New to Sim City 4 Modding

[Simcraft 0]

Hello,

my name is Simcraft and I am new to Sim City 4 Modding. I already mod for about 7 years, but mainly for Batlefield 2. I´ve got strong Photoshop skills and decent 3ds max skills. Now I want to change from Battlefield to Sim City, because I would like to create some buildings which are (or were due to ww2) in my home town Hannover in Germany. But I have to tell that I find it hard to find some good tutorials about modeling, skinning (there must be differences to battlefield 2) and exporting buildings to Sim City 4. Either they aren't that good or the link to the tutorial no longer works because its a very old tutorial. That is why Im asking you experts in this forum if you can recommend some nice tutorials for me. Also which tools do you recommend me?

I would also like to know something about the sim city 4 technique. Does the needed tool render the created building from every side and creates pictures from it or does it export the whole model & skin. Im asking because Im not good at not wasting polies for my models and performance would for sure suffer if the tool exports the whole building.

Thanks in Advance!

Simcraft

[Andreas Roth 607]

If you're from Germany, you might want to have a look at the BAT tutorial at http://www.simcityplaza.de - it's intended for gmax, but if you want to use 3DSMax, you can use the BAT4Max plugin. Additional help can be obtained via http://www.simforum.de, there's an active German modding community around. Basically, what you need to do is constructing the building in 3D and apply textures to it. the BAT will render the model in the five zoom levels with four sides each and compile an SC4Model file, which is basically a box with the rendered textures applied. It doesn't really matter how many polys you have, as long as your machine can handle the modelling and rendering process.

[Simcraft 0]

Thanks a lot for your reply! Thats much appreciated! And for sure I will join the german forum.

This is all I needed to know.