CB's Bats

[City Builder]

After spending quite a few more hours trying to do my twin CC towers I finally came to the realization that I really didn't like the way it was turning out.  I like the buildings very much for what they are but trying to place them together and create some sort of base for it wasn't floating my boat so I dumped it.  I stripped the buildings apart (after saving them) and figure if theres anything usefull in there I'll merge it in with a future project.

But I started playing with just a single version of the building this morning and decided to create "SimTelco", still have plenty of texturing to do but Im not going "grunge" with this one,  This is a new building in town so it's likely to be somewhat cleaner than the rest and the inhabitants of it take really good care of it so it's windows are cleaned regularly and it's roof is swept. 

Yeah I think (keyword, think) that it's going to be raised above the ground on those pedestals, they may get tweaked a bit but I like the idea of it since it's rather funky.  Only a shame that I can't get stuff to go underneath it in the Lot Editor like cars etc, instead I'd have to put them into the model file instead and I don't really want to do it, though I might.  Maybe have an under building parking lot or something like that.

[City Builder]

Well the color sure did shift on the SimTelco building once it made it into the game and here it is.  Let me know of ideas for improvements, if possible I'll try to implement them within reason and within my skill range.

I do like the way raising the building up on the stilts allowed me to park cars under neath it.  A building with this many offices surely has need for more than one little 12 slotted parking lot like I've seen in many lots,  I was also under the impression that you can't place things under the building and have them show up but they show up fine here.

The windows are still my challenging point.  Even using a targeted directional light pointed at the sides of the building and naming it nitelite_spot01 etc and excluding everthing except the windows still doesn't show up in my game, yet other peopls custom content lights up fine.  Also I've got to rebuild one more time for the windows as I made them too translucent to try to make them appear whiter at night instead of a glowing blue, but now in the daytime they are completely transparent so that needs to be changed.

Thanks,

[City Builder]

Some other shots

[Pat]

Thats looking real intresting there CB...

[callagrafx]

The windows are still my challenging point.  Even using a targeted directional light pointed at the sides of the building and naming it nitelite_spot01 etc and excluding everthing except the windows still doesn't show up in my game, yet other peopls custom content lights up fine.  Also I've got to rebuild one more time for the windows as I made them too translucent to try to make them appear whiter at night instead of a glowing blue, but now in the daytime they are completely transparent so that needs to be changed.

If the windows are transparent at night they will not reflect the light that's being thrown at them...and as you've excluded the interior from the light, it will not be visible either.  Just make the windows non-transparent but add a sky bitmap to the environment setting and make the window material reflection map "raytraced" but set the amount to around 20.  This will reflect the sky environment onto the windows just enough to add interest but won't really interfere with the nitewindows.

[RebaLynnTS]

Also, be sure you have set your main building to consume power, I believe at least 10 is required for lights to work.

[City Builder]

One night in a rage of disgust I decided to release my country cottage which wasn't much of a cottage at all and more of just a small boxy house like I've seen in my neighborhood when I lived up in the mountains over on simtropolis.  I didn't take much time at all to do the lotting and just slapped it down onto a lot and made it a landmark.  Along came Nexis who relotted it (and made it look more distinct by doing so) and I guess turned it into a growable lot.

The cottage model can be seen earlier in this thread somewhere but you can get the final lotting on simtropolis from : http://www.simtropolis.com/stex/details.cfm?id=19316&v=1 and get the model file from here: http://www.simtropolis.com/stex/details.cfm?id=19291

Download the first link first, then download the second links contents and only extract the sc4model file into the same folder that you extracted the first links contents and the lot will appear in game.

P.S. In case I need to mention it, my "cottage" is the white building on the left in the first image.

Things I learned on this BAT... Roofs should overhang the walls of the buildings a bit to look right.  On this BAT I fudged it and added some roof rain gutters which gave it just enough overhang to look like it should IMO, the brick chimney was an after thought because I didn't like the amount of windows that I put on the lot so the chimney was used to cover up one of the windows instead of having to redesign the whole wall.

Edit Turns out I never did show you all my little country cottage in this thread.  Probably never thought it was worth showing so when 3DSMax is done rendering my sim telco I'll have to upload a screenie of it in the max program.

