mcdrye

I had a look at how NOB's set did it, and they have indeed used LODs below ground level but in the .lot file there is an option to disable building shadows! I did not know this was possible. The walls above ground are a seperate prop that still generates shadows. Maybe I could indeed use a more complex LOD and some nice person could path it for me

I'm glad to hear you like the SSR alot, I've got tons of ideas for pieces, and I like your idea about the my existing station. I was planning to re-render it what with the new textures and such. What I plan to do is release a starter set to get things going. This would include a straight bit (maybe various lengths), the curve, the 2 end pieces, and finally the transition. There are so many possible add-ons such as junctions, more station variety, diagonal etc. And yes I think I'll put an open invitation to mod my set in the STEX release as I'm not capable of getting trains showing but would love to see it!

Thank you! Check out the previous pages too see other pieces I'm working on, though they will all have to be reworked to the new depth and scaling. mightygoose has a great idea in that you could have 1/2/3 tile sections with differing dirt etc

This is how it looks now, I squashed X axis and adjusted materials and exposure, cables made thinner and squashed along Y axis, dirt needs a sorting at the bottom.

Thanks for all the great comments guys! More to be revealed of the Lucky Penny soon... Meanwhile as per some suggestions, I thought I'd try a less deep SSR. This is how it looks with the rail bed at 7.5m as opposed to 16m. I'm not sure what I think of it, the default rail texture I used looked crap so I now use a seperate ballast texture with 3d sleepers, also the small gap between tracks in SimCity looks strange here, I could try a deeper level maybe?

Wow have I been gone a while! Loads of RL stuff to deal with and boy has this year flown by! Well I haven't forgotten good ole BAT, and though I occasionally opened up BAT it wasn't very productive. edit: Forgot to mention, my laptop failed back in Spring! Technology hates me! Thankfully I got a new Dell back in April. This week I decided to get this SSR stuff sorted. Back at the beginning of the year SimFox was giving me some great advice but the prospect of radically altering the models which had already been altered several times before made me lose interest, but they seem so loved by you fab people that it's time I got them done and released. The old wall textures had to go, oversaturated from multiple edits, barely tileable, and the bump map was flaky. They were still Standard Materials aswell so no ambient occlusion, and rounding corners, which is very useful with old brickwork. So I've retextured the walls and with A&D materials. Below is the current result, what do you think? An improvement? I think the dirt at the column bases is a bit too dark whereas the top dirt is too light, but I'm fiddling with that still. Also render time is huge for this 1x1 building, like 15mins, I was wondering if that is normal (I supposed it is HD)? Also I've been working on a seperate project for months, of which a sneak peek is below...Don't worry! It's actually about 90% complete and this is a small portion of it. The Lucky Penny Casino Hotel. (The Swan hotel I posted a while back is taking a backseat for now.)

Thanks for the comments peeps! (Y) I've rexported the 90 degree piece to reflect new settings and wall height. I'm also nearly done on the SSR to Rail piece but I want your opinions! In addition to what you think of it overall, how in particular do you think the rails should be ended? The electric rails are easy and slope down like in real life but its the main rails I'm wondering about.

Thank you very much T Wrecks! I'll give it a go later on. I've made a second type of end piece that looks like a bridge when placed on either side of a road or rail. I've also shortened the walls to let a little more light and more detail to be shown.

toxicpiano yes I remember you suggesting this a while back but I didn't answer for some reason. I have had a look at this, I'd have to use a different method to render a one sided piece, an to get a shadow you'd have the LOD covering the whole thing, but that has caused funky inverse shadows and such for me in previous stuff. I need to see how people do highway walls and such before doing this, I like the idea though, because you could actually have trains passing through.

Eyecandy indeed, how cool would it be if you could see trains down there! Yeh to get invisible base textures you edit the Exemplar bit of the .LOT file in Reader but where and what to put I do not know

I've re-rendered the 90 degree turn to fix alignment and also lower saturationm I have also re-rendered the 1x1 straight piece and end piece to reflect the new saturation. I'm STILL having that missing FSH on the end piece, any ideas guys based on what I posted earlier? Other than problems with the end piece, i'm now redoing the Rail to SSR transition piece. When all is solved and the transition piece is completed I plan to release the 'Starter' pack with these 4 pieces. Heres a pic of it ingame so far, I like how nicely the NAM works with it. PS How you edit a lot so that it has NO/INVISIBLE Base textures?

Thank you very much GlobexCo! I tried BSP2 and it rendered fine but was slow so I adjusted the settings for BSP and it rendered fine but quicker. I've rendered the 90 degree turn now but will have to do it again as I made a mistake with the alignment .

