autoVino's bat projects

[autoVino]

Let me tell you, I have many unfinished projects.

And now Ladies and Gentelmen... welcome to my Bat thread!

Here I will show some of my projects, up to date:

Bowlingreen Office Park (pending)


Egg Corperation (this one is pretty much dead because of an unfixable rendering error)




Old Morrison Administration (working on it time to time)


And a residential hi-rise (this one is pretty much dead, the modelling isn't very good and it takes up too mcuh space.  I still have the original floor plan files that I made though, so I might work off of those)


Enjoy!

[Sim Shady]

lol you came over because old ST is down eh?  Driving me nuts that i cant check ST out.

All your work looks so good, you should release some of it 

[JosefBrisko135]

Hey same comment i made on ST! 
incredible work.

[Scifan68]

Excellent work Autovino!

[autoVino]

Sim Shady: Yeah, St was down... or at least it let me go to the home page after about a minute, but I couldn't click anything and it crashed ie 7... I'm gonna release some of it, but I'm just not happy with the quality of some of it yet.  Thanks for the support!
JosefBrisko135: Glad you like it!
Scifan68: Thanks for the support!

Anyway, I tried to add some roof junk to the Bowlingreen Office Park building:


not too happy with it yet, though...

And here is some Mr-arch and design texture fun  :


Enjoy! 

edit: why is it all bold? Never mind, now fixed...

[Pat]

WOW simply to say is WOW Autovino great stuff....
to answer your question why your last text was bold was
how you where replying Sim Shady after you said " Thanks for the Support" to him there is an extra [b*]
as you see in the quote here i removed the extra [b*] and all is good...
Of course that is minus the *... I Hope that helped you and again Awsome stuff here

MOD EDIT - Quoting the whole post was totally unnecessary here, please try not to do that unless you absolutely have to - Fred

[autoVino]

Patfirefghtr: Glad you like it!  Thanks for the bold fix, didn't notice that 

Here is another small update, I'll probobly be doing them a lot throughout the day... really hot and humid outside, soo...
I added a "test" texture to the front of the main wing of the builidng.  I personally like it, maybe change the color a bit later to fit the game more.

What do you all think?

[autoVino]

Update time 
















There are some things that I'd fix, like the texture, make it more simcityish, turn up the final gatherer settings, etc.
The only thing that I'm stumped by is that deep blue color of the shadows.  It looks wrong and I'm not to sure on how to fix it...
anyone know (I use 3ds max 9, with a Mr sun and sky lighting rig...)? 

[rooker1]

I like the shape of this building and the fact that it's big, but I can't wait to see the texture you use and some of the finer details.
Great work so far. 

Robin 

[SimFox]

Oh this is a good one!!!
How did I miss it?!

OK, to the problems you have:

• Final Gather. Yes, this is a bit tricky one. First of all draft sometimes look appealing to some people cause it lightens up some knocks and corners. Problem is that this happen at the cost of accuracy and as such thing become less believable. When you change you setting of FG BAT script (when you do export) will NOT respect it and will pick up the setting that has been saved (with file) last. So if you want to make sure which settings are taken by script save you file after you've changed them.
• Shadows. The culprit here is MAX. It's X-Refing system to be precise. When you X-Ref your lighting rig from separate file bond between Sun and sky is broken. I mean their location bond. And since location is determining the color hue and relative brightness of either the result is very odd. You end up with tropic midday (straight up) sky, and some much more moderate mid to late afternoon sun. Cyan of midday sky is overpoweringly strong. That is what you see in the shadows. There are couple of different solutions to this problem. First one is compensatory – in same place where you set logarithmic exposure there is setting for white balance. Set it to some light cyan and activate. This color will be "subtracted" from the scene. This is very effective tool to give your renderings certain look. However it isn't strictly speaking accurate. But accuracy and BAT aren't on best terms anyway. There is, however, another effect of this Sun-Sky disassociation – not only it affect hue, but also brightness of the light. As a result this your scene is getting quite a bit lighter and since your settings of exposure control are fixed you get what you're suppose to get - everything gets somewhat overexposed. One sign of overexposure (anyone who has been doing some photography on a level at least a tinny bit more evolved then just poin'n'cliking) your colors get bleached by light.  So the "proper" fix would be to get rig to work right and that would be accomplished if it was in scene. How exactly should that be done would have to be tested. Should lights be uncoupled from cameras and set in scene file tight to same handler or another dummy set to copy original one (TB2...handle – or whatever its name is, but I'm sure you know what I'm talking about), or would it be sufficient to just merge that X-Refed rig into the scene. Still even in-scene Rig does have slightly bluish cast at that "time of day" so some white balance correction may still be in order to restore neural, or if so desired to give render SC4 pinkish look.
• Textures... well, Sun bleaches!! Always does! Especially in you try to balance bright and dark and that is what logarithmic control does. You can still tweak its settings. Reality is that for optimum result each project probably should have tailored settings, but, on the other hand most wouldn't really notice difference. People are looking at gross mishaps in game and don't seem to see or mind them. And I don't mean some common trends, but contradictions, like different shadow angles and so on. One way to combat that bleaching effect on level of texture is to apply custom curves to them. And you can do it right there in Mat Editor. No need to go back to Photoshop. This applies to maps level in material. Open up Output roll-out and there it is! I trust you'll know what to do once there!
• And completion... well I really like the approach you have with thins one! Hope you continue in a same key. Only slight nagging I hear in my head when I look at this one – the scale. It looks too large to me... What is a floor height? Something like 5m+? I know game scale is very screwed, and different buildings seem to live in own dimensions, but still it look a bit out of place, and it's not just height. May be it is because it is soo white or something...

