ACEfanatic02

I considered doing this, but the way night is done in-game is just by multiplying a color on top. Shadows are unchanged. We could deviate from that here, but I think it'd be pretty noticeably different from existing buildings. I've gotten sidetracked a bit lately (ADHD spun the wheel again and got me back into RCT2), but I am close to finishing up the updated light rig. Moving everything into an asset library is a good call, I'll take a shot at that as well.

FWIW, if you separate all of the windows into a _single_ object (not one object per window) you should be able to use the Random Per Island input in the shader graph to offset the noise individually per pane.

That looks a lot better! I like the blinds. A few more nitpicky suggestions: the bump noise on the glass is a little intense. I'd maybe reduce the scale on the noise texture a bit, maybe halve it, to reduce the noise frequency. If the panes are separated (i.e., not a single sheet of geometry), you can also play with the Random Per Island node to break up the noise per window pane. I'd also suggest playing with the coat roughness (assuming you're using the coat for tinting). By bumping that, you can soften/mute the reflections higher up the building without needing extreme noise in the normals, which looks a bit more natural. The advantage of doing this with coat roughness (instead of base roughness) is it will have less effect on the transmission, so you'll still be able to see through the windows correctly. Again, nitpicking, it looks great already. But prominent reflections tend to look a bit jarring in-game where they don't actually correspond to anything.

Unfortunately the light rig (and compositing setup) depends pretty heavily on driver connections to know the rendering state. AFAICT, drivers are very fragile and break as soon as you copy them, even within a file. So we'd need some alternative means of getting the data around. I've experimented with custom named properties for this, but annoyingly one of the fields I need to update (the rotation of the sun disk in the world lighting) does not support noodle-graph input and so can't be changed automatically without a driver. I do absolutely agree it should be better, and I hope we'll get there in time. For now, the expected workflow is to start by forking the light rig file and importing anything you need in there. Alternatively, use linking to non-destructively load your model into the light rig scene (this makes it a little easier to update to a new version of the rig.) Somewhat related: in an attempt to make emissive night lighting easier to manage, a new custom node: Work has been kicking my ass so I'm struggling to find time/energy to get this all ready to go, but updated rig should be out sometime this month.

I think the glass may be a little too reflective, especially on 1 S Wacker. Looks more like metal than glass on the shadowed side of each view. In street view you can clearly the offices through the windows, so they're not nearly that reflective IRL: The bands of opaque and transparent windows would break things up a bit, make the building look a little less... dystopian, IMO.

I disagree, actually. There's definitely some sharp edges remaining in the Blender workflow, but it's absolutely possible at this point to make models, light them correctly, and get them in-game. The bottleneck is learning to use Blender itself, which is... not the most intuitive piece of software out there. OTOH, the internet is drowning in tutorials on "how do I do X in Blender", which is emphatically not the case for GMax.

Yeah, I think the sims are sort of the "original sin" of SC4's art direction. (In terms of consequences, I'm not actually sure it was the wrong choice.) I was actually doing some tests this weekend to see if I could match the scale of the sims in Blender (using the human base meshes Blender released a few years back). Turns out the sims are about 1.5x larger than they should by (after accounting for the 136% vertical scale to compensate for the perspective.) AFAICT cars are not scaled up the same (they're closer to realistic sizes), which makes things even weirder. I assume the sims got scaled up just to keep them visible out to Z3 (which seems to be the sort of 'default' play condition), but some subset of buildings are scaled accordingly and others are not -- for example the rowhouses I showed a few posts ago are too small, the sims are taller than the doors. I'm guessing the decision to make sims bigger happened mid-development. Or maybe there just wasn't consistent art direction around it, who knows? Maybe a thing to do would be to replace the various sim sprites with reasonably scaled versions. For Science.

