Rural Renewal Project

[XiahouDun]

Wow, that looks dam good ... ok, another lame pun by me.

I still need to get to finding the tractor number for you. Was a crazy week last week

[dedgren]

I'm fiddling around with your fences, Chris.



Your email box will contain a small file this morning- you are welcome to do with it whatever you might see fit.

* * *

We need some ploppable crufty old farm field water tanks, tractors, haymows, that sort of stuff.  I'm going to start combing the prop sets that are out there.

Always great to pop by here- I see you are working on the McLaren Impoundment dam.  Heh!


David

[Chrisadams3997]

Wow, that looks dam good  ... ok, another lame pun by me.

That's alright Xia, when it comes to making dam comments, dam jokes are just a matter of time .  Anyone who's taken the dam tour at the Hoover Dam should be able to relate.

Dedgren: 

I see you are working on the McLaren Impoundment dam.  Heh!

Had to do some searching to find that David, and it would indeed fit in well there.  I got you're email and will look at it some time this week.

As for ploppable stuff, as Xia just said, he's (supposed to be) looking up some tractor props .  Making the actual flora exemplar for them is the easy part given the props' TGI's and a logical idea of how to group them(as we don't want a plop for each model ).  If you or someone else can dig up some useful groups of props, making sure to keep track of the dependancies of course, I'll make plops for them.


I've added ladders to the front and started planning out the control building on the side, so here's just a little update.

This is the only picture I've got of the control building, so most of it I'll be making up as I go






New in-game pics will have to wait on finishing that building and updating the LOD's.

Chris

[JoeST]

Hey chris, that looks stunning

Joe

[jacqulina]

amazing work chris the dam looks wonderfull,
great pics david.

[smoncrie]

Chris, a while ago you asked about foam on in-game water.  Have you tried any of the bridge wash effects?   They are normally used around bridge support pylons.

[Chrisadams3997]

Thank you Joe and Jacky.

Smoncrie:  That one had occurred to me, but I don't think it'd be very convincing.  Too square, so unless I could build a new version of one(make a copy and link it to use new .fsh's), I don't see it as a great option.

In the mean time, I've worked up a second (and more satisfying I think) effort at the foam wash beyond the dam, though more work is still needed.

[girlfromverona]

Wow, that looks dam good ... ok, another lame pun by me.

Heehee, I toyed with that one, too. Damn!! 

Chris, how did you make that foamy water effect - is it ploppable? It looks fantastic and I can see it getting a lot of use!

[Chrisadams3997]

Hey Marisa,  it's basically a texture I made with an alpha map placed onto a big flat UVW map.

I started off building the texture from a couple of different source images to build this texture:


From there make an alpha from it:


Then applied those to my, uh, "model" for the render.  It's really all in the texturing, except for the basic size and shape of the spline based UVW map(the model)

I'm not sure how applicable this specific model/texture is for other areas, but I can see the possibility of other more generic applications using the same process.  It could be made a building so as to always float on top of the water, despite the depth.  But I'd need to know more about where and how it'd be used to build something appropriate.

[threestooges]

It looks like some good developments were made. The control building looks pretty good (especially considering what the pic gives you to work with) and the foam looks like it'll work out nicely. You are quite good with those textures. Incidentally, I have a few rural models that I have been working on, that never really had a destination in mind (things I made to practice and whatnot) and I would be happy to send them your way (or David's) if you wish. Good work so far, and I'll look forward to what's next.
-Matt

[Chrisadams3997]

Hey Matt, I'll take a look at any models you've made if you send them to me.  Depending on what they are, I might just have a place for them.

You are quite good with those textures.

I've been playing with digital images and textures a lot longer than 3D models.  And yet I'm still learning new things all the time.  It's really amazing some of the things possible.

Xia:  Jess(Jestarr) actually has a model he offered to render to make tractor plops out of, so you can call off the search .  I'll get to that soon enough I suppose

I've gotten a little of progress.  The control building is kind of in a first draft stage to see what it looks like.  It's got a scale issue or two to fix, and more detailing to go.  I'm also going to scale the rails down a bit, along with the width of the ladders.  If anyone else sees any room for improvement, I'm glad to hear it.  The foam wash I think is finished at this point, I'm rather satisfied with the effect.





Also for those curious about it, I made a screen shot of a render of the wash so you can see how the texture is applied to an irregular spline shape:



Mostly nitpicking at it at this point, so any suggestions are welcome

[rooker1]

That is absolutely incredible.  Brings a whole new level to the realism of the game.

Robin 

[Ennedi]

1. The circular pattern is a great idea!
2. I think there is a bit too much contrast between a big foam splash near the dam and smaller ones in bigger distance.
3. More splashes near to riversides close to the dam would be good (maybe).
4. We can make water ripples more subtle to don't let them disturb  

Adam

PS. It would be nice to see how does it work with another water mods (for example more blue, although this one is very realistic - both the surface and color!)

[Chrisadams3997]

Thanks Robin, that means a lot.

Adam,

You had to pick the one thing I was happiest with to critique .  The contrast between the initial 'splash' and the rest is intentional based on reference photos and experience.  the splashes near the riverside is a good idea, but I can't since different people will terraform the edge differently there.  You can see in the model that it actually fans out larger than my spillway area just in case for this reason.  There are always compromises in this sort of thing.

As for ripples, I know you could likely change that for the better .  I can send you the present models if you wanted to play with options there.  But any changes as you know would impact the whole map, not just here, so it'd be something very optional to the user.  I'm not entirely sure therefor how best to include that.

Checking it by other water mods(and terrain mods as this affects the 'beach' textures under the spillway) is a good idea.  I'll have to take pics with a few different ones.

[Ennedi]

I'm very sorry Chris!  But you asked for critique 
Don't worry, everything is very good as is! My opnion is subjective, maybe I had something different on my mind - I have some dams near my hometown too, but they are on mountainous rivers and of course everything looks different there, because the river below the dam flows fast.

You are right about splashes near the riverside. I had an idea about them , but of course your solution is more universal.

Of course changing ripples will give an effect in the whole map. But it is possible to do two things which can look good in other places too:
- We can make ripples larger but less visible and softer
- Sometimes we can remove ripples at all from particular areas leaving them in other places. But it depends on the riverside shape and it would need some tips about terraforming. I'm afraid there are very few people who would like to play with it.

I agree with Robin, again you create something revolutionary. You should establish an SC4 Institute for Advanced Technologies 

Adam

[Chrisadams3997]

Naturally we'll never be able to see it like this in game, but just a little eye candy for the hell of it



Oh yea, I added an antenna(that's a good enough excuse for a post, right? )

[threestooges]

for a second there, I thought I was looking at a pic of the real thing rather than the model itself. That angle alone is enough of an excuse for a post (the antenna is nice too though heh heh). Great to see all the details on this thing. Even though they may not be readily seen in game, they do add a bit of a colored blur to the model which would look flat otherwise (how I justify modelling details for a render with 256mb RAM... well that and it's fun). This thing looks great.
-Matt

[Diggis]

I'm with you Matt... I had to look twice to see if it was the real thing or not. 

Looks great Chris, can't wait to see this come to life.

[jacqulina]

wow thats very realistic chris awesome work my friend

[bat]

Really nice work there on that stuff, Chris! Looks wonderful!!!
(Looking forward to it and to more...)