Lloyds of London

[callagrafx]

Once again turning to my collection of stock models, I have this...  Will take some doing to retexture for the game, as the original model was done for Vray, so all the materials need to be rebuilt for Mental Ray.

Hands up who wants?  And should it be a Landmark or a Reward? 

[art128]

I've always been interested in that building. I'd say a CO$$$ would more appropriate as it's an office building IRL.

[callagrafx]

I've always been interested in that building. I'd say a CO$$$ would more appropriate as it's an office building IRL.

Yeah I know, however I don't think there should be more than one instance, which is why I was thinking reward...

[Girafe]

This building is so unique, therefore I would go for a reward / landmark or ploppable CO$$$ but I agree that many instance in the game would be kinda weird
Good luck for the texturing, If I am right there are a ton of metals parts which is always tricky to render properly 

[Getron]

Reward to prevent my Landmark menu from becoming even fuller  ;-p

[Mad_genius]

The building looks amazing. 
It would be really nice as a reward, especially if it has some conditions to be unlocked, just to give us a little challenge. 

[callagrafx]

Ok, done some ingame test renders on a basic LOT...

[AsimPika3172]

Awesome!!! 

[fantozzi]

  Au naturel hardcore! 

I'd go for two versions a CAM-growable and a functional landmark.

[art128]

Stunning lighting.

I was gonna say that is looks a bit small. But then I checked and the real building isn't even 100m high, It's weird I always thought it was higher than that.  If you have the time and opportunity to do that, can you try to scale it up a bit on the Z axis? Just to see how it would look compared to the normal sized one.

[callagrafx]

Stunning lighting.

I was gonna say that is looks a bit small. But then I checked and the real building isn't even 100m high, It's weird I always thought it was higher than that.  If you have the time and opportunity to do that, can you try to scale it up a bit on the Z axis? Just to see how it would look compared to the normal sized one.

The building is 95m high to the tip. I've already scaled it 130% on the Z axis to allow for BAT squash. Any more and the arches and pipes become too distorted.  It's not a skyscraper, and is dwarfed by others nearby...

[xxdita]

I generally prefer growables, but some buildings should not repeat all over town. So a reward or functional landmark version would be great.

[callagrafx]

Right, because I'm basically crap at modding I've decided to make this is landmark with jobs... however I want to limit it to just allow one ploppable per city.  Now how do I do this?

[mattb325]

Looking good.

In the Reader, the exemplar to make something restricted to only one is 'City Exclusion Group' and you assign the value of the Lot Resource Key to it. So if your lot resource key for this lot is 0x12345678 then the entry in the reader will be:

City Exclusion Group | 0xEA2E078B |Unit32 | 1 | 0x12345678

I've typically only ever used it for rewards, but it should work on a ploppable landmark (it's worth a shot).

Also, the bat would be more useable in multiple situations if you ditched the batted base texture. I can see there are some underground elements that need to be hidden, but using the matte/shadow/reflection option in the UVW map instead of the bitmap you're using in 3dsMax will do the trick of hiding the underground elements and allowing the in game base textures to come through.

To avoid odd results with the m/s/r edges and SC4 anti-aliasing, once having selected the m/s/r map, you uncheck everything (receive shadows, Ambient Occlusion, Indirect Illumination) and then you make sure that the colour of the 'Color Mapped Background' are the same RGB/HSV values of your 'mr physical sky' which is found under rendering->environment.

[callagrafx]

Having to relearn Mental Ray... in Vray I can just tell certain objects to affect the alpha in a negative way.  Also realised I left HD output on when I rendered, which is why it's much sharper than the surrounding buildings... 

Update:  Having issues where the object with the MSR material is still being included in the alpha. Mask opacity is set to 1.0.  Have matched Mapped Background with ground colour on sky map and turned all the other stuff off..

Figured it out... need to add the environment map to the Mapped Background.  Wasn't enough just to use the values in the colour box.

[callagrafx]

Just to sound my own horn... but this is now on the LEX here:  https://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=3962

I have also done a Maxis Nite version for people who don't use the Dark Nite modd too... That's a separate download.