presented. I want to use it for my own bulidings and help share the info in my videos -benji

And here is the latest: Learn how colors are applied to materials in the latest episode of SimCity Guide to Custom Creations:

Yes, the link between the game materials and a custom mesh has to be coded into the building's "Material Info Texture". With the 3DS Max tool Oppie has worked on, you assign a pre-existing material set that you have exported using SimCity Pak to your mesh. When this textured model is exported, the 3DS Max tool writes all of the vertex information for what part of hte material set is applied to what part of your mesh to the title of the 3DS max material itself. SimCityPak is able to read the information written in this material and in turn write it into the building's Material Info Texture. Problem is that the tool is buggy, and the materials on a building in game don't look like they do in the 3DS max viewport. The tool needs more development. If you import a collada file into SimCityPak and it hasn't been created using the 3DS Max tool (which hasn't been publicly released/still in development), SimCityPak will crash. You can however import an uncolored, untextured OBJ file into SimCityPak - swapping it in for a pre-existing building - then export the package file, stick it int he SimCity Game Graphics package and your model will show up in game. it will just look like crap because there won't be any colors or textures assigned :/

In regards to coloring buildings: Building colors are assigned using a 512x16 color palette image. The palette has a bunch of colors in it, different colors on each pixel. However, for each material SimCity samples the palette as a 2x2 block. There are 256 columns of these "blocks" and 7 rows of blocks in a color palette. A single block has 3 colors in it (the right two pixels of the block are the same color -- this has do with with efficiency in the way SimCity samples the palette) Also assigned to each building is a Color Control Map. Each material within the color control map has an area assigned RED, GREEN, or BLUE. These colors are "placeholders" for colors from the color palette. A single material in the Color Control Map is assigned a column from the color palette and SimCity picks a row. In the color palette, the color of the pixel in upper left quadrant of a block is assigned to the RED portion of the material, the color of the lower left of a block is assigned to the green portion of the material, and the color from either of two right identical pixels of a block is assigned to the blue portion of the material. Some columns just repeat the exact same blocks all the way down the 7 rows, meaning that that particular building style's colors stay the same. Other palettes have colums where the blocks going down are varied in color. The materials assigned to these columsn will change in color as the buildings are repeated and SimCity iterates down the column. I'm releasing an overview video of the color palette soon, but hopefully this helps. To see what a color palette looks like you can open a building's RW4 in SimCity Pak, select "materials" and export the materials for 3DS Max using the button provided. There will be 4 assets exported. Two of them look like the palette I described, but only one of these is 512x16 pixels and this is the Color palette associated with that particular building. Its really small and you have to zoom way in in photoshop to look at all the different colors, but starting all the way in the uppler left try to "see" the pixels as 2x2 blocks because that is how SimCity samples the palette. The materials of a building themselves define the textures that are assigned colors, so to learn about the materials check out my videos:

I agree that the buildings are more complicated than simply importing a mesh and your texture. You need to make your materials in the format/structure that the game uses. Don't know if you've seen it, but I'm working on a tutorial series explaining the game's material sets how custom buildings work, and I'm working on a tutorial to explain how the color palette works.

I'm working on a tutorial that explains the Color Palettes that SimCity uses for coloring buildings. I've already created one that explains the building materials if you want to check that out.

Short answer, it's hurting them. Their micro-transaction based game no longer needs them to create content now that it's offline. If they restrict the content that is made then there will still be money made from "expansion packs" but with the modding community we can make stuff and it's free. They want to restrict the community made content as much as possible so they stay relevant. It takes tons of work to make a good looking expansion set or custom building set. I think we can get some good stuff from teh community, but the fact that there are artists sitting around getting paid to make awesome looking stuff like the Amusement Park set, I think is a good sign that we can get good quality paid content and every once and a while a nice mod community building to download for free

The only one that I know of who is developing a modding tool is Oppie and it is SimCityPak for PC. I'm also running OSX but I use Paralles to use Windows (since OSX stopped being able to format my drive for boot camp for some reason

I want to share this first tutorial on an overview of the SimCity Building Pipeline line based on information I've gathered from developers and Oppie. I really hope its helpful, especially to those of us who are more desigers than game developers/programmers YouTube SimCity Guide to Custom Creations - 01 - Buildings Materials Demystified Here is a link to a PDF version of the Presentation http://tinyurl.com/mmgvja4

I'm slowly working on a "swamp shack" 'on the Bayou' set, but i haven't made much progress since starting these tutorials. Oppie's tools are kinda buggy so I haven't gotten my simple model to show up in the game yet. I know it works because he used the same technique to get his model's in, its just slow goin'.

