N1's Gap Fillers

[art128]

Nice to see this little building finished!

[N1_2888]

It seems I can't get along with the new forums. Even removing all special characters and codes doesn't help. I try it this way:

(Click to enlarge!)

[Andreas]

Let me try...


Thank you!

Andreas is still very busy, so I've decided to complete the Hotel (the new board remarkably can't display a circumflex) on my own, at least I try to do so. First I think it makes sense to provide a French and Polish translation of the in-game texts, as my first Mairie does have this feature, too. Unfortunately I can't speak these two languages, thus I'm kindly asking for your help.

This is the text appearing on the unlock message pop-up window:

Mayor X, Y has become a respectable city. The city council has come to the conclusion that the modest Mayor's Office no longer meets your high standards as the head of a developing metropolis and has therefore approved the construction of a representative city palace as a new residence in Y. If you want to distribute the burden of administration on several shoulders, a use as a council house for urban districts is possible because the building can be plopped as often as desired.

I would also need a French and Polish translation of the short description text being visible, if you mouse-over the building's icon:

The Hotel Cail is the mayor's office, but can also act as a council house for urban districts in larger cities.

Second, some testing would be useful, ideally by a person with some modding skills. But let's begin with the first.

[N1_2888]

Hi folks!

You may know Mas71's stairs. I like them very much, but unfortunately the smaller one lacks a mirrored version. So I BATted new stairs following the design of those from Mas71:


Now I'm struggling with the nightlights. I put an omni into the lantern body which makes ugly shadows. To illustrate this, I've increased the light intensity:


Any idea how I can fix this?

[Girafe]

Do you have the option of self illuminated materials under Gmax?
Usually it's easier to deal with them that omnis

[BartonThinks]

Self-illuminated materials in Gmax stay self-illuminated during the day, unfortunately.

I believe the most common method used for Gmax is to mimic omni lights by using target spot lights. I'm not sure how difficult it would be to achieve this for the scene you've modeled.

One option that I haven't tried but which I think might work in theory is to do the following:

• Model the scene without any nightlights and export it
• Move the exported model outside of your plugins folder so that it isn't overwritten
• Edit the scene so that the lamp is self-illuminated
• Export the model a second time
• Open up both of the exported models in reader
• Delete the day renders from the second export (the one where the light is self-illuminated)
• Copy the day renders from the first export (the one where there are no nightlights) and paste them into the second export

As I said, I haven't tried this myself, so I'm not 100% sure that it would work. However, this might take less time and be less of a hassle than trying to set up a bunch of target spot lights to mimic an omnidirectional light.

[art128]

Have you tried playing with (if available on gmax) the near and far attenuation of the omni options?

[N1_2888]

Thank you!

Well, illuminating the lantern bodies is not the problem. I managed to do this with direct lights:

I've switched off the light at the top of the rendering to show the difference. Anyway, thank you for the information that there is a self-illumination setting in gmax. This seems to be much easier than fiddling around with directs.

But what I want is to add a surrounding flare that illuminates the walls as well as the ground, which in turn causes nice shadow effects. I've tried several near and far attenuation settings without any success.

[BartonThinks]

So, I'm not sure if this is the "right" way to do this, but I think I found a workable solution.

I created a simple test scene with a lamppost, a short wall, and a ground plane. I then tested the lighting with an omni light inside the lamp itself. The results were similar to the ones that you got.



I tried a few different things to try and fix the shadows, most of which worked very poorly or not at all. But after experimenting with a few different techniques, I was able to come up with this:



This was achieved using the following steps:

1. First, I deleted the omni light completely.
2. I then created a "Free Spot" light and assigned the following parameters:
- Multiplier: 0.25
- Hotspot: 173
- Falloff: 175
3. I then placed this light so that it was just outside of the light bulb.
4. I then rotated the light along the X axis to 45 degrees, so that it was pointing diagonally away from the light, toward the ground.
5. Finally, I created 15 copies of the light (for 16 lights total) and set them around the light bulb in a circle, with a new light every 22.5 degrees.

In case that's confusing at all, here's what the setup looks like from the front view.



The one obvious downside to this technique is you end up with a bit of a "starburst" pattern because of how the lights and shadows overlap. The good news is that the starburst effect can be reduced by adding additional lights.

