BATs by DaveN

[peter007]

Wow it looks great.
I have no further account on these  buildings because they're amazing especially your last building.


-Ernst

[DaveN]

COMMENTS:

Peter007: Thansk a lot.


After the valuable remarks introduced small modification of the texture of the roof. Now looks much better. I hope that you like. In order, however, nothing is wasted, earlier version can also be future gatherings. In the end, not everything is always perfectly done.

Now it looks like this:

[supremec]

Wow! Awesome BATs   

[Girafe]

Looks good.

Your modelisation skills are good as your work on the textures.

Just the lights need to be worked again according to me. Maybe trying auto-illumination map 

Anyway excellent job on this building 

[peterycristi]

The new roof texture looks really great! It's fantastic on which level of work you are, just so short after you started batting. I take off my virtually hat. Go on with that great work! 

saludos

Peter

[metarvo]

The weathered look of the textures is beautiful, Dave.  Keep it up! 

[DaveN]

Replies:

supremec: Thank you.

Girafe: Thanks. No. of lights have a big problem. Read about it below in this post.

peterycristi: Many thanks. I try to take inspiration the best. While the caissons modeling and texturing I am doing quite well, with the lighting I have a big problem. The fact is below.

metavro: Thanks very much. I tried to fit in and yet not do a very bright house.

Hello.
After the recent comments I decided to try to work on the lights. For the first tests I created a simple ubic house with four windows. As a first technique for testing I took the windows glow with varying intensity. I encountered a problem. Introduce you to a picture, and below I will describe the different phases of trials.



The upper house is highlighted in the picture window without differentiation parameters. The "Global idensity = 1.0". As you can see the windows lit.

The middle picture shows the light intensity and variety. Window A = Idensity enabled and set to 0.9, B = 0.7, C = 0.5, D = 0.3. And all the windows remained unlit. Of course, all the windows tell the prefix "nite" in their name.

The following picture shows a return to global settings. Idensity turned off at each of the windows. The remaining value of the "Global idensity." And as you can see the return of light is also not lit.

I do not know how to solve this problem

Therefore I decided to try for his first BAT, who shared the ST. Trials with different light saturation in windows also failed. I decided to try setting the Omni and spot lights. By the way the whole house modeled again, leaving practically only slightly changed front. I put a different texture, similar to those of the original version. Now the building is as much so and I managed to do a test light.



What do you think? Do you know any links to good tutorials on lighting? Waiting for suggestions and comments.

[peterycristi]

can you show a closer view of the nightlighting of the last building? Anyway i'm not a friend of nightlights too  . This tutorial of JBSimio isn't that bad: http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=9551.0 I hope that will help you.

saludos

Peter

[DaveN]

Replies:

peterycristi: Hi. Closer view can not be obtained. It is the largest in gmax. Below any picture in better quality, because that direction last I had to convert to jpg because he did not want me to take the png format. It succeeded. By the way, thank you immensely for the link to the tutorial. Very much helped me a lot and learned from it. I am with your work I'm happy. I spent half the night, but I think the lighting is acceptable.



What do you think?

[Silur]

Excellent night lights 

[j-dub]

Looking real.

[Aaron Graham]

Looks great, i like the night light, they seem to have a blur look in them.

[jmyers2043]

Hello David

Andreas said a long time ago that SimCity is a rooftop game. And he's right when you think of the top down view. One of the challenges is to add some interest to a roof. Many roofs have Air conditioning, chimneys, and antennas. But what do you to those open areas that are supposed to look like a partly cloudy day or a roof where water has settled in a corner and dirt has collected? It is tough to find the perfect picture and anyone can add a lot of roof junk. So I spend a lot of time in a Paint program altering images. 

I have Paint Shop Pro. The last time I knew, Jeroni, and Pegasus also used Paint Shop. Some of the folk in the BSC have the more expensive Photoshop. I believe that Tag_One uses GIMP which (I think) is a free download. So you'll forgive me if I demonstrate something in Paint shop because I'm not sure what you use for graphics and texturing.

I'll start with this picture of stone aggregate pavement. I like it because it already has some horizontal and  vertical cuts and I'll not have to draw them in.



