tchntm43

I've been consistently getting an error that causes the Reader to run out of memory. When I get this error and check in Task Manager, I can see that the Reader is using over 1.5 GB of RAM. I'm currently working on a massive overhaul of the capacity for population of all residential buildings (they are unrealistically high in the game). When I click on the building reference in the reader, it gives me the option to see all 4 views of the building. This is important, because I use the image of the building to calculate what the population should be. Beginning with the buildings located in Simcity_1.dat, under Residential $/Buildings, this works fine for the first few buildings in the list. But when I get to "R$56x28_7HouHiRise_Tenemts1_017F" and click on any of the four entries for "Bennet Apartments" I get this message that "the entry is invalid (refresh your list)". Then it says it is out of memory and crashes. The buildings after this entry (it's the fifth or sixth in the R$ list) have the same problem, though I have been able to verify that buildings much further down the list load properly, in addition to the ones at the beginning of the list. -Justin

Is there a mod to allow you to define the entire region as one city map? I consider the implementation of the whole region/city thing to be the worst idea put into this game, and want to be able to play the whole region as one city, even if it means significantly slower gameplay (I have 2GB of RAM and an nVidia 8800, so I'll be all set, though).

Since everyone else is making threads in their name for their artwork, I thought I might as well show some screenshots. I have 4 completed and 1 that is still in progress. I say completed because they really should not be considered finished products. I'll post them in the order I made them in. I started doing BATs out of necessity. After I modded the game to redistribute all the growth stages and population levels, I realized there were a number of holes where there were no buildings. In fact, R$$ had no stage 3, 5, 6, or 8. So these are mainly to fill in gaps. Also, this means I will only eventually upload the models, not lots or descriptor files, because the population numbers for the buildings are much less than the default that SC4 uses, and that wouldn't be much use to the rest of you. :-) The first building I have to show is based on the many towering projects that dot the landscape northeast of Manhattan. As such, I have called it New Rochelle Project. This building is pretty ugly, both in reality and in my interpretation. It's my first BAT, and it shows. Almost all the textures are default Maxis textures, and night lighting doesn't work very well at all. It fully occupies a 4x4 tile, not much room for lot development really. I will probably not end up uploading this, unless there are requests for it, or unless I eventually get around to redoing 90% of the textures and some of the modelling.

I would agree that those are all areas for improvement. With regards to the roof texture... the original image is not as contrasted. I think that BAT exaggerates contrast a little bit in some instances. This is something I will consider fixing. This is actually a R$$ building. It is loosely inspired (The inspiration is only similar in that it is also made of tan bricks, about the same height, and has all right angles. I couldn't remember the rest of the details.) on a building which is actually a R$$$, but since it looks more like a R$, I decided it would be averaged. :-) In reality, the interior of a residential building seems to determine it's wealth much more than the exterior, and there are some rather externally uninteresting high wealth buildings. There actually are curtains behind some of the windows, but it's kind of pointless because the windows are too opaque to show it. I also opened some of the windows for variety. I was originally going to go about adding those smudges, but I couldn't get it to look right on this building. Here's the newly rendered night lights: I added over 180 internal omni lights. I figured that the interior hallways would always be lit, and those are represented by the narrower windows. I also increased all brightness modifiers to 10. Why are they green? Because the floors are green. One thing I have learned here is, if I want a certain color of light for night lights, it is better to color the internal objects that color and probably just use a white light. I'll remember that for future projects. There are still a few things that are imperfect. Because the windows use a gradient opacity map, the light in the upper windows doesn't show through as well as towards the bottom (the extreme example on the first floor is actually due to the floor being a different color from other floors). There is a strange vertical line of lit area in the corner above the entrance. I'm not sure why this is there, as the two walls meeting there actually overlap by quite a bit. There's no seam gap whatsoever. I would consider one more render, but other than that, I think I am done here. This building has been giving me rendering nightmares for quite a while, and I am eager to start something new. I still need a solution for the rendering problem I mention in the rendering help thread.

Refitting the LODs and the Camera and Lighting Rigs did not solve the above problem. I also noticed that something very bizarre happening with the nitelites. Each image (that I saw; it did take 9 hours to render the whole thing and I wasn't about to sit around for them all) appeared to render fine, until it got to Zoom 2, East View, Night Lights. At this point, the external walls of the building seemed to disappear (it continued to do this on every subsequent nitelite image to the end of the render). I don't know if these two problems are at all related.

