How to make a glass city in UT

"Counterfeits"

How to make a glass city

Inspired by Confessions of a Shopaholic, PUSH, Waiting, Mall Rats, and Ready Player One.

Start with a genaric base map and skybox. This map is built as a series of terraces to give it the look of a hill side over looking Hong Kong (Victoria) harbor. Temporary cubes are placed around the base as place holders for the finished buildings that will be added later.
Buildings Buildings are made in a separate file and copied over to the base map as needed. A series of add-ons is prepped in advance so each building has slightly different power supplies, antennae, posters, floors, and ad banners. 1). Make a hollow cube, wall thickness equals 8. (thin sheet of glass) 2). Subtract one wall and a door. 3). Cube is textured as "transparent", and usually uses one of the default sky or water textures in GenFluids.utx. Texture size is increased to X8 to give it a smooth tinted glass look. 4). Add toppings * No other surfaces or objects can actually touch any of the cubes without causing an HOM error.
Textures Textures (2D graphics) are collected in advanced. It took about two days of browsing Google Images to gather the first batch of textures. Of the approximately 295 processed and converted graphics only about 100 make it into the map.
Assembly line Once the base and graphics are finished, each building is made from scratch. Sizes vary from 192x192 to about 256x320. Anything larger than that loses its cheapy low budget “snug” type of feel. A couple of 2 story buildings are placed near the center of the map for contrast, variety, and to create a central focal point for the map. Buildings are built diagonally to not overlap each others' X Y viewports.
Pump up the Bass When a new building is completed, place it in the base map (cross your fingers) and press F8. :-) Repeat process until map is full. I try not to “pick at” a map once its done. Sometimes it's tempting to want to add extra do-dads and “sprinkle it with glitter” to a map that's really not necessary. In fact I usually remove ANYTHING that seems to in some way come off as not benificial, corny, distracting or neutral at best. The Zemeckis Cube is the only impulse-vantiy (look how clever I am) add that I felt was worthy of being in this map. It just looks like it belongs there.
Spiffy Screenies