Buildings and Wonder Design

[Gerikes]

If the trees are a bit larger than normal no problem. Elves won't build on small or even average trees for they have to be strong enough to carry a large family. They may be impressive

Edit: just make sure they don't take more place at the basement.

If you need more house but less tree, I bet you could take two medium-sized trees and put the house between them.

Of course, the reason you probably say not to take up more base is that you're looking for a 1x1 plot on the city, so having multiple trees would probably take up 2x1 or 3x1. Unless you were to try out the custom no-LSystem XML tags, but with all the fun we've had with the normal LSystem I think we should just stear clear of that all together

 

[Ploeperpengel]

If you need more house but less tree, I bet you could take two medium-sized trees and put the house between them.

Of course, the reason you probably say not to take up more base is that you're looking for a 1x1 plot on the city, so having multiple trees would probably take up 2x1 or 3x1. Unless you were to try out the custom no-LSystem XML tags, but with all the fun we've had with the normal LSystem I think we should just stear clear of that all together

No way! I want to create city art I think nifediting vanilla cities using building models as attachment could be a way to go. But didn't try yet.
Wouldn't be needed of course if it's doable directly via max but so far I didn't see anyone doing this. The city nif seem a little different to others, sort of an atlasmap but 3D.
The reason why I asked not to increase the size of the basement is mainly motivated just to keep the proportions nice. The way I'm planning to do it I think wouldn't count much whatever place the model normally takes since I can scale in the viewer. But as I said I have yet to try it first. #Could be I'm totally wrong...

 

[woodelf]

I have a building set between 2 trees, but I forgot to post it here...I posted that one in FfH2 private forum.

 

[Ploeperpengel]

I have a building set between 2 trees, but I forgot to post it here...I posted that one in FfH2 private forum.

As a cityart or as building?

 

[woodelf]

Building. I don't make cityart.

 

[Ploeperpengel]

Building. I don't make cityart.

Ah ok I misunderstood. As soon you spy any info about a new cityart please inform me about it. I looked at the city nifs and think I can edit them the way I planned but additional info about that is allways appreciated.

 

[woodelf]

So we're on the same page...what do you mean by cityart? The actual buildings that make up the city when founded?

 

[Ploeperpengel]

So we're on the same page...what do you mean by cityart? The actual buildings that make up the city when founded?

Yep exactly.

 

[woodelf]

I can get no buildings to show up, but when I add buildings to that file or rename another nif the exact name I get nothing. It's bizarre.

I kind of like the barren look and you only add buildings as you build them.

 

[Ploeperpengel]

That's bad. Looked so easy. I guess those Buildings would have to take an exact position like buttons in an atlasmap will be difficult to find out-if's possible at all. I'll check this now.

 

[woodelf]

Yeah, I asked Kael and he said the FfH religion specific buildings are just skin jobs. I want new cityart! Maybe I'm missing something real easy? Maybe I should leave the shadows and try to build right on top of them and on all of them? Hard to say, but I'm going to look into it again tonight. I might just copy that last elf house into that file and copy it 20 times and fill every shadow and see what happens.

 

[Ploeperpengel]

Good I'll try as well.

 

[Ploeperpengel]

Ok my first experiment. I replaced some ancient building with modern city buildings and got this strange result:


Woodelf could you try something for me. Import an existing cityart in max and reexport it to see if it's still ok?

 

[Rabbit, White]

Looks to me like the new buildings take on the textures from the old ones. If you want modern and ancient buildings to be part of the same city set it seems like you'll need to copy the modern city texture into the same folder under a different name and reassign it as the texture for any modern buildings you add.

I already did some quick experimentation with city set, and seems like the easiest thing to do is make new buildings fit in "footprint" with the original ones. Although I'm pretty sure it's fairly straightforward adding new sizes and then just adjusting the XML to take them into account. The catch is that while it's straightforward there's a lot of stuff to do, not the least of which is if you add a new size, figuring out how to properly position it in the city so it doesn't clash with the other ones.

Anyway, on a building by building basis it shouldn't be any different than regular buildings. Just merge your model into an existing set and put it under the desired node based on its size and that should be it.

P.S. I apologize if I didn't address some specific point, as I only scanned the previous posts. Let me know if I missed something.

 

[Ploeperpengel]

Yep you missed the aim of the project. This was just a test to see if it's possible at all to change the citynifmodel in the viewer. Because woodelves test to add a building didn't work. I don't want modern buildings in ancient cities but completly new models for the fantasy civs
Thx for the tip with the dds I expected this to work as normal but I'll try reassigning new texturenames.
Questions: think it could work adding three 1x1 leafs on a 3x1 leaf i.e.?
Did you already import cities in max and if so did it work after reexport as well?

 

[Gerikes]

Questions: think it could work adding three 1x1 leafs on a 3x1 leaf i.e.?

I don't think so. From what I know about the LSystem, it places them for you, so you can't garentee that your buildings will be adjacent to each other unless you screw around with the ability to not use the LSystem (like walls and aqueducts do).

 

[Ploeperpengel]

I don't think so. From what I know about the LSystem, it places them for you, so you can't garentee that your buildings will be adjacent to each other unless you screw around with the ability to not use the LSystem (like walls and aqueducts do).

The question is is the Lsystem refering to the nifnodes or the meshes within the nodes. I'd guess the first is the case. So if I place more than one attachment into a node I thought this maybe should work-maybe better not think I'll just try

 

[Rabbit, White]

No I haven't imported any existing city models because there's nothing there I could use. I was going to simply create some new meshes and plug them into the existing city NIFs.

What did woodelf do when he tried adding buildings to the city NIFs? Because adding just a building isn't enough. At the very least one needs to create a properly named node (although maybe the name could be anything as long as it's used in the XMLs properly) and of course modify the XMLs accordingly.

As far as three 1x1 leafs on 3x1 leaf, are you referring to NIF files or the XML? If it's nif then I don't see why it shouldn't work but it'll be just like if you modeled three buildings but used them as "one building". I'm not sure what's the point of that.

In any case, when I was talking about new buildings fitting in within the footprint of the old ones, that of course doesn't mean it has to have the exact same size and shape. It just means that as long as the new building fits within the bounds of an old one, then when the city is "constructed" you won't have any problems with buildings intersecting and mixing up with each other, since their positions have already been preplanned in such a way as to avoid that.

 

[Ploeperpengel]

Ah that I wanted to know. So I won't need to modify existing citybuildings because of special material or something but can use any I like. The point of putting several attachment into one node is simply having some woodelfbuildings surrounded by plants, trees i.e.
I don't know exactly what woodelf did but he scared me

 

[woodelf]

I scare myself honestly...