FrankU's Lottery - Space Center update

[mrbisonm]

Got it now FrankU.

I understand now what you meant by "cutting edge of the silage", something we do not do here in NA (North-America). Thanks for the picture of the machinery used for this purpose, never seen (or heard of) it before.
We use simple finetoothed forks or "buckets" mounted on a tractor to shovel out the silage and bring it into the barn or dump it on a conveyeur that leads right into the barn, and usually parts of it fall out while loading and leaving heaps as I have created in my outdoor silo.
Most of the time, we use black plastic or rubber sheets to cover the silos also, but now are also various colours available with various qualities. A lot of White as for round haybales are being used also. Of course I will make them black for the "Holland Farmprops kit".
It will be later this week or beginning of next week that I will have a half a dozen or so props ready for you to "inspect" and approve and finally make some final touches.

Thanks for the pictures, also the covered silo of which we have only a few like this, raised in the middle by an aluminum pipeframe. The newer ones (since a few years only) have a plastic like solid cover that was invented in Europe (Holland or Germany?) Our covered manure septic tanks are mostly in closed buildings attached to the barn or not far from them with one side open to drive in with the machinery, square of course without windows and also many just open to the sky and round, looking more like large but low silos than sceptic tanks.

I see what I can do and send you examples, those not needed or wanted will be put into another farmpropset (north-american farmprops) later on.

greetings

Fred

[FrankU]

Meanwhile I have finished my so called Stage 0 farms: growable farm fields without any kind of visible building, construction or vehicle. They look like plopped farm fields, but are functional. I want them to grow in between all other growing farms, also in the higher stages, but I fear that to achieve that I need to make also stage 2, 3, 4, and 5 fields in the same way. But the disadvantage is that I will need to make the amount of jobs unrealistically high. I am not sure if this experiment is going the way I want.

Anyway, I also finished the complete set of plopable* farm fields and I gave them an Icon.


In the game menu it looks like this.
In the background you can see the plopped fields.


And another information:
I have been thinking about functions I could apply to the many windmill lots I have made. They are now landmarks with IR jobs. That is a bit, well, risky, you told me, concerning abandonment.

I have four windmill models at the time:
Oppie's
Meurdoos Stellingmolen
Meurdoos Wipmolen
Nutley Windmill

Someone even advised me to make a seaport out of the mills. I won;t do that. As far as I have understood the seaprots are hard to crack.
I am considering the next:

-The lots with Oppie's windmill I consider to make them CS§.
-The Meurdoos Stellingmolen is usually built for industrial use. The lots I made with this mill have an industrial look. I consider to make these IM.
-The Wipmolen, I have yet not made lots with them, but sure are going to, will be wind power plants.
-The Nutley windmill will be used for lots that look like water pumping facilities next to smaller canals and rivers. So these can be found in between farms and farm fields. So what could be a useful function between farm fields, considering they work with wind and water? I thought: water purification and supply! A small purification and supply plant is always welcome in our polluted farming areas.

Some lots will probably be simple landmarks with landmark effect and no jobs.

* There is discussion about the spelling of plopable. I see it as plopable and ploppable. Both can be found in the Pm-X read-me and program. I decided to use plopable. It looks more fitting into normal English spelling to me.

Oh yes, and Fred:
Since a few years hay bales are wrapped in plastic here too. First they used white plastic, but people didn't like the eye-soring effect of the large white bales in the fields. Now the plastic is light green. Sometimes the bales are square, but sometimes they are a bit larger and more rounded.


I can't wait to see your BATs!

[FrankU]

The day has passed almost. My wife is on the way from a meeting and I found a problem with my farm lots.

I started a completely fresh region today. I installed CAM 1.0, some additional lots and my own farms. I also block Maxis farms with the BSC prevent IR lots file.

I zoned a large amount of farms. I also zoned some low density housing. I plopped one power source. That's all. I saved this city. Then I let it run for some years. I found out that immediately my stage 3 farms begin to grow. I expected first some so called stage 0 (the fields), then some stage 1, then 2 and then, when there is some real population, stage 3. Just as the CAM read-me states. But this does not happen. When I exit the city, remove the stage 3 farms from the plugins folder and start the city again, only stage 2 grows.
What can be wrong? This is not supposed to happen!

Help!

[mrbisonm]

Modding is not my strong, CAM even less, I don't even have it, but this you should ask in the CAM section to get a "professional" answer, no?

Fred

Ps: be back later this weekend with the props.

[kelis]

Great job with the farms !   

[supremec]

Very good ploppable farm fields 

[mrbisonm]

Here are the props again, a little advanced, hopefully close to being finished.



And also those that I am currently working on (together with a few more not ready to be shown yet)

I would like to know which are good enough to continue to work on and are "usefull" and which I can just forget about and/or use for other props.



Let me know.........

Fred


Edit:

I did one more, a silage pile covered with black plastic just plein without walls, like the ones you showed in the first pictures. They still need some fine-tuning though. I'll work on them.

[FrankU]

Hi Fred,

I feel a bit awkward. You offered your help and invest a lot of work and I write negative comments. We are both doing this for fun, so I hope you don't feel insulted when I write that the props are not exactly what I have in mind. Be sure that I highly appreciate your work.
Anyway: you make your choices what to do with the props. I will use them as far as I think is good for my lots.

Now for the comments

The drive-in silo's.
When you look closely at the pictures I provided you will see that the silo's are filled in a different way: the silage fills the space between the concrete wall completely and even piles up. This is covered with black plastic. It looks more or less like a stuffed sausage. At the front the plastic is taken away so that the silage can be cut out. You made certainly a good prop, but it just isn't the perfect Dutch silage silo.
Also the tires: aren't they supposed to be black? On my computer the tires look more like some grey metal object.

The manure pits.
The closed one: is the cover also covering the upper edge of the tank? In real life this is the caser. Just a minor thing. A very nice prop indeed.

This brings me to the question of size: how large are you making these props? Is the manure tank filling a whole tile or is it larger? Not too large I hope? And the silo's? The double silo might be a bit less wide than a tile and maybe about one and a half tile long, or two.
In my lots I take the size of Haarlemmergold's Dutch Farm props as a reference. You can see them in my Willemsen Melkvee (reply 141) farm: the farmhouse and the barn, where the cows live, is my reference size.
Intermezzo: my English teacher never could dream of the fact that I would discuss farming industry with a Canadian, so he never taught me the words for it. So I don't know what word you use for the building that the cows live in. Google translate tells me: barn. But a barn is something you store things in, like hay of tractors. Or not? And stable; this is the word for horse-housing, isn't it?
When I talk about the housing of my cows I say: barn. Is that correct?

This brings me to your other props:
The manure pile, the silage pile and the sand pile. They are always useful for propping the mess that we find on many farms. Some farmers really mess up their terrain, some others are very neat. Maybe I should lot some messy and some cleaned up ones.

The haystack: this is a pile of square hay bales, isn't it? The bales look a bit large. The texture could be a bit more rough, they look a bit clean now. Could you, if you can, add a single hay bale?

The roofed haystack: the original roofed haystacks have a covering with reed roofing (is it called thatching?) (my English is improving here!). The slope of the roof is about 35 to 45 degrees. Maybe the stack looks nicer when you lower the roof a bit. As you know the roof is moveable: that's why the poles/rods are so high and stick through the roof. Usually the haystack is not filled completely, so a half full one is more common.
These days most haystacks are turned into a shed and the roofing is black corrugated steel or something cheap like that.
The ones I found and put on image have three rods and six corners (edges?), but square is more common, so that's perfect.

And then the dairy farm.
A beautiful building, but not the way these buildings look in the Netherlands.
In my reply #127 (page 7) I show some aerials. If you look at aerial 2 you can see a typical "ligboxenstal" as we call it.
A "ligboxenstal" is housing for the cows: often they even never leave it, these days. They exist in small and large sizes up to say 50x100 m2. Usually they are smaller like 20x30m2. These barns (may I call them that?) contain room for the cows to lie in private: a ligbox. This is a small area that is fenced off with steel bars. These are built in rows. Here the cows can lie down, eat their silage and sleep. The barn also contains room where the cows can walk around. The floor is concrete with holes in it: the manure seeps through into the cellar where it is gathered and transported into the silo.
And of course: the milking machinery.
Nowadays these barns are built as open as possible: the sides are almost completely open. Just a low wall. Above this wall there is room for a curtain to keep the harshest weather (wind, storm, cold) out. On most days the wind can blow through the barn. These barns are usually built with red brick for the front and back facades and the low walls. The triangle in the front and back are made with vertical steel cladding in dark green or black. The roof is made with dark grey steel sheet piling or corrugated sheets. You can see the colors quite well in aerial 2.
The slope of the roof is usually about 20 or 25 degrees. Not steeper.
In this aerial you can also see some drive-in silo's with silage: the black things to the left. These have no tires, as you can see. It is not always that they use tires. If you get tired of batting the tires you can as well leave them out. One of the silo's is eaten up almost completely.

