non-asian branch of SimFox' pixel torture chamber

[SimFox]

i can sed that one to right away so you could CAMeLOT it while I'll iron out some remaining issues with rendering

[RippleJet]

The picture below shows the first CAMeLot with the Red House (R§§ stage 12 on a 3×2 lot):
The name of it is just for SimFox to understand...



SimFox, you need to make a custom LOD for it.
As it is now, no props can be placed at the entrance...

If that's where the entrance is... the building doesn't have a door!

[thundercrack83]

Well, that looks great in the game, SimFox! Great job! And great work with the testing, RippleJet!

[zero7]

So we're finally going to get a SimFox building to play with .... 

Looks excellent in game.

[MIncroabl]

Now this does look nice! Can't wait to get my hands on it and do a little modding of my own.

The name of it is just for SimFox to understand...

I'm glad I've studied Russian for 5 years.

...And barely understand the name...

[Antoine]

OMG ! What a BAT !!

[jeronij]

It looks perfect in game 

I hope you can iron these issues soon, and we can see the nightlights as well 

[SimFox]

I'll be doing manual export and assembly for this one and with next BAT I'll have to take a longer look at scripts and MR to find out what causes this problems.

BTW I have a question to all who use MAX. Do any of you have your system Units set to be inches?

[SimFox]

Bump
the red is done. I've spend almost two days manually rendering and assembling the whole thing as normal export wouldn't go due to that system unit mismatch... anyway. the TruNite  regular version of it should be available for download shortly as soon as I'll put together some passable lot for it



and here are big Zoom5 views:
click on thumbnails to see the whole picture



RippleJet so how about CAMeLOT?? should I send you new model file or will you send me the Desc

[Krio]

What is with horrible doubleposting and bumbing old theards 

Ooh, beautiful! Release these and I'll forgive you.

[Madeira aka Constantina]

i like to see a lilac version please.

[iamgoingtoeatyou]

now that is nice!

[Antoine]

OMG They are excellent !!!!!!

[RippleJet]

RippleJet so how about CAMeLOT?? should I send you new model file or will you send me the Desc

Send me the model and I'll send the SC4Lot file back, which includes the building exemplar (desc file).
The lot will have only basic Maxis base textures, nothing else.

For lotting in LotEditor, that file needs to be in the root of your plugins.
By saving (not saving as) from LE, you will be able to keep those two files within the SC4Lot file.

[callagrafx]

BTW I have a question to all who use MAX. Do any of you have your system Units set to be inches?

Nope...metres all the way.  Why would one set the units to a sub-measure unless you were modelling an object rather than architecture?...and even then you'd probably be better off with cm.

[SimFox]

Ripple:
I'm sending it now!

Callagrafx:
Apparently MentalRay particularly its GI is set to work with inches. When some changes had been made to it (I think in a version 3.2) to redefine and make much more precise the GI calculations there was a question what should be taken as an unit, and since US is a biggest market it was decided to stick with inches as a unit. Anyway I ended up switching from Meters to inches because I had odd artifacts popping up on concave surfaces when I used Mental Ray. The problem was limited ONLY to mental ray. Scanline and Vray work fine! But I can not use V-ray for BAT because of it's camera settings and I actually like the look MR gives to exterior scenes better then that of V-ray. Plus it works wonders with glossy materials and FG with Self-illuminated materials is a killer! Anyway back to the reasons I switched to inches - I've traced problem to ray-traced shadows and then to units. So when I switch to inches as a SYSTEM unit problem is gone! So i decided to keep that settings as I've came across of statment by one quite expirienced and trust worth person that one should touch that settings at a risk of all sort of MR problems. Only when I was tweaking GI for RED did I realized the world of difference in realism that having "right" system unit means!

[autoVino]

about doing exporting manually, I'm pretty sure there's a way to copy part of the script and "feed" it the images that you use.  Or write a script that automatically and correctly names all the texture slabs that you make.
Also, I've been able to succesfuly export individually each zoom and rotation (not sure about day/night views yet, this may be tricky) and then recombine them using the scripts that came with bat4max.  Meaning that I did a seperate export that only did a certain zoom and rotation, then putting the output files together and getting it into a model. (this makes rendering a lot less frustrating when for some odd reason your render crashes... so instead of restarting, just start from where you left off.  But, after each render it is mandatory that the output files are backed up, or there may be some trouble...)
Hopefully the same principals can be applied to day/night renders making trunight easier to export.

[SimFox]

Auto!!
That is very interesting topic!! I mean exporting separately each zoom/rotation! Could you send me that script? or part of it and may be some instructions???

[callagrafx]

Apparently MentalRay particularly its GI is set to work with inches. When some changes had been made to it (I think in a version 3.2) to redefine and make much more precise the GI calculations there was a question what should be taken as an unit, and since US is a biggest market it was decided to stick with inches as a unit.

That stands to reason...thanks for the info, I'll try it out with some stuff I'm doing, although I've not really noticed any artifacts as such.  I had a problem with highly reflective concave surfaces and MR (rendered black where there was a bright highlight) on 64bit but SP2 sorted that out.  I'll have to take a closer look.

[SimFox]

Callagrafx:
Well my guess was quite close...
Here is the info from the man involved in the development of Mental Ray concerning that inch/meter issue:

"It seems from my research that max places the orthographic camera "100000" units from the scene. The problem is that a single precision float (which all geo data in mr is, to save space) is only accurate to about 8 decimals.... so this is why values in inches (that tend to be in the 0.5-10 range) work fine whereas the same number in *meters* which end up being approximately 0.002-0.25 go beyond the decimal limits.... i.e. 100000.5 can be expressed cleanly in single precision float, whereas 100000.002 can't...."

and here is an illustration of the problem I see with GI:

one on the left is with inches and is correct in my view. One on the right is with meters, and I think it is NOT correct
but here with RED it is even more obvious: look at th area Under the roof canopy:
I think in some cases (when the most of the light is the bounced one) the difference is WAY to big to ignore


BTW did your artifacts look anything like these: