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c.p.'s BAT and Lot Workshop

Started by c.p., November 23, 2012, 04:25:46 PM

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fantozzi

#880
Sanddunes? SANDDUNES?  %bur2$

When I was a child I was too shy to change into my bathing clothes in front of other people. "No I won't," I said. And my mother said: "look there is a dune". Exactly like yours, a cluster of whitish hair-grass catching the sand and creating a small hump like an old whale with algaes growing on this back breaking through the sand's surface. "Go behind the dune, no one will see you." And so I did.

Later I learned that there must be a million young boys and girls growing up like me. Because it's simply untrue. E V E R Y B O D Y can see you behind those dunes. You aren't hidden from peoples eyes! It's just to make you believe behind the dune is a covered place. But it isn't.

Well. Okay. Still it's a very pleasant one. And I guess to get the prop and the ground textures matching must be a challenge?


mrbisonm

Oh my, c.p. Your houses, sheds and barns look great, really love them. And that dune, .....kind a difficult to match it with all those beachmods.....

BTW, I'm pleased to see you're still at it, you're probably the only one that I still know from Civ III so well. Been a longtime......


Fred


....Uploading the MFP 1.... (.........Finishing the MFP1)

c.p.

#882
Thanks everyone :)

Quote from: mattb325 on March 23, 2019, 06:51:14 PM
are they your first HD models?
They're not actually HD.  They look a little like it because the grass is rendered antialiased against the dune sand behind it, so the grass doesn't stand out as chunky blocks of pixels as it would otherwise.

Quote from: fantozzi on March 24, 2019, 01:22:28 AM
Sanddunes? SANDDUNES?  %bur2$
Well childhood traumas will break through the surface from time to time, like algae-covered whales.  Such is life for us all, I guess. :P

Quote from: fantozzi on March 24, 2019, 01:22:28 AM
I guess to get the prop and the ground textures matching must be a challenge?
I don't know yet how the color-matching is going to look in-game (this is just a rendering on top of a screenshot). Maybe it will look exactly like this, but I doubt it.  It's all a bit of an experiment for now.

Fred: Good to see you, and hope things are going well with you.  Yes I remember you from way back.  I was actually never involved with Civ III, but I was involved with SimCity 3000 for a little while (via Freeland), before SC4 came out. Maybe you're thinking of that?


Here are a few more dunes of different sizes (fall/winter version):


As mentioned already, this is a bit of an experiment.  I'm hoping I'll be able to scrunch a bunch of these together via MMP and/or a God-mode tree controller, and that they won't look terrible.
I'm thinking the most likely problem with these is the way they collide with and clip one another.  So I'm making custom LODs for these, sort of like this:


I'm sure the shadows of the grass with get cut off by overlapping dunes, but I'm hoping the grass itself doesn't get too mangled, or if it does, that it somehow still looks semi-OK.  It will be interesting to see if it works.

Simmer2

Hi Brian.

Now you only need a couple of scorpions and snakes to complete the picture  :D

Custom LODs will definitively reduce clipping.

Simmer2
________________________________________________________________________________

c.p.

Thanks Nick :)


So, I tried making a little MMP with the dune models to test it out. Even though I've made tons of MMPs in the past, I'm not getting this thing to work, even after several very frustrating hours.  I must be overlooking something, but what it is, I have no idea.  Perhaps scorpions and snakes.  (It's as good an explanation as anything else at this point).  For now, I'm ready to move onto something else.  But I've attached my non-working test MMP with the dune models to this post, in case someone feels like looking it over or fiddling/fighting with it.

mrbisonm

Quote from: c.p. on March 24, 2019, 08:22:56 PM
Thanks everyone :)



Fred: Good to see you, and hope things are going well with you.  Yes I remember you from way back.  I was actually never involved with Civ III, but I was involved with SimCity 3000 for a little while (via Freeland), before SC4 came out. Maybe you're thinking of that?




Sorry, I was going to write sc3000, but my fingers have their own will sometimes. Of course it was Simcity 3000 and on Freeland, loved those little "Goodies" of yours and continue the "Goodies" you still create, for SC4. ;)

Fred


....Uploading the MFP 1.... (.........Finishing the MFP1)

Silur

Okay, c.p. I'll see what I can do with the dunes. The basis of all this is a model  :thumbsup:.
Everything else can be corrected with careful work.
Thanks.

Andreas

Brian,

I got your file working. Delete the "Item Name" property, and change the "Flora Cluster Type" property ID of your first Exemplar file to the ID of the second one. I also removed the "Exemplar Category" property, as this wasn't present elsewhere, but I'm not sure if this was necessary.

Your models and/or properties might need some further tweaking, but the result looks very promising already! :)
Andreas

c.p.

Thanks Andreas :thumbsup:  That was a huge help. &apls  I still don't understand why it wasn't showing up in the menu, but the Item Name must have been the culprit (even though I have other MMPs with that property that do work. ???)  Anyway, it's working now. :)

Also, thanks Silur :thumbsup:

mrbisonm: yes, freeland was a great fun, back in the day :D


So once I got the MMP functional finally (with Andreas' help), the shadows cast by the game were the next problem, as they created a ring of shadow around the dune which looked horrible.  I tried setting the shadow strength to zero, getting rid of the shadow properties, adding an IsGroundModel property and setting it to true and false, and none of this had any effect on the shadows.  What I finally ended up doing to get rid of them was to add an additional model 0 reference to the RKT4 property (I just used the smallest model of this set), and put it first (only the first model 0 casts a shadow).  Since it is smaller than the dune, the shadow it casts is hidden by the larger dune model.

One of the dune models is too dark and needs to be re-rendered, but otherwise, it finally came out about as expected: the clipping is noticeable, but bearable, in my opinion.  I'm thinking I'll try making another set of dunes that are basically more solid squares of beachgrass, and widen the spacing of these ones slightly and use them as transition from the more solid beachgrass to plain beach, and see how that looks.  But this is how it is looking so far:

Andreas

#889
I think you cannot have both "Item Name" and "User Visible Name Key" properties at the same time; for translation purposes, the latter one is always preferrable. The shadows were pretty ugly alright, but your tweaked set looks quite nice already! Some filler grass for hiding "edgy" borders sounds like a good idea.
Andreas

Nick Cesare

Hi c.p.,

Brand new poster (but STEX/LEX user for about a year and a half and an old, longtime player of SC2000, SC3000 and SC4) here!

First of all, I just wanted to say that your work on here (along with mattb325's, Spa's and others') has made this old game brand new for me... as an architecture lover, your attention to detail and appreciation of historic US vernacular building styles makes a good game great. So, a thank you is in order.

That said, I just thought I'd check in and ask if we can expect to see any of the amazing work you've posted on this thread make its way to the LEX anytime soon (once it's working properly again of course). My thing, since getting into playing again a couple years ago, has been creating New England/East Coast-style towns and cities, more or less in sandbox mode, with lots of mods (but vanilla roads... I play on a Mac and it's kind of buggy, so no NAM at the moment). As you can see in the attached, I'm getting there, but could still use some more variety... that's where your backlog of beautiful buildings come in!

No pressure, obviously! Just a friendly ask.

Cheers,
Nick


evarburg

Totally concur. (And so glad you are still at it ; those sand dunes look great. I hope they're now almost ready to get out of the oven.)

Fin44850

Oh no...he's gone again. God, these houses look incredible. I'd love to have them just as props. Any chance at all you'd just throw them into Lex as-is ?