In the midst of work and life its a lot of work to for Oppie to document the information he's discovered and still make forward progress on SimCityPak, 3DS Max tools etc. I'm trying to help with the tutorial part of it so he can focus on what he does best

I'm Trying to correspond via twitter w/ one of the original devs of SimCity who left with Ocean Quigly. He sent me this presentation he did on the graphics/modeling development he did for the game. It might help has you work on your buildings sets. http://www.andrewwillmott.com/talks/from-aaa-to-indie The first part has a few really useful images about how the textures for the buildings are made. It looks like a lot more geometry is built seperate from the main mesh. This extra geometry is the "facade" (windows, doors, roof tiles, etc). These would obviously exceed the polygon budgets, but they are created so that their texture maps can add relief mapping and detail to the outside of the main mesh. So the geometry from the facade isn't used, but the depth, color, normal, reflection etc. info is. One of the texture maps for the facade is a map that assigns a solid color to each element. For example, all the window frames are blue. This solid color is a placeholder so that the game engine can assign random colors from a simple bitmap palette to the window frames. I don't know if we need to seperate these colored areas for our buildings or not. In the presentation, these colored maps are used in a special dev tool to help quickly randomize a bunch of buildings that will sprout up. My buildings are made of wood textures so a solid color replacement wouldn't work for the window frames, but maybe we have to do solid colors and that is part of how the game engine is able to make so many buildings and not load a colored texture map for each. On the other hand, the game still has to load a shat ton of texture maps with each building, so maybe it isn't an issue. . I'm not very clear on the interior light mapping. It looks like you basically use the inside of your mesh (or just a box, since this is only used for what you see in the windows), add a light or two tomrepresent the ceiling light or whatever, then bake the global illumination and ambient occlusion on a single unwrapped UV texture. It's nice to have a little bit more clarity to the process. I at least feel comfortable enough to model some windows and doors onto my shotgun shack. I just need to keep them separate from the original mesh. Here are some images from the presentation:

+1 on this. Currently I use the "tree anywhere" mod and individually place single trees in the most outstanding gaps. Pretty tedious and all you get is a bunch of trees, which looks better then the bare dirt, but still just trees. http://quick.as/a0zlcppk

My head hurts as well. I'm really hoping Maxis is working on something we can use to make our own buildings and textures. Maybe its the next "Expansion". I would totally pay for it if it was relatively easy to use. That's what Maxis/EA wants. "I would totally pay for it" - paying for everything and even the littlest things which are normally free. That's the wrong attitude. Normally a building creator tool, which had maybe even there at the beginning of the game release, isn't smth. You are paying for. And to say "I would totally pay for it" makes them releasing more things, which should be free. And even they wouldn't release a tool, cause they wan't the people to buy buildings. Like all the DLCs... *facepalming 100,000 times* I think there would be enough value in a tool that would help us make our own buildings and modify the textures to justify a price tag . I also don't mind paying for expansion packs that have a decent amount of professionaly designed models in them. Waiting for Maxis' new blog posts to give us a little more insight into how to design custom assets is going to be really annoying. If someone isn't getting paid to make tools that are easy and fun to use the same way the developers got paid to design a great game that is fun to play I feel like its going to take a really really long time to get a lot of modding done .

My head hurts as well. I'm really hoping Maxis is working on something we can use to make our own buildings and textures. Maybe its the next "Expansion". I would totally pay for it if it was relatively easy to use.

I think I'm also in this crowd. I could put together some cool rustic themed buildings in Cinema4D and export to OBJ or Collada (or whatever works with the mod kit). But after that I'm pretty lost. I know I'd have to make versions with lower detail but a little more information would be helpful as to how to go about doing this. Do I start out with the highest quality model and then duplicate, make another version with reduced polygons and lower the resolution of the textures? Does my final texture need to be a single texture that is unwrapped with UV coordinates? Just some sort of clear workflow to get me started would make it easier to contribute to the modding community. Should I/we ask Maxis for official tools or have they basically given us permission to mod but it's up to us to figure it out? If they're supportive of the modding community why don't they give us more of a "glimpse behind the curtain"? And why wasn't this a part of the development stategty all along since they knew that sooner or later we would beto Modding the game (like fans have always done). Or maybe the next Expansion Pack is an official mod kit? I would totally pay for that if it were easy to use. Maybe as easy as modeling in Google Sketchup and importing into the kit. The learning curve for this sucks right now, it's discouraging.