CAL's BAT Cave

[callagrafx]

Bengt:  Sometimes it's not so great...that last one was rendered at 1am. And I do charge enough, that's for sure 

Yoder:  Been working on it  (see below)

Jac:  Thanks as always...nice to see you here.

Simfox:  I grabbed it from archidom.net as the in-house flora generator is a bit lacking.  I'm looking at Onyx or maybe Xfrog as I do more and more of these.  The material is a generic foliage without any form of alpha, the leaves are actually shaped, so it's rather heavy on the ole polycount.

Neal: Less of a god methinks.  You wouldn't believe the time spent.  And Max does a lot of the work as well.

As I mentioned, I've been playing with how it looks orthographically and here's what BAT sees (standard lightrig, scanline renderer for simplicity):







I know SC4 is a rooftop game, but I think there's too much rooftop and not a lot else...which will make for a fairly dull LOT IMO...I don't want to spend a long time on this to find it looks bleah ingame.  Opinions definitely wanted.

[Krio]

Could you change wall textures? In SC4 they look kind of plastic. And could you add a place where to "park" you bicycle?

[Antoine]

simply word : WOW 

[Madeira aka Constantina]

nice

[Sim Shady]

like you said, sc4 is a roof-top game, so maybe you should slap a few roof junk things to spice it up, even if its not totally realistic.  Also i think the basketball court needs its texture toned down a bit; a little too bright.

Fantastic job on this so far 

[kimcar]

  Beautifull  Great bat and work 

[callagrafx]

I think the whole point of this building was to display roof junk...

..so I'm pretty sure the roof junk will turn out great.   

(Great work, BTW, Callagrafx  )

Actually, most of the installations are internal...that's the company's main USP, most of the air-handling units are inside, therefore do not need protecting from the elements and are easier to access for maintenance.  Displaying this is a bitch, but strategic use of opacity maps gets the job done....And most roof junk around these days is old legacy stuff.

The basketball court is actually 3 courts, but yeah, most of the textures need to change as they were done for Mental Ray with an IES sky sun rig, so the ole BAT lighting rig makes them incandescent.

[cammo2003]

I think you need to scale the buildings up as well... They look a little, ahem, flat.

As far as textures - the main problem is a lack of variation. I know these sorts of schools don't have a terrible lot of variation (unlike older schools like the high school I attended which opened in 1956, which was a bit of a mish-mash of buildings).

I'd consider using a black gravelly/asphalt kind of texture for the basketball courts. It'd be a good contrast. On the other hand, a coloured texture might work better (to enhance said contrast.

A few things to consider:

- There's no outdoor assembly area. Although there's an assembly hall, such items are usually only used for major assemblies/graduations etc... For the more regular assemblies (for school announcements etc.) an outdoor assembly area is used (and these sometimes serve dual-duty as an emergency meeting point in case of fire etc.). It might be worthwhile to include this.

- The buildings are very tightly packed. In SimCity terms this is likely more practical, but there aren't many sprawling schools around the SC community. It might be worth the while to BAT a couple of smallish buildings to plonk some distance from the main area. There's rarely much logic to a school layout. 

That flora looks amazing.

[bat]

That's looking really great, callagrafx!

[MAS71]

Wow!!
It's Incredible work CAL san!!
Great!! It's really great!!

Before,,,,
Thank you very much for update the "CAL Canal Aqueduct BSC" !!
I'm sorry to my bad English (request).
It was made you confuse.
I must learn English more before study the BAT and MOD


and
I'm sorry to late "Thanks" for then.
(I can't have enough times to look(join) SC4D and forum now. )


Ok,
I'm looking forward to a completion this your new great work CAL san!! 

[threestooges]

The constuct as a whole looks quite good. I wouldn't scrap this project too quickly. The right props would make this thing come alive. As bengt suggested, bikes/bike racks would be a nice touch. As for the roof junk (or lack thereof) I think it looks fine right now. It has some stuff going on up there, but nothing too busy. Then again, most of the schools I have attended have been in CA so there isn't much call for heating (or even A/C) units. One thing that might be interesting that my undergrad campus (Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles) used, was solar panels. It seems like a contemporarstyle school like this would be on the cutting edge of things like that and would be useful to fill any areas that look excessively open. Again, very nice design. I'll be interested to see where this goes.

[jacqulina]

thanks lee good to see you are well my friend,and still doing awesome work 

[Sim Shady]

Whew! we got alot of constructive critism for ya don't we 

[FrankU]

Now everyone is communicating about the school, so I'm probably a bit late....

But I just discovered this thread and am amazed of what you did to Simgoobers canals. I will download them this afternoon. Including the stunning aqueduct!
Pity though, that we won't have diagonal canals.
Oppies are very nice, including the very easy to handle diagonals.
Maybe someone feels challenged?

Great work, thanks a lot. Without people like you, SC4 would have become dull within 6 months.

[callagrafx]

* cough cough...

Been a while since the Cave was opened, but I've been busy working on my small contributions to the Birthday Bash.  Here's the first one, Celestia.

A set of 3 LOTs including a R$$$ (4x4) Stage 7 Apartment block, an R$$$ (3x3) Stage 8 Apartment block and an R$$ (4x3) stage 8 apartment block plus a CAMeLOT R$$ Stage 9 Tower block.

[TheTeaCat]

Oh my word 
stunning just stunning


TTC

[Traff]

The Celestia Lofts look great. Very nice work.
And the school looks outstanding. Many hours I bet

[FrankU]

WOW!

[jacqulina]

hi lee hows you,excellent work there my friend

[jayo]

Great work-is it supposed to be a UK modern tower block?