Date: 9/11/2005 6:02:55 PM Author: Pegasus Date: 9/10/2005 9:23:43 AM Author: pmiller19574 Also, keep in mind that use of even a single nitelite, doubles the size of your BAT model... and the time it takes to render. When a nitelite is used, a complete seperate set of night time images is generated for each view level and angle. quote> Well that would certain explain why my render time skyrocketed after I added an array of 180+ internal omni lights!

I have the same problem that Leech10 has. I am pretty sure the LODs and stuff were all reset before the render, but I will try it again. Are there any other solutions if that does not work?

Date: 9/10/2005 6:33:34 PM Author: 6459978. -For starters, I usually have to have intensities of upwards of 10 before I get any significant light showing through. -Do you have floor surfaces for each of the stories of the building? If there's no floors then you won't see the light lighting up much of anything at all--- For interior niteliting what you are seeing lit up is generally the floor. quote> I will try raising the intensity. Also, I do have floors and wall surfaces, but the texture is very dark. Could that be part of the problem? I chose a dark texture because I didn't want a bright color bleeding through for the daytime shot. Man, what I wouldn't give for the ability to be able to change textures for day/night... ;-) Thanks for the help.

I am having a lot of difficulty getting my omni lights to show through windows. I have the building interior divided into rooms, with walls and floors that lights should be able to illuminate (and thus be seen through the windows). What is an appropriate brightness modifier? I have it set at 2 right now.

Well, here is an update. I have finally managed to somewhat tame the disappearing texture problem that was plaguing me. It still pops up, but not all the time, as it was before. What's different: -Better distribution of the brick texture on the walls. -Much better window texture. It is a gradient with a gradient opacity map. -I changed my mind and decided that this will be a building with minimal roof junk. I think it is best if some buildings aren't overly burdened with that. -Added bicycles, open windows, small potted plants. -Began night-lighting. *In the pictures below, there is a door for the rooftop structure, it's just on the other side of the building. As you can see, I am having some problems with the night-lighting. I don't like the default nightlighting that is built into BAT; it is too flat and pixelated. So I want to use interior lighting using omni lights. The problem is that they don't seem to light up very much. I have all brightness multipliers at 2. You can see a few edges that are lit, but the interior walls of the room are not. I don't know why, because there are no obstructing objects within the rooms. Also, it appears that light sources treat partially transparent objects as opaque when it comes to passing light through them. I could definitely use advice on creating realistic interior night-lighting.

This will probably not be for some time (especially with the problems I've been having lately), but I plan to do all three of these buildings at some point. I've looked around a bit and I haven't found any existing BATs of them yet (somewhat surprising for two of them). This is the famous Woolworth Building in NYC. It is my absolute favorite piece of architecture in the world. If this building truly hasn't been attempted, I am quite surprised. These aren't the best pictures, but I went with them because I doubt a .edu host will prevent me linking to them externally. This is the John Hancock Building in Boston, MA. I am not sure why I have not been able to find an existing BAT of it (even if there is one, I will still give my own shot at it). I hope these pictures show. This would be my second favorite piece of architecture in the world. It is the Trinity Church in Boston, MA. You can actually see it in the foreground for one of the John Hancock pictures above. If anyone has actually done some of these already, I would like to see them (this will not prevent me from doing them myself, however). -Justin Smith

Date: 9/8/2005 3:14:35 PM Author: debussyman tchntm43: The 'loosing textures' problem is very common in gmax, I get it all the time in grouped objects aswell that in ungrouped ones, the solution that usually works for me is saving, exiting the program and reloading, sometimes it doesn't work is very random, you can also try merging your objects into a clean scene; avoid merging cameras and default lights which might be currupted. Hope this help solving your problem.quote> Well, you were correct. Eventually, I began to get the same problem again even with ungrouped objects. Even when I chose to hide all objects except one, it would render without the texture. I had tried the method of creating a new file and merging the old information into it, but that did not work either. What I am doing now is, whenever I run into this problem, I select all objects (first deleting the camera handle and LODs from previous render), and save selected as. Then I work using the new file. This seems to be good for a number of renders before the problem sets in on the new file. Then I repeat the process and save it back over the original file. This way, I need 2 save files for a building that has these problems. So far, it has worked out fine.

Date: 9/8/2005 6:57:34 PM Author: Hanson784 It's great to hear you’re going to create buildings again for SimCity. Based on your tilesets for SC2000 and Hall of Fame winning SCURK's, I can already tell these will be good. As others have already said, the John Hancock is already on the STEX. Here it is, www.simtropolis.com/stex/index.cfm?mode=files&filetype=BAT&Str=hancock%20tower%20%20boston%20ma Maybe you could replace the John Hancock with 40 Wall Street, American International or any of the other great buildings in Lower Manhattan. The Woolworth Building is on my enormous list of buildings to do, now I can cross it off since you’ll be making it. We'll be waiting.quote> Well as I said before, someone else having done the building before doesn't prevent me from doing it myself. When I was doing SCURKs for sc2k, lots of the buildings I did had already been done. Painters often gather at particular places to paint the same scene, because each one has a specific way that he sees what he paints that is different from how others see it. As far as the John Hancock in Boston goes, I have seen it, and I think it is okay, but I am not fond of the glass texture used. I live in Boston, and it usually appears to have a very deep blue color, not a pale blue. There are a few other things I'd do differently. As for 40 Wall Street, that is one of my favorites and I will definitely want to get around to it some day. There are a lot of buildings in downtown NYC I would like to do. The Citibank Tower is another favorite. In Midtown, there are loads of average-height (for NYC, that is) art deco skyscrapers I would like to do, such as the Channin and French buildings. There is a 900+ ft residential tower (the name escapes me at the moment, but I know what it looks like). There is Penn Plaza and the Worldwide Plaza building.

DISCOVERY... and possible solution! I had been planning to save a single wall from the building into a separate file to see if rendering from that one file would still generate the problem. If it did, I was going to upload it and ask someone here to download it and verify my problem. So I ungrouped it from the other walls, and then I decided to render it (the first render since starting my computer up), hiding every other object. It rendered fine, so I unhid the rest of the building, and without regrouping the other walls I rendered the whole thing. All of the walls rendered perfectly fine, but the roof top objects were still missing. I had the beginnings of a suspicion now, and surely enough, all the roof objects were grouped together. I ungrouped them, and now all of my textures are displaying properly in the render. Here's what I think... If you have several objects that have their own UV Mapped textures, and you then group them together, Gmax may have a problem with it. The solution is probably to ungroup everything before rendering. However, I don't know for sure how this will relate to objects which are grouped together and then given a collective UV Mapped texture. I will have to find out. I guess this is a rare bug probably caused by some minor compatibility issue with some part of my computer that is unusual in some way. Am I correct that no one else has experienced this problem?

Well, this thread has not been posted in for a long time, I see, but I have a question. How do I get rid of U Drive It? I actually have no interest at all in it, I just want to build my city. But that annoying car icon shows up all over the place, and sometimes it appears right as I am click the mouse for something else and I have to once again decline to drive the car. Is there a setting somewhere that will deactivate it?

Date: 9/8/2005 3:00:32 AM Author: brtim2 Date: 9/7/2005 11:28:54 PM Author: tchntm43 I'm really at a loss now about what to do.quote> Well I don't have the previous experience to know what to do about this as I have never had this problem, however, I wonder if the lighting/camera rig has anything to do with it? Again, I don't know, this is only a suggestion, but have you replaced the cameralight rig with the one in this thread? Try that, it might not work, but it might. If that doesn't work could you provide a screenshot of your 'gmax material editor' window? Sorta like the one I offered up above? Maybe we can see a problem there. quote> The building doesn't use the huge lighting rig that there is a problem with. It's not big enough. Here's a screenshot. This is the texture for the sides of the walls.

Well, my radical idea did not work, either. I rendered after creating every new texture and applying it to each object. When I attempted to apply it to a particular object, all of my textures in the render vanished. I then deleted the texture I had just created, and removed the UV Map from the object I had applied it to. No good, the textures still would not show. I went back and removed another step of texturing, but I could not get the textures which had previously rendered fine. Then, upon exiting gmax, I was presented with an error message. I've gotten this error message once before, actually. It happened right around the last time I started losing textures. Here are some screenshots to demonstrate the problem and facilitate solutions: Here you can clearly see that there are textures on many of the surfaces. The colors that appear strange are just the default colors of the objects as gmax created them. The bicycles actually have no texturing, as solid colors work just fine for them. And here is what my Sunnyside Up Apartments has been reduced to when actually rendered. :-( And this is the nice present gmax left me with when I closed the program. I am pretty sure this is the same error message I got right around the other time I was having this texturing problem. I'm really at a loss now about what to do.

