Hey, here is a work in progress of building 3 -rf - 09. I have had to look at other buildings and get a general idea of what it looks like cause, you can’t really see what is going on in the pic, so I am hoping that I am headed in the right way, anyways C & C are always welcome. 
MainlineX
[b]Warning: The following is not constructive in any way, and for that, I apologize.
[/b]I just had a looksee at the demo and my god you guys kick ass!
I would offer my services, but alas, I have neither time nor skill (still learning the basics of 3dsmax), all I can offer is encouragement. :applause:
just wanted to post another WIP
when i see the polycount of kjwjansen’s buildings, i feel like hiding behind the sofa because my building currently has around 10,000 faces and still doesn’t look that complex…hope that’s still okay :sad:
but anyway, here we go :):
Here comes an update on 4-lf-02:
Watch out! it is 160 kb.
http://www.bonetweb.com/mats/4-lf-02.jpg
It is not completed yet…
@Moogoo:
-I think that the style of the door is quite off. It looks rather more arabic than romanesque to me.
-The arc’s that you use for the windows don’t seems really round, a bit bumpy or so… Do you use splines (arc) to create them?
-And at last, the steep part leading up to the door looks a little weird. A bit fragile. What material should it be made of? (And how would someone walk up or down, when it is so steep 
)
@kjwjansen: Great to see that you’ve picked up this project again! I don’t really have any comments on your building for now, it looks good! The only thing I would like to ask is to watch your smoothing groups. The inner part of arcs at windows should have one smoothing group assigned to the polygons. I corrected this on your previous buildings, but it’s quite a lot of work to do, so please watch this when you’re modelling.
The two buildings you posted later look good too. The only thing that you could take a look at is the lower parts, they look quite empty there.
@MainlineX: A good start! Try to give it some more detail. If you can’t see this on the reference of your building, you can indeed best look at references of other buildings.
@MadPayne: Maybe you can show us a wire? Than we could give you some advises on how you could get more detail with the same amound of polies.
@shoglic: Your building looks really good! Maybe you could give the large arcs on the lower level some more detail, by making smaller arc in it or so. And secondly, don’t use too much triangular shapes above the doors, it looks good, but you don’t see that anywhere in the movie’s city… So a few of them are great, but don’t let it jump too much out of it.
@All modellers:
To save time for everyone, please have a look at the following few things
[ul]
[li]Always make sure that the inner polygons of arcs (in windows for instance) have a smoothing group assigned to them.[/li][li]When you send me a model, please send it as one object, not 240 different ones forming your building.[/li][li]If you use 3dsmax, try not to use boolean. This still is quite a dangerous tool in some situations, and you can easily mess up your mesh with it. I see it quite often that people use it to create windows with a round top, but this can be done much better: use splines and extrude them! [/li][/ul]Thanks.
Oh and the new viewer will be released somewhere in the coming two days, so keep an eye on this thread. 
okay, here are some wires. Maybe i should rebuild all windows, there seem to be too many polys at the top of each window. i propably messed up something with my extrude settings or something like that. well i guess that’s a newbies fate… any other hints, suggestions , advices?
maybe my technique to make windows isn’t so smart. i always made a curve for one half of the window, then mirrored it and connected them. then i lofted a surface out of it and used boolean to “cut” the shape of the window into a plane and then i used the same curve and extruded a square along it to get the window frames.
by the way, what are these smoothing groups? never heard of them in Maya
Hurray!
@MadPayne (and all other Maya users): I think that you could get the same look with a lot less polys. Maya doesn’t have “smoothing groups” as such, but the Edit Polygons->Normals->Soften/Harden will let you smooth the transition between the edges. Just click on the edges you want smoothed and set Soften/Harden to all smooth (180). I usually set normals to face for the object then do the smoothing. About 16 divisions for an arc looks really good. Also you “can” use booleans in Maya, but make absolutely sure that you triangulate and delete the history for your model.
ahh thx for the info.
Pjanssen: Ok, will change the door, and use a better procedure for making the arcs. Is that a suitable place for the door? The building kinda goes down into nothingness, so I didn’t know if it would work there or not. Um. SO yea, will work on it again this weekend.
Finally it’s there: the new realtime viewer
After a long time of hard work, we can show the new version to the world
The amount of updates is really huge, the viewer looks even better (great job Ysaneya!) and the amount of polygons has been doubled since the previous release!
We’ve tried to find and fix as much errors as we could, but I’m sure that there are still some that we didn’t spot. So if you see a mesh/smoothing errors, please tell me, so that we can correct it.
