Rural Renewal Project

[dedgren]

Chris, you're getting that dam down to the expansion joints in the road and white efflorescence from the concrete seams level of detail.  That's about the most nicely conceived SC4 project I've seen in a while, and it fills such a hole in what's out there.

Two thoughts- is there a way to make it in small stream, large stream and gigunda stream variants? and would it be possible to have the impoundment side be plop water?  Just askin', don't let me divert your attention or anything.

Great job!


David

[Chrisadams3997]

would it be possible to have the impoundment side be plop water?

Yep, it should be easy.  Since the ground around that side is fully terraformable, you can raise the ground on that side to the level you want, then place plop water or any lotted water types(ponds/canals)

is there a way to make it in small stream, large stream and gigunda stream variants?

I've had in mind a larger version from the beginning, so I've made as much of it as possible easy to expand to the larger size.  Each flood gate is 16 meters or one tile(nice how that works out, right ).  This one has 7 gates, and I'm tentatively planning a 12 gate, the same size as the real dam it's based on.  I hadn't thought about a smaller one, and I don't know if I will.  For each size, I've got to do a custom wash for it, and some LOD's might need to be reworked, so I can't really make it any size just at will, it will take some work.

Now, if you wanted really gargantuan, I came across a number of good pictures and plans on this dam that would be pretty crazy:


It's almost a kilometer across .  If done to real life dimensions, without the navigational lock on the far side, it'd be about 57 tiles... but don't count on that any time soon.  Maybe one day

As for this one, I wanted moss along the inside edges of some of the spillway openings.  While I could have made one huge texture to cover all seven of them, that'd wouldn't be expandable later , so instead I went and looked into vertex painting and some procedural textures and came up with something like this:





Now, I've got to learn another new procedure to get the street lights built how I've got in mind

Chris

[dragonshardz]

So is the flow coming from the dam a permanent thing or are the flow(s) going to be a timed prop?

Personally I like the timed prop bit, that way there's a little more visual variety in the dam than what's already there.

[Chrisadams3997]

It'll be timed, with the foam wash(which is a separate prop) being timed along with it.  I'm also going to include a version without the foam wash I believe for anyone wanting to use this in mountainous terrain where they'll be able to use rapids effect lots instead of a flat game-water spillway after the dam.

[dedgren]

Whoa, Chris- your attention to detail is certainly bound to become legendary.

Just don't let anyone talk you into modding any snail darters [linkie].


David

[MAS71]

Hello Chrisadams3997 and nice to meet you 

Wow!! That's really beatiful water works !!
I was able to know very well difficulty of the works about some water.
so I assert that you do very splendid work.  and I'm looking forwardt to the followup of your work in a future !!

Thanks for reading Chrisadams3997. 
-Mas'71

[deathtopumpkins]

I decided to finally pop in here and see what I've been hearing so much about (*cough*David*cough*), and I am just awed by that dam! Now it looks like I'll have to go back and read through the rest of this thread! 

[XiahouDun]

  And I'm off to destroy my existing dam for when this is available Seriously great work.

[Chrisadams3997]

David:  lol, sure, it'd be easy!  All one pixel of it(that's after accounting for the vertical squashing caused by the SC4 viewing angle .  Although, the tellico dam that caused that controversy is a good model to work off of for a small dam.

Mas:  Great to have you stop by.  I downloaded the river lots you uploaded recently and am actually curious to see them, as I haven't actually played the game since then , but what I saw in the pictures look great.

DTP:  And it's finally time!   Nice to see you here.

Xiahoudun:  Thanks

Alright, by now, yall should know I don't usually make big posts.  This one might be.  I think I've finally got almost all the details and such I wanted to add in, so I've gone around and taken a number of pics from different angles(including the one yall haven't seen-anybody notice that ) and zooms.  So without further ado:



Here you can see for the first time the scaling next to other buildings.  I might have to reduce the scale on the control building just a tad more, if anybody sees anything else a bit off, bring it to my attention.  I also need to beef up the light poles a tad and move them in towards the road more.



Here I played around with placing various flora in next to the model to test LOD's mostly.  You can see that it allows them quite easily in the spaces.  Also you can see the roof junk for the control building.  Any suggestions there?



I switched terrain and water mods if you didn't notice before .  This is the painted desert mod and little missouri water that comes with it.  The big thing is a different underwater beach texture and, more importantly, lower transparency at shallow depths.  This causes the dark areas on the edges of the foam wash to show a bit much, which I anticipated might be a problem under some circumstances.  I'm going to render it against a more neutral background color(as opposed to black) to alleviate some of this issue.

Also looking at the concrete abutments on the edge of the spillway, you can see an LOD issue here.  I've got two options to fix this that I'm still mulling over, but it will be fixed.



I love this shot.  I'm rather certain if you showed it to someone who hadn't played SC4 before, you'd have a hard time convincing them that the water is at the same level on each side.



Here you can see the abutment LOD issue on the other side.



Another close-up on the control building, showing the roof junk and surrounding flora as it fits into the LOD.



I'm also impressed with how well the perspective shift holds up at higher zooms



I also decided to experiment with TPW.  Obviously this method requires raising the elevation on the lake side of the dam.  So I raised about as high as one might dare, though from this angle it doesn't have much impact.  I had to lower the section inside the dam(behind the flood gates) in order for the water to not be too high there, plus I had to use my lowest TPW model(at .6 meters high), which accounts for the different water color there.  So if you want TPW inside, some special precautions and methods have to be used.  Not really much way to avoid this.



On the whole, I'm not sure it's worth using TPW, unless placing this in mountains where in-game water isn't available.  I turned the grid on here to show the drop off that occurs where I had to lower the terrain inside the dam(as described for the last picture.)  This meant that I had to make sure the TPW pieces I placed next the the dam here where not placed on the slope itself to avoid graphical glitches.



This view is where I think the TPW suffers the most, as you lose the sense of depth on this side seen in the in-game water, without really gaining anymore of a sense of height difference.



The further out we zoom, the less convincing the TPW lake really looks by comparison.  Also, looking at the top of it, it's obvious that it needs to be absolutely flat, as slopes cause them to 'bunch up' if you will and cause glitches.



At max zoom you would need to use some very careful terraforming to hide the square edges of the TPW, along with smaller pieces(this is all big pieces.)  In the end, it works fine with the LOD's of the dam, which is the main thing I wanted to test, but I'd have a hard time justifying a TPW reservoir in anything but mountainous conditions.  Hence a big reason I wanted to make the dam work convincingly for in-game water.

The main takeaway points here is that if anyone sees any room for improvement(that I didn't mention) in the model, or the scale of anything, throw me a comment.  I'm going to add a metal railing similar to the ones seen on either side of bridges on either side, and, well, that's about it, then do night lighting otherwise.

Till next time,
Chris

[Yoman]

Hmm...I think Jrj needs to add a smiley that includes a drooling face, then continues onto the drool short circuting the keyboard and the screen exploding, well maybe not that far, but the first part of my proposed smiley shows the reaction the the realism you've achived with this product, and as I've said earlier, I hate LODs

[deathtopumpkins]

I agree with Yoman's smiley request 

I'm rather certain you'd have a hard time convincing them that it was a game at all. That looks REALLY GOOD!

I think we should stick to using game water for it though, as I'm not really liking it with TPW.

[Chrisadams3997]

lol, just for you Yoman, I'm going to show a few shots of the LOD's themselves .  Actually, I'd been thinkin' about showing them for a bit, but it's a good excuse.

DTP:  I agree about the TPW here, I just don't find it well suited to large bodies of water in general, though it works well for rivers.  But, there are cases where it'd be the only option.

So... I just took a couple of renders of the LOD.  The main things to see is that you can see clear through the middle openings, noting how they allow visibility up to the flood gates--that's why water appears on one side and not the other.  Also, as a general rule, anything going underground has to have an LOD that fits tightly vertically to the model.



The reason for the abutment graphic glitch seen above relates to this, as part is skin tight, while part is not(just in front of the flood gates.)  I'm actually going to make the inside section that is skin tight now looser so that the whole inside section of the abutment always shows, wether really supposed to be underground or not, for perspective reasons.  It's part of the optical illusion.  The outside of those abutments on the other hand will be skin tight so that from the outside angle they follow the terrain.



Note here that the LOD doesn't need to follow the curve of the base(which you can see poking out of it), as it doesn't need to.  The LOD here defines where the model 'face' shows under the water.  If I wanted it to show above the water, I could move the face of the LOD there up, with out touching the model.  The important thing to remember when doing custom LOD's is that the rest of the model is only going to be used to produce a texture placed onto the LOD, the way the model interacts with the rest of the game environment(other props/water/etc.) is all based on the geometry of the LOD.  If anyone has any questions how to set one up for a particular situation, just send me a PM and I can likely help you out with it.

