Tom's BATs

[tomvsotis]

Thank you both! I've very much admired both your work over the years, and your kind words are much appreciated

[gn_leugim]

indeed you have some good texturing skills there good roof

[Unconstantean]

Great start    and with an art deco building -> that's just perfect can't wait to this how the project evolves

[tomvsotis]

Hey y'all, it's finished! Or, at least, the building is: now I need to make a lot for it, and it'll be ready to go. In the meantime, here's a shot of it on a test lot in the game - I'm pretty happy w how it's turned out!



Here's a question, though: how do you render buildings in a resolution that looks sharp at zoom level 6? the BAT only seems to deal w resolutions up to level 5: are you guys using other software, or what??

[Unconstantean]

Looks excellent 

suggestion - lotting it's very important for the general look of the building, so i recommend you should take a look at bipin or mattb325 homes and take some inspiration for the lot design, those 2 are the best

[reddonquixote]

That's pretty good for your first BAT, well done  I wonder whether the roof colour might be a bit over-saturated though.

Regarding resolutions, I'm pretty sure there are only ever 5 renders for a single BAT. The 6th is 'artificially' produced out of the 5th within the game itself. For this reason I don't think its even theoretically possible to produce z5 and z6 renders that are both sharp. (If that's what you're asking about)

- The default render is resolution for z5 in-game. z6 is just z5 'zoomed' in game, which in turn causes the apparent loss in resolution.
- However, there is an option to render in HD, which renders z5 at a higher resolution so it appears sharper at z6 in-game, but instead loses it's resolution at z5 in-game. This option is usually used for really small things like props and rarely used for buildings - I imagine this was to conserve processing power back in the day 
- Because of the conflicting resolution sharpness at different zooms, HD BATs can look out of place used in conjunction with the standard and more common non-HD BATs.
- Usually BATs are released non-HD as a default, and HD is included as an 'optional extra', which of course is more work and why you don't see them very often.

HD is produced by first selecting the HD option in GMAX BAT, then again in BAT4Max under the Preview roll-out (assuming you're using 3DS Max)

Hope that helps..

[Krasner]

Nice  But to me it looks quite out of scale, way to small compared to the most common scale. In SC4 indeed, scale is basically not very coherent but however there are, more or less, like standards. The basic maxis-sim is 4 meters high, and so one floor should be a little bit higher imo, around 5 or 6 meters, or a little bit more. This is my own opinion towards scalling, but some prolific BATers worked with a smaller scale.

Personnaly I help myself with the smaller namspopof's people (a few are mighty, out-of-nowhere giants, be careful  ) and the cars that can be found in SHK parking pack props, when I need to 

As reddonquixote said HD-render has a few defaults, but however there are more than a few HD BATs available here and there, not enough to make an entire satisfying and coherent collection but still, there are more and more. I systematically use HD render, Simmer2 does so, like some other active or inactive BATers. So you see if you like it or not. If you use Gmax you need to get an alternate script available somewhere on this website, the option does not exist with vanilla GMAX BAT.

[Unconstantean]

^^ I second Krasner on that, indeed it need to be a bit bigger

[tomvsotis]

Interesting. When you say "bigger", do you mean "higher"? Or just bigger in general?

And thanks for the info re HD rendering, reddonquixote!

[mrbisonm]

Nice.........Bigger in general I'd say. The scale is a little too small compared to others of the same category.

Fred

[tomvsotis]

Nice.........Bigger in general I'd say. The scale is a little too small compared to others of the same category.

Fred

Cool. I actually scaled it down from the original model, which was as close to IRL dimensions as I could get it, because i thought it was too big. This is the original, true-to-life model (with a slightly desaturated roof texture, as per reddonquixote's suggestion... and another texture that's just gone missing, annoyingly), on a 3x3 lot — what do y'all think of this size? I still feel like it's too big - it's twice the size of the maxis mayor's mansion! - but at the same time I kinda like it.

[Simmer2]

Very good model and texture

Perhaps you could scale it down 10%, it will look more inline.

Simmer2

[mrbisonm]

You almost tripled its size now......lol. I also would say to scale it down by 10 or 15 %, and it would be perfect



Fred

[Unconstantean]

10% smaller it's ok
also 3x3 fits well with Mattb325 mansions

i would also add some roof junk or maybe some cracked concrete texture or smth on the terraced roofs, and maybe a wood/pannel texture on the garage door. Other than that the model itself it's gorgeous 

[mattb325]

Scale in SC4 is a vexed issue. Almost everyone will have an opinion of what they feel 'looks right' or they'll alternatively use the 133% scaling rule (if making a recreation). Simply grouping and scaling everything by a random % won't help you.

A long time ago, when Maxis shipped the BAT plugin to the community they put one of their lead artists (i.e one of the guys who actually made all of the buildings we see in game) - MaxisBrian - into the community to help people start with their journey in Batting. There are still remnants of that old thread over on ST.
When the BAT was released, a little R$ (it says R$$, but that's wrong) house was shipped with the Bat...it resides here on your PC: C:\gmax\gamepacks\BAT\Sample Model. This house was made by the Maxis employees who made the game.

He also helped write the phillipbo tutorial. He gave the exact dimensions that 80% of Maxis buildings use and was unequivocal in his measurements for a standard wall - an 8' house ceiling (ie from the top of the carpet to the underside of the plasterboard) = 4m in game.

He also stressed that your model must be true to the X/Y dimensions.

He also gave the external measurement in the Phillipbo tutorial which is between 4.5-5m. All walls in these low rise buildings across all wealth categories you see in game are therefore between these values of 4-5m.

Therefore, make sure your walls are at least 4.5m tall (from the ground to the underside of the eaves) for a mid-wealth residential home and you will be fine with the Z axis.

Where you are in trouble with scaling is the X/Y dimensions. Measuring the real building in google maps, the longest dimensions on the ground plane are ~22.5m on the Calder highway side and ~13m on the Bay St side. This will mean it would actually squeeze onto on a 2x1/1x2 lot in game. Your model now is on a 3x3 lot and looks to be about 40m x 35m at its longest points which makes for a very large house indeed.

You'll need to pull it back to closer to the dimensions in your 2nd last picture - the one with that sc4 logo - on the ground plane and then scale the z axis only until your floors are about 4.5m high. You will then fit in with Maxis' stuff.
I'd also recommend lining it up with their mid/high wealth houses in the Lot Editor (use the bldgprops 1 & 2.dat in your plugins for this) to double check floor height and the HSV values of your texturing 

[mrbisonm]

When the BAT was released, a little R$ (it says R$$, but that's wrong) house was shipped with the Bat...it resides here on your PC: C:\gmax\gamepacks\BAT\Sample Model. This house was made by the Maxis employees who made the game.

Oh Geeeez, now you tell us....after 12 years of trying to find someone who was willing to share a model for SC4 with me, so I could get started in BATting while learning from his/her model while inspecting the details carefully........All these years I had to learn this by trying and trying and trying on my own......lol


good grief! 

Fred

[tomvsotis]

Hey Matt, just quickly, thanks for a SUPER helpful post. Still working on it, but the suggestions of setting the ground-to-eaves dimension to 5m, and of comparing to Maxis buildings in the lot editor via the buildings-as-props DATs, were both really helpful. I think I'm almost there! (And then onto the lot editing, eeeeep.)

[reddonquixote]

Sorry can't help with scale... I have my own tricks but as I come under the most criticism in my own BATs for scale, will leave it to the experts.

The roof colour is much, much better though 

[tomvsotis]

Hey all, after a painful lot-making learning curve - thank god for PIM-X, is all i'll say, because I spent ages trying to use the Maxis LE before discovering it, which was aaaaawful - I have a lot for my house! It's not especially true-to-life, but replicating the IRL lot would have required a fair bit of plugin/texture making, and I think this actually fits better with other in-game lots anyway. I'm just about ready to call this done, I think, but if anyone has any thoughts on the finished product, I'd love to hear them.

[tomvsotis]

Hey y'all, here's a sneak preview of the next thing I'm working on. It's another art deco BAT, based on this lovely apartment block near where I'm staying in Melbourne at the moment:



I grew up around here, and I've always admired this building, so I thought it'd be a fun thing to give it the BAT treatment while I'm in town!

So far the modeling is going well. I have to say this is the part of the process I most enjoy, perhaps just because it seems to be the part that comes most naturally to me!



Obv still got a fair way to go, but as ever, thoughts, comments, etc are most welcome. Happy holidays, y'all