Unusual question/observation about Urban Sprawl 2

BeeMKay

steven.viscido said:

Yeah, I have seen those. They look nice but not really what I was going for with my Virginia city. They are nice and clean looking, but also seem like a much bigger city than I am going for. The other issue is, I'd have to replace all the palm trees... Virginia is too far north for that.

Edit: I am currently working on trying to Americanize US2. I am also going to clean up the signage. For example, it is not correct to have both Stop signs AND traffic lights protecting an intersection. It is one or the other. Yet in US2, the major intersection has both. Also, "one way" signs are not posted on every single traffic light, so I am going to get rid of most of those as well.

So far, I have replaced everything in the median. Now I am working on one of the side streets. My guess is this will be many dozens of hours of work. When I am done, I will probably wonder why I just didn't freaking take to Blender or something and just create my own damn city. But oh well.

In the mean time if I find one somewhere else that can suit as an American city, I might just toss US2, painful though that will be. The idea of tediously going in and replacing every SINGLE sign (there are tons of them) is just ugh. But right now it looks like the only choice short of "do the whole thing myself from scratch."

EDIT 2: BTW... if you look at Whitemagus's Park Avenue V, he has traffic pattern mistakes too... in the corners, he has arrows for traffic from one direction pointing INTO the oncoming traffic from the other direction. Don't the people who make these sets and props drive? LOL.

You can always go and sell it as an add-on. I'm sure that there's a demand. I, for one, would be interested. :-)

kyoto kid

...same here.

...effin'Magento makes me have to add lines to my post so it is considered "legitimate". Daz really "humped the canine" on this..

Steven-V

lee_lhs said:

You can always go and sell it as an add-on. I'm sure that there's a demand. I, for one, would be interested. :-)

Not sure what I would have to do to it to sell it as an add-on, frankly. Hopefully nothing that would make me have to start ALL OVER again.

WendyLuvsCatz

Re-posing all the props you only need share the duf scene if eveything is in the default locations DIM puts it.
I have loaded duf scenes by others, missing items not in my library get a grey cube but it all loads in place.

Steven-V

Well I am not just reposing and deleting props. I have also had to modify (or reverse) the UV map jpgs for the signs.

WendyLuvsCatz

Well that you would need to contact and work with Stonemason over unless you made totally new different textures for the signs maybe, cannot re-uv map and share either.

Steven-V

Just an update:

I am still in the middle of trying to "Americanize" US2. The main pain in the neck is that ALL the props on a given city block are a single object. So I can't just delete a few signs and a traffic light and replace them (which is all one needs to do, at least conceptually). Deleting them takes away garbage cans, mailboxes, newspaper vending boxes, garbage bags, dumpsters, traffic cones, and regular street lights (the non-traffic kind). This means that to keep US2 the way it was but just reverse the traffic pattern, I have to basically re-install EVERY prop except the buildings. This is exceedingly tedious and I have only had the patience to do it in small steps... the middle traffic islands one day, one side of one block the next. So far I have about half of one out of the four main blocks done. Ugh.

Another frustration is that certain of the props do not seem to have been provided outside of the pre-load. For example, in the pre-load many street lights have one-way or no parking signs on them, but the street lights in the props folder do not have this. As the street lights, attached signs, and backwards traffic items are all attached in the pre-load, there is no way of retaining the signs. Additionally, for some reason, the garbage bags were not included outside of the pre-load (at least, not that I can find), although garbage cans and dumpers and the like were.

I also had to change the tiling on the street (the "road paint" surface) to be -1 so that it the painted arrows would go in the correct direction.

All in all, changing this scene over to the American side is one huge pain in the garbanzo beans, and honestly if there were another viable city I could use, I would ditch US2 in a second. It's a nice set but I'm not sure it's worth all this work and annoyance.

mindsong

have you fiddled with the LIE editor in Daz Studio? it seems like an in-place image overlay/tweaking tool may help your workflow and may help with your (noble) effort. others may be able to contribute thoughts to the practicality of using the LIE tool for this sort of thing.

while not necessary, a tool to bake those changes just came a short while back in the store, and might also be helpful.

cheers,
ms

Steven-V

I'm not sure how LIE would help when it is the 3D objects themselves that are facing the wrong way -- not just their textures.

It does turn out that when you flip the object the right way, some of the textures are reversed, but that is really the least of my problems. I can flip those around in PS in a matter or minutes and just load those textures onto the object.

Unless somehow LIE can change how the physical objects are facing as well??

Steven-V

I am now, finally, done "Americanizing" Urban Sprawl 2. Every single street light, garbage can, dumpster, stop sign, traffic light, mail box, newspaper vending machine, power junction box, and so on had to be replaced. Some things could not be exactly replaced. For example, the street lights bearing "one way" or "no parking" signs were not provided as separate objects, so I had to just use plain street lights. I may go back and add some signs manually just using rectangular primitives and my own texture maps, but for now, I am not going to do that.

I also removed the overhead sign with the highway instructions. It just does not fit with the type of city street that US2 models - overhead signs with "exit" numbers on them are usually found on highways or parkways, not main streets with storefronts. I would have had to do too much messing with it to get it to be realistic, so I just decided to get rid of it.

Here's a shot of what it looks like Americanized. I am not sure how much is evident. The traffic light is correct now (on the right side, facing the right way for a U.S. street).

A note on how I did this: Basically I went along a single side of one block, with the content library open to US2's object folder. As I went along the street with the mouse or WASD keys, I counted... 1, 2, 3, 4 street lights... 1 stop sign... 1, 2, power junction boxes. As I did those, I double-click loaded them into the scene. They call came in at 0,0,0. Then I selected them in the Scene list, and grouped them. Then I moved the group into roughly the right location, and then I selected individual objects and moved them on top of the existing mail boxes, benches, etc, re-orientating them so that they were facing the right way, moving them up/down, etc. Once this was done for the entire side of one block, I then did the other sides. once all 4 sides were done, I hid the original props, leaving only mine behind.

There are four main blocks, 4 sides per block. The sides on the "main" street have the most stuff. I would estimate it took about an hour per "side", or about 3-4 hours per block, times 4 blocks = about 14 or so hours of work.

I wish I could share it with people but the rules prohibit it, since it would require re-distributing parts of the model, the UV maps, etc. Sorry about that. At least now we know how to do it. ;)

kyoto kid

...looks really good.

I agree about the overhead sign. I have seen them above the streets in larger, cities but only where there is an express/parkway that leads to multiple destinations (like I-5 South to Salem, OR and I-5 North to Seattle, WA where I live).

Yeah too bad what you did cannot be packaged because of the EULA. Looks like one more time consuming project on my list.

Did you save all the quadrants as presets so you don't have to go through this again?

Was hoping to give you the link to the freebie street sign collection I have but apparently it is no longer available. :down:

Steven-V

Right now it is just saved as a regular scene file. At some point I may make presets our scene subsets out of it, but for now, I have not done that.

As for signs... I guess one of these days one of my projects is going to be making all the various road warning and regulatory signs just so I have them for when I need 'em.

WendyLuvsCatz

you could try to contact Stefan and offer it to him to add to the set.

kyoto kid

...good point.

Fraggin' Magento can't even make a simple comment without it freaking out. Really getting tired of this rubbish.