I don't want it to look like a photograph on my roof so I took away all the color and will disguise the stone by using the pixelizing tool. Makes it look kind of cartoon like.



Here are the layers I'm going to use to add some shadows to the roof. The top left picture is the base layer, my pixelated stone. Layer 1 (top right). Blend mode is darken at 10% opacity. Layer 2 (Lower Left). Blend mode is Burn at 10% opacity. And the lower right is the end result.



Let's see how it looks on my Diner. Not bad. There are dark shadows made by the diffusers and Air Conditioning. Lighter shadows of the roof texture simulate dirt around the edge of the roofline. For every hour I spent in gmax I spend two hours in a paint program. Sometimes I get it right the first time. Other times it will take all evening of experimentation until I'm satisfied.



I alter almost every texture and I even add gradients to brick. I think the side walls of some of your buildings and some of the roofs could use some gradients or shadows.

Good Luck with your flat roofs.

- Jim

[DaveN]

Jim: Thank you for the great comment, and share skills. Well understood in this example, what was the matter. Certainly these messages useful to me in working on textures. In fact it looks much better. More vividly and more natural.
      When it comes to various things on the roof, the matter is such that the image of the buildings in my city, and here the situation is so that if something is already on the roof of a rule are the chimneys, and from time to time television aerials. For residential buildings will not find a such things as air conditioners. Such things are in commercial buildings and is also rare. Therefore, usually a lot of things on the roofs gone. Very often compare their buildings with others who create a similar style, such as Ferox with BSC or Kontrabass of SimCityPolska who also reflect Polish style. Also look at the buildings SFBT or xannepan, which have a similar style. And on the other hand, if the original roof has one or two chimneys are so well is my model. But I think what to do. Thank you for your valuable advice. I certainly have benefited and will be very helpful. Also will try to work even on models I presented in this thread.

[jmyers2043]

Hello David. 

I was thinking about the side walls of the buildings. My minds eye sees a painted block or brick facade where the paint is faded and peeling. I'm going to use these images for my Simcity illusion. You'll recognize the image I grabbed from Sketchup Warehouse (lower left). I darkened the image a lot and the facade seems to have turned into an earth tone mustard color. There is an image of some peeling paint on a brick wall, an image of the Maxis block texture that has been arrayed vertically and horizontally, and a cloudy pattern.



I know that the side of my building is twice as high as it is wide. I also know that I'm going to apply the Sketchup texture to the front of the model. The side wall has to match the color. So I'll flood a new 300X600 project with the mustard color paint. I also flood portions of the brick wall texture with the same color. Leaving some white spots. I hope the white spots will add some random lightness when I layer and blend. I'll pixelate it so it looks less like a photograph. This first layer is blended using 'normal' mode. I forget what opacity. I use the Paint Shop 'Magic Wand' for the next layer. Grabbing some of the bricks from the original wall as I think that I'll need a strong color. This gets blended using the 'normal' mode at 100% opacity. The last image is the result. Ok, time to to apply it to the side of the buildng before I get too far along. It doesn't look all that good on a test render but it has promise. The most important thing is that I know that I'm on the right track.



What's missing? The blocks, shadows, and a gradient. The Maxis brick texture gets layered in using the 'multiply' mode at 50% opacity. The next layer is the cloudiness. It is blended in using the 'darken' mode at 10% opacity. I finally layer a gradient so the mustard paint at the top of the wall is 20% lighter than the paint at the bottom of the wall.



And here is the final render. Want to know the truth? I would not use that mustard color in a real bat. But I didn't have time to go back to the beginning and start again.



By now you should know the most important tool for making SimCity textures is LAYERS. And how the layers are blended to produce the result you want. I'm not an expert at this. I just know what I like and keep plugging away until I'm happy.

Good Luck. I promise not to hijack your thread anymore.

- Jim



By the way - here is a PNG that you can grab and use for gradients.

http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/7/4/1237795/gradient.png

[DaveN]

Hello after another long break.

       Recently I have too much time on new projects, but I still have a few already made ​​a few weeks ago, but have not yet showed. Some still require some minor amendments. There is also included on their new skills and capabilities that have been explained to me. However, despite all they can be considered completed, and any comments will allow me to refine any minor errors.

