Facades - Designing Facades with a Minimal Number of Objects

I've been working to fill in some of the geometry placeholders for skyscrapers in Elkins Beach and would like to share a technique I've been using to quickly place believable facades.  I do it because I'm lazy and would like to get these buildings done ASAP, but it may also be useful for conserving cell space.

Designing facades with a minimal number of objects generally follows this pattern:

• Find an orthogonal object with some depth to it. If you want your facade to have windows, make sure it also has some empty space in the middle.  Door frames, windows frames, primitives, and some furniture sets are good candidates.  
• Scale this piece so that it is very wide and very tall, but also very thin.  
• Layer other pieces into or onto your largest piece to give the image of building forms: Beams, posts, frames, etc.

For an example, we can start with a building I completed yesterday in Elkins Beach.  I started by selecting some objects I would like to play with.

 
For my main building frame piece, I selected Unit04.rwx as it is a cube with some depth.  For some thinner detailing that could make a believable 'wall' and window ceil, I chose wframe01.rwx.  For further detailing, I chose p1rec0100g.rwx for some simple beams in my facade. 

With these objects selected, we can begin scaling them to be very wide, very tall, and very thin, and then attempt to assemble them into a believable facade.  I scaled the Unit04.rwx to match a 10x10 meter space and scaled the wframe01.rwx to fit within that space.  Once I had this scale set, we can begin to see the facade take form:

Done! With these final objects:

# Object         Purpose           Action

2 unit04.rwx     large frames      create scale 5 5 1

2 wframe01.rwx   detail frames     create scale 4.39 3.53 4

3 p1rec0100g.rwx horizontal beams  create scale 0.5 1.85 1

All it needs is some texturing and a window panel... and we can slap it onto a building! I chose a texture theme of topgrey for the panel and ctable2 for the window frames.  There is a building near SW City Town Square Park that features these textures and I really like the colors that come out of it.

Here's an example of it in action.  Not counting windows and other detailing, this is only 7 objects for a 20x10 meter frame! 

 And the completed tower:

Designing facades with a minimal number of objects is all about experimentation.  Some things may work well, others won't. I've found that as long as the object sets I'm attempting to use have some depth, I can usually exploit them by means of scale or shear to look like believable buildings.

For example, I'm not a huge fan of the tan-colored building next to this skyscraper. The tan building uses quite a few flat pieces, which robs it of depth in some critical areas and really makes it look unsatisfying.  In this project I'm going for completion, so I don't mind these imperfections in some filler buildings -- the more important thing is the process and the learning gained for some of the more prominent buildings in the area I would like to work on.

Capping Off Content in Elkins Beach

Since I've come back, I've been slowly working to cap off old builds that I left incomplete.  It is really jarring just how much I left unfinished. This weekend, I've been working on the oceanside area of Elkins Beach, a medium-density town area in the Southern Highlands.

The bridge in the image above was fun to slap together. It is reminiscent of another project (that I actually completed!), Legacy Bridge in Cypress Hollow, AWTeen.  That bridge was quite a lot better, this is just a small bridge over an outlet.  

This entire bridge is sheared by z2 = -0.5 because the road in this area is sheared to connect two areas of the town that are offset by a few coordinates. Since I've gotten comfortable with the shear command, I much prefer it to manually rotating long-pathing object groups like roads because there is a lot of power in being able to maintain the length along one axis while manipulating another.  This can especially be seen in the beach-side road in the images below, where shear helped me to cleanly extend this weird, windy road down the length of my beach.

My priority has been on getting the roads and landwork capped off first, and I've started to set placeholders for the geometries in the area.  There's an area set aside for a cathedral I had planned... but will probably scrap because the landwork around it would make it pretty stumpy in length.

Another embarrassing build that is unfinished in this area is where my Cy Award for the ActiveWiki rests:

I intended for this to be a skyscraper that featured ActiveWiki content, but never got around to completing or even really starting it.  Whoops!

Hopefully I'll get some of this capped off before I leave again.

Alphaworld Builders: Shear/Skew Petition

Shear/Skew have been disabled since the v4 rights bot stopped working, which has been troublesome for many builders who make use of the features for applications such as shearscaping (landscaping with shear/skew to easily manipulate 'terrain') and general building.  A poll has started in the AW Forums and has gotten some really good discussion going (including an excellent post by Byte) about the value of these commands and what a great asset they are to Alphaworld builders.

I'd like to join them in these remarks as I've personally used shear on a number of occasions in Alphaworld and AWTeen and the mathematic precision in producing angles is second-to-none.  Its much, much better than using three-axis rotation techniques and by using shear I've been able to streamline efforts in landscaping and construction projects, such as the Legacy Bridge in AWTeen.

Though I'm sure AWI Support would be more than happy to help you with shear/skew rights on an individual basis if you contacted them... I think it would be easier for everyone if these were just turned on by default. :)