Alex' Belgian BAT Thread

[mattb325]

The model is looking so much nicer with the newly enhanced textures.

About the stonework at the base - you are partly correct: at the present resolution, each of those blocks will not be visible in game.
But the larger lines, the light and shade - all of which 'trick the eye' (trompe l'oeil) into believing it sees stonework are there.

Particularly with a signature bat such as this which will likely be plopped once in a city and probably surrounded by water/flora etc, the user will in fact be looking long and hard at the BAT because there won't be much else around the castle. That means you'd probably think twice about cutting the usual corners with smaller BATs designed to blend in with the urban landscape.

Besides, you've seen how much a simple hue shift can change the feel of the BAT, so it pays to follow that through.

CG Textures have tons of stonework pictures: I just downloaded the first one I could find. I then downloaded two stain decals that I thought would fit the bill. I only downloaded thumbnails for this excercise

Using the gimp, I sharpened the the stone texture by 30% and saved it. I then added an alpha layer to the decals and pasted them onto the stone work. I erased some of the edges of these until I was happy with the result.
I then turned the tint up through red and added (using the dodge and burn tool) highlights around the blocks that I want to show off in game.
I then added a slight gradient and airbrushed a few of the prominent greens, brown and greys through the stone work.
Lastly I desaturated the whole image.

I did this very quickly and it's very free-form - I probably wouldn't use this texture in game (too small and I really did it in a hurry), but I hope this shows you what can be achieved. These darker/lighter areas would in fact show in game and help create the illusion of stonework.

[Girafe]

looks good,

Smooth a little it your towers (cylinder). Your brick texture is maybe too pink but don't desaturated it , switch to more yellow one.

[alex_bervoets]

@Matt: I've been looking around CGTextures myself and saved some textures (that one too)... I'll see if I can do better but yours looks OK so maybe I'll use it. We'll see how it looks...

@girafe: I'll tweak the texture a bit...

thanks!

[alex_bervoets]

Here it is:



wall-texture is a little less yellow
Base texture is now rock with some moss. No running down algae because I was thinking: there is no water running down, just some minor changes in water-level. So I've deleted that part of the texture.

Previous:



What do you think?

[mattb325]

Looks great.

Of course, now that these other textures are improving, it's starting to show a flaw in your roof texture 

Based on your other BATs, this particular texture becomes quite beige and washed out once in game due to the colour shifts that occur in GMAX.
Gascooker wrote some very informative tutorials on dealing with textures in the BAT. Barbyw posted a couple of them here: http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?board=41.0. Others may still be available on Simtropolis Omnibus.

To fix your roof (and align it more to the warm grey slate of the original) I would recommend adjusting the hue to include slightly more blue, magenta and red shades in the midtones and shadows, and slightly more magenta and red tones in the highlights.
It certainly doesn't have to be a strong shift. But your grey has quite a yellow base whereas the actual grey roof has a much redder base.
(To tell that this is the case, just use the eye-dropper or colour selection tool in whichever program you are using to compare photos and your BAT, be aware that photos may not be 100% accurate based on lighting conditions and other factors, but it certainly gives a good reference point)

Lastly, I would then apply a subtle gradient to the tiles to give the roof a greater depth.

Gascooker used to have a tutorial that talked about 'cauliflowering' brickwork.
I can't locate the tutorial anymore, but essentially he said that you use both the dodge and burn functions at various strengths with an oddly shaped brush (hence the term cauliflower) to 'roughen up' your brickwork. This will aid in giving the apperance of drip stains, water streaking, dirt and other grime that builds up under window sills, around rain spouts, under eaves, in cracks etc.

This really is coming along beautifully 

[kelis]

The second image for me is the better, because the textures looks more realistic 
I have a question for you, How you will do the water? It is possible a version without water ?

Greetings mate and keep up the good work 

[FrankU]

It would nice to have a version without water, so that everybody can plop their own water type: PEG ponds, PEG PPonds/Canals, Simgoober, CAL, Oppie, Diggis .... how many did I forget?

[alex_bervoets]

@ Matt: it's like programming: fix one bug, created another 
I'll fire up photoshop and try to get that "slate-look"...
For the bricks: I've used those dodge and burn-tools in my booktower of ghent. But this texture is a box where all 4 sides are the same color so they can be repeated. I needed this because of all the small items. One large texture didn't look good.

@ Frank & Kelis: I haven't really tought about the water. This render has water because I wanted to show how it would look. So this texture will be removed in the export. Don't know if this would still look good without water? I'll give it a try, but a castle without water is like a pub with no beer 

I was thinking of making it like a harbor: where a part has to be on land, and the larger part on water... Never tried this before, but I guess this can't be that difficult... I've already built the bridge over water



Thanks for al the positive comments...

[kelis]

My idea is make a personal lot with water, but using props, can you understand me?  If you export a
bat without water, We can put our water. As Frank says, we can select the type of water and use the
better water for us.

[FrankU]

A castle without water is perfectly OK. In many cases the moat was and still is dry. But with water it's nicer, of course.

Making a lot that can be placed partly on water is simple: in LotEditor there is a tab where you can choose "water". If you place one of those tiles on your lot you have to place the lot in such a way that that blue tile will be under water. The rest may be on land. If you add a brown tile named 'land" that tile has to be on land, the other may be (bus does not neccessarily) be in the water. So if you use "Land" the whole lot may be on land. Simple.

[mattb325]

Me again   

Regarding the bricks, if you have a texture that is a sqaure, that is an excellent starting point.

Tiling in GMAX is one way to achieve an outcome, but a better way is to make the texture to fit the wall.

In GMAX, you will be able to see by your longest wall (the south one) how much wider your brick texture needs to be. (For Example, if your texture is 128x128 pixels and UVW map tiling is by a factor of 3 vertically and 7 horizontally, then the your texture size for this project will be 384 x 896 pixels.

You then tile the brick texture in photoshop. That way you can apply the gradient, the doge and burn and tonal variations across the entire palette and there will be no need to tile the texture in GMAX.

For a signature piece like this - as well as the fact that you have a perfectly tileable texture, you can also get very specific:
1) In your front viewport in GMAX, right click the word 'Front' and select 'Smooth+Highlights'.
2) You will now see your textures in the front view.
3) Right click 'Front' again and select 'Texture Correction' and uncheck 'Show Grid'...this will make things appear closer to the render.
4) Select every object except the front wall, its window sills and any other protruding details on that wall (such as the decorative course lines etc)
5) Right click and select 'Hide Unselected'
6) Take a screen shot of your textured front wall/sills and so on
7) Using the calculation above, line up your wall so that it completely fills your project space
8) Create a new layer, and then subtly paint on (using gradients, airbrush, dodge and burn etc) all of the little logical stains that you would expect to find running from window sills, brick string coursing, eaves and so forth. You could then either save this as a new texture, or copy the layer over to your tiled texture to ensure you don't loose any quality in the brickwork.
9) Repeat for other walls

Below is to illustrate.

*I have made a wall that is 10m high by 15m wide. I have added typical details such as window sills, downpipes, decorative coursing.
*I have selected a 256x256 wide brick texture.
*I apply it to the wall and it looks ridiculous, so I tile it in GMAX. I tile it by 5 across and 3 high.
*This looks better, so I now take my screen shot.
*I open the GIMP and make a new project of 1280 (5x256) x 768 (3x256) and paste the wall screen shot to completely fill the space
*Because my screen shot is perfectly flat with all of the elements on my wall to guide me, I then get creative with gradient, dodge & burn to emulate water and dirt stains, airbrush (pale-blue, pale-brown and pale-olive) to 'cauliflower' the brick work. Using these tools tends to saturate the image, so I adjust the lightness and saturation.
*I save my texture as some new name
*I reset the UVW tiling in GMAX to 1, 1, 1 and apply my bespoke texture.

Picture 1 shows just the brick texture I have used (no UVW tiling)
Picture 2 shows the brick texture with UVW tiling of 5x3 ready to be pasted into the GIMP
Picture 3 shows the final result - as this is an illustration, I have 'over-emphasised' the stains and marks, in reality it would be far more subtle

Hope this helps 

[carlfatal]

Hi Alex,
sorry, i was busy in the last weeks, so i only looked for some short views into Your thread. But now i must say again: this castle is still beautyful!   
I also prefere the second version, and whow - i´m eager to make a lot with it.
And in every point i accede to FrankU and kelis. Many players use ploppable water, reason for a dry version, maybe enabled for build on slope. But i wouldn´t make a port from it, as a lot i would think for a bigger one with a detailed moat and a smaller one dry for free use with ploppable stuff. I´ll write You, when i´m ready with the old lot.
Greetz, Carl

[alex_bervoets]

@ Matt: I really appreciate your texture-manual... but do you know how many walls I have in this bat?   
And how to texture those round ones? I can't paste a round texture on a rectangle one because it will deform, no? I think it's very usefull on straight walls, but I'm afraid I have to many bits and pieces of wall...

@Carl, Kelis & Frank: I'll skip the water-part... but maybe I'll have to raise it a bit: the stone base is now underground? The bridge should probably have a slope that ends at 0m?

[vester]

@ Matt: I really appreciate your texture-manual... but do you know how many walls I have in this bat?   
And how to texture those round ones? I can't paste a round texture on a rectangle one because it will deform, no? I think it's very usefull on straight walls, but I'm afraid I have to many bits and pieces of wall...

You could model it like a straigt wall and the add a bend modifier. You will need to add a lot of sections to the length of the wall and the polycounts goes up.

Or you could pick a cylinder uvw-map.

[mattb325]

In addition to what Vester has said, there's a real quick and dirty method to getting this to work no matter what the wall shape or details.

I have made a very rough massing model of your castle to show you what I mean (I have used splines and basic rectangles as it is very quick, but it will work on other methods).

The first thing I do is look at the length of the longest wall and the height of the tallest wall. The longest wall is 54m and the tallest part of the tower is 30m. That then becomes my UVW map parameters for EVERY wall.

So, I apply a 'Box' UVW map to the South Wall: Gmax gives it co-ordinates of 19.05 (l) and 54.05 (w) and 0.03 (h). I slap my 256x256 brick texture on it

This won't do based on my measurements above, so I change this to 30.0, 54.0 and 5.0. I then make my U tile 8.0 and my V tile 4.0. This is just for illustration - your measurements will be different of course.

I make every wall have the same UVW measurements for a very simple reason: all of my bricks must look the same size no matter where they are on the building. Looking very closely at your images, I think that some of your bricks are different sizes based on what the size of the UVW map is.

In my image I have done this on every other wall to illustrate that it works even on rounded walls, but you wouldn't need to go that far as you now have the measurements you need (that is 256px x 8 and 256 px x 4). Also make sure (using the UVW gizmo) that the base of each UVW map is the same on the z axis.

Next in photoshop, you would open a new blank project 2048wide and 1024 high. You copy and paste 256x256 texture 32 times as needed to fill the entire space. Be sure to add a subtle gradient.

Now save this as a base, as you will be ammending this a few times.

Looking at the arrangement of walls that you have, I can see there are four main types based only on the horizontal sandstone trims (and I'm ignoring the window placement).

Using the method from my last post, you can take a screen shot and line up the horizontal bars and paint dodge/burn streaks into your brickwork depending on where those horizontal lines are. Emphasize the shadows underneath the lines and lighter stains where water may run down the wall. You can also make some darker and lighter areas for visual intrest. This should be enough to do the trick.

You will then have four (or more) types of wall that will have specific stains depending on your sandstone lines.

Also replacing a texture in GMAX is easy: In the Material Editor click on the 'M' next to the Diffuse button - you will then be able to expand the Bitmap Parameters: click on that and load your new texture. Any surface with this texture will automatically become the new texture.

Beats the heck out of selecting every wall and navigating to the material editor to apply the texture

While of course this is your BAT, and there are many, many wall pieces, I do hope you consider doing something with the textures. While it may seem like a pain now, it will assist greatly in future as it will make projects so much quicker for you...

[alex_bervoets]

Matt... I've did several attemps to improve the textures... but every one turned out worse than it is now... 
I'll give it a try on my next project (wich will be lots easier to try this).

In the meantime: I've done some more work:



The towers at the back aren't finished offcourse... they need some windows and details.
The grass is just to see how it would look (it was a bit empty)
The path too...

So... what do you guys think?

[FrankU]

Hi Alex,

This is getting better and better.
In my opinion it might be easier to make the building in front and the two at the back as separate models. They can be put together on a lot to make the whole castle. Maybe yo make a separate prop of the walls in between too. You don't have to worry about the grass texture then and the use of the props will be more versatile. We can combine the props with other stuff.

[alex_bervoets]

Good thinking Frank... I'm also batting the gate-building after this one.

but I do have a problem with the grass-area: the grass is 1.5m above ground level (now water)... so without a grass-textured-rectangle, the Maxis-grass will be too low. Any ideas?

[FrankU]

Well, then it is a matter of how exact you want to be.
If you plop the lot in game-water there is always a small difference in height, so a normal lot with game textures etc will look OK. If you want to make your own water it would be possible to make this water a bit lower than the normal ground level, like all canal modders do. Then you will have this difference in height too. If you want us to make our own water by plopping some ploppable water (PEG, Jeronij, Edmonton etc) then there is no difference, but when you make some kind of wall around the garden I guess nobody will really bother about the problem. Or is it just my lack of perfectionism?
Otherwise you could make props with the grass texture on it which is 1,5 meter thick...
Options enough! You choose, we plop! 

[w_swietwoot]

No constructive critisism from me because all I can say is that I really like the building!!! I can imagine it somewhere just out of town in a highly desirable and beautiful location.