autoVino's bat projects

[Pat]

Auto i really loving the progress on that casino its looking better and better each and everytime 

btw welcome to pg 6

[autoVino]

Thanks, patfirefghtr

Huston, we have a problem...
1 gig of ram and 4 gigs of virtual memory aren't enough to even do a zoom five preview render... Im really scared.

I think I saw a way to resolve this issue somewhere on the internet (It was a cunning mix of fg, gi, caustic maps, and max scripting...)
I'm also worried that this will be to big for one s3d model, I mean, there are only so many textures ids you can use per s3d... after 16 it gets a bit tricky.
For now here's a perspective of inside detailing:


Fayette is the name of a mall not too far away from me (and in this case it will serve as a jewlery store)
and PF Chang's is a really good place to eat.  I have about a megabyte more of different logos and signs that I can use...  As you can see, it's no where near to finished, needs some more work, and most likely it won't be visible for simcity, but who said this has to be for simicty? 

[Krio]

Oh my :/ Hopefully you can get this through. I once had same problem with my first PopMart-stage's giant LED-screen, when I really made 150 000 small "led" balls to form a pic. My machine, better stats than yours, was dying under the renderer 

[Pat]

WoW auto that sucks i hope you can get it corrected... So that is a mall you are trying to work on now... no zoom 5 eeeeeeeeeks must be a masive mall then? ? ? ?

[SimFox]

HYm... memory concerns...
Well first of all as much as I understand you are running 32bit version of MAX, right? if so then 4 Gb of virtual memory are pointless as in 32Bit environment a b´piece of software can not access more then 2Gb of it. In XP pro you can set this limit manually in ini to 3Gb. But that's it! One solution is to migrate to 64bit system!
As fo the size... well I was wondering when will this come to light... I was watching you to ad volume after another big volume to the project... There is only that much as LODs could encompass before GMAX BAT will reject them. One solution is to brake the entire thing into blocks to be assembled in LOT editor. In order to preserve the shadows and stuff you can have "missing" blocks right there when rendering  - just make them invisible to the camera.

The texture issue is something new to me... And I think you got it wrong... The s3d only has 1 (!) texture  and that is your rendered image of the building. Or do you mean number of slabs?? and IDs for those?? If so then this may be the limiting factor on the LOD size! as soon as it's area exceeds what could be covered by 16 (it that right?) 256x256 squares that export from GMAX fails. Well it is sort of logical given Hex nature of all indeces in SC. And if this is a case then then limitation is not in scripts but in proprietary DLL supplied with BAT for GMAX that does all the naming.
If this is a case hen it is a valuable discovery in it's own right as it would give clear indication to what is possible and what isn't in terms of model sizes! It also means that Metro Harbour View will never see the light of the games sun in one piece... 

[autoVino]

Bengt : Man, that does seem intensive, but the problem here isn't the fact that the render time is too long, there is no render time.  I'm not allowed to do a reneder of this size, there's not enough memory to store the bitmap information... 
patfirefghtr : Actually, this is the mall that's inside the Resort Hotel/Casino.  What you saw in the perspective render is tiny compared to the rest of the complex, just to put in to perspective.  But I think I'll go for taking this into a new dimension and cutting the building lod's into large slabs, so that render time will be decreased and so that I can fit 16 textures per s3d file...
SimFox : Ahh 64 bit system.  There is a solution in mentalraytips.blogspot.com as for how to do super large renders.  As of right now, I dirt poor (they charge way too much for books at school, what ever happened to taxes!  )  Not really, but I don't have enough money to upgrade to a 64 bit...
Yeah, I was waiting for this day to come (gmax probobly would've rejected this long before...).  Well, in order to better "seamless" lods, it may be better to just fit a large lod box, render it with the rest of the scene untouched, and do it over again with the rest of the lods.  This way in lot editor I can just simply put the props in one place and have a ready finished model!  For even more accuracy, I can use ilive's reader to specify a manual location for the prop models in the lot...
as for the textures, my mistake!  I ment the texture slabs, thanks for pointing that out.  I'm pretty sure this is the limmiting factor for lod size, for this is where the script causes an error 6.  There may be a way to fix this manually, but it would turn out to be increadibly tedious and it may be tricky to avoid id conflicts.
There is always to have texture slabs and lod slabs... kind of taking it a step up.

[mightygoose]

what is this long hand manual override to the code 6 error?

[autoVino]

Manually texturing the s3d files?
Simfox mentions it in the 3ds max think tank thread (or was it troubleshooting?), and it caught my attention for about a week.  That's about as far as it went. 
As my system rarely causes error 6, I'm just going to divide this model into a few seperate slabs, a crude way of putting it, and then just reassemble it in lot editor.  That way it could be downloaded as a few seperate downloads, and not as one huge one (and can be rendered more easily, but it will take longer).

