More city buildings

[Archon]

Here is 3 story terraced residential building for early era 1750 - 1870 or something.

It still needs some work. any ideas for back yards are more than welcome.

[sojo]

any ideas for back yards are more than welcome.

trees, toilet in the eraly years, shed for rabbits and so, vegetables, a bicycle garage, a english tea-house

[AP]

Vegetable patches, definitely, they can apply to most eras. Runner beans growing up canes, that sort of thing!

Formal landscape elements (fountains, steps and terraces, lawns mown in stripes) for if you make a stone/ more upper-class house version (which these are presumably not). That never went out of fashion either.

I'd also put iron railings between the front steps, as though there's a light well behind down to a basement floor. Fairly standard design - in fact that's the whole reason for the steps out front as you've shown them. Without the basement you wouldn't need the steps!

[wlindley]

Excellent!  

Perhaps also a block of flats in the same vein?  Or perhaps larger 2x1 units?  I am looking at Wikipedia's comments and photos of terraced housing.

Have you noticed the cities seem to grow "better" when higher-density housing is available...

[Archon]

Put some more stuff on back yards and rendered snow images.

http://www.saunalahti.fi/jusskiiv/pak/building.A_3StoryTerraced.pak.zip

That was model for this building.
http://www.eriding.net/media/photos/geography/where_I_live/beverley/060901_rfoster_mp_geo_bev_044.JPG

Thanks for ideas.

I got time to do more buildings if someone has photo.

Wlindley, simutrans doesn't yet support city buildings larger than 1 tile.

[wlindley]

Perhaps some period tenements?  Images from Future Glasgow





And in the more modern era -- from flickr: "Erno Goldfinger designed Alexander Fleming House, now known as Metro Central Heights, Elephant and Castle, London."

[jamespetts]

Might I suggest some modern high density buildings, such as:

[jamespetts]

Or, perhaps, this:



for late 19th century high-density residential?

[Archon]

Here is preview of next building.


As you can see there is still plenty of work.

[vilvoh]

Anyway, it's a great work!

[jamespetts]

Very impressive looking so far!

[Archon]

It is here now!


http://www.saunalahti.fi/jusskiiv/pak/building.A_4StoryTenement.pak.zip

[jamespetts]

Archon,

that looks good, although two things to consider: firstly, the colour of the bricks seems a tad light; and secondly, they seem to be a different (smaller) scale to those terraced houses... But excellent to see the building variety increasing so!

[Junna]

What about some nice tower blocks?

Specifically something like the Swedenborg Gardens estate. I think that the slenderness of the towers means they would work fine in simutrans, and also capture the typical style of the British tower blocks, which often were rather slender. It's a sad thing they don't make them like it today. ;c

[wlindley]

1920 looks a lot more realistic now!  Archon, could you possibly do an in-block (non-corner) variant of the tenement, to give us long rows of them?

[The Hood]

Looking impressive so far!  Really great to have a steady stream of new buildings coming on - should certainly add more variety to cities with the timeline on.

Somehow though they just don't quite look like the existing pak128.Britain style buildings though (or is this just me?), and I'm not sure why either.  The colours are right, the buildings are good examples of British city buildings, and the scale is right.

They just looks a little blurred to me compared to the existing ones.  Are they done in blender?  If so I'd love to have a look at the blends and compare the render settings and see if I can play around with it. 

Sorry to be critical - I really like them, just I'm not 100% convinced about them next to the existing buildings and I'd like to see what others think and whether we can fix it.

[Archon]

I tested it some more and walls indeed seem too bright. Here is picture with one rotation remade.


blender file can be found: http://www.saunalahti.fi/jusskiiv/3storyterraced.blend It contains both buildings.

Tenement might have little too small doors but other than that scale looks good.

My priorities are currently early buildings 1750 - 1940.

[jamespetts]

Ahh, the darker one is a definite improvement! It fits with the style much better.

[AEO]

good work, these would certainly give more variety to the current city buildings

[Archon]

new version with darker walls.

http://www.saunalahti.fi/jusskiiv/pak/building.A_4StoryTenement.pak.zip

[The Hood]

Thanks for the blend.  The models are perfect, but there are differences in the camera and lighting setup which I think explain why there are some subtle differences in image style. 

I would be a lot happier if these were re-rendered using Kieron's setup (which is what everything else is rendered in).  An example can be found in this zip:
http://simutrans-germany.com/files/upload/pak128Britain-blender-examples.zip

Use 1980-warehouse.blend as a template.  The way to do it is to have the model on layer one and then use the lighting in layer 3; rotate layer 1 only and take the four renders. 

The attached images give an idea of what I am talking about (although I don't have the image textures Archon used).  Test1.png is Archon's original setup, Test2.png is the exact same object rendered in Kieron's existing setup - hopefully you can see the difference I am talking about.

[Archon]

Finally I got that lighting setup working. here is result.

[The Hood]

That looks better

I would say now that the walls need a more obvious and darker brick texture, and the roof texture is a little odd (or is that the snow texture - if so there is no snow on chimneys/doorsteps).

[kierongreen]

It might not be a bad idea to copy one of the existing textures used. Keeping the set to a limited palette of textures gives a more consistent feel.

That said the building does look good!

[The Hood]

It might not be a bad idea to copy one of the existing textures used. Keeping the set to a limited palette of textures gives a more consistent feel.

Not a bad idea at all.  I will upload all of the texture images used so far into a new thread this evening.

[Archon]

Finished version with new lighting.


http://www.saunalahti.fi/jusskiiv/pak/building.A_4StoryTenement.pak.zip
http://www.saunalahti.fi/jusskiiv/pak/building.A_3StoryTerraced.pak.zip

[The Hood]

Excellent!  Much more consistent style now

[AP]

Is there any way to make building types cluster in simutrans? I mean, can it check what the adjacent tiles are before placing a new building? Because, having made my demo, I quickly found that, as one might expect, in British towns it looks more normal to have rows and rows of victorian terraces, or several streets of townhouses in the centre, than to have a random mixup of them all.

[The Hood]

No it isn't - in fact the game engine tries to avoid placing identical buildings adjacent to one another.  I agree though, it would be good to create rows of terraces etc, maybe someone could write a patch that enabled that?

[jamespetts]

Wasn't this an extension request about 6 months ago...?

[Archon]

Next building getting ready.

there are still more work but I would like to hear your opinion.

Also pub (industry one) is missing needs_ground=1.

[The Hood]

Nice.  I think the brick texture is too smooth - any chance you could make it more coarse so that it looks more obviously brick like (probably use one of the textures I uploaded the other day).

[Archon]

Some more work on it + texture on walls.

[The Hood]

Nice

Another thought:  For your tenement and this graphic, it would be nice if you could have both corner buildings and non-corner buildings.  You can then use these together to with dims=1,1,8 to get corner buildings always on corners and non-corners elsewhere. Does that make sense?

[wlindley]

Ah! I updated the wiki to explain that you can have eight building directions.  This makes me think perhaps I could redo some of the high street shops as well.

p.s., I can't remember where the explanation of what "north" is for the .dat definitions -- is 0=north?  That needs to be in the wiki as well.  It does bother a little that the directions increase anti-clockwise.

p.p.s., Archon: This building is in Washington State USA but perhaps a half-timbered structure like it could be a larger 1600s British city residence building, consistent with the existing house drawings?