Houses

[pks1414]

I have started to put together a few houses to add to VFR scenery. However I can remember most of the instructions from the Gmax tutorial (which I subsequently lost) however the part about the roof has got me beat . I am trying to create the overhang of the roof once I have collapsed the top to create the shape. Whilst it works great at the sides of the house, the front just 'protrudes and does not follow the slant of the roof shape down (am I making sense)

Also on the subject of textures, I have noticed that with scenery designed by people 'in the know' the textures are usually all on one sheet for a building, or even more than one building. Usually this is a 512x512 and the various textures are different sizes so that they all fit on. When I try to do this the texture appears 'stretched', say something like bricks, if my bos in Gmax is 4m square the bricks look great, if it is 8mx4m they distort on the 8m part, is this something else that I have got completely wrong

A bit of help would be really good

Thanks

Paul

 

[JeffS]

Gday Paul,

Im actually a Bricklayer by trade so i can give you some help there.

Here in Australia a standard clay brick is 230 mm x 76 mm x 110 mm , now add 10 mm per joint and you have 240 x 86 x 120 !

so if you have a column two bricks wide, you have 2 x bricks and 1 motar joint but we round off to 480 mm if it is 2.5 bricks we round off to 600 mm .

This is for Width !

for Height we have 76 + 10 = 86 mm x 7 you have 600 mm rounded off.

Standard wall heights are 2.4 meters / 2 =1.2 / 2= .600 ( 600 mm ).

therefore 2.4 meters = 28 brick courses !

Now, to create your texture you need an image of Bricks wich is 14 bricks in height by multiples of Bricks in width, id recommend 2.4 meters ( 10 bricks in lenght ).

Once you have this image, go into your Gmax and take a screen shot of every wall you want to texture.

Crop the image so you only see the wireframe of the wall your texturing and resize it to 256 x 512.

Next copy and paste your brick image and build up the layers to fill in the wall panel ( ensuring you know the wall size ), merge all the brick layers and the base texture ( the wireframe screenshot ) to produce an image.

Do this for every wall panel ( if you can use one of the images for another wall panel it will save you time ).

Now , open a new texture file that is blank with a size of 1024 x 1024.

Copy and paste your wall panels previously created onto this new larger texture and when its full ( you run out of space ) merge it into a texture, you may need to do several images depending on the walls your texturing and the quality of detail.

Now, go back into Gmax and map the textures to your model. when viewed in FS9 the walls will be to scale.

For windows and doors, the tops of these is 2.1 meters (24.4 bricks in height ) so once you have pasted the window image onto your wall panels, adjust the window or door to 24 bricks ( its close enough ) and merge them into your texture and resave it. Allso note most windows are to a set size 600 mm , 1.2 mtrs , 1.8 mtrs and so one ( normally in multiples of bricks )

In the trade , this is called working to a Brick Rod !

This will give you a very well detailed house !

For a Roof, sheet metal is normally in widths of 1.2 meters so again a set length is tiled across but !!! start your image tiling from the Center and work out to the ends and your roof textures will allso scale out.

I dont know how to show images here so ill place them in the designers lounge under " Oz-House " so you will get the Idea.

rgds Jeff

 

[JeffS]

OOOps i forgot i could add the images here anyway.

 

[pks1414]

Thanks Jeff, that ponts me in the right direction. Whereabouts in Australia you from? I spent 2 years there in 1982, lived in Sydney (Cremorne), got a few friends out Bathurst way too We are actually looking at going over to see other friends up on the Gold Coast as well. To be honest we would have stayed put, loved the place, unfortunately Bob Hawke had other ideas

Cheers


Paul

 

[arno]

Another option would be to have a small brick texture (128x128 for example) and just repeat that multiple times along your wall. This will keep your texture size smaller, but it only works if you don't want to paint windows and doors on that wall of course.

You can repeat it different times along the x and y axis of the polygon, so you can get any scale you want.

 

[pks1414]

Hi Arno,

Not quite sure what you mean? if I create an image say of the front of a house and to fit it onto one texture pallete (512x512), first I would normally put together the whole thing, resize it to 128x128 and copy that back into the main pallete (512x512) so that I can get many views, front back etc, plus any other buildings, i.e as many as I can get on to one sheet. However I have noticed that if I try to use these for other buildings the textures stretch because they are bigger/smaller etc. Does the underlying texture have to relate to the size of a building or can it be scaled accordingly.

This sounds very confusing doesn't it

 

[arno]

Hi Paul,

Yes if you design it for one building specific then it should match the size of that building.

But for general things like bricks or roofs, you can also make a small texture that just contains a sample of the bricks or the roof and repeat that as often as you want along your building. If you building has a different size you just repeat it more or less to still keep the correct scaling.