Date: 9/7/2005 4:53:38 PM Author: frogface ^^ its on the STEX I think, definately done because I have it one of my cities. quote> Hm, I did a search for John Hancock on the STEX and it came up with 0 results. Unless it is one of the many real-world BATs on the STEX that has been renamed with some fictitious name. It drives me nuts when people do that. Anyway, I expect to do many BATs that have been done before. Making the building is the fun part. I find that actually playing the game is not nearly as much fun. ;-)

Hm. Aldara6166, your solution did not work. I am going to try something radical, and delete and reload all textures. Also, I seem to have problems giving names to my new textures. Frequently when trying to name them, BAT crashes when I type the first letter, regardless of what that letter is.

Brtim2: Your advice worked very well. As far as opacity maps go, I am guessing from your screenshot that black is transparent and white is opaque, right? Now I will easily be able to create windows which have a gradient from dark blue to very light blue towards the top, as well as having an opacity gradient from transparent at the bottom to less-so towards the top. I think it is going to look great! aldara6166: I will try your suggestion overnight (as I wish to be able to use my computer at the moment and BAT renders kinda prevent me from doing anything else.) I hope it works. Thank you both. -Justin Smith

Date: 9/1/2005 6:11:39 PM Author: 6459978. Okay, well just because you don't get a transparent object in the GMax viewport is not a sure indicator that transparency isn't working--- how does it look when you render it?quote> I wouldn't be wasting people's time here if I didn't test render it many times already. I also rendered it as a model to place on lots in the lot editor, just to be sure of how it was going to look. It looks the same. Also, I now have another problem with the Sunnyside Up Apts building I have been working on. When I render the image, some of the textures disappear. This didn't happen until I started cloning lots of objects to decorate the building with (bicycles, potted plants, etc.). The polygon count is currently just over 200,000. Is that high? It appears to be somewhat random which and how many textures disappear, and if I immediately render again after the first render, it is usually different (and usually there are more missing the second time around). This strikes me as the sort of thing a memory shortage would cause, but with 1 GB of ram I really shouldn't have a problem with that, should I? Furthermore, I would expect it to give me a low memory message of some sort rather than just tossing out random textures.

No, I have not touched anything under the Maps header. Here are a couple screenshots to help with solving this. The first is have the texture set up on an object, where pretty much everything else besides opacity change is properly set. And then I change opacity to 50% and click apply again (I don't know if I actually need to reclick apply, but either way, I don't get a transparent object. I also circled everything just to show I have set this up correctly.

I'm having some issues with windows. I want to apply a light blue - dark blue gradient as a texture. However, when I apply a texture to an object, the opacity setting doesn't work at all, and so my windows become opaque (and thus the internal nightlighting won't be of any use). I'm pretty sure it isn't due to my video card, as the rendered version also shows opaque windows, and since the rendered image isn't calculating textures and transparencies in real-time, the video card shouldn't be involved there. Are there any specific settings in Gmax that have to be changed from the default setting to get this to work right? Also, how does the opacity mapping work? Does it take a greyscale image where white is opaque and black is transparent? Will this work at all if I can't get textures to be transparent the regular way. -Justin Smith

Date: 8/29/2005 5:29:42 AM Author: T Wrecks Concerning lot design, it would easily be possible to offer two alternative versions: A 5x5 version (which would allow for at least some lot design around the building) and a 4x4 one (which would look similar to in-game buildings like Zaidi apartments). quote> Probably true, though as I had said, I will most likely only be releasing buildings as model files (because my building and lot files will be unbalanced in regular gameplay in term of population and growth stage). So you'll be free to create the lots yourself. The 'Fitchburg Building' - the 2x2 one, also looks very nice, although I think the windows could be a tad more pronounced and need a better texture IMHO. The textures on those columns near the edges of the building maybe look a bit too smooth and light... all in all, it's a very promising building, though, and quite unique at that! quote> The columns are about that bright in reality, and the way I modelled them makes it difficult to texture them well. I'll see if there's anything I can do. And your Sunnyside Up Tower - wow! There all the progress you made clearly shows. This one would be a great R$ tower that doesn't give you eye-cancer like those brown Lego default buildings. The reflections on the balcony railings are a bit too strong IMHO, however. And once again, a more varied win dwo texture would be great. quote> The glare is actually from the floor of the balconies. The railings, which are a solid dark grey color, were supposed to break up that glare a little, but as I said before, they disappeared due to the cylinder objects having too small a radius. I've since remodelled the railings differently, and the glare is now partially obscured. Furthermore, I plan to place several different kinds of objects on random balconies which will further help that problem. As for the windows, I am currently in the middle of adding randomly placed curtains behind some of them. I might also open some (They are modelled so that the bottom part can be slid up realistically very easily.), which should also help. Thank you for your comments. -Justin Smith