Show Us Your Anti-Grid!

[Thin White Duke 4,072]

I switched to Berner Oberland!

Other people than me are allowed to post here, and I know for sure I'm not the only one going for gridbusting glory, so go ahead! 

[philforhockey51 4,220]

[CT14 2,486]

Time to bump this thread, here's a scene from Bison.

[Haljackey 17,385]

Tinkering with some anti grid grids

[dc'smycity 30]

On 9/24/2016 at 1:23 AM, CT14 said:

Time to bump this thread, here's a scene from Bison.

Righteous bump indeed. Is there (or was there) a street leading from thad DxO Ave intersectino at the bottom. Love the breakwater concrete blocks and dirt streets.

[CT14 2,486]

On 11/7/2016 at 6:09 PM, dc'smycity said:

Righteous bump indeed. Is there (or was there) a street leading from thad DxO Ave intersectino at the bottom. Love the breakwater concrete blocks and dirt streets.

Yes, the crosswalk to nowhere is a remnant from a street intersection. I sometimes apply that technique intentionally, but that time was an accident!

Here is the latest from my FAB project - testing diagonal and FA3 prop families:

 

[f3cs 1,063]

Just a Little anti-grid in the new part of the city. You can see Bellingham Central Artery too.

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

CT14, massive props for your trail-blazing diagonal W2W and FA W2W buildings! You may just yet give the impression that SC4 is more than a grid. I believe the systemic way you have gone about this project is a first for the SC4 community. Keep it up!

///

Grid-busting roundabout.

 

The lone diagonal...

[Arn71 804]

Diagonal Suburb

[philforhockey51 4,220]

 

[korver 27,685]

An anti-grid farmland scene I made last year - more in my recent CJ entry.

 

[adventurerneil 29]

It takes guts and/or naïveté to post something following a korver post...      that's where I am come in!  

I'm a new player (and new Simtrop lurker), and I got inspired by this thread to try something different, both in terms of city size and shape / feel. So I spent a good chunk of the day dinkering around on Wilsham Farms, a new city I created in a new Eaton region. I wanted to start a new region that I can have plenty of time and space to challenge myself to learn NAM and design and other things with - so far I think it's an OK choice.

I want Wilsham to be bucolic, but also visually interesting and challenging. Here's what I came up with / where I'm at so far:

The red circles are my rail lines (not very realistic, but I wanted to ship farm cargo the old fashioned way), and you can see some extensive curvy-wandering street goodness in the form of the gray squiggles. To get the circles, I put on crime-view and traced the radius of a police building, but had to straighten out for a river crossing or two. 

Here's a view of the early transport network infrastructure. I envision the river area being the seat of the town, which will be pretty mellow in this farming community. You can see some of the rail curves here (that will stretch into neighboring regions), as well as some red brick roads that give it a charming relaxed country feel. I'll probably switch to dirt roads soon, because I don't want it looking TOO bougie (plus seriously, who has *that* many red bricks lying around these days): 

 

Ack - I was going post another image or two but I guess that 4mb max sneaks up on you pretty quick. 

Thanks for the inspiration all, I'll keep you posted with how it develops, if it's worthy of sharing. 

[matias93 7,535]

@adventurerneil this is really an inspiring concept! Nonetheless, a couple of considerations would be useful:

• it looks like you found the FAR capabilities of the RRW, but strangely enough, you aren't using it on the whole curve. They are a bit hard to learn, but on the NAM documentation folder are a couple of RRW manuals you can consult; this would give your lines the perfectly smooth shape they deserve
• on the same vein, a slope mod would be very useful to keep the lines vertically smooth too. There are several on the STEX, just look for them!
• On the point the lines encounter, I was expecting some kind of transportation hub and maybe some railyards. It is not necessary at all, but it would be the better part of the map to put it. Again, look on the STEX, particularly for Simmer2 wonderful works.

And on a more practical hint: you would be able to put much more than two images if you use an external image server, as photobucket, flickr or imgur, and then insert the images here. Is better to keep those 4 Mb free, in case you need to upload some file when troubleshooting something.

[adventurerneil 29]

19 hours ago, matias93 said:

@adventurerneil this is really an inspiring concept! Nonetheless, a couple of considerations would be useful:

• it looks like you found the FAR capabilities of the RRW, but strangely enough, you aren't using it on the whole curve. They are a bit hard to learn, but on the NAM documentation folder are a couple of RRW manuals you can consult; this would give your lines the perfectly smooth shape they deserve
• on the same vein, a slope mod would be very useful to keep the lines vertically smooth too. There are several on the STEX, just look for them!
• On the point the lines encounter, I was expecting some kind of transportation hub and maybe some railyards. It is not necessary at all, but it would be the better part of the map to put it. Again, look on the STEX, particularly for Simmer2 wonderful works.

And on a more practical hint: you would be able to put much more than two images if you use an external image server, as photobucket, flickr or imgur, and then insert the images here. Is better to keep those 4 Mb free, in case you need to upload some file when troubleshooting something.

Thank you, Matias, for the info / suggestions! 

So, I installed NAM, I think I chose "full install" but I'm not too positive I got RRW completely installed with it, because I don't remember seeing those pieces in my menus. I may have to look at re-installing with custom to get it. All the lines I did yesterday were just with the default "t" rail tool. Per your suggestion, today I dug into FAAR puzzle pieces and learned how to see the difference between ortho, diag, and FAAR ("OK, it starts ortho up here, but I need to transition to FAAR, do a few staight pieces of that, and then transition to daig...").  

Funny you should mention a slope mod - I installed one after drawing out most of my lines yesterday. I noticed that it took me ~30 mins to crank out a bridge with restrictive rail rather than default, but I imagine a lot of that is learning curve time (I imagine the same process would only take a pro like haljackey a few minutes from a total rough start?). Since the rest of my town so far is streets, the slopes have been pretty forgiving ever since. ;-) 

And yes, I'm totally with you on wanting a railyard at a few of the convergence points! I still don't know what I'm doing enough to do that, but I'll check out Simmer2's stuff and see what I can do. I only finally today learned how to use Wineskin Winery to make use of all the .exe's I've been downloading. Until today I've just been downloading interesting content and crossing my fingers hoping that it wasn't wrapped in an .exe! 

Here's how's it's looking today, on the left side you can see one of the rail curves I smoothed out (the inner circle, outer is a street): 

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

Full-on diagonal residential neighbourhood.

 

[matias93 7,535]

I insist, it's impossible that those images aren't real photos!

[rsc204 21,865]

On 27/04/2017 at 11:24 PM, adventurerneil said:

So, I installed NAM, I think I chose "full install" but I'm not too positive I got RRW completely installed with it, because I don't remember seeing those pieces in my menus.

You won't find them there either, take a look at the RRW FlexTrack manual, which you can find inside the Documents\SimCity 4\NAM Auxiliary Files\Documentation folder. The NAM has been transitioning away from puzzle pieces to Flex and Draggable replacements for some time. In the case of the RRW, most of the track options require you to draw a pattern with the rail tool. It's worth checking these out, since they offer a super-quick way to draw curves and switches once you've memorised the patterns. Otherwise, just switch between the reference guide and SC4 whilst building.

In relation to the 4MB attachments, you'll do much better if you convert your PNG images to JPEGs before uploading them. Plenty of free tools exist to do this. PNG files are kinda verboten, because they are taxing on those without faster internet connections. In fact they make loading a page full of images quite annoying. Especially when JPEGs will look just as good with the right settings.

[adventurerneil 29]

13 minutes ago, rsc204 said:

It's worth checking these out, since they offer a super-quick way to draw curves and switches once you've memorised the patterns. Otherwise, just switch between the reference guide and SC4 whilst building.

Thank you, rsc! NAM 35 continues to awe (and overwhelm, if this newbie is being honest!) with its native capabilities. I'm stoked to hear it's moving toward Flex/Draggable and away from puzzle, too. Just fiddling around with it and comparing it to old school rail textures I was pretty amazed at the contrast with what rail must've been like back in early vanilla. 

I'll dig in to the documentation on my next city build up, which should be tomorrow. Cheers! 

[rsc204 21,865]

In addition, you might want to check out my NAM Tutorials series on YouTube (link in my sig). This goes over some of the basics of the NAM for beginners.

[korver 27,685]

[Thin White Duke 4,072]

Work in progress. The town of Decatur keeps expanding, and it's fun to build. I'm 'bout to throw some sicc mmp's in there, yo.

[Haljackey 17,385]

All over the place

[korver 27,685]

[Hordes Of Nebula 44]

Some stuff I've been working on. The city has some harsh terrain centered around a high mountain with a gorge cutting through it and a flatter area on the outskirts so I've build the commercial stuff on a grid and all the residential is either in a suburban anti-grid type zone or winding up the mountainside which has taken a lot of work and I'm still working on cleaning up some.

[korver 27,685]

[redfox85 659]

tried capturing my anti-grid so many different ways.... this ended up the best, oy.

 

[korver 27,685]

[Ceafus 88 1,871]

@redfox85 I like where that is going!

@korver Lovely work as always!!

@Hordes Of Nebula Beautiful little suburbs!

[korver 27,685]

Thanks alot @Ceafus 88

[korver 27,685]