Skyscraper by ThreeDee

Skyscraper by ThreeDee
http://www.filterforge.com/filters/5016.html

Too many controls for my tastes, but I like it. Nifty!

Cool

I like the clouds in the windows variation. The building (when it's white/gray) needs to not be reflective though, that just looks silly, but cool window reflections on some of those variations.

jffe

This is just way to cool..

Hi guys, thanks for all the comments!

Here is some further information and tips on the filter.

The filter is purposely fixed at 12 stories. This is so that you can more easily create texture maps for a whole number of buildings to the same scale, not having to worry about fiddling with different texture map scaling for different buildings. This is also because it is the lowest common denominator for 1, 2, 3 and 4, plus harmonious with 6 and 8, and so gives a good starting point for symmetrical-looking buildings (Besides, you could hardly call anything with less than 12 stories a “skyscraper”).

I have attempted to keep the ranges of the various controls to such that a large percentage of Variants will fall into usable range.

For the same reason, and as most real life skyscrapers are in shades of gray, I included the “COLOR AS GRAY” checkbox. Of course, in some cases you want to use specific colors for the different structural parts, so you can do so.

You may want to make a night-time city, so it has been made easy. In addition to the “NIGHT TIME” checkbox, a few other things affect the look of the night time building: The most major one is the Brightness control in the Lighting tab. Increase Brightness to make the interior lights pop out better. The “Light brightness” control in the filter itself can also be used, especially to make it seem like more or less offices have their lights on.

Interior lighting: Two things affect the color of this lighting. The “Light hue” obviously does, but if you don’t have “COLOR AS GRAY” checked, the “Window color” changes the light seen through the windows. This is also a good way to make the interior details disappear altogether; just make the window glass dark enough.

Blinds: To render these properly, you need to render a larger map. Since they are mostly a “fancy detail” for a more close-up view, you may gain speed by leaving them off and rendering the map with a low antialiasing setting for any building in the distance.

As noted in the filter description in the “About” tab, the SIMULATION MODE is meant to be used in pre-visualizing how the rendered building will look with proper reflections. Use “Reflect source image” with a cityscape as you current image for best results. For most uses, this checkbox should be turned off before rendering texture maps. With this mode off, you will see straight through the windows, and you will get your color map. Rendered with a reflection map in a 3D program, the proper result is achieved.

For simulation purposes, the Brightness setting in the Lighting tab is around 100 for day time images, 500 for night time (makes the interior lights shine brighter).

(BTW, if you are interested in simulating a realistic reflection for flat surfaces, you may want to check out what I did to actually reflect the HDRI image on the face of the building.)

Speaking of 3D, in modeling your city, I recommend putting a couple of boxes together with slightly modified versions of the same basic map to make even more realistic buildings. I dare claim that nearly all skyscrapers in the world, save for the most unusual, can be recreated with a combination of a few boxes (or cylinders, cones or pyramids) and suitable variations with this filter.

Number of controls and their arrangement: Since I had a rather extensive amount of custom controls, I grouped them so that a whole set can be turned off – I figured this would be the best way of grouping things. Look to the top controls (before the first all caps) plus every ALL CAPS checkbox for the main controls.

Edge rounding: also good for reflections and meant to be kept on for export of height map to 3D programs. Well, you probably all know that, but I thought I’d mention it anyways. There’s a nice little touch (at least in my opinion) with the edge rounding in that it is not just a blur, but sharp on one edge, soft on the other.

Tip: Transparent windows are not directly supported, but you can render an alpha map for windows by turning on “Metallic” and rendering the Metallicity map.

While you are likely to create the texture maps for a whole city in the same amount of time it would take you to make them for one building manually, if speed is still an issue (such as for making high res maps) and you have the full version of FF, I recommend ripping out the simulation mode section of the filter, or “column tiles,” or the blinds, or simplifying the interior of the buildings.

Note: Some strange effects may appear to be taking place if you keep rendering over the previous render and have Simulation Mode and Use Source Image selected, as the current image is being “reflected” from the windows.

And now for other trivia -- someone may already have figured this out before me -- but I’ll mention it here: I was building this filter and wished there were little labels or “stickies” I could put in the filter tree to say what was where. Then I realized I could use the “Color” control, disconnected, as a sort of a sticky note. Made finding the right section of the filter easier for me – you can even zoom all the way out and click on one of the “stickies” and read in the side panel which one it is. Disconnected controls are not even a problem for filter submission wizard per the criteria, so I kept them there in case you want to dig into the filter and modify it further for your use.

For a quick taste in 3D, here are the very first renders I made, default image with 2048x2048 maps: “Downtown FF” in daytime and in the middle of the night. The entire model consists of four boxes, a ground plane and a single point light (for the night scene).





And here's a city that wasn't built in a day (because it only took two hours, 25 boxes, 2 cylinders and 6 sets of FF maps):



Without FF I'd probably still be on the second building...

That night shot looks best, IMHO. It appears this filter might come very handy for those quick cityscape environments...

I like the first two samples in an artistic sense.....and the third looks really good for design apps.....nice work!!!

::heart::

I love you forever. This is FANTASTIC. wow. gah.

::runs off to make a thousand maps for 3d stuff.::

I love you forever. This is FANTASTIC. wow. gah.

This is a great filter! Very useful for cityscapes.

Thanks
Richard