Police station Exterior?
DaWaterRat
Posts: 2,885
I ultimately ended up putting one together using Urban Sprawl 2 (since I didn't want to buy anything today), but I discovered today that while we have interrogation rooms, file rooms, locker rooms, police cars and (depending on what generation figure you're using) uniforms, there isn't a (roughly) contemporary police station exterior in the Daz store*. (there also isn't an office/desk area, but that can be canibalized from other office sets)
Is this something on somebody's list, since we seem to have gotten every other part of a police station? If not, it should be. I live a few blocks from one that was built in the 2000's (and was actually a filming site for Patrick Swayze's last television series), so I can take reference pics easy (once I explain what I'm doing, of course)
*I only found two over at Renderosity, both part of larger blocks, and one was a futuristic setting.
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Nooo, don't explain. Just wear camo and you won't be noticed.
no guarantees but reference pics always help visualize what you have in mind.
Amusingly enough, the police station by me isn't really what I picture when I picture a police station. Too much TV set in New York, I guess. I was offering because it was an actual "modern" police station, though suburban, rather than urban. Our Post Office is actually closer. I can get pics of that too (though that requires a bit more effort, since it is not in simple walking distance). :) I wasn't really expecting someone to take me up on it.
The weather for the next couple of days is supposed to be pretty lousy, but I should be able to get something after Easter.
Edit to add until then here are a couple of official pics
http://berwynpd.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/BPD_Station.16474223.jpg
http://www.oakparkdining.com/www.oakparkdining.com/images/large/berwyn-police-dept-illinois-745x395.jpg
And of the post office
http://www.postofficefreak.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Berwyn-IL-Post-Office-60402.jpg
http://www.billburmaster.com/mailbox/images/berwynil_60402.jpg
I think a police station would be cool especially if it were modern enough to look sci-fi!
I think a police station exterior would be a great idea!
Having public buildings interiors and exteriors would be great!
Well, there's this one
http://www.daz3d.com/gothic-city
Which doesn't come up under searches for "Police" (part of the problem with the stations being part of a city block)
And is a bit too techno-noir for my purposes anyway. Not what I'd call a "contemporary" station.
Yes, Gothic City is done as an homage to the Tim Burton-era Batman sets.
I'm thinking that for contemporary municipal buildings (including police stations, high schools, boards of ed, post offices, etc) an enterprising vendor might be better off designing a generic gov't building with a set of different signs and props for customization, kind of like how the old Central Subway set had a different texture set to change the country the subway and the nearby stores belonged to. The main exception would be firehouses, which have to have distinctive exterior qualities almost by default.
In the UK Police stations and other such municipal buildings don't tend to have any particular style. Indeed some are housed in some buildings which are considered quite spectacular architecture.
Like the one where I grew up (since converted into riverside apartments I have to admit). This was 2 Police Sations in one, the main building and the smaller on on the left which had it's own pier and mooring facilities for the River Police. http://www.boroughphotos.org/bexley/phrus_044-erith-police-station/
Okay, consider it under construction.
Police departments in the US don't follow any particular style, either. This is my local PD.
Yay!
Yeah. Someplace relatively large with a large parking lot - possibly two (one for visitors, one for municiple vehicles). Our board of education building is an old school (also fairly close to me. The only thing I'm missing in easy walking distance is the post office and city hall - and City hall is still within what I call walking distance - just the "I'm going to complain about having to walk this far" kind). And of course, in Chicago, you wouldn't know that the court house or City Hall are any different from any of the other various corporate offices. (The court house/county jail at California and 26 is fairly distinct, though.)
Hospital exteriors would be, at least on the Emergency side, a little different (and a lot bigger.) And as you said, Firehouses. Especially as around here there's the "main" fire house and then a handfull of auxillary houses some of which are just about literally that. A 2 or 2-1/2 story house with a garage big enough for a fire truck and an ambulance (or 2 fire trucks, depending. The one by me has an ambulance, probably to help out the hospital) attached.
And Yay! from me too. (Now I just have to remember to have enough mad money to get it when it comes out.)
When I think "Police Station" I tend to think of the decommissioned one on York Bl up in Highland Park, which is now a police museum. I think it was from the '20s or something. Very film noir.
That's actually a really nice piece of architecture that your local one has.
The P.D. in my area is actually part of the City Hall building... lots of old Dutch style architecture here in my area... the Town Hall building actually looks more like a castle than anything else, and the P.D. is in the basement of it, while the city offices and courts are on the other floors. LOL
This is from the side of the corner across the street from the building, and shows most of the building. The P.D. entrance isn't visible in this photo :
http://s985.photobucket.com/user/Kurtman518/media/Capital Region/CohoesCityHallSmall.jpg.html
And the attachment shows the main entrance to the P.D., which is around the side (currently has the yellow barrier in front of the steps in this photo). The blue section is for Juvenile. We actually don't seem to have too many actual photos of this part of the building, so I had to get a screen shot from the google street view. LOL
One area police station is an old house, another looks like a cheap double-wide (Hey, this is WV, after all)...and another is a nice old stone building. The one for the town I live closest to is actually just a corner of 'city hall'.
I'm excited. I think you'll do an excellent job with it. I'll buy.
Here in FL it seems like all the buildings are the same and have that mission feel to all the buildings' architecture. You wouldn't even know it was a police station except for the cars all parked in front:
The city near where I lived in WV, the police station was in the basement of the court house right smack in the center of town. Again, though, unless you knew where to look, you wouldn't know where it was which in this particular case had an entrance at the back of the court house.
In NY, the small village I lived in had an actual building for the police station. It was small and also contained the offices for the village clerks. Again, though, it didn't really have any visible indicaton that there was a police station there other than the large number of police cars parked beside the building. Of course, there, I think we only had 3 cells.
I think this one happens to be a very cool looking police department. It also, kind of, has that sort of futuristic feel that could be a police station of the future.
Side View
Front View:
I think I'd be happy with anything FirstBastion could come up with, though, because as mentioned earlier, in the States there is no specific style for police stations and it would be better than no police station exterior. I did a quick search for police stations in Toronto and found these two:
I think either one would work just as easily for a US scene as long as it were possible to be able to swap out flags and no one would probably be any the wiser. His sets are always top notch so you know it will be a quality set no matter what he decides to make. So, yeah, I would buy whatever FB comes up with cause I could definitely find some uses for it.
I like the idea of one building that could easily be modified by the user to become any one of a variety of public buildings. I always thought you could do a lot in that direction with School's Out (was that one of Ant Farm's?), but I don't use that one much as you can't easily remove the ivy from the front of the building and so it takes forever to render on my machine. It would have made a passable police station or hospital entrance with a few nurses or police milling around by the door though. I think there may even have been room to park a police car or ambulance out front too, but that ivy was just too limiting for me. If there's ivy involved, FirstBastion (I've always loved your user name :) ), please can we have the variety that doesn't permanently cling?.
yes a generic set of public buildings would fit the bill nicely
certainly here in Australia the local Police stations and larger ones vary a lot, some are just like houses others much like DaWaterRat's examples
I've actually been in this station many times. Its retired now, the new Division 14 has moved to a brand new building across the road. I'll try to take a pic of it. I do like all the suggestions being posted.
as plaintive or accused?
Couldn't this school make a police station too?
http://www.daz3d.com/school-s-out-19787
That was the one that I was talking about, but the ivy by the door can't be removed easily and takes ninety shades of forever to render on my machine. I've never actually seen a modern-ish school with ivy on the building anyway, and one of my sons (who is on a school caretaking team) would remove any that might seed itself by accident before it got a grip as it can be quite damaging to brickwork. A small fortune was spent on removing ivy from a council-owned mansion not far from us a while back as the harm it could eventually do would likely cost even more. I can't really see schools encouraging it, even if they don't have to render it as well :)
I tried this set out, and it seems to render pretty quickly to me. Using my relatively "humble" GTX-970 nVidia card, I rendered the full school to 100% convergence in 90 seconds (this would have taken 15 mins using CPU alone, but much less time to an acceptable level of convergence), and the front part where all the ivy is seen in around 4 minutes (although the image looked just fine after 2 mins). All this was done using shaders out of the box, ie the 3DL shaders it comes with. If I had converted them to iRay shaders it might have been quicker (but probably not much quicker). Images attached.
If you made the building generic enough you could use it also as a fire department. Or perhaps make it a police building with a fire deparment expansion!
The real-world pictures suggest strongly that a generic 'Public Building' exterior (with entrance signs, etc) might well be a versatile and useful product, with presets and extra props for post offices (five mailboxes out front), police stations, even libraries.
The jails I've seen tend to make the windows too small for a person to fit through and put them high on the room walls so one can't even attempt to fit through them. This is the cells that have windows.
A police station may have some holding cells, but usually (in my experience) the jail is a different building from the police station.