Tom's BATs

[tomvsotis]

Hey, I made a BAT! This has been a fun project - it's involved teaching myself first Blender and then Gmax - and it's gotten to the point that I've rendered a model successfully and exported it for use in the game. The thing is, I'm not super happy w it - the roof, especially, is kinda bland - and I'm looking for advice/ideas from the more experienced types here as to how it might be improved.

Here's the model as it stands at the moment - it's based on a beautiful old art deco house in Bendigo, Australia:



(I haven't implemented nightlighting yet.)

And here's the reference image I used:



Any and all thoughts, suggestions, feedback etc are welcome.

[Alan_Waters]

In the photo, the color of the roof of the building is almost the same as the color of the brick near the basement, and you have it pink, which in the game does not look very good. IMHO

[mgb204]

I'd say the roof texture needs some work, but the concrete is probably about right.

There is a great tutorial by Gn_leugim here on ST for making BAT textures, that's a good place to start. Generally speaking you probably want to make the roof darker. The thing that's important to remember is that whilst the reference picture is taken from one climate, that's not to say it will fit well with the SC4 colour palette. If you want your BATs to blend in with other buildings, you'll always need to compensate for that when texturing.

You also want to look at the UV mapping of both of the rounded roof parts, because it simply looks wrong here. Is the roof all one object or in separate pieces? If you model them as separate pieces, you can give different parts their own UV map with unique settings. Which is probably the best solution to avoid this issue. If need be you can remove those parts from the current roof and make them as separate objects to achieve this.

Lastly, I think you've fallen into the trap everyone does for their first bat, it looks squashed vertically. That's because using real world scaling doesn't translate well to an isometric game. To compensate, you should make everything about 33% taller than the real world. Bear in mind sims are like 4m high (ridiculous I know), but if you want it to look like they can walk through the front door, again you need to adjust your modelling to fit.

[Krasner]

A newcomer into BAT  It's a very good first try imo  Especially if you come with an art-deco style, which is not so common in SC4 (and which I absolutely love btw  )

But as you said yourself the roof is kinda problematic - the color is not so good, too pink and maybe a little bit too bright, also the round parts you placed above the bow-windows do not match the IRL image you provided and the texture display bad on it. You can also add some traces of dirt flowing from the roof top - small details like that always make the whole thing better. And don't forget the gutters - which some BATers forget to add many times 

Also it looks quite crushed - don't forget that SC4 is not exactly 3D and that you need to multiply the height of the whole thing to 1.3 (approximately) so the proportions will, normally, look coherent 

Btw the brick parts - which add the polychromia which make this kind of buildings so pretty - are maybe too saturated compared to the white walls imo, or maybe the walls are to bright. The polychromia may look better otherwise, I don't know but if I had the orders I would try that.

That's a thing I personnaly like to do but you do as you want - as your IRL picture show, assorted fences add coherence and prettyness 

But as I said, it's already a good BAT imo 

[Themistokles]

A very good-looking BAT. I really like the art-deco style, so I could definitely see myself using this BAT if you decide to share the final product (which I hope you will).

[vester]

Maybe scale the height to 130-150 %.
The game view squashed the bats.

Also the texture is also good to scale up. Think I go to around 150-200 %

[tomvsotis]

Awesome, thanks all. I'll have another crack at it this evening, hopefully!

[noahclem]

Great to see you starting batting  Great project with some real potential!

[reddonquixote]

Great start 

As others have said, once scaled up 133%, it will be much better. The other thing is the roof line, if you look at the chimney, it actually sits on the white part of the wall, you have it sitting on the roof tiles. That means the roof actually has quite a thick parapet running around it. I looked the building up on google earth (there's no such thing as privacy anymore!  ) and you can see the roof sits inside the confines of the wall, rather than coming right to the edge like on a normal house. Sorry for the ugly picture, but thought this might help...



Once its scaled up, you might think about making the window muntins(?) - the crossbars in the windows - a bit thicker, they are a pretty prominent feature of the architecture but disappear in the BAT if you don't make them thicker than RL.

Hope that helps, keep up the good work 

[tomvsotis]

lol thanks Reddonquixote - i did EXACTLY the same thing (i.e. stalking these people on google maps) and came to the same conclusion re the parapet

i think this looks better now, at least as far as the roof goes! (it added room for a gutter, too)

[gn_leugim]

good start out there!

That roof will be a bi tricky to do as it has at least two round shape parts, the adjustment of the texture will no be easy. How good are you with image editing, and what software do you use?

[tomvsotis]

good start out there!

That roof will be a bi tricky to do as it has at least two round shape parts, the adjustment of the texture will no be easy. How good are you with image editing, and what software do you use?

Thank you! And yeah, that roof is hard. Re image editing: I'm pretty good, actually! I have Photoshop CS5.

[tomvsotis]

Making progress!

[Krasner]

Nice ! 

[vester]

Looks good.

The tiles looks a bit off.

Try to replace the texture for the roof with a test texture to figure out what is going on:


If I should do a roof like this in the begin, I would do the roof as 11 separate objects.
That would enable the use of UVW-Mapping.

The you might need to do UV-mapping for the two half cone shaped roof.


Do you use gmax or ?


EDIT: Just thinking about it, haven't tested it out, maybe you could use a cylinder UV-Mapping for the cone shaped roof.
You will have to place the center of the cylinder in the center of the cone.

[tomvsotis]

Looks good.

The tiles looks a bit off.

Yeah, they do, and I'm not quite sure why.

I used Blender for the modeling, because I have a Mac — the only way to use Gmax is via virtualization, which makes it sluggish as hell, and in any case I like Blender's interface way better. The best way I could find to import a model to Gmax from Blender was to create one object for each material, and then apply the textures to those objects in Gmax. This means that the roof is one object, and for this attempt I made a texture specifically to fit to the UV:



It fits nicely to the map:



But for some reason in the rendering it looks like it's sitting at a slight angle? Idk, but I'll try your suggestion of adding a test texture and see how it looks. (Thanks for the advice!)

[vester]

Ahh, a top down, UVW-Map.

Maybe make each tile a bit wider.

The screens tend to make object textures to real world measuments looks a bit strange.

[tomvsotis]

OK cool I'll try that!

[reddonquixote]

Great work, its looking really good now. The building style is instantly recognisable. Good luck with the texturing, good progress so far 

[mattb325]

Looking good! And it's great to see another (Australian) batter