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Topic Title: Twinkle, twinkle, little BAT... Topic Summary: madhatter106's tea party - he's gone batty... Created On: May-09-2008 09:06 PM Status: Post and Reply |
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#1396889
May-09-2008 09:06 PM
So I've been messing around in an attempt to come up with what I'm calling a New Age/Occult Pack of buildings - tarot and palm readers, psychics, and new age bookstore and occult shop. It doesn't seem like anything like that has been done on the STEX, and I thought it would add a little flavor to some of the lower wealth commercial areas. |
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Edited: 01/07/2009 at 02:19 AM by madhatter106
#1396895
May-09-2008 09:10 PM
| Woops, forgot to add - I'll need some help with the numbers when I'm lotting these - I defer to the experts and more seasoned players/BATers/modders when it comes to appropriate values for capacity, power, water, etc.
I have downloaded SC4Tools and have done a little delving, but a lot of these little shops are small affairs - usually only one or two working in that front room reading the cards and the teas leaves and whatnot...so I will be asking more questions soon...  |
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#1396898
May-09-2008 09:18 PM
| They're looking good so far. All I have to recommend is to study how things look in the game and tweak and test your building accordingly. For neon, you can create a direct spotlight which faces the neon tubes. Then you can change it's properties so that the light will only travel as far as the sign, but won't keep on going to hit whatever is behind it. I forgot the name of that property, so you'll have to check the BAT Essentials tutorial in the omnibus. As far as modding goes, remember that the numbers don't make any sense realistically. Just go by what similar Maxis buildings do. For example, in real life houses only have a few people in them, but they have a dozen people in the game. |
#1397128
May-10-2008 10:08 AM
| This is looking really nice so far, and I like the idea as well. I second Jason, though: To get an impression of the textures, I'd plop some of your buildings into a city made up of Maxis buildings (or photo-edit them into a screenshot showing such a city) - if your BATs stand out visually, then you may have to tweak and adapt them. That's a very important factor, and even some of the best BATs may suffer from it: they may be absolutely superb both in modeling and in texturing, and when they are among themselves, the look might be more than impressive. However, when you test-plop some among similarly sized Maxis houses, you may find out that the BATs differ in saturation and colour hue, and this makes them stand out and prevents them from mixing well with the surroundings. |
| If a man walked into a lonely forest and said something, and no woman could hear him, would he still be wrong? |
#1397220
May-10-2008 12:40 PM
| These are looking pretty good. I take it they could fit on 1x1 squares (that's a really under batted niche)? I have two suggestions. Some of the roof textures look a tad bleached out to me though. Also the doors look a little short and squashed to me. Other than that these look really promising. I look forward to seeing what you do with the backs of them. |
| Check Out My BATs in Progress |
#1397404
May-10-2008 06:11 PM
| RE: the color saturation - yeah, I find that I forget that the steps between BAT and the final lotting tend to bleach out the saturation on the textures. I've noticed it especially on the roofs. I should aim to darken them a hair to overcompensate for this bleaching in the final steps...
RE: the textures and lot size - I haven't lotted or grown them in a city yet, so can't say for certain how they match up with the Maxis buildings. We shall see. But I'll be losing some detail since most of these, especially the single story buildings, are all fitting on a 1x1 square area. (These are zoom 5 screenshots taken in the preview render in BAT.) The lots themselves may be 1x2 or 2x1 if I decide to add parking, but the buildings won't occupy more than a 1x1 square. I'm considering to do different versions, both with and without parking. I think the purple on the tarot building may be a little much, but it's part of the cheese factor of these buildings - there's not subtlety when dealing with these, hehehe... RE: door scale - yeah, I need to raise the door heights on the single story buildings for certain. I have a tendency to forget about the 1/3 drop in height once the rendering is done, which accounts for those doors looking so squat and short. It's almost glaring in the single story buildings, and it's on my list to fix. RE: the backs - the backs are done, mostly rear doors/steps/windows with piping and/or junk. I just didn't include the screenshots here. Also the sides for the tarot and the palm readers have silly painted details on the stucco - a tarot card and giant palm, respectively. You'd be amazed how junky these sorts of buildings look in real life, and it's what I'm trying to capture in these BATs. (Hence the aim for CS$ on the single story ones.) I'm still mulling over lighting issues - the phillipbo BAT tutorial only has basic lighting concepts, and I find most of the threads concerning lighting on this forum are of the "I can't get the night lights to show up in game" variety. Perhaps my search-fu is weak in this regard, but I've found precious little with regard to actual lighting techniques being the subject/main body of threads. (I haven't delved into personal BAT threads/discussions, so perhaps my elusive quarry is there.) I guess I'll keep digging and playing around in BAT. I'm a bit fuzzled over the difference between "night lighting" and "night texture" and the possibly difference between these two effects... |
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#1397460
May-10-2008 08:16 PM
| "Night texture" (or "night map") is what you see on most windows. It is usually a cloudy yellow image over the windows. To do this, you just select whatever you want to light up, and you type "nitelite" infront of its name. "Night lights" in general is whatever shows up at night in the game. But within the context of night maps, night lights would be actual lights that shine at night. To make a light a nitelite, you select a light, and type "nitelite" infront of its name. On your buildings, the windows used nitemaps, and you used night lights on the brown and green building, and to give some glow to the light on the tarot card building. As you've noticed, nitemaps aren't actually lights and don't create light. They are just textures which the BAT overlays after the render. So they don't glow or cast shadows or anything. All you need to know for lighting for now is in the BAT Essentials tutorial. To get any effect you would change the properties of that light. But lighting in Gmax isn't very good in general, so it will take a lot of practice and experimenting