[Shadow Assassin]

That isn't a bad BAT at all. It fits in quite well with the game... the scale seems to be about right, anyway.

[City Builder]

I've had to give up  on the sim telco bat (it's the triangular shaped one) as the angles are just too wonky after I tried making some adjustments to it so I did what I do best and I grouped many of the components and saved them individually to use later on my next project which brings me to my next box style 70's era building.

[City Builder]

And an image of the whole building as it currently is.

Im looking to add some detail to it, but Im not sure what kind of detail to add to it just yet.  I'm one of those people that like the traditional concrete rectangular buildings but i know that many people like to see buildings with a great deal of detail to them.

[RebaLynnTS]

CB ... don't get caught up in trying to please everyone, you can't. Make the stuff you like, and just do it the very best you can.

[City Builder]

I've decided that I need to start over and start smaller.  Im finding that Im really not ready for these larger buildings just yet, I guess baby steps are in order here.

So I searched out to try to find a rural'esque type of farming building and found one that I like then spent some time trying to model it up.  The textures are certainly not final nor is the model for that point.  Hmmm seems none of my models are final nor ever done, hmmm go figure.

Anyway....  You can see the original building on the plane behind the model (duh  )

As you can tell, it took me about 2 hours to put this together, I think if I had more patience they might come out better.  I can't quite figure out on the original whether the walls are boards, like siding in red or just worn out deep red/brown paint on the original building.  Hence why I used the brown grunge texture for my walls which Im not really liking though I am liking the grungyness of the texture but since there are so many different wall pieces they show up the individual texture on each one making it looked chopped up when it should flow from bottom to top.  Not quite sure what to do, to fix that.  I've tried choosing all three wall pieces on the front of the building and applying a uvw map then applying the texture but it still choped them up and applied the texture individually to each piece.



Edit: After looking at it with fresh eyes this morning, I now see that it's not proportionally correct.  I think the height is okay, but the main portion of the big building should be as wide as it is long, so it's basically too narrow.  Oh well, live and learn, maybe I can fix that without re-doing the entire model.





The second image I was trying out some wood siding but I really don't like the way the angles mess up the lines of the boards and make them all wonky, so I don't think I will go with wood siding for the moment.  Many BAT's that I've seen on different exchanges that use wood siding have the same situation where the lines of the individual boards get messed up by the angles that the BAT creates for the game of the building.

Edit: Since I feel quite guilty uploading my images to SC4D, I've uploaded them to imageshack and hotlinked them here instead.  I don't want to be sucking up SC4D's bandwidth for my little "works of art"    Especially since I have the tendancy to show a new image everytime I do some small little thing that I might be pleased with.

[RebaLynnTS]

Personally, I think the wood siding is amazing.

[City Builder]

No matter how much I'd like to take credit for that texture I can't since it's not my work.  My only work with it is to put the words stamped onto it for the one wall, and I don't actually recall where I got the texture, I found it on the deep recesses of my hard drive but of course that could mean I downloaded it just yesterday too 

Anyway, I took the cheaters way out and used the stretching tool in max to widen up the building a bit which widened the windows a tad but I don't think it's that bad and when it makes it into the game I don't think it will be all that noticible really.  Now I've got to figure out how to make it a wheat farm building so that it grows with a wheat field.


I also did some refinement on the odd contraption near the front corner of the building and made it a bit smaller, and added hand rails and a ladder as seen (I think) in the original photo of it.  It seems Im always designing very bulky items and then later trying to refine them down to make them a bit more ... well, refined.

The more I look at the original photo I have a feeling that the original building might be constructed out of some sort of cement or stone blocks, I've seen these blocks before at the local home depot, they are sort of like cynder blocks except they are smooth, and sort of rounded on the sides and a bit smaller than the traditional cynderblocks that are used in todays cheapy 1 story apartment construction used in the less affluent areas where I live.

I still need to insert some window glass though since I have no plans to light this model up at night (after all, it's a barn of some sort so not likely to have people working in it at night) so I may just leave them vacant since after angles, window glass is not my strong point either and since the nite lights don't work properly with 3dsmax and I don't like the effect that shining a targeted direct light and excluding all other objects 'cept the pane of glass on creates so it might just be a waste of time to do it.


