Marcszar's BATs

[flame1396]

I hear 3ds max renders will save some of that detail

[Jasoncw]

It can render things more sharply, and I think his detail would be visible, but the overhang of the cornice covers it up. 

[SimFox]

Unfortunately MAX wouldn't save most of the details. One reason is the view angle, and here no matter what you do if it is obscured by something it is obscured! Another thing is that a lot of detailing is very visible and clear because you see outline around it - remove it and most will fade away. Now here Max may offer some help there are some shaders that support such an outline, but problem would be scale - one pixel at zoom5 is something between 5 and 7 cm.

[mightygoose]

the thing is though, although you cant see it in sc4 we know it is there... which is enough for me.

[Fledder200]

OMG!! 
they look so amazing!!!! i realy love the detail!!
can't wait to see the real stuff!

[Krio]

Detailing is excellent! The firestairs and the roof..ooh the roofjunk is so..fresh. Many batters, like me just throw some ready made roofjunk, but your roof is beautiful and breathtaking.

[Zaphod]

This is a great building

I like the addition of some sort of shop downstairs? what is it?

[Jasoncw]

Very nice!   

[cammo2003]

I love the roof junk. It has that sort of random feel, though it still has some semblance of organisation... which is about how most roofjunk likely is.

The detail on the whole building though is amazing. I look forward to seeing these textured. 

[SimFox]

Are you making those in Rihno?

[toxicpiano]

Yeah I think it is, from what I can remember from mr marc's first BATs?
I love sketchup. It's so easy to use it's hilarious.
How easy is rhino?

[rooker1]

Awesome work.  I love the details.  The roof junk, antenia and the laundry.  All great stuff.



Robin 

[Ehanson]

Extraordinary work! This is an authentic BAT that looks like its from the Lower East Side.

Can't wait to see it textured up in BAT.

[JosefBrisko135]

Very beautiful thsi is perhaps one of the nicest buildings i've seen so far 

[mightygoose]

impressive detail indeed.

[Sim Shady]

can't help with with your rendering problems, but i must say the building is coming along quite nicely 

[Jasoncw]

Mental Ray is what I use.  You want to increase your samples, and you want to have your filter set to Lanscoz (spelled wrong).  You also want to increase your Final Gather settings (20 should be plenty), and you want to increase the number of bounces from 0 to 2 or 5 or whatever looks nice.

The AA settings for Mental Ray are at the top of the Renderer tab.  Final Gather and Bounces are at the lower end of the Indirect Illumination tab.

Both Mental Ray and V-Ray can do photo-realistic renders, it's just a matter of using them right.  For SC4 purposes though, you don't need to know very much.

[iamgoingtoeatyou]

^ didn't understand a word jason said, batting language is so alien to me

anyways, the detail on those are incredible marczar, fantastic job!

[tag_one]

^^ this goes further that BAT. it's 3ds max language 
I can't follow it too, but at least something beautifull is comming out 

[SimFox]

Some of the issue you've pointed Like the quality of the shadows have little to nothing to do with rendering engine you use. You have to go to your lighting and shadows to fix those.
There is No point in using anything but scanline with default lighting rig. V-Ray or MR are worthwhile propositions if you look for different lighting - Sun & Sky type one. There are numerous advantages for such a setup. Among other are far superior shadows and possibility to use Global Illumination solution (instead of dozen or so lights) to provide indirect illumination.
This said i believe that in MAX 9 Mental Ray should be your render of choice. It has couple of advantages over the V-ray in regard of BAT. Main one being that V-ray is not compatible with night scenes as they are done with BAT scripts. It would simply ignore the changes in ambient light. Also it's environmental light (one that is most efficient for GI) is also incompatible with BAT scripts. It all solvable, but why to bother when all the tools used by MR are 100% compatible and in some respects the way MR handles materials and particularly blurred reflection/refractions is far superior to that of V-Ray.
For MAX9 with MR you have to consider using either MR Sun/Sky combo, or simple imitation of such a daylight system with a directional light (as a sun) and skylight  (as a sky) Each solution has some strong and some weak points.
MR Sun/Sky rig has advantage of properly dispersing shadows (the farther the shadow is from the point of origin the weaker and blurrier it gets). This is a small marvel replication of which would otherwise require the use of Areal light with area shadows that may bog done render the bad way. Also setup process is very simple and the rig like that is totally size independent. Drawback is that you would have to get down and dirty with Logarithmic exposure controls and with Gamma correction to get your textures to look right. TBut learning all that is quite essential if you wanna do something in 3D. Also when XReffed by max rig is loosing proper sky position, or to be precise the proper orientation of sky gradient texture. The result of this is hat your sky reverts to the top down state despite the MR Sky icon suggesting otherwise. One solution is to have Sky separately set inside of your model file (you would have to have two skys then, one for day and identical for night (like nite-Sky). There are other solutions but they are rather complicated and still untested properly.
Simple sun/Sky with a direct light and Skylight have on their side excessive simplicity and flexibility of choosing on your own and directly color of either, plus no need to fiddle with Logarithmic exposure. Drawbacks are sharp (if you use ray-traced and you shouldn't use anything else) shadows and somewhat flat appearance (still much better one then with default rig which is a mess and some of rigs in Bat4Max are totally screwed and shouldn't be used as is). To improve the shadows you can set your Sun to be a (with MR) a MR Area Spot. this way you can get those properly dispersing shadows like with MR Sun, problem is that you would have to play quite a bit to get that right, plus this is still a spot light meaning that rays and consequently your shadows wouldn't be parallel, but will spread out  which is, strictly speaking, impossible for a sun!  Also in the end such a solution may prove slower to render then with MR Sun/Sky. In addition to that you have to be aware that default Max' skylight is in fact spherical, not hemispherical like icon would indicate. so you HAVE to have a ground plane to cut off the light coming from down under.