Buildings
 

I’m building a city with low polygon count structures for the far off buildings. I’m trying to build a good texturing scheme to be applied to it. On first trial run I built a basic window color map, bump map, specular map, and reflectivity map. They are all attached to one placement node which repeats the images many times to give the look of a building.

Problem One:
It looks ok closer up but when you bring the camera back it becomes one color or grainy as seen in the picture below. I have the same problem with some model. What is wrong that causes the far away image to look worse than the close image? I’ve even had it sometimes that the non-rendered view of the model looks better than the rendered view.

http://www.ftnv.com/Buildings.png

Problem Two:
Right now no incandescence is applied; but I’d like to create a script that would randomly choose between on of two images when the placement node repeats the image. To clarify, I want some windows to be lit while others to remain dark. How do I write something up to select the image to light up the window sometimes while picking the image to keep the window dark the other times?

Thanks,
Mike

Hey Mike

With problem one, it looks as if the lines are not drawn very fine and have jagged edges I'm not too sure but have you checked your render globals try anti-aliasing on production quality this may fix the problem or at least help if you do notice an improvement start upping the aliasing value although production quality should be fine.

If this doesn't work at least post some specific information on your render globals like picture size and quality. Also there is a 1 to 1 scale button in the render view try pressing that sometimes the picture isn't presented in correct proportions and that button sets it back to 1 although your problem doesn't seem to be noticable that one.

Problem two. Okay you want lots of windows some lit up some not. Using images. One way to do it would be to feed both images color and incandescentce into your window color map and create rand() expression to generate either a 1 or 0 to switch between the two.

Basicly you have two images going into a color blender utility which you then put an expression on the Blender attribute.

right click on the Blender attribute and select Create new expression...

Make sure your choosing attribute blendColors1.blender

I haven't really used expressions much but it should look something like:

$select = rand(0,1)

if ($select>0.5)
blendColors1.blender = 1
else
blendColors1.blender = 0

You can adjust the $select>0.5 to add more or less images in your scene so this gives you reasonable control.

If you got any more probs just keepon postin.

Adam

One Step further!
 

Problem One: Solved
Ok, I’ve solved problem one partly in thanks to Adam. The anti-aliasing was set fine, but I had an extremely poor light set up and not enough light was getting to the grayed out areas. What actually was lighting it was reflected light off the other buildings it seems because when I reduced reflectivity everything got dark and I added more lights and things looked much better.

Problem Two: Close
Thanks again Adam for the suggestion!! I didn’t even think of that. It worked except for that all the windows either light up or darken based on the randomly generated number. This is because generating the repeated image happens in the file node defined by the transform node. Is there a utility that can take in the repeatUV values (from the transform node) and upon each repeat loop access a set of code I write that would be something similar to the blender example. Or can I edit the code of the image node directly?

Ok, let me try to explain this with an example. Our mystery node starts by getting the variable information of the repeat UV from the transform node. Let’s say those values were 2,3. Now as our mystery node writes the color for each location it will access the random number generator and choose between one of two color maps and write it in that grid space. Thus the output would be our two images girded randomly.

Possible output:
Lights_On Lights_Off Lights_Off
Lights_Off Lights_Off Lights_On

I hope this makes sense. Thanks for all your help thus far!!! And a special thanks to Adam for the suggestions!!!!

Okay bear with me mike

Do you want a random set of images shown or do you want some form of control over all images presented.

From your example you wish to display a certain group of images either on or off in a specific section then tile that specific group around your whole scene is this correct.

If this is the case and using your example of

Light_on Light_off Light_off
Light_off Light_off Light_on

What I would do is create a larger texture with the group of windows looking exactly how you want them on or off then I would just UV tile them this would also render faster in that you wouldn't need the expression or the blender node instead it's just one large texture with the specific window colors set to whats required.

Is this what you require if it is and it works I would like to see the end result. Sound Interesting.