Chris

[threestooges]

Again, I can only say that this is impressive work so far. I want to thank you for that LOD discussion at the bottom of your last post. That is probably one of the clearer descriptions of what an LOD is/how it works that I've heard. I'll be waiting for the release of this, but until then, take it easy.
-Matt

[MAS71]

Thank you for your reply Chrisadams3997. 
It's looking so beatiful and having realism so much !!   
Especialy, An Affinity is good with Ttansparent Water Plane and your Dam's !! It's just matching with the Land and Water(sea) without any unnaturalness I think so.

May I give an opinion a little ? 
About a pont of the Waterfall. (Water runs in a dam)
Would you give some alpha map (permeability or Opacity) to that plane(Mesh)  in max ??
This is one of my little idea for them, I don't know well that it's will be best result in your case,

I'm sorry if I worsen your mood about my little opinion.


however, Your works will be a good one for us !! I convinced so !!
Thank you again.

-Mas'71

[Yoman]

Wow, those LODs themselves could make a fine dam BAT. Thanks for the the little discussion on LODs, that clears up a few things. The reason I hate LODs is primarily that sometimes I need tight fitting ones such as yours, and I hate having to basically BAT the whole thing again So I try to cheat, sometimes it works, such as on my cranes, [[Linky,]] where props needed to be seen under, around, and behind the frame etc, and on other BATs that were a bit more complicated, well the LODs didn't work out quite so well

[Duvad]

Chris, the control building looks fine in terms of scale to me. That foam is also (i.e. apart from the dam) pretty impressive, and adds a fair bit to the overall appearance.

[bat]

That's looking really nice there, Chris! Great new pictures of that work!!!

[Chrisadams3997]

Matt:  Thanks, I'm glad you found it useful.  I'm thinking that next time I make a somewhat complex LOD for something, I'm going to make a tutorial out of it.  It's definitely one of those things I think a lot of people have trouble wrapping their head around.  I should know, it took me a while to really start to understand it (and I'm still learning too still).

Mas71: 

I'm sorry if I worsen your mood about my little opinion.

Not at all.  I've been trying to think of ways to improve on those, so any ideas are welcome.  The exact approach shown in your picture wouldn't necessarily work here, as we don't really want the concrete underneath showing.  It does give me another related idea I'd like to try when I get time however.

Yoman:  I can see how those cranes would pose a challenge.  I'd actually like to see the models and how you made the LOD's out of curiosity.  As well as those 'other BATs', lol.

Duvad:  I think it's close, but could still be a little improved.  Besides, the smaller the building is, the larger the dam looks next to it

Bat:  Thanks bat.



Well the engineers where all in a fuss about people driving off the edges and crazy stuff like that, so I add in some guard rails on the edges and closed up the gap with the building.  The streetlights have also been brought up to spec.  At this point I think I'm done messing with details and am calling the modeling done, well, I still have to update the LOD's for new stuff, but you know what I mean. .. right?

Which brings me around to the next phase...
.. .
.

Dang it, where's my trumpet fanfare.  Anyway, moving right along.  As I was saying, the next phase, making the road across functional.  At first I'd considered making an invisible subway connection lot for each end, something like the big dig project.  But that doesn't give us any cars on top .  No good.

Then I had an idea.  Some of you have seen the bridge model I started a while back, with the real road dragged across.  Well, I can't do that here, sorry.  It requires land underneath, which was hidden by the bridge, but would show through under the dam here.  No good.

But, if we had a bridge that was covered up, or that is actually incorporated into the structure itself, that would work like a charm.  So I talked to threestooges about it(OK, so I begged him to make one for me ), but he couldn't look at for another two weeks.  The modeling for the bridge would be nothing, in fact just a single flat plane with the road texture that would replace the road texture currently in the model.  Nothing to it.  So I'm going to look into the process if it's not too involved of modding it, or if any other experienced bridge modders could take a look, I'd be quite appreciative.

At any rate, I also got a chance to play with Diggis's new pond lots under construction, seeing how they can be incorporated.  I thought I might show some pictures of that.  Though mostly I'll just be showing off his work .  If you haven't seen it yet, Check it out

I've also switched out to the meadowshire terrain mod, and a custom green water mod of mine(made to match up coming TPW)











I've got some additional ideas for a dam version made more specifically for plopped or lotted water, but we'll get to that later.

Chris

[JoeST]

this stuff is looking amazing

thankyou

Joe

[Alfred.Jones]

It goes great with Diggis' ponds. Cannot wait for more