I am trying to reduce the height of a building with the techniques you described. I copied the 'y' column in the vert tab of the s3d file in ilive Reader's to Excel and scaled all values by 0.75, and copied the scaled values back to the s3d file and saved. It kind of work, but some of the vertices of the triangles (some of the borders/edges of the building) do not scale correctly and became distorted. I am keeping the full 6 digits precision in the conversion. Any idea of what I am doing wrong? Or, it this not the right way to change the height of a building?



At street level (Y=0 m) the stretch factor is 1.250

Halfway up (at Y=255 m) the stretch factor is 1.250

At the top (Y=510 m) the stretch factor is 1.250

At street level (Y=0 m) the stretch factor is 1.000

Halfway up (at Y=255 m) the stretch factor is 1.125

At the top (Y=510 m) the stretch factor is 1.250

At street level (Y=0 m) the stretch factor is 1.000

Halfway up (at Y=255 m) the stretch factor is 1.0625

At the top (Y=510 m) the stretch factor is 1.250

Due to the high viewing angle used in SC4, buildings usually look vertically squashed if they are made to scale.Thus, in order not to look squashed, bats are usually made taller for the game than they would be in RL.This has been particularly important for low-rise and mid-rise buildings.Depending on whom you ask, the recommended scale factor varies a bit, between 1.25 and 1.50.Obviously, the shorter the building, the higher the recommended scale factor would be.However, the same phenomenon does apply to skyscrapers as well.One well known example is the in-game model of the Empire State Building.Now, what can be done to S3D models that are already rendered for the last time?Following Chrisim's Tutorial: MODding rendered SC4Models it is possible to stretch models afterwards.However, one has to be careful not to create unwanted effects.This post byin's tutorial got me later into investigating this and trying to stretch buildings vertically:In order to test this out, I took a recent upload of a really tall building, the Burj Al Alam byThat is a copy of a RL project, and modelled to exactly its RL height, 510.8 m.I decided to stretch in vertically 125%, giving it a height in game of 638.5 m instead.The image below shows five buildings, from left to right:1. The in-game Empire State Building, squashed and unstretched, 480 m tall to the top of the spire.2. Burj Al Alam, unstretched, 510 m tall.3. Burj Al Alam, parabolically stretched, 638 m tall.4. Burj Al Alam, linearly stretched, 638 m tall.5. Burj Al Alam, evenly stretched, 638 m tall.Note that I have plopped these with an empty plugins folder, so there are props missing.Before explaining the difference between the three stretched version, lets take a look at them from another direction as well.In the following picture, the original one is on top, followed by the parabolically, linearly and evenly stretched ones:The evenly stretched version was the first one I made.In that, each Y-coordinate was multiplied by 1.25:Looking at the base, you can clearly see the distortionwas referring to.You can also see that shadows appear under the model, which appears to have been raised.The linearly stretched version was the second one I made.In that one, the stretch is linearly varied depending on the height above the base:The linearly stretched version is a huge improvement over the evenly stretched one.The parabolically stretched version was the final one, and the one I'm most pleased with.In that one, the stretch factor corresponds to the square of the height:In the first picture you can clearly see how the different methods give a different stretch on the dome on top of the skyscraper.The more parabolic, the less the basement is stretched, and the taller the top floors become.In order to give a final reason to why I prefer the parabolically stretched version, let's look at the towers from yet another direction.In this picture I've left out the already discarded evenly stretched version.The ones shown are, from left to right, the linear one, the parabolic one and the original one:Note that there is a clear difference in the white planter protruding to the right from the basement.The parabolically stretched tower is basically identical with the original one, but not the linear one.Next I think I'll stretch the in-game Empire State Building parabolically...Now, can anyone do this?In principle, yes. You only need to understand's tutorial, and use Excel for the conversions.The twenty S3D models included in the Al Alam SC4Model file had a total of some 5,000 vertices that individually had to be stretched.Each vertex got its own stretch factor, depending on its height above the basement.Without being able to copy these vertices from the model to Excel and v/v it wouldn't have been possible.Now, the next step would of course be to give this stretched tower to Barby and let her make a stage 15 CAMeLot out of it.Finally a slight warning if you liked this tower; unfortunately the ploppable tower available on STEX grows on empty lots as well.It is set to belong to the in-game CO§§§ family 0x400000AB, which grows on lots as small as 3x3.The tower itself requires a lot sized 7x8, and would thus become immortal if it would grow on an in-game smaller lot.