So... What have I learned so far on this model?
1. No matter how much I'm feeling lazy, I really can't chintz out or cheat on the model and it will show.  The small gable roof at the bottom of the model, the one that has the door under it and the two fence railings below it, I took the cheaters way out.  The gable type roof was orginally a box I believe that I grabbed up some poly-Annas and bunched them together to make a peak, not thinking ahead to what I was going to do for the roof texture.  After realizing my mistake in doing so and not wanting to have to actually design walls for it since angles are not my fortay, I detached the two faces on the angle part of the box and moved them forward to give them an overhang.  The problem in this is that it makes them paper thin and I see now way of extruding them at this point and don't really want to do it all over again just so that I can thicken up that small roof panels, next time I'll try not to take the cheaters way out.
2. I was wrong in my post (was it this one or the one before?) where I said I applied a uvw map to the entire side of the barn and applied the grungy brown texture and it wasn't working right.  I hadn't done that at all and that's why it came out in panels.  Once I selected all of the panels and applied the uvw map and then the texture it all flowed together as if one giant piece of good browness.
3. I learned a relatively easy way to make the roof panels with the angles but the angle thing is still not my friend and the roofs were a right pain in the butt trying to get them to line up properly with each other and I had to grab some edges of them and push and pull them until they lined up properly.
4. I don't need to create a floor inside of the building if it's not going to be seen through a window, and it's a waste of time to do so if nobody can see it.
5. Many finer details get lost in the game and just become some colored pixels so theres little point in putting them in there since I don't design my models to be award winning models in the model form but only design them to get them into the game.  That's not to say that all details get lost, but the smaller ones seem to.
6. I need to pay more attention to the proportions of the building that Im working on and not wait till the end to scrutinize it as stretching the model is not the best option by any means, and will create a bit more work to unstretch certain parts that get way out of whack from stretching the entire model.  Case in point (though really simple and easy) is the chimney stack on the front roof line, when the building was stretched wider, so was the chimney stack and it was not longer round but now eliptical, so it had to be adjusted back to round.  Theres far more that would need to be adjusted back if I really felt that it would be noticed in the game but I really don't.

[RebaLynnTS]

I really think you should consider doing 2 versions, one with the wood siding, and one with stone or brick.

[City Builder]

I've got nothing but time on my hands today so I might try to do it in stone or brick to see how it turns out.  Though Im not a big fan of brick buildings in the game as the lines of the bricks on the angled walls seem to go all wonky and get pixelated to where the lines are no longer straight.  But I'll try it out as I just downloaded about 50 different brick textures so one of them might be a good candidate to work with.

[RebaLynnTS]

Wish I could offer some advice on that problem.

[City Builder]

Brick.  The bane of all existance.  It is the cause of all that is most evil in the world.   

I think brick textures might be one of the most difficult to work with. If they aren't looking terribly tiled, then they are making awful moire patterns, make the bricks more in proportion to the building at hand and it makes those issues even worse.  Make the bricks larger and it reduces those two issues but then the bricks are huge and would have taken a team of construction workers to lift each brick into place 

Oh goody, I can now link photos from my Google Picasa album so that I can permanantly store them online instead of using imageshack.  



Anyway, it's that tiling effect that sort of bothers me, and Im really not sure what can be done about it other than to create a really huge texture file and make every single brick different so that it doesn't get that effect but man, that would seem to me to be a huge undertaking.


This image uses a substantially larger brick texture to try to combat tiling and moire effects and as mentioned it would take a team of workers to lift each brick in place but once inside of the game it may not be nearly as noticible since the game does such wonky stuff with angles and patterns with textures like brick textures (at least I think it does)

Can you say woops!  The thing is 4 squares long and 4 squares wide in total, (ummm, math no good... 64x64 feet?) That seems a bit large for a farm building in the game.

Yup, when placed near to those single family dwellings this must be Dr Evils lair.  It's just massive.  Boy is it going to lose a lot of detail when shrunk down to a more appropriate size.

[RebaLynnTS]

In SimCity, each tile is 16 meters x 16 meters (approximately 52' x 52') making your lot 208' x 208' (A meter is rounghly 3.2 feet)

[City Builder]

Thanks for the correction, yeah I was thinking in feet instead of meters with regards to the grid.