[mightygoose]

erm im using your tutorials mrsun&sky setup, but when i delete the sun to get correct shadows from the sc4 lightrig, my exposure control goes out the window.... how exactly am i meant to export....

allow me to show you further....



any and all help appreciated....
MG
john

[SimFox]

erm im using your tutorials mrsun&sky setup, but when i delete the sun to get correct shadows from the sc4 lightrig, my exposure control goes out the window.... how exactly am i meant to export....

allow me to show you further....



any and all help appreciated....
MG
john

Why would you delete the sun??
What do you mean by "correct shadows"?

[mightygoose]

well if i leave the sun it does not rotate with the model and thus im left with shadows that are at a fixed angle, unlike in SC4 where they are at the same orientation to camera regardless of view direction...

[SimFox]

Oh, I see, you simply have to assemble new Rig. Open one of the rig files take the cameras from default rig ones, and delete all the lights, and put Sun and Sky in stead of them and save the file. I'm not sure if following is needed, but since it is so easy why not to do it - make 4 copies of the file and name them appropriately (with Big, Normal etc.) Also place one in startup folder of BAT. And that's it - you have new rig. When exporting Max will bring rig from the file as  External Reference - Xref

[autoVino]

and to add on, the reason the render is so dark is that the exposure control is ment for (if daylight is checked) a bright daylight scene, which is many times brighter than the standard omni light with intensity set to 1.
Of course, in 3ds max 2008, there is a new exposure control that solves this problem  (i think)

Have you tried resetting your camera and lights?  I've had this problem over the weekend, but it got magically solved... strange 

[SimFox]

Well, either Mental Ray 3,6 or the whole MAX camera setup will be mimicking V-Ray or Maxwell or Fry Render camera setup. I think it was Maxwell with it bombastic claim to be Physically accurate unbiased renderer who first introduced also Physically correct camera - with exposure, aperture ISO etc controls.

Difference of the Day scene vs normal lighting isn't just brightness but an enormous contrast! That 's why there have to be LOGARITHMIC  - nonlinear exposure. Renderers work in linear space, however our monitors aren't. Actually LCD are, but for compatibility issues they follow nonlinear 18-2.2 gamma of old CRT ons. so the picture have to be adjusted. Plus human vision isn't linear (and that is most important!) either.

I don't think resetting camera and light would do anything, though.
The question (to mightygoose) is what exactly do you want to accomlish? to use new lighting for export or to use old one?
If new, why then deleting the Sun?? And how shadows it gives are "not correct". If you want to use old one why to set up the Sun in the first place?

[mightygoose]

i wish to use a new render setup, i tried exporting and obviously the shadows were incorrect, so i deleted the sun hoping that just for a draft render i could use the old way, but obviously it isnt that easy. i know you probably think its obvious, but can you make a more detailed step by step of how to make that new rig.

[SimFox]

To use it you have to set up new rig and replace old one with it as I've written above.
In order for a new rig to cast shadows in right direction the sun has to be in the right spot in the sky, naturally. and this spot is XYZ -474,-352,575. Sky's placment is a bit trickier thing. It should be located at the same spot with sun also direction wise  (both targets should be at 0,0,0). But the problem is that when rig is Xrefed this sky's position is not respected by FG calculations. (I speak now about MR Sun and MR Sky, if you use other types of Sky - disregard this.  At any rate I suggest for you to place Sun and Sky at the same spot. It is a good start.

[autoVino]

Thanks, SimFox, for explaining all that, It saves me a good bit of time.

Haven't been very active lately... I'm home today, and not at sports because of a high heat index... everything got cancelled.

Anyway, here are some examples of real roof junk, this is on the convention center portion of Mandalay Bay Resort.

Here is an example of some technology that I gound at a casino.  My best guess would be a powerplant or a very powerful cooling system, probably the latter because a powerplant usually creats emmisions, this one doesn't.  It could be very likely nuclear, but those requiere some pretty strong cooling systems and are usually located by a large water source... besides Las Vegas has the Hovver Dam.


Here are some tests that I did with the roof.  THese may look very bad, but this is because they are not final (they take about 5min rendering time each!)
(they're of decent loading size, so I'll just link them.)
http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x62/autoVino/3a.jpg
http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x62/autoVino/2a.jpg
http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x62/autoVino/2.jpg
http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x62/autoVino/1.jpg
http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x62/autoVino/3.jpg

They are some varients, but I don't think I'll keep them.

[mightygoose]

definately the first photo is the best of those... remember the grains on those dark and well oversaturated textures would be metres across if that were real... tbh i think the grain is fine enough to get away with it entirely on material with no bitmap.

[autoVino]

I think that the grain should be fine, I rendered a 5000px by 5000px image for photoshop, and worked from there.

[Pat]

Auto i agreed with MG the first one is defintly a keeper