Do you have some tips? I'm beginer :)

[Marc L]

Hi,
I want to know if someon has tips for me?
I'm learnig about Building Design, but there some Tools, I don't know how to use them (Google Sketchup, GMax is for later)
There is the Real Building:

And my Model:

Hope you got tips for me

Cheers, Marc

PS: IF someone lives at Hammerfest, can hem give me some pics of the airport? Thanks

 

[sfrenchie]

Salut Marc,

It seems you got a good start-up with SketchUp. Here is a simple tutorial I created for a friend. It's not the only way to create this model, just my way, easy and quick. It does not include the texturing of the model which the part on which you probably will spend most time. Pulling up boxes is the easy part hum!
I see in your screenshot that the roof is purple-ish, right-click and reverse faces. In SketchUp purple is for transparent by default (if not textured) and white is opaque. Also make sure you delete the bottom (floor).
The best tip I can give you is to look on the SketchUp startup form. There is a link to tutorials. I don't know how useful they are but it's worth taking a look.
To head you in the right direction, to texture you use the paint bucket to which you add your texture. To position them, just right-click on the face --> Texture --> Position. Make sure you find a help topic or tutorial (maybe on YouTube) on how to use the pins. Those are your life saver since they allow to resize, twist, and turn textures.

This should get you started. Good luck and we're here to help further more.

Patrick

 

[Marc L]

Salut, Hello

Thank you, for the roof, this is because it wase "selected"

I wanna take a look in the tutorial

Cheers, Marc

 

[sfrenchie]

Just looking at your screenshot again. Move your building to the origin point, either centered or origin on front of building else it's going to be a real pain to place in FS since your reference point would be way off.

 

[Marc L]

Ok, thank Patrick

 

[JRobinson]

Never used the "follow me" tool Patrick, that's pretty cool, thanks for showing us how to do that in your tutorial!

 

[Marc L]

Yeah, this is a great tool Thank Patrick

 

[Lane Street]

Nice job on the tutorial.

One point.

You mention to delete the floor, I believe this is incorrect. This will make the model not be "manifold", or able to hold water.

Remember to texture the floor or it will be the default color which will add an unnecessary drawcall.

FSX models (and P3D I believe) should be manifold. I think this has something to do with shadows.

Maybe someone more knowledgeable can confirm this.

cheers,
Lane

 

[sfrenchie]

Never used the "follow me" tool Patrick, that's pretty cool, thanks for showing us how to do that in your tutorial!

Glad I could share a trick with you all. This tool is not perfect, i.e. it doesn't like taking tight turns but it sure is cool to make pipes.
I'll give you another tip you might not know. Say you want to create 10 pillars/columns and of course you want them spaced out evenly. You create the first one, select it, use move tool + CTRL key (move/copy) and place it at the first spacing you want. Now type "x9" and you get the extra 8 objects with the same spacing. Just remember you "X" the number of spaces required.

 

[sfrenchie]

You mention to delete the floor, I believe this is incorrect. This will make the model not be "manifold", or able to hold water.

Thanks Lane. I am very curious about what you are stating, it seems I'm going to learn something. First what do you mean by an object being manifold?
And second I chuckled at the "holding water" what do you mean by that?
I see you are referring to FSX, do you know if that holds true for FS2004?

Patrick

 

[Lane Street]

A manifold object is "air tight" or enclosed on all sides. When you remove the bottom of your hanger it is no longer airtight.

A six sided cube is manifold, remove one of the sides and it is no longer manifold.

cheers,
Lane

 

[JRobinson]

I hope objects don't have to be manifold because I haven't built a manifold object in 10 years! Old habits die hard - I punch the bottom out of every model I make. I think ground shadows work OK on non-manifold objects, volume shadow might require it though (not in P3D2). Sometimes I've made things manifold to prevent flickering when two surfaces are very close together and the object is batched. You can drive the poly counts through the ceiling making manifold objects, that's a big problem with sketchup if you don't component-ize your stuff.

Say the pipe from the tutorial - sketchup wants to cut a hole in the wall where the pipe goes - why? - you have a flat wall that's made up of 2 triangles, sketchup wants to cut a 24-sided hole in that while striving for manifold-ness. When it slices up the plane to fit in a 24-sided circle the triangle count of that wall goes from 2 to 50 - literally. Add another 3 walls, a couple roof panels and stick about 20 more things through the wall and a model that should require 300 triangles hits 5000 with ease. There's no reason for it, in gmax you just stick the tube through the wall, there's no need for it to be manifold. In sketchup you have to make a component out of the pipe then uncheck "cut opening" to make it leave the wall intact.

 

[sfrenchie]

Wow, I had never thought of it that way before. I suppose it's possible to just place the pipe adjacent to the wall and keep the wall intact.

 

[Lane Street]

So many ways to skin a cat.

Here is Patrick's hangar as he posted...

Had he made the hangar a group before adding the pipe...

If we add a floor to make it manifold (which it looks like might not be necessary)...

Lastly, for me the 3D doors are OK if I might park in front of the hangar. If it would only be seen from a distance I would paint them on a flat plane...

In the last one you can see the floor is only 2 polys. I would put all of the textures on one sheet, only one drawcall.

The key is to make the hangar a group before adding the pipe. Components are used for parts that are to be duplicated in one model. If you had a building with a bunch of columns you would make one column as a component, then copy it as needed. That way you could edit one and change all.

Hope this help.

cheers,
Lane

 

[Marc L]

Wow
Thanks to all,
befor buiding scenery with custom 3d modelisation, I wanna do sone airport modifation, repace runwayn apron as reality and add some objects from the library

Cheers, Marc

 

[sfrenchie]

Marc, trop tard, t'as attrapé la p'tite bête. Quand on commence FS développement, on ne peut plus s'arrêter.
Too late, you got the bug. When you start FS dev, you can't stop.

Have tons of fun.

Patrick

 

[Marc L]

nanan, j'ai prevenu, c'est mon apprentissage a la modelisation xD, j'ai jamais nommé ce topic "Hammerfst X"

no no, This il my Learning about 3D buildings, never said that I wanna do Hammerfest

Cheers, Marc

 

[JRobinson]

View attachment 20235

In the last one you can see the floor is only 2 polys. I would put all of the textures on one sheet, only one drawcall.

When you make the circle on the wall that you'll use for the follow me tool, right click it and choose entity info. There you can reduce the number of sides from the default 24, 12 should be plenty for something like that and 8 would actually be better. Also when you make the arc that the follow me tool follows you can do the same thing with that. You'll loft with fewer sides and steps now, that'll probably reduce your triangle count on that particular model by half. Can't help you with texturing the elbow though, in gmax you can lay it out flat so you're essentially mapping a cylinder then you disable the "straighten modifier" and the part springs back into it's elbow shape with the mapping intact.

 

[sfrenchie]

Yes on reducing the segments on circles, I thought I had included that in my mini tutorial. Select circle tool by press 'C' and immediately after type 'S8' + Enter, where S8 means 8 sides, same with arc.

To texture curved surfaces you need to use projected textures. The only way I know to do it is as follows:

• Draw a vertical rectangle in front of the curved object
• Not sure it's relevant but I like to reverse sides to work on the opaque side
• Bucket too, apply texture to it and position it (only time to position is now)
• Right-click --> Texture -->Projected
• Alt-click on rectangle to copy the texture
• Click on curved object to apply the texture (position is not possible anymore)
• Delete rectangle

 

[JRobinson]

I'm talking about mapping an elbow in the stove pipe, like this:

You'd have to project texture from 4 sides if it was something that mattered and the texturing needed to be perfect, say it was part of a structural column and it had text on it or something, but even then there will be some distortion. You do it like this in gmax: