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Build Stages

Started by Maldrick, October 03, 2018, 09:46:58 AM

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Maldrick

Been getting my ducks in a row to get into modding again.  Occurred to me that, with the mod I did last winter (and the other that I modelled but didn't complete) I followed Discrepancy's tutorial.  The tutorial has you start with a frame and then add faces for walls.  So, at the end, it was just a simple matter of pulling the faces and other details out to create the frames for build stages.

I've been watching a lot of tutorials for modelling buildings in Blender and Sketchup and all of them seem to start with a solid block then contouring it. Which is probably more efficient once you're adept with it and likely reduces extra polys as opposed to piecing different elements together.  But now I'm debating how best to go about doing the build stages for buildings and have them match the final mesh, especially ones that don't necessarily have parts of a frame on the exterior.

Really curious as to what others do for this.

Also, unrelated, but since I'm posting...I noticed with the mods I did before that bannies were able to clip through the outer corners of my buildings in-game.  Which leads me to suspect I was exceeding the grid to a degree even though, by eye, everything was within the grid.  Is there a way to, say, snap an edge to the grid to make sure it's within that boundary?  Or is something else causing it?  I double checked the mapping at the time and it was as it should be.  Actually, with the one I didn't complete, I think I kept everything at least a couple of cm within the grid, come to think of it.

Thanks in advance for any insight!
"We are the architects of our actions and we must live with their consequences, whether glorious or tragic."
― Ezio Auditore da Firenze

embx61

#1
Both ways are valid and it depends on the building which is modeled too.
It is indeed faster to have double faced walls for the building stages but a single plane wall works as well.
In the build stage mesh I use either a shell modifier, or detach a wall as copy, move copy of the wall a bit in and flip the faces.

But if I have just a double plane wall I just delete the insides of the main mesh after making a build stage copy to save some poly.

For things as statues I use a slice modifier to remove some of the top of the statue and just cap the top of the bottom part and re texture this part.
This is seen in the Statue of Liberty and Cristo Retendor mods build stages.

There are sure more ways of doing things but these are the ones I mostly use.

Yes the clipping can be annoying as bannies cut corners even into #.

In the beginning I made my buildings just as luke with the buildings smaller then say 4x4.
But then some "complained" about the road not going all the way up to walls. This was before the ghosted road pieces from CC.

So either way is okay because of the bannies cutting corners but players all ready know that bannies also walk straight through ghosted pieces and just accept it.
I have seen bannies walking inside a mine through the back through about ### thick not allowance part in the template file.
So all in all, most players know about the limitations of the Mod kit and the sometimes weird pathing behavior of bannies so I would not worry too much about this stuff.
[size=8pt][color=teal]My beloved Kathy
As you were you will always be
Treasured forever in my memory[/color][/size]

[size=10pt]For my list of Mods with download links go here[/size]

Maldrick

Really appreciate it, @embx61 .

Just so I have what you're saying correctly...

One option would be to make the model but do it with double sided walls.  Like as if one were planning to do interiors.  Then just knife out a frame, add the missing faces on the sides of each part of the frame.

Or, after building the model, delete extraneous details, duplicate the exterior faces, pull them inside and reverse the faces.  Knife out a frame and add faces on the sides of each piece.

Just making sure I have that right. Reminds me I'll have to get accustomed to the knife tool again.  Seem to remember having some trouble with it at first but eventually got it down.

What is a shell modifier?  Not familiar with that.  A plug-in?

Thank you very much.  I'm really fuzzy as it's been almost a year and I was still learning then as it was.  Trying to wrap my brain around a few details like this so I can proceed with some semblance of an orderly workflow.
"We are the architects of our actions and we must live with their consequences, whether glorious or tragic."
― Ezio Auditore da Firenze

embx61

If you have double walls (A box) you only have to delete all the faces on the inside of the building of the main mesh after making a copy for the build stages.
The main mesh walls become plains after deleting the inside faces.

If you start the mesh with plains then those plains can be copied and moved a bit and flip the faces so they become a double wall.
The start as double wall is easier to do so i recommend this and I use this the most too.

If the walls are low poly to start with i sometimes not even bother to delete the insides.
Saving on poly is a good thing but saving 36 poly on say a thousand by deleting inside of walls I sometimes leave it be :)
[size=8pt][color=teal]My beloved Kathy
As you were you will always be
Treasured forever in my memory[/color][/size]

[size=10pt]For my list of Mods with download links go here[/size]

embx61

Here a picture i took more then a year back when i redid some of some houses for The Pilgrim.

In this case I deleted the inside of the walls so they became plains.
The walls are modeled pretty bad as is seen by all those lines on the walls.
This mostly happens if the modeler create a box as wall and add a bunch of segments on them to later delete some faces to become the openings for door/windows.
As is clearly seen in the picture there are a lot of rectangle boxes which are all become two poly each.

I a case like this redoing the walls and either use a boolean modiefier to maker the door/windows holes or a better use of adding the connect edges is faster then weld a lot of vertices.

[size=8pt][color=teal]My beloved Kathy
As you were you will always be
Treasured forever in my memory[/color][/size]

[size=10pt]For my list of Mods with download links go here[/size]

embx61

In the picture I made fast a wall.
It is just a box. Then I added two segment lines horizontal and from these lines 4 vertical segments so I can make the 2 windows.

After aligning the windows I delete the faces of the windows so they become holes and weld the vertices on the sides of the walls to the top and bottom corners.
Then in edge mode I select the edges of the windows to close the sides of the windows.

This double wall with 2 window holes is only 26 polys and mostly the top and bottom and even sides of the walls faces can be deleted so it become 22 poly wall
Using the boolean or pro boolean modifier to cut the holes can save a couple of extra poly and I think Red using the pro boolean modifier a lot.

[size=8pt][color=teal]My beloved Kathy
As you were you will always be
Treasured forever in my memory[/color][/size]

[size=10pt]For my list of Mods with download links go here[/size]

Maldrick

Oh, I gotcha.  Yes, I've tried different things for walls and different methods have their pluses and minuses.  Interested in checking out Sketchup as it seems really intuitive and a bit more dialed in for our uses than Blender.  Saw that 3ds Max has a trial version and I might give that a look, too.  Blender is great, but it's a large and complex package and I found it kind of unintuitive and slow-going before.  I'm sure whatever I decide to go with will lend itself to a particular method.

But I think we might be talking about different things.  My question is about building the building stage models once you've completed a final mesh.  The ones displayed by the game while the building is under construction.  Thus far, I've used Discrepancy's tutorial method where you start with a frame then build on top of it...Then, at the end, deconstruct it back down to the frame and then foundation for the building stage models. And clean up the interior faces for the final building mesh.  But if you model from, say, a solid cube or several, skipping a frame, is there a particularly good way to go back and create the building stage models so that they match the final build?

I might not be articulating this well.

Thank you for the images.  I'm a big fan of The Pilgrim's houses and It's cool to see what it looked like in progress.  Using that as an example, how would you go about making the building stage models for that?
"We are the architects of our actions and we must live with their consequences, whether glorious or tragic."
― Ezio Auditore da Firenze

RedKetchup

#7
i personally have everything double side. and it is super easy to do my building process since i delete the roof, the windows, the doors, and everything decoration and that copy i call it "build03" "build02" "build01" thats all

the citizens will always cut corners, i mention it very often. when they turn, the pathing allow to go at the very first pixel allowed to walk. they dont go from middle of a tile to another middle of a tile. so you need to give space and not stretch too much your mesh or allow another +1 tile large and +1 more tile width ^^

also make sure all your dummy are placed on allowed tiles map. if there is one misplaced, it will trigger sometime a "map protection modification" by the game which make the #### occasional instead of immovable. which will make your citizens allow to pass more easy through wall (like if would be a stockpile) this protection has been made to allow citizens to build / and not being struck inside a building when you finished to build it.
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embx61

In that case I would select a wall and detach/copy that wall. (Plane)
Then move that copy of the  wall say 8 or 10 cm in and flip the faces. Then close the holes with cap/bridge modifiers were needed.

It is more time consuming but sometimes the only way beside modeling from scratch from a model downloaded from the internet as mostly they are just hollow boxes so the walls are just planes.

That IMHO it is easier to just stick with the double walls and create the whole mesh. After the main mesh is done make a copy named build02 and delete roof, doors, windows.
Because the walls are double all ready not much else need to be done.

Then make a copy of build02 and name it build01 and delete everything beside the foundation.
After all is done inside of the double walls from the main mesh can be deleted as they are never to be seen unless you use transparent glass and/or other openings not closed by a door.

Some indeed just drop some building materials as the build01 stage.


[size=8pt][color=teal]My beloved Kathy
As you were you will always be
Treasured forever in my memory[/color][/size]

[size=10pt]For my list of Mods with download links go here[/size]

RedKetchup

Quote from: embx61 on October 03, 2018, 12:49:15 PM
Then make a copy of build02 and name it build01 and delete everything beside the foundation.
After all is done inside of the double walls from the main mesh can be deleted as they are never to be seen unless you use transparent glass and/or other openings not closed by a door.

yeah since i use see through windows all the time... i prefer to keep my double side walls :)
also the shadow game engine has hard sometime with single plane roof, if there is a little hole somewhere, the whole roof wont cast shadows.... so i always let everything double side.

i ve got to be a "save the polygons" addict at some point.... but when i saw the number of polygons CC has almost everywhere... i stoped to care too much ^^
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embx61

#10
Here a picture of the mesh and two build stages. There are more because of a F key variant but just focus on the first row.

There is the mesh, it has double walls so when it was finished I made a copy named build02 and start deleting roof, doors, windows, chimney etc.
After that i made a copy of that and named build01 and deleted everything beside the foundation.

As you see it is easier then adding extra planes so i would stick with double walls wherever i can.
That is why i mostly remodel a model from internet from scratch as it is faster then meddling with those planes they mostly just are :)

I like to add while I not really know Blender 3ds max is also a complicated piece of software.
I honestly think if I know 10% of all there is in 3ds max it is all ready on the high side :)
But what i know currently is enough to make mods for Banished and we learn more features as we keep going.

[size=8pt][color=teal]My beloved Kathy
As you were you will always be
Treasured forever in my memory[/color][/size]

[size=10pt]For my list of Mods with download links go here[/size]

RedKetchup

yeah thats quicker and more easy. the thing though i do, i take the time to edit the build02 and add wood piece to make a roof frame to add more realism.
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Maldrick

Awesome!  Thank you, gentlemen.  That's definitely easy and straightforward enough.  I had visions of having to get inside and frame out a whole building but using the walls like that is great.

@RedKetchup Since you mention it about the clipping issue, I think I put my build points very close to the mesh so that may be what happened. Next time I'll put them further out and see if that fixes it.

Thanks again, guys!  Excited to get back into this.
"We are the architects of our actions and we must live with their consequences, whether glorious or tragic."
― Ezio Auditore da Firenze

embx61

I agree Red that while I try to save as much poly as possible I am not that I waste hours of looking for and deleting some faces to save an extra 50 poly in a building.
I mostly save poly's if I have to (re)do round columns because they use like 32 sides what can easily be 12 or 16 for a column.

Some things from the sketchup site are just crazy. While it all looks nice in Max lots of vertices and poly's which are not needed so mostly recreate thoise from scratch like the Brandenburger Tor and The Arch i am currently working on. I found one time 10 Yes TEN planes just stacked on top of each other  ::)

In Banished you cannot really get up close anyway without using a cheat engine so a lot of details (Which mostly cost the most polygons) are washed out and not worth the extra poly's.
[size=8pt][color=teal]My beloved Kathy
As you were you will always be
Treasured forever in my memory[/color][/size]

[size=10pt]For my list of Mods with download links go here[/size]

RedKetchup

yeah thats sad, i requested often a better zoom for us modders who love to put details.... Luke has ignored me each time :(


3dsmax can import skp files, but it is sure it is not 100% optimal.
not sure if you can ask sketchup to export to .obj and ask 3dsmax to load the obj which would maybe more optimal.
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