Pak64 Urban Renewal

[raven]

Welcome to the pak64 Urban Renewal thread.

Simutrans grows with your help, this is why I want to encourage everyone to help developing the Urban Set. ATM the style is a bit messed up due to lots of different contributors, scales and levels of detail/texture/lighting.

But we still need variation! The solution comes through blending styles together and using some common standards (not too restrictive), here comes the problem of copyright, ATM I've got a lot of stuff from a thousand different authors here in the sources, and I don't really know who'll be upset if I adjusted scale or colour of one of his/her buildings, so I've considered the following ideas:

- copyright is retained inside Simutrans, any author can use other author's stuff to create or mod his/her own, as an example, I took one of Abo's (by stormoog) block and created a muliplicity of variants, and also adjusting scale to 6 pixels/floor. (I won't do that with actual content until I know artists don't mind).


- SCALE is 6-8 pixels per floor


- SIZE, pak64 Well, you can submit either:

 - quarter tile buildings: Don't worry about grounds, these are to be composed into full tile buildings by the team

 - full tile buildings

- other sizes, of course, smaller than the full tile, but remember it'll be harded to create a working building with these ones.

- SPECIAL COLOURS, SNOW, TREES
 This is yet another way in which pak64 style is mixed up. To solve this, buildings are better if trees, snow, etc are standard. The team will add trees and  create a snowy version, feel free to either join the team or suggest where to place the trees  (or use original ones), or use the same method for snow laying.

- WHAT TO SUBMIT?
 · this project is town building oriented, and we'll need buildings and parks of all styles and ages, feel free to do whatever you like most.
 · Feel free to submit half-finished stuff and ideas, all is fine. 

- When it's completely functional, the weapon of choice to share content will be www.graphics.simutrans.com (thanks powersack)

Thanks for reading this

[Gogo]

Feel free to submit half-finished stuff and ideas, all is fine. 

 

Then, here is my first (even less than half-finished ) building (or whatever it is)
It could be base/template or anything else...

EDIT: I don't know what is happening to me today... Forgot to put attachment

[raven]

 

Well, don't get me wrong Gogo, but I think you were joking

Then let me rephrase it.

Fell free to submit half-finished stuff with the original idea (better?), a photo, or whatever.
Posted on: April 12, 2007, 04:11:16 PMOk, here's a little mockup, I used and modified graphics from the following artists:

MHz, érin, Hajo. Hope they don't mind, but anyway, without confirmation, no releases.


Also added my buildings so far, use them if you wish, of course! , roofs, bits, whatever.

[mobo]

Yay, thats what i always wanted, someone else who messes with the buildings I'm too lazy to finnish myself.

So, feel free to modify my stuff. I'll also post some unfinnished things next week (you know the usb stick / internet access problem).

[raven]

Updated with some plazas, I think it's ready for composition.

If somebody feels like doing so, step forward please

EDIT:oops, confused files

[raven]

Final version, still had some hidden stuff around, 25 houses, let's see how many tiles I get.

[raven]

Common people, pak64 needs you! (And your pixels)

Nothing special here, just a question. Large one is taken from a screenshot of a popular game. Copyright infringement?

[VS]

I'd say if you used the original only as reference and didn't copy pieces off it, then not.

[raven]

Well, it's some kind of homage to those good games.


Here's another building for you to guess the original game. Easy!

[stormoog]

Here's another building for you to guess the original game. Easy!

 

[raven]

Scale test.

Also, the block is a bit too blue, isn't it?

[stormoog]

Also, the block is a bit too blue, isn't it?

Depends on the set you're using... but probably, yes.

[raven]

Thanks for the feedback stormoog.

I tried it with a ligther blue, and also with the brownish colours from some of my chicago blocks.

To the bottom you can see one of houses from Abo, which was where the original blue came from. It was also used on the other little house. Interesting how the little houses do look fine and the larger one stands out as too colorful.

(I'm also sticking an APC for comparison)

[raven]

this one is worth a thinking. Which one is the right scale?

The thing is, most 'our' houses here at pak64 are size 1, that is, extralarge-.
Posted on: April 16, 2007, 04:16:45 PManybody out there?

a making of gif. Perhaps a good adition to the wiki.

(perhaps...)

EDIT: added another test with longest stay of last frame
Posted on: April 16, 2007, 06:16:32 PMlast sillyness of today.

[Timothy]

Vehicles are always going to be a bit bigger than buildings, I think this is probably a good thing (since they are more important...) Thus I'd say the second small house and the apartment block are to-scale.

[raven]

then let's get the demolition ball, well, at least the Urban renewal stuff is up to scale.

The good thing is that skyscrapers will look large.

[mobo]

Ok, as stated above, here are some half ready buildings i did.

Some aren't totally new. That very big one is known but i made it 3 floors lower now (18px).
edit: uhm by looking closer it seems to me that this isn't the lowered version of the scraper (i'll check that again)


I can also tweak some thing if you like (i should still have the multi layer files).

[Timothy]

Maybe put something on the roofs of the two left-most "earlyscrapers", the roof looks a bit empty.

Otherwise very subtle improvements which keep the character of the originals, but overall a vast improvement

[raven]

They're incredibly detailed, and the colouring is great too.

A problem is scale, 5pixels/floor. I'm going to try the mentioned conversion to 7pf and see how it turns out.

Thanks mobo

[mobo]

Well there was this "unwritten rule" that large things can have a smaller scale and small thing a larger one.

The first picture isn't the latest version (I'm almost sure) so wait till tomorrow I'll see if i can find the other version. The big one is 6ppf BTW.

[raven]

Hmm, but if we used proper scale and a mixture of highrise and small buildings for higher levels, then we could use standard scale, and it isn't that large anyway.

Here's my go at first building.

[mobo]

Yup that's ok. I just wanted to explain why my buildings don't have a coherent scale. The other reason is there was no strict standard therefore it was a bit up to oneself.

But a strict standard of 7ppf for all buildings should increase the look and coherency, i hope.

[Timothy]

I like the stretched building Raven... I think we should definitely aim for a stringent 6/7ppf standard accross the set (some buildings have differently sized floors, so some small variation is ok...)

How're the 2x2 blocks coming along? Do you have anything I could test?

[raven]

I could create some dats, sure. But still no snow or special colours. (didn't you see the finished images?)

[Timothy]

The workpad image in the other thread? I am more looking for the buildings arranged into 2x2 blocks, so I can see what the effect would be in-game, I think it'll look awesome but I want to check =P

[raven]

My fault for spreading stuff around,  I'll move all graphic stuff in here.

Also two houses I've reworked from old models
Posted on: April 17, 2007, 12:24:26 PMAnd an A-Frame

[raven]

should buildings be the same size as those rowhouses above? I mean, modern city buildings.

[Timothy]

Yes, though of course some variation in height would be nice too, but the same size and height. Some things like apartment blocks could occupy one half of the tile, or an L shape or something for variety too maybe

[raven]

you know how easy is to change height of these buildings, right?



ATM I'm in the middle of a mini-project, I'll give it a go later.

The 11 tiles done already are good?
Posted on: April 17, 2007, 07:23:20 PMHere it is, some non-standard stuff.

From left to right,

Tristan Tzara's House, in Montmartre (paris) by A. Loos 1925
Cafe de Unie, in Rotterdam by J.J.Pieter Oud 1924
Villa, in Viena by A.Loos

They're a bit odd IMO

The idea would be to make the intro date of the tiles with these buildings around the twenties.

The surrounding buildings would be the same 1880's style.

[Timothy]

Hm, they look odd, but that's probably just because they're different to the rest of the architecture

The tiles already done are good, though I'm sure we could get a few more variations out of those images. I think repetition of the full-size tiles would be more noticible than repetition of the individual buildings on them - though this depends on how many buildings we will eventually have.

[raven]

I'd say don't use each building more than once, they're easy to make after all.

[Timothy]

Well non-repetition is good, so I'm happy with that

[Timothy]

Also, I think some of the buildings from here would do well for inclusion in the main pakset, assuming the scale is correct.

And that level crossing looks good!

[raven]

Indeed, all are considered.

Last today, three modern buildings.

Next project would be post WWI condos

[mobo]

Ok here is the later version nof those early scrapers. The big building was already shrunk, but i had replaced the first (left) and the second also looks a bit different.

I was chatting about methods with raven yesterday, and now i've composed a little picture that shows how many layers i use sometimes (this one has a lot). But more layers doesn't automatically mean better result. If you're used to do it all in one layer that's ok too.

[raven]

perhaps smaller is better.

I considered this after the conversion, since the original building looked too large.

EDIT: I found the later study interesting. While keeping the same pixels per floor (PPF), building to the left looks less strange, and smaller. The building to the right looks a bit stretched.