Sydney Opera House - For one night only!

[Diggis]

Is that a new WFK I see coming on? 

Great work Mate 

[sunv123]

 

Amazing.

[callagrafx]

Is that a new WFK I see coming on? 

NO, it's bloody not!      'Cos someone is BOUND to ask for diagonals...

[Andreas]

Awesome, Lee. That, and the new NAM, SC4, here I come! (Hey, that even rhymes!)

[Ciuu96]

Amazing. It's better than the real thing.

[sandrasim1]

Awesome, Lee. That, and the new NAM, SC4, here I come! (Hey, that even rhymes!)

Andreas took the words out of my mouth. It's simply stunning and I love the night lighting.

[Kitsune]

that truly is a work of art... and those seawalls are awesome too.

[noahclem]

'Cos someone is BOUND to ask for diagonals...

Haha, that's me 

[Serkanner]

Wonderful!

[callagrafx]

Just back from a little side-trip, and the Opera House is rendered.

Day



DarkNite (seen here in Maxis Nite)



Question... Do I need to render for Maxis nite, or is the Darknite one OK even if you don't have DN mod installed?

[art128]

I personally thing the darknight looks quite good in Maxis nite.

[MTT9]

This is awesome Cal!

[Andreas]

Hmm, I never used the DarkNight Mod, so I can't tell if it would stand out too much. Nevertheless, it looks lovely as it is, and since I personally don't switch to night mode very often, I'd be perfectly happy with the current nightlighting.

[callagrafx]

Just the one model then, thankfully 

The base is 64m deep, so it'll even sit on fairly high ground...



and the ubiquitous night shot 



And that's it, done!  Barby has the model and will be making it look prettier, and function as it should. 

[noahclem]

I use night mode all the time but never with maxis night. i have a feeling that this wouldn't look out of place at all in a maxis night setting and have never heard an MN user complain about a DN model. If one uses DN an MN bat looks overpoweringly blue though.

I'm glad you included a such a depth to the walls but with my settings I'll only see a few meters of it 

[Gringamuyloca]

 
Not sure what gives me the most thrill?! 
The BAT, or the members participating!

[weixc812]

It definitely looks better with a base specialised for it 

[Jasoncw]

Yeah, the inverse shadow problem is a huge pain sometimes.  I think the BATed base looks much nicer though. 


The way the game makes shadows is it takes the previous rotation's (one of the rotations anyway) FSH alpha masks, and rotates and skews them to make the shadows.

The problem with underground BATs is that while part of the building is either underground, cut off by the LODs, or otherwise not visible, the rendered image of the underground portions are still there in the FSH files.  Everything above ground essentially gets rotate so that the shadow is behind the building, meaning that everything that is below ground gets rotated so that the shadow is in front of the building. 




The way to avoid the problem in max is to model an object which covers up the undesired underground portions, and to give the mask object a matte/shadow/reflection material.  And then things that are underground but need to be visible sometimes are usually made into custom foundations.

[weixc812]

Sorry that I bump this thread again since I'm to eager to see the release of the Opera House.
Does BarbyW encounter any problems?
We hope it's just too busy for him to finish all the work in an instance. 

[callagrafx]

Thanks Jason, so many things forgotten over the years... When I get a chance I'll have a play.  I use the matte/shadow material quite a bit for animations to do travelling mattes etc, dunno why it didn't occur to me to use them like this. Getting old.

We've had to relearn a load of things    The Opera House will be a conditional landmark with a custom query, which requires some additional tinkering (that's well beyond me) and it's been years since we've done anything like that, so it's taking longer than anticipated.  But all good things etc...