For example, in the image below, I doubled the number of lights to 32, with the lights spaced out every 11.25 degrees around the lamp. The multiplier for each light was reduced to 0.125 to compensate for the added brightness created by doubling the number of lights. As you can see, the starburst pattern is a lot less noticeable.



Now, there might be an easier way to do this. I just started BATing recently, so this was just a case of a total newbie throwing stuff at the wall until something stuck. Some of the more experienced Gmax users on the forum might have a better solution. It may also be worth popping in on the BAT Help Thread at Simtropolis:

https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/74718-bat-getting-started-guide-faq-resources-help/

In any case, hope this helps!

[N1_2888]

Thank you for your very detailed and easy-to-understand small tutorial as well as for providing the link to the BAT Help Thread at Simtropolis! I consider myself more as SC4 devotee than as Simtropolitan and thus didn't have ST on my radar.

[N1_2888]

I think our virtual Paris derivatives need more uniformity – even more uniformity than Baron Haussmann could have ever imagined. Thus I've created a kind of add-on for Xannepan's Rue du General-Foy buildings.

As you may or may not know, these buildings have lacked a narrow version till now. Due to their quite unique proportions other Paris BATs do not really fit in:


Behold and be amazed:


What do you think about the roof? Should I decrease its colour saturation a bit?

[Andreas]

The wall texture is a perfect match, I'd say, but the greenish tint of the roof stands out a little alright. The saturation is probably fine, and obviously, a freshly renovated roof on a real-world building would look different as well, but some fine-tuning for makeing it an actual "add-on BAT" to the Paris set might be preferrable.

[N1_2888]

In order to make my BAT more look like those from Xannepan, I've even mimicked his reddish roof rabbets:


The colour of the backyard slate roof still doesn't match:

[Tyberius06]

That's awesome!
More generic Parisian buildings are always welcomed! Perhaps more variety on the angled and angled-corner side would be even more awesome!
But it's alwasy nice to see your "expansions" for the Parisian sets   

- Tyberius

[N1_2888]

Well, corners and angles ... That reminds me somewhat of elbows.   For in November I had an e-scooter accident that affected my left elbow in a, well, negative way: At the tender age of 39 I experienced my first broken bone. I really hope it will be also the last. But there was also something good about it as I used the sick leave for some BATting. No corners, no angles (i.e. in connection with roads), not even Paris, but slope situations and Meudon-sur-Seine:




There are already railway station BATs for terrain cuts, but there is only one by NOB for unilateral slopes. I think this new model will be a useful addition. It's not finished yet and lacks a mirrored version.

The original building still exists, but serves as a restaurant now. The corresponding railway line was "downgraded" to a tram line in the 1990s.

[DebussyMan]

Love it!! Any chance of a 7.5m version?

[N1_2888]

Any chance of a 7.5m version?

This should be achievable without too much effort.
_____

Generally I'd dearly love to have a greater BAT output, but my BATting method doesn't allow this.

As you may know, the B.A.T. renders surfaces pointing upwards brighter than the rest of the model. The only way for me to handle this issue is to model these surfaces separately:

The dark blue objects, most of them with a thickness of just 1 millimeter, are textured with a lower RGB level.

Moreover, texturing stone facades is quite challenging, at least for me. I have to add shadings to the facade in order to make its parts clearly visible and standing out from each other. These are the textures of my previous BAT, which is actually a quite simple one:

In the south view, for example, just the south and north facade feature shaded textures, east and west don't for reasons of simplicity (otherwise I'd have to create extra textures ). Thus I have to texture and render south/north and east/west separately.

Due to the distinct texturing of the stairs I now even have to do this for each view.
_____

Anyway, let me finish this post with adding the other two views of my station:

[Tyberius06]

Hi,

Wow, this is pretty damn awesome @N1_2888 ! I agree with DebussyMan, if it is not too much work a 7.5 meter version would be really appreciated!
Also if you need help with the modding (specially with Transit Enabling), please let me know, I'm more than happy to help with it as I helped out others with similar stuffs in the past. Probably a rail and a GLR/Tram version could be modded/lotted as well.

Anyhow, great work!

- Tyberius

[manga rivotra]

Superb work on this station!     
It will perfectly complement the recent great ones by DebussyMan. 
It only remains for me to rework all my rail networks, to create an appropriate environment for them.