My SC4 CJ Scrapbook | Important update and news!

[Mymyjp 1,052]

As always, amazing entry Lnx. I am looking forward to your night entry and your next update.

[jmsepe 2,039]

Nice grid busting. I really like the realism of your suburbs and agriculture. 

[47ply 1,100]

wow you keep out doing yourself it looks real good

[packersfan 666]

Wow, amazing.  I haven't done any mmp farming.  Too much scale for that kind of detail in the long run (though, I think I will have to give it try if I want the theme to be farming).  I do use a lot of those downloads and creators you mentioned.  You have one parking lot next to your river and embankments that have green fences.  Did you lot edit those?  The diagonal sections are right up against the embankment and seem to share the same lot.  Great attention to all the details!

[Donician 9]

Everything looks amazing, but you're farm fields are top notch. I'm going to try to make some similar fields in my region (instead of simply laying out farms).

[tankmank 853]

Some great updates i've missed, need to check back here more often. I have always admired the way you create rural areas, they look so great the layout and way you incorporate so much. Also your BAT choices are great so many that i never would have thought of and they all seem to work and compliment each other 

[AboveTheCity 6]

What Mod do you use for these green river shores with a sidewalk in it? Your city is one of the best I've ever seen! 10/10

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

Replies:

 

Mymyjp: Thanks a lot!

 

jmsepe: I love gridbusting and laying down agriculture.

 

47ply: I'm still exploring all the mods I've downloaded so there is so much more to explore and improve upon!

 

packersfan: To answer your question; no, I have never used the Lot Editor and I haven't even downloaded it! I don't have time for LE so I rely on a lot of BATs, fillers, MMPs and lot textures to give the illusion of lotting work. As for MMP farming I reckon it is the best way to go for organic looking fields, it is a very time-consuming process but the payoff is well worth it.

 

Donician: Give it a go with MMP farming! I would love to see this method be used by other members.

 

tankmank: Thanks for the compliment! Agriculture is my favourite aspect of SC4, but I love the urban to. With all the custom content I have been downloading I am finding it easier and easier to diversify city areas.

 

AboveTheCity: I use Mas71's river banks which can be found here: https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1674. And thanks for the comment!

 

 

---

 

 

Update 44: The Estate

 

In the final part of the Grethor tour we travel to the retail/industrial estate in Southeast Grethor. This has a little bit of everything: industry, shops, flats, houses, lakes, farms, highways, farms, woodlands and MMP work. Enjoy!

 

///

 

Southeast Grethor

 

 

///

 

 

Ball-breaking gridbusting.

 

 

 

The estate.

 

 

 

The manufacturing zone.

 

 

 

Pots Lake to the left and Croppers Pond to the right.

 

 

 

As ever Diggis ponds come in super useful.

 

 

 

The suburban is strong in this one.

 

 

 

 

The Coke-Cola building dominates the skyline for miles around.

 

 

 

One of Grethor's elementary schools.

 

 

 

 

 

The Six Blocks housing estate.

 

 

 

 

The Two Ponds housing estate to the right.

 

 

 

 

 

Moving eastwards over the estate now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am really loving the Project Symphony highways.

 

 

 

 

Some FAR filler tomfoolery.

 

 

 

 

A thing I love to do is to fill the forest floor with MMPs to spruce up the Godmode plopped trees.

 

 

 

///

 

And here is a preview of Townshead, the new city I'm working on.

 

///

 

In the next entry I'm going back to San Widge where a cathedral and a grand central station await.

[jmsepe 2,039]

I am really amazed on how you lay down your roads and add mmps to the surroundings. If I may ask, do you place the roads first or just let the city grow and add roads later?

[Sabretooth78 808]

Loving the grit!

 

As an aside, I would love to see how you would tackle a custom seaport or airport.

[wwetom1 831]

Wow, awesome area. Really impressive work. I like the fences along the FAR road. How much custom lotting do you do, if any?

[Compdude787 916]

Wow, awesome area. Really impressive work. I like the fences along the FAR road. How much custom lotting do you do, if any?

In a reply in this last update, he says he's never even touched the Lot Editor. Impressive, huh?  

[Donician 9]

You've probably provided this info before, but what tree controller are you using?

[LexusInfernus 908]

Wow, another great update. You really make some of the best industrial areas. And I also really love those medium height apartment blocks. Nice job!

[Belfastsocrates 1,753]

Superb! Your industrial areas are the best I've seen, truly fantastic.

I forgot to ask earlier, what's the monument this image?




I recognise the BAT but I can't remember it's name.

[freemunchies 124]

Wow you've really been cranking out updates lately!

