message posté le 27 fév 2004 à 03h18
Modeling Sim City buildings in gMax/BAT: Walls
Note: It would be a good idea to review the User Reference, and perhaps going through one or two standard gmax tutorials, under the Help menu, before going through this tutorial which is specific to creating buildings for Sim City 4.
Getting started - Before you begin, you’ll need to set up the scene for SC4 building scale:
Go into Customize/Units Setup, and make sure you have Generic Units checked (default).
Go into Customize/Preferences, and in the General tab set it so that 1 unit = 1 meter.
Go into Customize/Grid and Snap Settings, then to the Home Grid tab and set the grid spacing to 1.
Some General Tips:
Name every object in your scene! You will spend a bit more time doing this in the beginning, but it will save you time and frustration later on when the scene gets complicated. You should also use the “Named Selection Sets” feature as much as possible.
Concentrate on finalizing the model first before going on to texturing. The test of a good model is whether it looks great, with clarity and definition on its own, and without the benefit of any textures.
You may want to make up a library of objects: doors, windows, heat vents etc. These can then be used on other models later on.
Because of the camera angle (line of sight) we have found that we need to exaggerate the heights of buildings vertically in order for them to appear plausible in the SC world. So if you want to make a house with an average 8 foot ceiling, your walls would want to actually be 4 meters high in the Gmax environment in order to simulate this. The footprints along x and y should be true scale though. In other words, cheat your buildings a bit taller.
You may want to create a library of certain objects, like different window and door types, if you intend to create several buildings. Then you will have the option to merge these into your new buildings as you go.
Make use of the Arc Rotate tool often. Click on this and rotate the circular handle that appears in the center of the scene. You can then revert back to other views with keyboard shortcuts, F= Front, L= Left, R= Right, K= Back, T= Top.
You will be going back and forth between the “Create” and the “Modify” panels, and it is important to remember which mode is applicable at any given time. One of the common frustrations for gmax novices is forgetting to switch modes. Basically you will create your objects in the Create tab, and any subsequent alterations/edits will take place in the Modify tab.
Create and Modify tabs
1. Making Walls:
A. There are a few ways you can go about modeling walls, but our recommended method is to extrude “editable splines”. Splines are basically another term for lines in the 3D environment.
First, a couple of steps to set us up for making walls more easily: to begin with, click the Min/Max Toggle at the bottom right of the screen in order to display a single viewport (you can toggle back to the split views at any time) and make sure you are in the Front view (keyboard shortcut = F).
Min/Max Toggle
You have the option to turn on the Snap Tool, which allows the line vertices to snap to points on the viewport grid. This makes it something like drawing on graph paper, and you might find it very useful for ease and accuracy. The snap tool is to the left of the Animate button at the bottom of the screen. Click the button and hold down, releasing on the 2.5 option. Right-click on the Snap icon, and make sure that only “Grid” is checked.
Snap tool
Right click on Front, at the top right in the viewport, and make sure Smooth + Highlights, Edged Faces and Show Grid are checked.
B. Now you can start on the front wall. Click on the Create tab, then click on the Shapes option just underneath.
Create tab is at the top left, and the Shapes option is the second in the row below.
You have the option to create a line or one of several other spline shapes, all of which can be extruded into solids. You will want to draw an outline of the front wall, using either Line or Rectangle, along with any wall openings for windows, doors, etc. Make sure the bottom of the wall aligns with the horizontal ground plane (X in the front view). Note: you will need to avoid any overlapping lines in order to have the wall extrude properly (the space between the bottom of the door and the bottom of the wall for example). The wall spline for a simple house might look like this:
C. Once you have drawn out the shape of the first wall, select all of the lines comprising the wall, window and door openings, right-click on the selection and convert all to Editable Spline. The next step will be to attach all of these splines. To do this, select any single spline and under Modify/Geometry rollout, click Attach and click on the rest of the splines until they are a single object.
Next you’ll want to extrude the wall spline. With the wall selected, go into the Modify Panel and add an Extrude modifier (click on the drop menu and select Extrude from the list). Set the amount to -.3 for a typical house, and more like -.4 or -.5 for larger buildings. You should see the wall become solid in the viewport, leaving the window and door openings as voids.
The Modify Panel is just to the right of the Create Panel.
D. The front face of the wall is centered in the scene along Z (your line of sight from front to back when in Front View) and you will now want to move it forward to fill out the desired building footprint. You can go into Top View (keyboard shortcut=T) and with the Select and Move cursor move the wall forward (down). You may want to keep the 2.5 D Snap on, select the wall at a point where the snap crosshair indicator comes on and move in exact one-meter increments. You of course have the option to move everything around the scene in a freehand manner without the benefit of exact measurement or conforming to the grid, but it is generally a good thing to keep major edges aligned with the grid where possible.
With Select and Move tool, and 2.5 D Snap turned on, you can move objects around and have them snap into compliance with the grid.
E. Once the front wall is positioned properly, you can go on to create the side and back walls. The fastest way to do this is to make copies of the wall you just made, then rotate them around 90 degrees and into position along the outer edges of the footprint you want. Make any alterations you like to the new walls (you might choose to remove doors for side walls, or make some smaller windows, for example). If any of the walls comprising your building are to be identical, you can make “Instance” copies of the original, which ensures that any changes made to either the original, or any instanced copies, affects the others in the same way. This feature is especially practical for copying windows and doors, and other objects that will be copied throughout the building. You always have the option to make any instanced geometry unique by selecting that geometry and, in the Modify panel, hit “Make Unique”. “Copy”, on the other hand, creates a unique duplicate with no effect on the original when edited.
Make Unique option
F. To edit the walls, make sure you are in the Modify tab, select the wall and go back down to Editable Spline in the modifier stack. In Sub-Object/Segment mode you can delete, move and/or copy any lines that comprise the wall. Also, if you decide to add an additional floor and row of window openings, you can raise the top edge of the wall, and copy/move the top row of window openings up one floor. To copy elements of a spline shape like this, you would Shift/Select/Move the selection. After you have made your edits to the spline, click back on the extrude modifier to see the wall take shape again.
Your four walls might look something like this:
Modeling Sim City buildings in gMax/BAT: Walls
Message édité le 27/02/2004 à 02h22 par Olivier
Message édité le 27/02/2004 à 02h22 par Olivier
Note: It would be a good idea to review the User Reference, and perhaps going through one or two standard gmax tutorials, under the Help menu, before going through this tutorial which is specific to creating buildings for Sim City 4.
Getting started - Before you begin, you’ll need to set up the scene for SC4 building scale:
Go into Customize/Units Setup, and make sure you have Generic Units checked (default).
Go into Customize/Preferences, and in the General tab set it so that 1 unit = 1 meter.
Go into Customize/Grid and Snap Settings, then to the Home Grid tab and set the grid spacing to 1.
Some General Tips:
Name every object in your scene! You will spend a bit more time doing this in the beginning, but it will save you time and frustration later on when the scene gets complicated. You should also use the “Named Selection Sets” feature as much as possible.
Concentrate on finalizing the model first before going on to texturing. The test of a good model is whether it looks great, with clarity and definition on its own, and without the benefit of any textures.
You may want to make up a library of objects: doors, windows, heat vents etc. These can then be used on other models later on.
Because of the camera angle (line of sight) we have found that we need to exaggerate the heights of buildings vertically in order for them to appear plausible in the SC world. So if you want to make a house with an average 8 foot ceiling, your walls would want to actually be 4 meters high in the Gmax environment in order to simulate this. The footprints along x and y should be true scale though. In other words, cheat your buildings a bit taller.
You may want to create a library of certain objects, like different window and door types, if you intend to create several buildings. Then you will have the option to merge these into your new buildings as you go.
Make use of the Arc Rotate tool often. Click on this and rotate the circular handle that appears in the center of the scene. You can then revert back to other views with keyboard shortcuts, F= Front, L= Left, R= Right, K= Back, T= Top.
You will be going back and forth between the “Create” and the “Modify” panels, and it is important to remember which mode is applicable at any given time. One of the common frustrations for gmax novices is forgetting to switch modes. Basically you will create your objects in the Create tab, and any subsequent alterations/edits will take place in the Modify tab.
Create and Modify tabs
1. Making Walls:
A. There are a few ways you can go about modeling walls, but our recommended method is to extrude “editable splines”. Splines are basically another term for lines in the 3D environment.
First, a couple of steps to set us up for making walls more easily: to begin with, click the Min/Max Toggle at the bottom right of the screen in order to display a single viewport (you can toggle back to the split views at any time) and make sure you are in the Front view (keyboard shortcut = F).
Min/Max Toggle
You have the option to turn on the Snap Tool, which allows the line vertices to snap to points on the viewport grid. This makes it something like drawing on graph paper, and you might find it very useful for ease and accuracy. The snap tool is to the left of the Animate button at the bottom of the screen. Click the button and hold down, releasing on the 2.5 option. Right-click on the Snap icon, and make sure that only “Grid” is checked.
Snap tool
Right click on Front, at the top right in the viewport, and make sure Smooth + Highlights, Edged Faces and Show Grid are checked.
B. Now you can start on the front wall. Click on the Create tab, then click on the Shapes option just underneath.
Create tab is at the top left, and the Shapes option is the second in the row below.
You have the option to create a line or one of several other spline shapes, all of which can be extruded into solids. You will want to draw an outline of the front wall, using either Line or Rectangle, along with any wall openings for windows, doors, etc. Make sure the bottom of the wall aligns with the horizontal ground plane (X in the front view). Note: you will need to avoid any overlapping lines in order to have the wall extrude properly (the space between the bottom of the door and the bottom of the wall for example). The wall spline for a simple house might look like this:
C. Once you have drawn out the shape of the first wall, select all of the lines comprising the wall, window and door openings, right-click on the selection and convert all to Editable Spline. The next step will be to attach all of these splines. To do this, select any single spline and under Modify/Geometry rollout, click Attach and click on the rest of the splines until they are a single object.
Next you’ll want to extrude the wall spline. With the wall selected, go into the Modify Panel and add an Extrude modifier (click on the drop menu and select Extrude from the list). Set the amount to -.3 for a typical house, and more like -.4 or -.5 for larger buildings. You should see the wall become solid in the viewport, leaving the window and door openings as voids.
The Modify Panel is just to the right of the Create Panel.
D. The front face of the wall is centered in the scene along Z (your line of sight from front to back when in Front View) and you will now want to move it forward to fill out the desired building footprint. You can go into Top View (keyboard shortcut=T) and with the Select and Move cursor move the wall forward (down). You may want to keep the 2.5 D Snap on, select the wall at a point where the snap crosshair indicator comes on and move in exact one-meter increments. You of course have the option to move everything around the scene in a freehand manner without the benefit of exact measurement or conforming to the grid, but it is generally a good thing to keep major edges aligned with the grid where possible.
With Select and Move tool, and 2.5 D Snap turned on, you can move objects around and have them snap into compliance with the grid.
E. Once the front wall is positioned properly, you can go on to create the side and back walls. The fastest way to do this is to make copies of the wall you just made, then rotate them around 90 degrees and into position along the outer edges of the footprint you want. Make any alterations you like to the new walls (you might choose to remove doors for side walls, or make some smaller windows, for example). If any of the walls comprising your building are to be identical, you can make “Instance” copies of the original, which ensures that any changes made to either the original, or any instanced copies, affects the others in the same way. This feature is especially practical for copying windows and doors, and other objects that will be copied throughout the building. You always have the option to make any instanced geometry unique by selecting that geometry and, in the Modify panel, hit “Make Unique”. “Copy”, on the other hand, creates a unique duplicate with no effect on the original when edited.
Make Unique option
F. To edit the walls, make sure you are in the Modify tab, select the wall and go back down to Editable Spline in the modifier stack. In Sub-Object/Segment mode you can delete, move and/or copy any lines that comprise the wall. Also, if you decide to add an additional floor and row of window openings, you can raise the top edge of the wall, and copy/move the top row of window openings up one floor. To copy elements of a spline shape like this, you would Shift/Select/Move the selection. After you have made your edits to the spline, click back on the extrude modifier to see the wall take shape again.
Your four walls might look something like this:
Modeling Sim City buildings in gMax/BAT: Walls
Message édité le 27/02/2004 à 02h22 par Olivier
Message édité le 27/02/2004 à 02h22 par Olivier
La patience n'est pas une vertue quand on se laisse marcher dessus.