SA trys his hand at the BAT

[Shadow Assassin]

Hey, guys.

Figured I might try my hand at 3dsmax modeling once again. Over the weekend, a severe case of boredom led me to open up, blow the dust off, and play around with some things in 3dsmax. I've only got two pictures so far, but hopefully I can finish it.

It is a commercial building. My working title for the building is "640 Latitude". So far, I've only done part of the base. It'll probably be six or seven stories high.




(just was fooling around with the Sun/Sky rig)

I haven't done textures or anything, and the building seems to be to (approximately) SC4 scale. Now, the first three floors are 4.5m in height, the next three floors are 4m in height. Have I got the scaling right?

Most of the detail work on this building is done using lofts (which unfortunately are evil to line up correctly in a straight line in any of the views).

The bottom floor will be a retail outlet, the third floor would have a function room (I'm gonna put in blinds), everything else above that will be offices. The final height, I suppose will be approximately 250m, with lots of roof detail... I'll have to fix that up.

As for nightlighting, are there any things I need to remember? Unfortunately, I'm an absolute n00b at night-lighting (well, it's early days yet... ).

Provide any constructive criticism, tips and tricks, etc, if you want.

--SA

[callagrafx]

A very good start SA...Just a few points.

Don't spend too much time with the Sun/Sky lights as they will affect the appearance of your textures and you may get a completely different look on final render.  If you want to get some decent lighting effects, use a combination of omnis as key and fill lights. A key light is the main light source and fill lights are supplemental to counter the harshness of the key.  A good place to position a fill would be directly opposite the key, so the building is softly backlit.

Second, Lofts are fairly easy to control once you get the hang of them.  The best way to align is to use the grid to snap.  To ensure they all follow the same path, clone one loft (use copy, not instance) and simply change the shape...the path will remain.  Repeat for all of your lofted elements.

Nightlighting: Remember that BAT4Max doesn't work in v8 and v9 with the nightwindows, you have to use proper lights.  The render script, for some reason, has difficulty handling multiplied lights that are greater than 1, you end up with a blown effect.  Use the near and far attenuation to control the light throw distance. A way to simulate the nightwindows is to create a target spot, aimed at the windows (one for each elevation) and set the light to exclude all polys except the window panes you want illuminated.  Try and keep the number of lights to a minimum to avoid Error 6 messages.

Textures: When creating the window texture, add a raytrace map for reflection and set to around 20...this will reflect the scene around and makes for a more realistic looking building.
Look forward to seeing some more progress on this.

[autoVino]

Hey, It looks really great!    And yes, the scaling is great.
If you're using the sun and sky rig (which most likely means you're using max 9, right?) then turn on the Mental Ray Renderer.
Go to the bottom of the common tab in the rendering options, Click on Assign Renderer, and change production from scanline to Mental Ray.
Now click on the Indirect Illumination and turn on final gatherer.  (Turn it down to draft or low settings if you have them available)

As for night lights, I highly reccomend that you use night libraries!  They're easy to use and are much better than the built in night textures (which don't work anyway in max 8 and 9).  Plus if you have final gatherer on, they will actually emit light (assuming that you're using light emmiting textures) like a real nightlight!  More here [link]. (about 2/3 down, Simfox gives a good tutorial on how to do it)

Also, If you use the sun and sky lighting rig, or plan to use non-standard lighting, download this file and read the posts around it [link] (attached about 1/3 down the page)

Happy Batting! 

[SimFox]

SA, good to see you coming back to the fold!!
;-)
Bating is a mother, Bating is a father... (Bab 5)
So, what do we have here! The beginnings of a beautiful tower, I bet!
For me it is a bit strange to see that you've started with the base, Me like most would first go for the tower, not the least since it is usually the easiest part – set of repeating floors, especially when those are pretty "modular". Also having tower sort of puts you more in the mood to overcome challenges of base design. Particularly getting it right given games peculiar scale.
As for tricks and tips. Well I have to side with Callagrafx (just this time ;-)) about lofts. They aren't all that difficult to control. just shape and path. Key thing to understand is how does shape interact with path – namely that paths runs through the pivot point of shape. Keeping that in mind you can very effectively control resulting loft. On the other hand looking at the renders above I don't really see much point for Lofts there... I think all the same could be accomplished without them. Or is it so that I'm missing something? Lofts come to shine when you have very complex and non-angular cross-section. With more "square" design regular polygonal modeling or spline based modeling could be actually easier and more efficient in terms of face count. Live Lofts  - those not turned into meshes (polygons) will bog down your viewports especially if you gona have hundreds of them.
Where I'm radically disagree with Callagrafx and side with autoVino is on the lighting issue. Sorry to say but the lighting anything with two or more omnis is really bad and inefficient way. First of all in will never look right for simple reason that light affects surface depending on the "angle of attack" meaning to get even outside like illumination you would need literally hundreds of those omnis. This system of key and fill lights was used ages ago when nothing better was available. Lot of time has passed since and this system should really be put to rest, at least for applications such as this. No surprise that all decent architectural visualizations (no matter what rendering system is used – V-Ray, Mental Ray, etc are done with Sun/Sky system. When more dramatic and less generic effect is desired – like in motion pictures different setups could be used, also to suit better integration into rest of the view. but as far as independent arch vis is concerned you can not really do better when Sun/Sky setup. That said I assume you understand that the lights are just first, starting step the whole "system". Next would come Global illumination setup. This, as well as precise composition of you Sun/Sky system is very much render specific. Claims of such a system(SunSky) doing something odd and most of all unpredictable to the texture is completely groundless. All those things could be effectively controlled right from the max. Quality of light is unsurpassed. Plus these setups (used properly) normally offer huge boost in speed compared of regular lights when used with GI solutions.
Btw what version of MAX are you using? If you can lay your hands on 9th go for it. Amount of improvements and productivity boost is really impressive. Only drawback is compatibility problem with plug-ins written for previous versions, but if that is not an issue it is the best of them all! and by far so! Arch-Design Materials are along worth the entire upgrade! Some of best and most flexible set of materials available for any rendering engine! Simply fantastic! Also MR Sun/MR Sky combo is producing some of the most beautiful light of ANY system on the market today beating hands down not only Scanline that look drab and tired, but also giving V-ray run for its money (and that is about 1000$ as a plugin for MAX)
Nightlighting: again I'm with autoVino. NightWindows as Callagrafx said above are not functioning in latest releases of MAX. I have a nagging suspicion that this is a result of the changes to mapping coordinates made if memory serves me right in MAX8 that makes scripts execution of those incompatible with new engine in MAX. Simply said night windows weren't textures but backs like a planar environment maps. They live on they own completely not conforming to any geometry or point of view in the scene and also inheritance for day all gone and best are forgotten. 
Lighting with actual lights also have many draw backs and definitely not the best solution for most cases. First of all - all and any max default lights are point lights and as such these create harsh unrealistic shadows. Of course you can set them to generate area shadows but this will result in very noticeable cost in render time. And with numbers high enough for larger building may bring export to the stand still, of even fail it. So lights (point lights to be precise) should be reserved for appropriate uses. This is particularly true about spotlights. Nobody in they right mind would decide to light up they house with spot light, yet most people seem to think it is perfectly appropriate for BAT. Most of light we see around is defused and very areal. This brings me to the best way to light things up – Geometry based lighting via self-illuminated material –aka night libraries! IT look great, offer limitless possibilities and offers great control and realistic falloff and so on, plus it works really great with MR – offering not only far superior general diffuse lighting solution with great soft areal shadowing, but it is actually faster then use of normal lights! and significantly so!
This said one should always remember about using appropriate solutions for the situation at hand. If, for instance, you have got a stadium, or exterior architectural spot illumination you wouldn't do that with self-illuminated mats, but for about everything else they are the way to go, particularly if you use MR. There are many ways to set such a material as a standard one, as architectural, through some custom shaders etc. If you would desire you can even emulate old night windows with the exception that now material would be sitting firmly in UWV space allowing you to tailor it to your geometry. But it would be same cut/past with exclusion from any lighting calculations and hence lightning fast (pardon the pan). That is very exciting topic, but such a discussion is best reserved to the time when modeling (or at least most of it) done and best and most appropriate solution could be discussed.
One thing you should remember night lighting early on is to avoid naming ANY GEOMETRY with prefix nitelite – this will crush export. This is a result of the loop looking for nitelites. It assumes that that will be light and doesn't have any failsafe mechanism. When an object with such a prefix is found script is instructing max to turn it on and, naturally when object doesn't have .on /.enable property your export fails. Apart from that nothing comes to mind...
Scale wise it 4m looks right for regular floor height. But 4,5 for public spaced on the ground/first levels of buildings may be a bit on a low side. Often spaces like that would have this number in real life. to reflect this greater height in game this should be increased still. Of course this brings us to dilemma of overall height of skyscrapers.  In a building of same 25-40m (in original) 1,3 coefficient (commonly accepted one in BAT) results in extra10-15 m in overall height, which is really unnoticeable in a greater scheme of things. But if you tower has "original" height of say 300-500m this same coefficient translates in 100-150+ m and that is a lot!! 100m at zoom5 translates into 497 pixels!!  PaulvMontfort, for instance model everything to exact real life dimensions. I, use 1,3, but I haven't really been doing something quite as high as your one for a time being.
Anyway if you have some particular questions just ask. And if I see something relevant I'll mention when time comes to it...
This message is way too long...  sorry...