I'm using 2010 and BSP. Max just says put of memory and just terminates the render. I have had the can't allocate # bytes error with a different BAT which causes Max to close. EDIT: OOOOO I never knew about BSP2 and the fact that it can flush unused render elements from memory, I'll give it a go

I'm also having another problem. When rendering the 90 Degree turn in HD, 3ds Max either crashes or a message pops up saying mental ray has run out of memory, this pops up whilst mental ray computes Final Gather points, so it hasnt even started rendering before it runs out of memory :S

I looked at it in reader and that view is split into 3 FSHs. But when you look at the UV map the last FSH (the bit that doesnt show ingame) it has been duplicated. One has the correct UV map associated and one doesn't have any UV map associated. I'm assuming that this is not normal, and the game must be using 1x2EndA_UserModel_Z5E_2. I've tried different LODs in 3dsmax. In the picture the top one shows the working Eastern view, whilst the bottom two show the problematic Western view. SimFox, I think I did update the rigs but I'll update them now to be sure.

I'm wondering if it is, but why in that corner on that single view? The LOD isnt overly complex either

Heres the first pic, a simple straight piece and end piece are shown. No alignment problems, no abrupt colour change problem. BUT, I'm getting that pesky red and green artifact on one view of the end piece as shown in the second pic. I tried the Merge into new scene thing but to no avail. Whats causing it?

WOO! Received my hard drive enclosure today so I've got access to my old files and textures I think it's only fair to finish my previous project so I've been reworking my Sub Surface Rail pieces (again!) It's a much more symmetrical model (no more mismatching bits) and bump mapping is now used along with obligatory HD. I love the Let There Be Light and it's effect on this set though it has made the set darker. Pictures to follow very shortly! NOTE: My casino still exists and a lot of work has been done on it, but it's now on hold. I was having mental ray out of memory errors causing fatal crashes whilst rendering this. I've optismised the BAT a lot but it seems to be too much for mental ray, not sure whats causing it.

Thank You very much SimFox!

I am also having the FSH insert problem specifically with v4.5. I'm on Windows 7 32bit, with Max2010 installed in C:/Max2010. The previous version exported fine. I noticed that the .ini file mentions "OutputFiles" when its actually named "Outputfiles", though I changed it and no difference (So CAPs or lack thereof makes no difference I take it ).

So sorry! Have had a bout of RL and unfortunately technology has failed me yet again! Started a new job in June and i've been busybusy, but the killer is that my laptop hard drive failed on me (though, due to me punching the already faulty keyboard). It had a head crash (the reading head came into contact with the platter and scratched it) and a lot of data is unrecoverable. Thankfully I backed up my files to my external hard drive back in June so I can probs get a lot of BATs (and textures) back, but only when I can buy a new enclosure as my previous one (note: don't buy an enclousre with an obscure unreplaceable power adapter) died. On more positive news I recieved a new hard drive last Friday and after hours of reinstalling Windows 7 and all the apps and generally getting back to normal, I'm ready to go once more! Until I can get back my old BATs I'm gonna work on something I've always wanted to do properly, Thats right, a casino! Yeh I know, there's a few out there but I've been playing with this idea since 2003 when I first got the BAT. There was a thread on this forums once tracking my progress of my old casino but that disappeared long ago and I'm considerably better at Batting than I was back then, and I have 3dsmax at my disposal with all its neon friendly features. I present my own creation, The Swan Casino Hotel, the casino that Vegas never built (obv not really but it would look quite normal there if it were real). A casino first built in 1967, and continuously added to, carries a late 80's enforced Classical/Caribbean theme, that looks a little tired today, thought the resort still thrives to this day in SimCity. So far I'm working on the 2 floor base area, thoughts?

I am using bump maps, though I admit they could be made more obvious.

Just for Fun

It is technically possible to TE the lots, but it wouldn't work as a whole (I think). You can have automata appearing the lot provided the LODs extend below the surface, but you can't have 2 transit enabled lots next to each other. There's also the slight issue of making the ground invisible as the LODs being both above and below the ground makes the ground texture appear (This is seen even in the Maxis El-Rail to Subway lot). Puzzle pieces are also not the answer. It seems NAM puzzle pieces are completely 3d, not pre-rendered in BAT, I wouldn't be able to maintain the high texture quality and model detail. On the plus side though the Rail/GLR to SSRail lot alone can be transit enabled, and automata can be pathed so they can be seen going down/up the slope to SSRail.

Update!: I'm finally getting somewhere with the 90 degree bend puzzle piece after re-starting from scratch. Unfortunately, in order to make the track look correct at the ends, there is a straight piece at each end. The lot itself though is only 1x1, under one end. Still some aligning issues etc but what do you think?