Haarlemmergold made a kind of ligboxenstal in his set. The roof is too steep in fact, but moreover it is quite nice. And because it's the only one I use it.
Here is his set: http://www.simtropolis.com/forum/files/file/19453-dutch-farm-pack/

Your dairy farm looks like your older large dairy farm that has been on the STEX for a long time already. Isn't it? It also looks like the building by JenP (if I am correct now) that I use in my Erve Olde Bijvank.

Here I have a good image of one of these ligboxenstallen.


And you last addition could be a nice one too, but my remarks on the silo with concrete walls go also fir this prop.

Sincerely,

FrankU

[earlbeach]

Here are the props again, a little advanced, hopefully close to being finished.



And also those that I am currently working on (together with a few more not ready to be shown yet)

I would like to know which are good enough to continue to work on and are "usefull" and which I can just forget about and/or use for other props.



Let me know.........

Fred


Edit:

I did one more, a silage pile covered with black plastic just plein without walls, like the ones you showed in the first pictures. They still need some fine-tuning though. I'll work on them.

I've seen a lot of roofed hay bale storage structures but most are elongated. 

BTW I love your tarp covered silage piles with the tires and other items to hold the tarp down.

Hope these items will be available to all of us.

Buck

[FrankU]

Hi Buck,

When Mrbisonm and I are finished discussing these props they will be available to everybody.

[Silur]

Excellent works - no words 

[mrbisonm]

Hi Fred,

so I hope you don't feel insulted when I write that the props are not exactly what I have in mind.

Don't worry, it will take much more to insult me. I always like to hear what people really think about the things I do, instead of what they think that I want to hear.

I didn't have time to look with details at the comments you made and compare them with the pics you showed and the props I made. I will do this later this weekend, if it rains here, if not, it will be during next week. We have to repare a lot of fences before we sent our cows out, the 6 feet of snow that we received this winter did not go sparingly on the fences and many are totally down. It's a lot of work. And now the rain and all the flooding we have here in Quebec, it doesn't make it easier.

I have decided that I will do only one Proppack for the moment and not a special Hollandfarm proppack and a north-american farm pack as I mentioned before. The *Nexis Farm Proppack Vol1* will contain some of the props shown above, maybe some with better textures and others differently, plus some that I will do my Best to be of good use to you, FrankU.

About the size of the menure tanks are a little smaller than a tile ingame, so they'll easily fit on a 1x1.

There are different places in Canada and the US that give a different name to certain farmbuildings. Here in French Canada (Quebec), we call the buildings where we keep the cattle, Barns....although a barn is supposed to be the place where you storage the hay, but....usually the barn is divided into 4 parts or so: the barn where the hay is, the stable usually below the barn which keep the cattle, horses, pigs, sheep etc, the dairyhouse, where all the milking equipment is and the grainshed, where you keep the grains in bags etc. Nowadays we have silos for green and semi-dried grasses and corn, silos for grain *en vrac* and some even have offices attached to the barn.
So, when we say barn here, it means the whole building in general.

A "ligboxenstal" is housing for the cows: often they even never leave it, these days. They exist in small and large sizes up to say 50x100 m2. Usually they are smaller like 20x30m2. These barns (may I call them that?) contain room for the cows to lie in private: a ligbox. This is a small area that is fenced off with steel bars. These are built in rows. Here the cows can lie down, eat their silage and sleep. The barn also contains room where the cows can walk around. The floor is concrete with holes in it: the manure seeps through into the cellar where it is gathered and transported into the silo.
And of course: the milking machinery.
Nowadays these barns are built as open as possible: the sides are almost completely open. Just a low wall. Above this wall there is room for a curtain to keep the harshest weather (wind, storm, cold) out. On most days the wind can blow through the barn. These barns are usually built with red brick for the front and back facades and the low walls. The triangle in the front and back are made with vertical steel cladding in dark green or black. The roof is made with dark grey steel sheet piling or corrugated sheets. You can see the colors quite well in aerial 2.
The slope of the roof is usually about 20 or 25 degrees. Not steeper.