       Therefore I invite you to watch and comment. At the same time I wanted to share with you information that I recently improved the mood. My first add-in (as a reminder photo below) was approved by the LEX. The more I was happy, because by creating this project, my skills were perhaps at 10% of what I can today.

        Let's get to the main thread. Below are a few recent works that are waiting for any minor comments and corrections and they can be exported to the SC4.

        So I start to presentations:

1st: Another house, this time from Katowice:




2nd: My first diagonal building. Invest Bank Head Office, located in Bydgoszcz:




3rd: The building is similar to building Invest Bank. In fact, was the first, but the colors of the facade and the shape of the roof are not compatible with the original. As you can see the lack of even texture on the sidewalls:




4th: Another house of Bydgoszcz. As you can see, progress is not yet large, and no preview of the render. It's all by using the original colors of the real building which render are very clear and bright. Will therefore be at a later stage quite dark and shaded. There is also the upper floors and a bay window decorations at bay.




5th: The next two projects relate to the Polish family houses built in the late 70th and the 80th of the XX century. The second project requires several fixes to reduce the size of tiles and to improve the upper floor.
In this case the creation of a few models, similar to Polish architecture, which creates a larger pack of those buildings.






Cordially greet and welcome to comment, criticism or advice, if any you have.

[jmyers2043]

I see that you are did a gradient with the Katowice roof. Great! You've selected a pretty good roof texture as a starting point. I think the orange has too much color and the black tile seams need to be lightened up slightly. Neither real life (nor Maxis textures ) have such deep shadows.

I know from experience that the orange clay terracotta roof is the most difficult to do. I've pulled my hair out and spent way too much time trying to get them right. So you have your work cut out. You may have already come to the same conclusion about the orange roof.    Maybe not.    That is the difficulty of making comments in a bat thread. I don't know if the orange roof is a first try or the finished product.

I like the geometry of the building very much. You have very good gmax skills. I like the color of the street side walls of the Katowice building too. I like the gray upper floors AND the complimentary rose color gray for the ground floor. It really adds visual interest.

The green roof (below) is very well done because the color is muted. Kind of like looking at the roof on a cloudy day and I'm hoping you can achieve the same muted color palette with the orange roof.  You are also finding some good textures for the W2W blank sides.




Re: the Polish farmily homes are very nice. Have you done a test export and looked at them in the game? You will be surprised at how small the scale has to be to blend in with other Maxis/SimGoober/Cycledog R$ early stage homes.

[DaveN]

Hello.
For a long time there is not anything new added. This is because recently I have very little time, and second, add-ins that have already been completed undergo a difficult and arduous journey to reach the LEX.

Thus, in connection with some remarks on the older design. I present below the screen to render, where he reduced the saturation cartoon murals.

Please opinion as to whether this could be or would have had to change something in these murals, or remove them completely?



Replies:
Hello Jim.
In response to your last comment, I must say that I'm glad you liked my last projects.
As for the orange roof on the building in Katowice, of course, crafted over it yet. Thanks for some great tips. I'm sorry that I answer so late, but I have recently two works, and I spend several hours outside the home, and I do not have too much time. However, when these guidelines and the guidelines for two candidates, I hope that now I know better which way to go with colors.
On the occasion of presenting the revised building murals on 39th Dworcowa Is now a better or even make a difference?

[jmyers2043]

Hi David

I have a question about the origin of the murals on your building. Are they photographs of real murals on Polish buildings?

I think that something more weathered would look nice. I did a Google image search for "polish murals". Some are very bright and colorful like the picture was taken immediately after the artist was done. Other pictures I saw looked worn and faded with time

I think I would try something similar to this


I personally like this one.


Do you see how the white has variations of brightness? You can accomplish the same effect to the trumpet player with GIMP .. I think.




I like the new brown roof on the building roof because it works well with the tan and browns of the trumpet mural. But I don't think it compliments the cartoon person with the red hat ... or at least ... that is my opinion.


Good Luck

- Jim

[Aaron Graham]

Lovely building.