[Zaphod]

Looks like it would make a great old hospital from its size and architectural style

[autoVino]

rooker1: Glad you like it!
SimFox : Whoa!  SimFox, you're a genius!  Thanks for such a detailed answer to all the problems! 
Btw, the floors are about 4.5meters tall.  I have one section that is 9 meters tall, like a big ball room.
Zaphod: Hospital?  This is an interesting idea... Thanks for the support!

Anyway, 3ds max or my computer is being mean, and didn't let me export (gave me a png conversion error?)


So here is a preview of one of the output files:


enjoy!

[Vario80]

It's brilliant, the nightlighting of Bowlinggreen Office park looks really cool and also the shape looks great.   

[autoVino]

Vario80:  Glad you like it!

Anyway, I killed the cyan, got boolean happy  , corrupted the file, and fixed it again; but the shadows look too dark:

[Pat]

Autovino: WOW and what Steve (zaphod) had said this would make a very excellent Old time hospital.
The texturing as i know you are working could be a little darker  cause the white is too brite ingame LoL.
I did notice the road texture how it cures into the wall... Hmm if you are gonna leave it that way i would
suggest making it look like some type of underground parking entrance and exit of course LoL... - pat

[JosefBrisko135]

Amazing. I love the detail you put on this. I'm about to get 3ds Max, but I gotta wait until I get my student ID! Is it worth the price?

[autoVino]

patfirefghtr:  Yeah, I had an underground parking area in mind and also a conflicting idea of a parking garage attached to the back of the large office block wing part of the building.  Maybe I'll make a mix  .
JosefBrisko135: Glad you like it!  And when I showed my student ID to my reseller, the didn't accept it; said it was one year too old.  But showing a normal ID and a semester grade report did the trick!  After you get all the little problems out of it, it is worth more than the price.  It's about a thousand times faster than gmax... I can go on forever about how great it is!

Anyway, after many fruitless atempts at exporting the building, I finally got it:
I added some similar style buildings for comparison:





Wern still has a darker colour, and I noticed that shadows on walls are blue, and shadows on level floor are grey... which isn't realistic, but hey, this is simcity we're talking about.  All I have to do is make this building a bit darker and it should be perfect (I hope) and this is easy to do with the log exposure settings at my fingertips .
Some closeup shots for ya:





Enjoy!

[autoVino]

*bump*

Right, big update time...








Enjoy! 

[JosefBrisko135]

I'm diggin the art-deco-ness there. Tampa lacks art-deco design, most of our stuff is Spanish Mediterranian or Cuban.
It looks incredible, I'm defintly going to download this and work it into my model of Tampa somehow.
I can't wait to see future projects aswell. 

[autoVino]

Glad you like it!  I'm surprised that tampa doesn't have much art deco style in it though... I know there are cultural diffrences, but prefabricated art deco style was pretty popular during the deppresion... guess it wasn't popular everywhere, or Spanish was more popular down south

Anyway, what about this idea?

Ignore that funky looking wall, for some reason it skipped photon calculations... glitch model.