These buildings are the same here, same sizes, same architecture, maybe a little bigger since we have more terrains here and a farm that houses 100 cows is quite common here and often not considered as a big farm. But these farms usually have 600 to a thousand acres (approx 500 Ha) which is almost half the size of Nederland.... ....lol

I myself own a farm of a little over 800 acres (approx 400 Ha), beefcattle, cow-calf system of the Aberdeen Angus breed and some Charolais. Hobby farmer, if you can call me, since I have someone hired to all this and only sometimes I help, whenever they are in need of me or I feel like actually working. My principal job is Loghome Designer, but I like getting my hands dirty here and there.

I will try to make a "ligboxenstallen" as you showed on the last picture, maybe in two or different colors. I like that "barn" very much.

Hope these items will be available to all of us.

Buck

Sure, once finished they will be uploaded to the LEX and STEX as a dependency prop-pack. FrankU might use some of them on his lots and I might even do my own lots one day, that will need these props, or you might find them in my MD/CJ here on SC4D (The Winding River Project) and you ask me privately for these lots/Bats there.

Be back later

Fred

[mave94]

It's nice to see how this project develops. I like those ploppable farm fields; it's a nice touch in rural areas.
Great that mrbisonm is helping with this project, I see some very nice BATs.

[Getron]

mrbisonm and FrankU,

Great job, guys. I like your farm props. Keep it up. 

And like Matthijs sad before, mrbisonm great that you are helping with this project.

Getron

[FrankU]

As you can see above I made some Icons for the menus. This way you can recognize the lots I add to your menus.
But now I am also considering to make a custom Query. Does someone know a good tutorial for this? The Daeley tutorial from STEX is a bit awkward to me. Isn't there a more simple way?
I'd like to add a background image and some information like the growth stage of the farm lots. Does anyone have experience with these things?

[mrbisonm]

FrankU, I have no idea how to make a custom query, nor anything else in this matter. I must say that I am a total *0* when it comes to tweak a file. Hope someone here will help you.

Meanwhile , I have finished a barn model, the first ones of my Nexis Farm proppack. I downloaded dozens of pictures of dutch farms in the last weeks and came up with this. This seems to be a typical modern dutch barn. I have done the same model twice in different color variations and also with different details.

Hope you'll like, because they will be in the FarmPack.

Now I will concentrate on the manure pits and silos. 

Fred

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[FrankU]

Hi Fred,

These barns are beautiful! 

First some compliments:
- Beautiful size and scale.
- Nice touch with the doors and machinery in the end walls.
- I like the white eaves and the ridge. They give the barn good edges.
- The material of the roofs, including the transparent planes, is perfect.
- The large doors look perfect (though the white edges around them are maybe a bit overdone).
- The scale of these doors in relation to the size of the barns is very good.
- The white dots on the ridge of the red barn are a nice touch. I don't know which purpose they serve, but that does not matter.

But may I now grumble a bit?
1. The green roof is quite uncommon, though it might be possible that you found a picture of some barn that indeed has this color on the roof. It is more likely to be used as the color of the sides. I'd say: make both roofs gray, in two different types of gray. The roof of the red barn is perfect.
2. The light brown sides of the barn look like wood. Is that what you intended? It's nice, even if it's not the most common look.
3. The red color of the brick is a bit too saturated. Maybe a bit less saturation and a bit more brown?
4. And both barns look a bit flattened. I'd say that they need to be stretched in height a bit.
5. The open "windows" on the sides usually go up until they touch the roof, take a look at my last image in reply. In your barns I see still a bit of closed side above the roofs. Maybe you can change that?

The addition to the red barn is a nice touch. Great for variation.
The barns are the same size, right? Is it much work if you would make one variation that is a bit smaller?, Or do you just need to stretch and shrink a bit here and there? I really have no idea how much work the BAT is. I deliberately refrain from BATting, because there is so much else to do already.

In the meantime I am lotting the stage 4 farms. I use Haarlemmergolds barn at the moment, but I will replace them on some lots when your barns are finished.

How are your fences going? Did you finish them?
The weather here is sunny like summer, even if it's spring yet. We even suffer a bit from drought. Too little rain, which makes the rivers go low. And this causes some trouble: in our the coastal areas the river water is needed to keep the salty seawater out. Now this does not work good enough, so there is fear for salinization.
Most people are very happy with the weather, though.

And now I present you my last stage 3 farms and the first stage 4.

Stage 3

Erve Olde Bijvank 2


Erve Schaarshoek 1


Erve Schaarshoek 2


And the first ones for Stage 4

Mensink Melkvee 1 (Dairy milk)


Mensink Melkvee 2


Harleman Eieren 1 (eggs)


Vorderman Varkens 1 (pigs)


What do you think?

[mrbisonm]

There might be some little things that I could change before rendering the barns above, but for most, it cannot be changed without spending more hours on them. I made them as much as I had time and as close to the real thing as possible. Maybe in your local area, the barns don't have green roofs, but if you take your time and earthgoogle Holland, you'll see that green, red (brown), beige and other colored roofs are quite common in Nederlande.
To change the height of the buildings I will have to restart a whole new model, simply because everything else on the model is sized to fit with the actual height. Let's not foget that these are stables (for cattle) only and do not have the hayloft (barn) on top. Like I said, I will try to alter some textures and maybe a thing here and there, like the frame of the doors, but in general these models are more or less ready for rendering.
To make a smaller model of these barns again will take a whole new plan to model, we cannot just enlargen or make them smaller and look good with gmax or 3dmax. But,.....you gave me an idea of a smaller building that I might just do if I find the time for it. One with open sides (windows) and maybe an attached small silo.

Now I am working on the silos and manure pits. There will probably be 3 silos and 3 manure pits in 3 different sizes and with different textures. I should have some pictures before the weekend is over.

Here in Quebec, we finally have some dryer weather, reducing the waterlevels that have caused many severe floods (several thousand of homes under water) in the last 6 to 7 weeks, and yes, I finished my fences and the cattle are out in the pasture at last.
Although I have a dozen or so contracts of loghomes to build this early summer, I will still have some free time to occupy myself with my MD/CJ and the Farm proppack, and if gmax does not crash every 10 minutes or so, I will be encouraged to make some more decent models. ( I hate programs that do not work 100 %, just like SC4.... )

Anyways, the lots shown above for stage 4 farms, you have done quite nice, I like all 7 of them. 

Fred

[greckman]

This is really nice work here. I've been looking at the Netherlands quite alot recently in Google Earth, and those buildings and those lots are dead on accurate. I've been lurking in this thread for a couple of weeks now I can't wait to use the lots.

[mrbisonm]

I'm back with some props that I finished tonight. These are the groundsilos, outside silos or opensky silos, or some call it "drive-in silos"....etc.
I made three versions only, too much work to make more, because I got a lot of other things to create on my mind. They are final, hope that you could use them for your lots.
The first ones are hopefully like you want them, with a equally filled department and a black tarp (maybe you should tell those farmers there to use white or other lighter colours in the future because we found out that black will heat the silage too much (with the sunrays) and cause immense bacteria colonies to grow of which some might cause deadly deseases... ) We had that experience last year here in Quebec.



Then one with the blue tarp filled like they often do here in North-America (US and Canada).... (some use green and also white which will be in my next farmprop-pack Vol2)



...and an empty single one, wich could be usefull too.



And then some round manure pits in four different versions, three open and one with a roof (tarp). They are also in three different sizes and colours. The blue one will fit on a 2x2, all others can easily be placed on a 1x1.




We rarely see those here in Quebec anymore, most of the farmers have buildings now that totally cover the manure pits, looking more like barns. The law is that we don't smell nor see the manure now and that it doesn't rain or snow on it to cause runoffs. Going nuts with environmental issues I suppose, but maybe a good thing.....!

The next props I will be working on later this week are some sheds (machinery and manure),  and some hayshacks or whatever you call them in Holland, we don't have them here, since the hay is either kept in white plastics not to absorb the heat of the bright sunlight outside beside the buildings or in the fields , or in barns, buildings built especially to storage them either attached to the stables or not far away. Some still have have a second story on top of the stables to store the hay.

Now I'm tired,....lol....Good night.

Fred