Cogeo's BAT showcase

[cogeo]

OK, here is another preview (HD):



The changes I made are:
- Decreased hue of the wall texture by 2 points. The lime-ish tint has gone, but I'm afraid it was way too much (the contrast between the wall and the roof pavement has almost gone as well). Maybe I'll try an intermediate value.
- Extended the light on the column upwards. So the column now is almost completely lit. I'm not sure if this looks really better though.
- Added nightlights (for the columns' bases). Not anything radical I think, and this was really missing.
- The attempted enhancement for the column head didn't quite work, this needs revisiting.
- Used a modified version of the Maxis blue nitewindows. This is less saturated, and the colour's hue has been lowered. In addition I performed some special colour adjustment, so that the highlights are almost white (darker areas have a slight but noticeable blue tint). This was to better emulate a "cool white" light colour.
- Made the skylight somewhat smaller, I think it looks better now.

SimFox, below are my replies to your comments:
- The pavement is indeed too much "perfect", I will attempt some slight differentiation amongst the tiles. Maybe I will remove some red, to ease its pinkish look.
- I had tried using less fine-grained textures, with "dirt", "imperefections" etc, and the result was... detrimental, esp on the side walls. Even tried making those "realistic" textures a separate layer (over a nearly "perfect" background texture) and experimented with various opacity settings. It didn't quite work. This may be OK for making a barn, an old factory or a run-down building, but how about when making a building which you want to look quite well-maintained? Actually the fine-grain texture had to be further modified (reduce contrast, to make it looking even more "flat") and I wonder if this was actually too little, or some blurring would make it looking better actually. Btw, a tutorial on texturing a clean, well-maintained wall (without looking "flat" or "plastic") would be really useful. There have been quite a few tutorials about making a run-down (or "aged") buildings, but I can't find a single one for the former case (and this is actually harder imo).
- I don't quite agree with what you have said about the colour. Yes, the fidelity of the source might be poor, but attempting to perform a software-implemented "white balance restoration" on a shot captured by that "low-fidelity source", and this only to determine what the colour "should" be, doesn't make much sense, I'm afraid. Many factors like the camera itself, the time-of-day, or the background colour come into play, and such "white balance restoration" algorithms are quite sensitive to these. Furthermore, I didn't take this shot (yes it's from a mobile phone) to determine the colour, only to have some architectural details available, which I couldn't memorize all. And I can asure you, the real colour is not pinkish at all, it's a rather "cool" yellow actually. Btw where did you take that amplified-saturation colour sample from, ingame or the pics I posted? And from a day or a night shot?

And sorry for using thumbnails, it's because images are often too big (disrupts the forum formatting), and also helps keep imageshack from deleting the images (it's ad-powered!). Clicking on the image (after it is downloaded) displays it unscaled (1:1).

[SimFox]

I'll get back to you in a couple of days when I get back home from Budapest.