Didn't do a whole lot this weekend, but I whipped up another variation of the shotgun house: Both variants will come with a bunch of color schemes (I have about 6-8 setup right now), but rendering all of those out and lotting them is kind of a pain so I haven't bothered yet. And because I cannot focus on a single thing (ADHD wooooo), another experiment tonight: Playing around with a modular kit and seeing how reasonably you can fit a suburban school into a 4x4 lot. Answer: not quite. Missing a place for a library and doesn't have quite as much classroom space as you'd want for a realistic capacity. It's more plausibly scaled than the Maxis elementary school, but that's not saying a whole lot. From measuring references in Google Maps, this _should_ be somewhere between 5x7 and 8x10. OTOH, this is much nicer than the Chinatown building I did earlier from a workflow perspective, because everything here (with the exception of the sign, roof and interior floor) is modular. So it's totally reasonable to take the same kit and build out a few different schools of various sizes. I like the general feel of it though. Aiming for the sort of generic institutional architecture that almost every school I ever attended was built with.

And now for something completely different: Did a wiki-walk from reading about NY tenements and ended up at Shotgun house, and these seemed quite charming and also simple to model. Ideally a competitor to the Vanilla R$ stage-3 duplexes. This particular one is loosely based on some in Mobile, Alabama.

Reexported 35 Elizabeth St. again with a reduced scale (133% instead of 136%). I think it feels slightly better in-context now relative to Maxis R$$: Not sure if this is a matter of floor heights or just the inconsistent scaling on the Maxis side (lol, look at the differences in stairs between those rowhouses), but this feels better even if it's less 'correct'. My windows are also just generally larger than on Maxis stuff, which I think contributes a lot. Still overly enthusiastic and grows too much, so will need to redo the modding, but I think it's getting better.

Instance texturing: yes and no. UV maps are the same between all instances, as are many of the procedural coordinates (generated and object-space, in particular.) However, there are shader tricks you can do to produce unique coordinates from these. For example, in the case of 3D texture sampling via object-space coordinates, you can instead use a vector transform to sample with world-space coordinates: In the more general case with UVs, you can potentially use an Object Info node to offset your coordinates according to the object position (which will be unique for instances placed in different locations). This one takes some care to avoid misalignment for structured textures (i.e., not splitting bricks in half), so I don't really bother with it. Overall I think you can just get away with not doing any of this in the majority of cases. Where an area is visually dependent on unique texturing, like the sides of this W2W building, you usually don't have much geometric detail. In that case, we don't need to build it from modular pieces, and we can give the entire wall unique UVs. OTOH, where the modular pieces are useful you tend to have a lot of geometric detail. Those hide some of the repetition, and they also are where procedural layers of dirt will show up, further disguising any issues. Being careful with the contrast of these textures also goes a long way. This BAT has some texture repetition if you know where to look for it, but it doesn't really stick out, and it's no worse than using a tiling base texture to begin with. Pools: agreed, we need more of these. Especially up here in the northeast they seem to be everywhere. Interestingly, the caustics are the easier part of water shading. Blender has approximate directly-sampled caustics via MNEE that you can turn on (it's sort of a pain, though, you have to enable them on the light source, the caustic caster and all of the caustic receivers for them to work.) Use a subdivision and ocean modifier on the water plane to model waves, and it will generate plausible caustics for you. Where this is a problem, though, is that these caustics are incompatible with volumetric rendering. So if you want proper water absorption, you have to fake it in the shader: This just uses Beer's law to compute the absorption and multiplies it into the base albedo color. Which is not correct, to be clear (it does the wrong thing for specular light off the base of the pool), but is close enough. I did a couple days of research trying to find the 'correct' absorption coefficients to use, but while there is some data out there the actual color varies wildly depending on what's in the water (chlorine or dirt or algae, etc.) So really just want the absorption to kill most of the red light, some of the green, and eyeball it from there, hence the reddish-orange extinction color. All of this is a massive pain, and my hacks only work in specific cases. Refraction and volumetric rendering are one of the areas Blender is really lagging behind in, relative to a lot of other renderers. (Which is not really a complaint; I'm a graphics programmer, I know exactly how really goddamn hard this problem is.) Fortunately BATs make it easy enough to cheat.

Exported, lotted, and testing: Apparently PIM-X has some rendering errors around sliced models, which made me panic and export repeatedly trying to fix it. (I've got a decent gaming laptop but that's still ~15m each time.) They don't show up in-game, so all of that was unnecessary. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Immediate thoughts: it feels a bit over-sized relative to other mid-rise buildings. I don't think it actually is, though, but the only comparable Vanilla buildings are 3-story rowhouses. (Which actually line up reasonably well.) It's currently a stage 6, but it doesn't have any other stage 6's in the 1x2 footprint to compete with in Vanilla so it grows very enthusiastically. Will need to tweak the filling degree, and I might even bump it up to stage 7 just so it doesn't completely wreak rowhouse neighborhoods? I'm excited! I've never gotten this far with BATting before.

Night lights for the back, and some water damage decals to liven up the walls a bit. (Might still be a bit too intense, could lower the opacity on those...) This area doesn't have full interiors, just walls and floor; I don't think the windows are large enough to justify it. Put a Voronoi texture on the walls to give some amount of fake detail, but very little of it is really visible. Looking at this now, I maybe want some exterior lights around the patio. Otherwise, I think this is... done? Maybe? I dunno. Am I missing anything?

A bit of quality-of-life feedback, after doing a fair amount of actual BATting now. None of these are that critical, just things that would be nice to fix: - I'm not entirely certain how important the model being exactly centered is. However, assuming it is important: recentering a model built up of multiple pieces is a massive pain in Blender. Could we instead translate the camera according the LOD's center during rendering? Even being careful to block things out centered, it's easy to end up with an uncentered model just because the depth of detail is different on different sides. - The automatic LOD generation doesn't seem to work correctly with collections. Currently, a collection that is hidden (but whose children are not) will contribute to the bounding box. Additionally, the generation only seems to account for explicit objects; instances of collections do not count, which is a bit of an annoyance with modular techniques. - The Day/Night collections for controlling lighting are nice, but it'd actually be quite useful to have multiple collections for each. (For example, if you build out a lamp with geometry + lights in a second scene, then instance to the first, AFAICT you can't put just the lights in the Night collection. Ideally you'd have another Night collection in the other scene to hold those lights and hide both.) I think checking for all collections with a prefix of `Night_` or whatever might work? (Or maybe `B4BNight_` to avoid naming conflicts.) - Minor bug: Day / MN / DN setting is not persistent in a file; if you render a night preview, save the file, reload, and preview again immediately, you will get a Day render with night lights on. (This is easy to work around, just toggling to MN and back works.) I don't know if this affects actual exports, but it's a bit of a footgun if it does. To counterbalance the criticism: 95% of the time B4B Just Works and stays out of my way, which is maybe the highest praise a tool can get. Good work, @memo! Still iterating on the next version of my light rig. Found out you can get a significant quality boost by denoising the extracted night lighting separately from the base image before compositing them together again, so need to backport that to the rig. Also working on cleaning up the compositor graph in general; I want to pull out some tweak values so you can do things like adjust sharpening and disable alpha clip without digging through tons of nodes. Hoping to make this easier to work with for people who are not me.

First pass at the rear side of the building: Modeled a nice little modular kit for the fire escape... and basically all of it is hidden. Oh well. The bounce light in that area is really neat though. The little outdoor patio is real (although I've changed the layout), but the windows on the extension building are completely nonsensical IRL and not clearly visible from satellite view anyway so I've just made something up. Floor plan doesn't make a whole lot of sense but... eh, it's fine. This is pretty close to done, now. Some lights for the back, and a few decals to liven up some of these bare walls and I think it'll be good to go. (Which means I need to learn how to lot in PIM-X, ugh. Anyone want to do that part for me?)