Right click -> save as - 49,9mb
I added a pdf to the zip where you can see what exactly has been added or updated this release
-> Updates.pdf
edit: some buildings seem to be missing in this demo, we’ll fix that as soon as possible, but that won’t be before next tuesday.
@moogoo: Yeah the location of the door is a little strange. You could just place the door on ground level.
Wow!!! This is amazing! I tried it out and it looks so good. I am at school right now, so it doesn’t run that good (P4 dual 2.4gHz, 1024mb ram, GeForce4 Ti4400) so I guess the performance is almost entirely up to the video card that you use. I will try this out later at home on my Radeon 9600xt which has been able to get ~35fps on the testing version of this release. I like that it goes full screen, but I miss the frame rate counter, is there any way to put this back in, Ysaneya? Anyway, good work by everyone involved 
This is really starting to come together and look good. I hope to get some more buildings done soon, but I am doing a 3D course during the day and a web design course on evenings and weekends, so I don’t have much free time.
Wow and again wow:scream:
Let me said this is incredible, and i hope can join to the project, but i found in the website that there is a lot of modellers and a few buildings:sad: , i hope you can count me in to this project if there is new buildings and let said congratulations to everyone of you:applause: for teh idea an the models. I’ll expect working whith you
the new demo looks great! i actualy downloaded it 5 minutes after it was uploaded and it looks just great. i had just a few errors in first minute while it was opening and then it ran smoothly. i used 64bit athlon @2200mhz and ati x800xt. even after turning on 6x anti-aliasing i didnt notice any problem. i would appreciate some shadows option. i noticed many mesh errors in the “library” on the ceiling.
btw. sorry for my english and if this wouldnt make sence dont care. im drunk =)
The viewer looks really really great
Although my system is not up to the task (Athlon XP 2000, 512 ddr, Radeon 9600).
When i look at the whole city from a far distance i have like… 0-1 fps or it freezes completely. (well the program doesn’t freeze, but it’s so slow that i can’t move the mouse for 10-20 seconds).
But nevertheless, this really starts to look like MT
That new viewer looks awsome… the frame rate is stil okee, not very high but okee.
@ all (new) modelers:Are you all still on this project? I thougt there were 30 new modelers, but the progress is’nt like 30 modelers. hope you will be soon post some wip’s
sorry for my english
Exactly my thoughts. I really liked seeing the wips of the new people who joined, but there are far less WIPs than one would expect from 33 people…
This time I’ll be a little quicker with assigning buildings to new people when I don’t see any wips or posts from people, just to give others who want to join a chance too. So just at least post a reply or so, and a WIP if possible, even if it isn’t much yet.
thanks.
@madpayne: that’s strange, I run it here on a XP2000, 1gb ram, r9700 and it runs perfect… But I’ve heard from more people that they’ve got performance issues, so I’ll discuss this with Ysaneya asap.
Hey guys…here is another WIP shot of building 3 -rf -09. It’s coming along bit by bit…anyways, C & C are always welcome.
Here’s what i have so far. If there’s anything wrong, then by all means, do tell me.
Sorry for taking so long, been really busy lately. :hmm:
Great work on the other buildings guys!
Hi! This is my first wip…it is ref no: 3-rb-01…I couldn’ really find good refernce images for this one so many details made up by me-so any crits appreciated…
I wanted to ask if this is considered a "small "building - in terms of polys…?
@Impulseone: A very nice WIP! I find it quite funny to see, because a lot of things you do exactly mirrored to how I do them. For instance the extruded piece above the three arcs, I would have extruded it inwards, you do it outwards. And the top piece, I would have made the lower piece larger than the top piece. (though the way you do it looks very renaissance-like)
I’m not saying that these things are wrong, but you could give a look at it, just try some things and see what you think that looks best.
On what polycount are you now by the way?
@Admiral Ra: Nice WIP. Some remarks: the arcs can use more segments, especially the top one. Same for the dome.
And for the arc shapes, please take a look at the image on the bottom of this post.
@Tarscher: It’s quite early to give any comments, it just looks good. I’m glad that you showed you’re still working on this project!
@MainlineX: A nice WIP too. It could use some more detail, like some more extruded edges, or some of those ‘windows’ without a gap, don’t know how to call them, like you see in the WIPs of impulseone.
And for the shapes of the arcs, please take a look at the image below:
This is for everyone modelling. I quite often see ‘wrong’ arcs being created. Maybe this helps to explain how they should look:
