Question on Floor Height

[woodb3kmaster]

I'm considering changing the height between the floors of my current BAT project, but I want to know what the typical floor height is among more experienced BATters. The BAT in question will be an office tower. As it stands now, I have floor planes that are 1m thick (to allow for internal equipment like air ducts and plumbing) with spaces of 6m for lobby floors and 5m for normal floors (I believe I based these original heights on philippbo's BAT tutorial at ST, where he used a height of 4.5m for a single-story office building). However, with these heights, the building as I have it planned now won't have as many floors as I want it to, and I've started thinking that those floor heights are over-exaggerated (i.e. over-compensating for the visual squashing effect that the game viewing angle causes). Instead, I think I want to make normal floors 4m high and lobby floors 5-6m high (the lobby at ground level would be taller than the skylobbies, which would also include mechanical floors). Before making this change, though, I want to ask those of you who have experience BATting taller buildings: How tall do you usually make your floors?

[threestooges]

Not sure if I'm a voice of experience, but I tend to budget around 4.5-5m for my floors for commercial, and around 4.5 for residential and I usually scale it up 15-20% in the Z at the end to compensate for the "squishing" effect. What I've noticed though, is that real world measurements tend to work quite reliably when BATting. If you have any doubts though, run a test render (draft quality) and put it on a basic lot to plop next to similar buildings to get some sort of comparison. I'll keep an eye out for what it is you're up to.
-Matt

[JBSimio]

From what I've seen, it depends in part on how tall the whole building actually is going to be.  I've never made anything that I'd call a "tower" since 22 stories is the tallest I've done.  For this, I generally used 5m floor heights, measured from the center of each "floor plane."  I usually use anywhere from 6-10m for base lobbies depending on the building.  Matt's advice is best though... if you're not sure do a test render and plop it next to some similar Maxis buildings.

Just as an aside... I personally wouldn't be too concerned with the thickness of your floor pieces.  Your logic makes sense, but from a game perspective, the interior floors and walls merely add visual "noise" and depth to the windows anyway.  (Unless you're making an all glass tower, in which case it might matter a little bit more)   

JB

[zero7]

Depends what degree of realism and what degree of Maxisism you want.

Start by modelling to scale.  If you want to go for realism then leave it that way, but the game angle will (realistically) make it look slightly squished (if it looks like Bing bird's eye view it's right!) and your building will only really fit with a minority of buildings.  Given that we percieve this angle as squished you will probably want to take the compromise approach of scaling up 1.3-1.5x  - this will remove the 'squish'.  This is the most popular approach and will generally give a 4-5m floor height.  Some people model this stretch; some apply it after.

You then move into Maxisism - Because Maxis made the buildings and sims to wildly different scales (why?) you may want to exaggerate the height of the ground floor.  This makes it look better against the sims and most street level props, but stupid against the cars - which are scaled correctly.

Finally Maxis use lower floor heights for taller buildings - for towers you probably want an exaggerated ground floor, but other floors to scale or even slightly less if you want to fit in with the Maxis look.

[woodb3kmaster]

Thank you three for your answers! I am especially grateful to zero7 for his very detailed response. It seems that Jon has already BATted with the scale I've been considering (my original wording might not be all that clear, but the scale I'm talking about is 5m between the centers of floor planes), and the SHUR buildings look pretty well-scaled relative to other in-game buildings, so I'll go with that as my new scale. It also seems that the Burj Dubai has approximately the same average floor height, after taking vertical scaling into consideration. Hopefully I'll have something to show you all in my BAT thread regarding this topic soon!

As an aside, out of curiosity I measured the height of my condo room's ceiling above the floor and was shocked to find that it's only seven feet. I'd be interested to know what the floor height in my area's skyscrapers is, just for comparison's sake...