[Shadow Assassin]

LOL, that's okay if it's way long, SimFox. Your information's a good help. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to work on the building for quite a while, because I've been busy with school.

I use Max 7, and I use MentalRay (with Sun/Sky rig, but it's a bit annoying to configure at times) for the rendering (I actually don't have the Sun/Sky rig on unless I want to do a render where I want to see how textures look, perhaps). And I actually find, with a little bit of tweaking, MR turned out consistently better renders than Scanline, and faster renders as well.

The lofting thing, I just used them, because well, part of the building is actually on an angle, and the shape that I used for the lofts are well, non-square... They make it easier to work with, and really, it's a breeze using them. The reason why I did the base first was actually due to the fact that part of the tower is in fact the base (the lobby section - the area where the stairs come up to the entrance to the tower).

You can see a close-up of the shape I'm using. I suppose it's not really complex, but the loft lets me do this sort of shape really easily.



I know that the later incarnations of Max would have much better improvements with the rig, but I'll probably stick with v7 until I can get my hands on v9 (because I can't afford it right now, and probably will get a copy when I start university)

[callagrafx]

This system of key and fill lights was used ages ago when nothing better was available. Lot of time has passed since and this system should really be put to rest, at least for applications such as this.

It's actually the defacto standard practice with RL photography and a lot of us old timers still can't shake the habit of using them  and I think a lot of the books about CG lighting still teach this method as a means to an end for specific situations.  On the other hand I will concede that it's probably not realistic for buildings 

SA, the detailing is excellent but will probably get lost in-game, but that said, if you know the detail is there that's probably enough.

[mattb325]

Nice stuff - I like the angles at the base so far - look forward to seeing this progress. For the smaller detail on the window frames, if you are able to get contrasting textures (say grey and black) you may not loose everything once it hits the game

[kwakelaar]

Seems this will be quite an interesting building, and like the rest is saying nice detailing.

[SimFox]

SA:
That's great stuff, but do you plan this from something else than BAT? I mean that level of detail is a bit pointless for BAT alone, Particularly ones that are invisible from the point of view of BAT. It isn't as simple as let'em be, cause their being there will seriously affect performance of both viewport and GI calculations. So it is a fine balance between LOD (level of Detail) and the efficiency of operations on the whole. This said I think one may go below the threshold of BAT resolution as with good AA like those available in MAX details turns out visible even when they aren't supposed to. 100m is about 450pixels in BAT making 1 pixel being 20cm, but details as small as 5cm are still visible in well rendered models.
With MAX7 your options are quite limited in regards of materials, Or to be precise same all things are technically possible but you would have to assemble each and every "advanced" material on your own. All the required (well almost all – enough) maps are available – raytrace, SSS (not that it is terrible useful in BAT scale of things), Fall-Off, Shellac, Ambient Occlusion. You would just have to assemble multilayered blend materials - that is what all those new fancy materials like Arch-Design set in MAX9 are – yourself.
MR in Max7 isn't quite as "user friendly" as in MAX9, and it is a bit slower, but still it would win hands down Scanline. BTW MR (or mental Images to be precise) were first to bring GI algorithms to "consumer" level  back in 1998. Here is good example of setting FG (Final Gather – one of GI methods used in MR) for your version of MR http://www.evermotion.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=42049 
Callagrafx:
Yeah it is photographic lighting and actually just because of the it isn't perfectly suitable for SGI as the method of rendering is very far from photography, but naturally it was first picked up when CGI was in its infancy. And true it still may be very effective for small isolated objects. But for anything exterior (even same small object) it doesn't work. Original buildings of MAXIS and all the bats done with default rig are good examples – shadows side looks anything but either realistic or good. And add here structures with complex shapes like courtyards and some such...
BTW what is your level of understanding of MaxScript? Or do you primarily use Maya? Anyway I think in essence the scripting in both should evolve along same routs. I'm interested in particular about scripting output window size based on camera FOV and total mass of objects in the scene...