to get it to look right. For example, for the tarot card building's orb light, you could make the color of the omni more yellow, to match the orb, and you could make the intensity lower because the light itself should be brighter than the glow. About the colors, there isn't really a difference between your preview renders and what you export, that's just a myth. There's a little bit because of file compression, but as a whole it's the same. As T Wrecks said, you can photoshop your preview renders into a screenshot of your city to judge them, and this is a reliable method. It might seem like there is a change in the image, but that's because before you were looking at it on a solid black background, while in the game you're looking at it among the colors of the game. Your profile says you're into costume design and digital painting, which are good for BATing. For costume design I'm guessing that there are concepts related to detail and color, and creating the costumes not so that they're realistic, but so that they look good when viewed or filmed a certain way. For BATs it's the same thing. |
#1398071
May-12-2008 05:01 AM
| great little bats here very nice work |
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#1398173
May-12-2008 10:48 AM
very nice textured.. you could also try to improve those windows, would be good  |
-Uploaded Works -UHW Project(on hold) -My Showcase (come and see :p) -Lights in gmax -Scaling issues
-my 1000th post XD -My site  |
#1398789
May-13-2008 12:26 PM
| So I managed to darken the roofs a bit and I lotted them and grew a bunch in a test city in-game. The roofs still look pale (my monitor must need some severe color calibration) on a couple of them - specifically the edging on the psychic and the tarot card reader.
Is there a way of re-exporting them, without having to go through the same run-through of the Plug-In Manager and Lot Editor afterwards? (Not that they take too much time, was just wondering...) |
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#1398794
May-13-2008 12:53 PM
| To do these right you're going to need to download the sc4 tool and maybe the ilive reader. The maxis plugin manager creates all sorts of wonky stats. What you'll need to do is find a comparable maxis building in the sc4 tool's database. Next load your desc file and set the stats (garbage, pollution etc) based on the maxis building. While you're at it, if you don't want to redo your lots, you can rerender and change the resource field value to match the new model |
| Check Out My BATs in Progress |
#1398827
May-13-2008 02:15 PM
| It's better to not do the actual modding until you're happy with your export. For testing it in the game, I just make a landmark lot, and I change the plop cost to zero. Instead of exporting though, you can take a bunch of screenshots from the game, and put them in your image editing program (Photoshop?). Then when you do a preview render in Gmax, you can take a screenshot of that, and you can edit it into the screenshots from the game. This also allows you to compare changes you made since the last time you rendered, by comparing them in Photoshop.
Your monitor might need calibration. Either way though, you should be able to judge your roof compared to the game's roofs, since they're both being displayed on the same monitor. |
#1398896
May-13-2008 04:24 PM
| I do have SC4Tools, and used it to tweak the stats in these lots. The Plug-In Manager does indeed come up with some strange and wonky stats - but a good comparison of in-game Maxis buildings and similar sized/themed/capacity quality STEX downloads has helped.
In the end, I have some workable stats and I don't mind reconfiguring the exports...I managed to see what they look like in-game, and the frequency of their growing at an early city's stage, plus I know that they'll grow at all with the stats I plugged into SC4Tools. (I do like the screenshot idea, and will use it in the future.) So I don't mind the extra step - it's like troubleshooting the visual as well as the logistics in one fell swoop. Plus I got to compare their lighting to the in-game as well as some downloaded low density CS$ stuff... I've been doing some reading on custom queries, as I think these new age ones might be goofy and quirky enough to warrant something fun...maybe a little custom pic in the query BG as well as a spooky/eerie/ghostly/mysterious sound. Plus a random goofy stat - such as "Number of palms tickled this week - 3" or "Incense sticks sold this month - 21" or somesuch silliness... |
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#1399058
May-13-2008 09:25 PM
You textures look amazing. My 2 things I'd suggest is putting something in some of the windows, like a magazine rack (easy to make, just a box with some pics on it) just for detail and please please don't ruin these with bad night lights  use actual lights with the prefix "nitelite" the night maps look pretty bad on windows |
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#1399136
May-14-2008 12:22 AM
| use actual lights with the prefix "nitelite" the night maps look pretty bad on windows Yeah, I do have little shelves and boxes/knicknacks in the large windows for the two-story bookstores. They look great at night... No, I haven't used night textures on the windows (or at least, on the large windows). Some of them will have little neon signs in them, but all the large front bay windows are not night-textured but lit from within. |
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#1400564
May-16-2008 04:39 PM
So I'm compiling these into what I'm calling The New Age & Occult Pack - Vol. 1 - the models have been revised, rendered, lotted, modded, and tested to grow in game. I've added some customization to the queries (mainly images at the bottom, with a goofy stat response curve statistic fitting the proper establishment.) So far there are six, and they are... |
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#1401438
May-18-2008 01:06 PM
| The STEX has technical issues with certain characters. I think "&" might be one of them. I'm not sure about "-" or "." though, but there might be issues with those too. "The New Age and Occult Pack Volume 1" would probably work better. The first thing I would do for the overlay textures, is see if you can't change the lot so that you don't need them in the first place. It depends on the design of your lot, but often times people use dependencies which aren't necessary in carrying out the lot design. You don't need to contact someone in order to use someone's work as a dependency. Texture packs are less common than prop packs, but they work in the same way. It's good of you to check though. |
#1488337
Nov-26-2008 06:53 AM
| So I have been absent for a while, though BATing in my head from time to time when I see an interesting store front or architectural detail. I've begun working on a few buildings for the sequel to my earlier New Age and Occult Pack, and have a couple of quick questions for you kind readers/forum peeps...
- Is there a color/intensity shift between the final render in gmax and once the building is seen in-game? - in terms of peaked roofs(such as seen in a typical residential house), anyone have a good reference angle that they use as a starting point ? Everything I make looks too sharp and pointy, or too flat and squat...it's that 1/3 squishing factor of seeing things in gmax versus how they end up rendered which is hampering my efforts... - if I have some cool roof junk that I wanted to use in another BAT, what's the best way of getting it on to a building I've just created? Is there some way of cutting and pasting certain selections between BATs? Thanks as always! |
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#1488396
Nov-26-2008 10:50 AM
| - Not really. It has to do with perception, you'd be used to seeing your building in isolation against the black matting. But in the game you see it among the game's buildings and their colors and values.
- I guess I'd just experiment with the angles. If one angle is too steep and another is too shallow then the right angle should be somewhere in between. Different parts of the world and regions have different traditional roof angles, and not only that, but individual building types have different pitches as well. You may want to find photos of real buildings and find out what those angles are. - First, in the scene with what you want to "copy", group it into an object and give it an identifiable name, and then save the scene. Then, in the scene where you want to "paste" the object, go to File>Merge, find your other file, and then in the new window pick and choose what you want to merge into the current scene. |
#1491236
Dec-01-2008 11:52 PM
| So I've been plugging away on the second New Age and Occult pack. See attached...I've gotten four of them modelled and two are already textured. Thinking of varying the roof junk a little bit, and losing a dormer on the left and right side of Wanda's Wiccan Wonders...I may have gone dormer-happy. May also reduce the lighting on the porch for Pedro's, it's looking really bright...and I need to play with the neon in the window of Bela's, it's not looking as bright as I'd like... Thoughts and comments appreciated, especially when it comes to texture color saturation...  |
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Edited: 01/07/2009 at 02:00 AM by madhatter106
#1491288
Dec-02-2008 03:23 AM
| I like the first one and the other too, but more the first one |
-Uploaded Works -UHW Project(on hold) -My Showcase (come and see :p) -Lights in gmax -Scaling issues
-my 1000th post XD -My site |
#1491293
Dec-02-2008 03:49 AM
| very nice buildings |
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#1491369
Dec-02-2008 12:13 PM
| Haha! These are so much fun! They'll add some nice variety to smaller commercial areas. |
#1491396
Dec-02-2008 01:21 PM
| these houses look good ! great work ! |
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#1491603
Dec-02-2008 09:01 PM
Thanks for the thumbs up, all. Here's the textured (but not yet nightlighted) BAT for Wanda's Wiccan Wonders. One wonders whether the base foundation texture might look a touch too limey green? |
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Edited: 01/07/2009 at 01:58 AM by madhatter106
#1491655
Dec-02-2008 10:06 PM
| Nice work Madhatter. However, you may want to decrease the saturation of the green in Photoshop, or change the 'amount' in the 'maps' dropdown in the material editor. I really like the roof texture, the gradient from dark to light at the top really suits this type of structure. Nicely done. |
#1491708
Dec-02-2008 11:26 PM
| Very awesome indeed. I think the base should be much less green, and more gray. After all, houses of this style usually have a significant foundation of stone or plastered bricks etc. and no one usually paints those. The rest of the building could use some *subtle* desaturation, don't do crazy though, I kinda like the character you gave it.
All and all, excellent job, -Todd |
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#1491769
Dec-03-2008 04:12 AM
| I have to agree with both about the green walls dude, but nice work |
-Uploaded Works -UHW Project(on hold) -My Showcase (come and see :p) -Lights in gmax -Scaling issues
-my 1000th post XD -My site |
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