AntigOne's Projects: Elsewhere.

[TheTeaCat]

Once again you raise the bar for what can be achieved. Bravo 

[Girafe]

Re texturing and addition of details process through .fsh is awesome 

[BartonThinks]

As always, blown away by what you've done here. I love what you've done with the train textures, not to mention some of the tweaks you've managed to make with these BATs.

[Une_ame]

You know you're crazy ?

Right ?

[Badsim]

From my home office;

My first task since the previous update was to replace the railroad overlay (I found the ballast "irrelevant") with a rail prop from Zimmer2's SM2 Mega Prop PackVol2, after changing its too dark FSHs:





Then,  I duplicated it to create a special piece suitable for a wooden crossing floor for carriages ...



If most of the time  I'm reworking FSHs for visual considerations, sometimes, that the only way to add details close to a BAT having non custom LODs, like with this mexican church (Wallibuk):



No way to plop a tree at that place, nor a bench or anything else at the base of walls that wouldn't have been cut off. On the other hand, this bench and these "flower decorations" may look a little offbeat (anachronistic), I know, but who's going to hang me (high and short) for this crime of lese-majesty?

I took this opportunity to develop a new technique consisting in exporting FSHs from existing props and merge them after some scale checks and corrections. Speaking about scales, Wolfze's BATs have been scaled down 0.8 while CT14's ones have been scaled up 1.2 ... finally, I have had a good surprise with the Historic Ferry Landing (WorkingManProduction) , perfectly scaled ...




Other works are more classical;

From CT14's Prop Pack Vol2:













From Wolze's River Junction Pack 1&2;











About that last one, I only kept  the loading ramps  from the corral, wanting to be able to build corrals of all sizes, using wooden fences from the WMP team, after have reworked their FSHs ( they were too bright and with a repetitive texture);



Not obvious to spot there but it makes a big ingame difference...

I reworked many props too, just 2 examples with that long logs pile from AC Saturn Props Pack (Aras):




I've had then to coordinate these old log pile props from Orange_o_'s Mega Prop Vol2;



From mother nature's garden (the only artist here) :

From here all pictures are viewable full size by clicking right/display in a new tab, all the subject matter of my work being U.H.D. stuff.

Various species of Agaves (A.americana, A. tequilana, A.attenuata, A.parryi, A.deserti) Opuntias (O.chlorotica, O.engelmannii, O.macrocentra, O.basilaris, O.gosseliniana ) and undefined trees and bushes that may visually suit a semi-arid landscape.

Zoom 6;








SizeOf 5:











SizeOf 8 ( so that you could count the figs on the prickly pear cactus ...    )





Special work;

To get some young pine trees  matching  these tall ones, instead of spending hours and hours looking for pictures, cutting them out and turning them into FSHs, I successfully tested an easier way; I duplicated Girafe's larches, resized them to 0.7 and adapted their tones to those of their elders ... on the left, one cluster of the original Girafe's Larches, on the right, my young Scots pines;

Zoom6



SizeOf 5



Did the same with Girafe's Norway Maples, they become U.H.D. bushes ....

Zoom6



SizeOf 5



Onlyplace4's giant logs props revisited, resized and duplicated:

Zoom6


SizeOf 5



Of course, all of this new flora is displayed in game with multiple MMPs. I also downloaded the Historic Harbor set, tons of valuable HD props (big thanks to krashspeed, vortext and all the other team members, a really fabulous work and, for once, I did not had to resize hundreds of Occupant Size properties!  ) On the other hand, frustrated with the limited number of props available through MMPs, I edited a new batch of MMPs displaying all the freight, construction, junk , workers and wagons props to spread them all over in Contention City.

From Contention City (still WIP, so that's the second set and certainly not the last one);

Zoom5;





















Zoom 6;































SizeOf 4:

















Latest innovation; semi-arid regions like the Sonoran Desert are prone to flash floods. Of course, no way to recreate them in SC4, but we have seasonal MMP MODing, so I re-MODed Jeroni's  Transparent Plopable Water MMP  so that  river spawns from September the first to the end of December only.







Such amount of props nearly at the same place is possible with my personal kSC4FloraParametersProperty only(180.000000,100.000000,200.000000,3.000000,128.000000,363.000000,15051.000000,0.600000,0.000000,0.000000,0.100000,1.000000,0.300000,5.000000 applied to each and all examplars of all MMPs, I already explained this several time before...)

Leaving the real story of Contention City, which has vanished since a long time, I decided to give it a strong development as its position along a railroad might have suggested ... Contention City will become an important regional economic center  with the timber industry and the transport of livestock. It's not an easy task considering the few BATs available but if SC4 had been easy, who would be still here ?



At therme, the whole landscape around Contention City will be enriched like that (I still have hundreds of cacti waiting to be implemented...), for the moment, I'm focusing most of my attention on the development of the city itself.

You know you're crazy ?

Right ?

Dear Emmanuel ... ... I don't see how I could contest it.

Matt, Antoine, Derry (great to see you're still visiting Devotion, I suddenly desire a cuppa) , Barton and MangaR. ( Are you coocking something about Gransimtenango ? ), thanks for the nice comments.

C.

[BartonThinks]

 

[AsimPika3172]

Awesome!!!! 

[manga rivotra]

After having created your own reskins of u.h.d trucks and trains, your own u.h.d plants, here you are recreating entire villages with this quality and this almost obsessive attention to detail .... 
But not only: your scenes are more and more realistic! 
The farwest atmosphere is transcribed there in the most beautiful way. 
Among all these masterpieces, the example of the freight station under construction, which is quite simply one of the most realistic scenes I have seen, is a particularly telling example (each person and each bush is ideally square !) .
If I list what I adore in this update, my message will be endless, but I must point out, the incredible precision of the placement of the sand or gravel MMPs, which are in total symbiosis with the ground terrain and plants (in town and on the river): sublime. 
Please reassure me by telling me that you are inspired by countless period photographs, because if you achieve such a result through your simple imagination, you have in addition to everything else a gift and an eye that I envy a lot!
This update still surpasses the previous one, which is one more feat!
Unbelievable 

[Badsim]

You know how I'm working now, so ....

























As per usual; from there, open the ingame pics in a new tab to get them full size (1600x900)



After MMP madness ;

Zoom 5 and 6































Zoom CrtlX SizeOf 4











































































Opened window on the next chapter;






Elsewhere ...

... it's above all 6 months of work, nearly 600 trees (something like 250 pines and 350 various deciduous trees and shrubs) and hundreds of props to reach between 95 and 99% of personal content. But, more than impressed with my work, I'd like you to be impressed with what this old game is able to handle. Before you ask, no, I can't share my work... for several reasons; first of all it's an incomplete work, I only replace the 400 FSHs set (which correspond to zooms 5, 6, and all higher levels using the code SizeOf) of course, it would be possible to replace all the others, but that's quite a tricky  process as smaller FSHs aren't a simple reduction of the biggest one, it would now take me just a few more years of work  ... that means at zoom 1,2,3,4 my trees go back to what they were originally; a Flunight's Large WashingtoniaFilifera cloned hundreds of times:



...but most of all the images I used to create these FSHs come from various sites offering them for download with the mention "for personal use", that's how the world works. These images, for the most part, are "isolated on a white background" which I cut out before adapting them to my own color scheme, there are also a few pngs with transparent backgrounds, but they never fit directly and always require a lot of correction work. Then comes the work of framing the FSHs, their implementation, the MMP MODing, the ingame checking and, most often,  the scale correction with SC4ModelTweaker...

That being said, even at your disposal, I don't think many players would have the patience to juggle dozens of MMPs, some of them having up to 70 different trees... 

On a side note, I accidentally discovered a trick to automatically scroll through endless menus (Ladmaks, Parks&Plazzas, MMPs in particular); start by scrolling your menus as usual by holding the right mouse click, with the other hand enter Ctrl+X, once the dialog box is open, you can release the mouse click, the menu continues to scroll automatically . Press Enter to close the dialog box and watch for the icon of the desired item; when you see it, just click anywhere on the menu to stop the automatic scrolling. That trick also works for the God Mod flora brush. Little things, little things ... 

Thanks for the comments and Likes.

Please reassure me by telling me that you are inspired by countless period photographs, because if you achieve such a result through your simple imagination, you have in addition to everything else a gift and an eye that I envy a lot!

It's a mix of both, I think. Somewhere a privilege of age (soon to be 60 years old ... gosh ! ) having always been a big fan of western movies, I have a mental and global vision of the subject, not necessarily faithful to what reality was. And a little observational gift too, probably my only gift and not particularly useful in RL. (Having spent so much time with SC4 and now since 19 years , you can guess how  I don't particularly like our current world. Thank you for your kind comment.

C.

[Ulisse Wolf]

it's AMAZING.

You managed to create the atmospheres of western movies. Good job. Keep it up

[Barroco Hispano]

As Spinoza said, nobody knows what a body can do.   

I can confirm the magnitude and complexity of what you do, I try myself but I don't reach your level, what's more, I haven't built a city for about 3 years. 

I have three questions:

1. I see that the grass can receive shadows, can you tell me what is the height of the lod?

2. Are all your trees and grass individual models or are they a mix of individual and grouped models?

3. How many FPS is your game running? 

[art128]

It's insane the amount of details you've managed to put in every pictures. 

What I find really satisfying in your work is, judging from a few pictures ( at least, what I can tell, please correct me if I'm wrong), that your scenes work in different angles easily. You're not blocked to one specific angle or else the other props won't look correct. 

[mgb204]

It's a good job your updates aren't too frequent, because it's going to take a long time to go through all the little details you've given us to ogle at.

As always I'm simply in awe at what you've managed to produce using SC4 and tip my hat to you for your perseverance. It's still amazing to see the results of your modding, without even creating models directly! I'm not surprised you stuck to z5/6 only, having done a few such model edits, the z1 and z2 stuff especially is just so lacking in pixels, it's hard to know where to even start and I'm clearly not half as talented with such endeavours as you.

Great to see you back here and looking forward to whatever you do next, as always.

[AsimPika3172]

Almost woods house ever! Sound likes back to cowboy time! Yeeehaaa! 🤠  

[manga rivotra]

As always you surpass yourself and offer us a new masterpiece. 
Everything has been said: it's technically perfect and also absolutely sumptuous!     
Some scenes seem to be reproductions of master paintings where a sometimes bucolic, sometimes wild nature is in the spotlight. Your UltraHD vegetation has a lot to do with it, and the addition of these "simple" tall grasses (with the shadows displayed on them) makes the scenes even more successful!
The scenes in the heart of the village are prodigiously realistic: each character, pile of wood or barrel is placed in perfect harmony with its immediate environment. The harvest scenes in the fields with draft horses or those related to forestry activities are extraordinary.
I believe you have just done with this update the most beautiful tribute that is to the props of the Historic Harbor set and to some of JMeyers.  , and certainly a new tribute to SC4 

It's captivating especially since the images don't seem to me to be edited at all.
So, don't apologize for not sharing content, because in addition to your tips and techniques, you are actually sharing your Art, which inspires us and will no doubt continue to inspire us for years to come.
A huge thank you!