 

I love the suburbs, but it looks pretty r$ heavy, just wondering where all the r$$/r$$$ are living? Also that industrial area fits in beautifully, fantastic planning!

 

Anyway great update, and the new city looks good so far, I can't wait to see the rest of it!

[Huston 5,799]

Nice work with the rural scenes and suburbs. Really love the blend of environments

[blunder 1,080]

Y U NO CJ section, LnX?  I keep missing your excellent updates.

 

But seriously, that industrial area: don't ever change

 

 

I forgot to ask earlier, what's the monument this image?

I recognise the BAT but I can't remember it's name.

 

It's by Seraf .... Atalier? I think?

[NielsC007 499]

Amazing work!

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

Replies:

 

jmsepe: Thank you! As for your query I always lay down the roads first so I can work out where everything goes. Sometimes an idea for a road, rail or highway network can be a centrepiece for a large city area.

 

Sabretooh78: This year I will be publishing a seaport entry. I've got more or less everything I need to build a seaport complex. But as for a massive airport then no I'm afraid. I don't know why but I find airports boring and it is really hard to make them look good without them being boringly repetitive.

 

wwetom1: Thanks a lot! I never do any lotting by the way. In this CJ there is no photoshop or lotting; just pure raw SC4 pictures.

 

Compdude787: Cheers!

 

Donician: I use the ARDEN tree controller, of the five version I use the evergreen inland version. These can be found here- https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2959.

 

LexusInfernus: Thank you! Every week I drive through Teesside, in the north of England, to get to a skatepark and every time I drive past the industry: the steel mill, the chemical works, the electricity pylons and other massive, and monstrous, sights. I guess that is my inspiration for industrial areas in SC4.

 

Belfastsocrates: The BAT you are looking is the Kaiser Wilhelm Nationaldenkmal, this can be found here-

 

freemunchies: Grethor has mostly R$ and R$$ homes with a tiny amount of R$$$.

 

Huston: I love merging various cityscapes together.

 

blunder: I don't post on the CJ section because I don't want to double post the same entries. Besides I use JPEGs for the pictures now so they will load up a lot more quicker. Thanks for the industrial remark!

 

NeilsC007: Cheers!

 

 

---

 

 

Update 45: Cathedral and Central Station

 

We travel back to Grethor to visit the Cathedral and Central Station.

 

///

 

 

 

Central Station.

 

 

 

The Cathedral.

 

 

 

The central station has fourteen platforms and is one of the central hubs in the region's railway network.

 

 

 

A very tight T-interchange of the Project Symphony. This is the first main entrance to the central station, it connects to the intercity highway which runs around most of San Widge.

 

 

 

The second main entrance into the central station.

 

 

 

Since the train station and the curved tracks work best on the flat, I had very little space to work with to curve the tracks around.

 

 

 

 

The railway tunnels extend for about a mile or so.

 

 

 

 

Of course it wouldn't be a central station without a lot of parking.

 

 

 

Hopefully the next NAM release will contain RRW Project Symphony overpasses!

 

 

 

Grethor's Cathedral. This BAT is the Antwerp Cathedral by xannepan.

 

 

 

 

Part of the challenge of the cathedral area was developing an old city feel to it. The cobbled SAM streets and pedmall plazas helped a lot!

 

 

 

The national archives building.

 

 

 

Special thanks to rsc204's MGB Diagonal Filler Set. Without these the diagonal paths would never have looked so good.

 

 

 

The North part of the cathedral gardens.

 

 

 

The South part of the cathedral gardens. The idea behind these came from the York Minster grounds which I have walked around a lot.

 

 

 

I added some BSC park pieces and park paths to spice up the grounds.

 

 

 

 

The cathedral grounds also contain other amenities such as a maze, a café and historical souvenir shop.

 

 

 

 

Inside the cathedral grounds it is another world. But outside the urban jungle surrounds it and the central station is only a few hundred meters away!

 

 

 

To the east of the cathedral the river flows merrily by.

 

 

 

 

In the centre is the city's main library which contains a few million books or so.

 

 

 

reddonquixote's State Library of Victoria is one exceptionally great BAT!

 

 

 

 

 

This small chapel building once housed the high ranking clergymen many hundreds of years ago.

 

 

 

The merry-go-round and other such attractions are part of a drive, made by the San Widge city council, to make the cathedral a tourist honeypot.

 

 

 

The Royal Cinders Castle was once a home -- one out of many -- for the the region's royalty. This castle was constructed during the reign of the first king of the Cinder dynasty about six hundred years ago.

 

 

 

 

 

///

 

Next time: Grethor's CBD in the night. And here is a picture to whet your appetite.

 

[APSMS 1,893]

I really like your entries, though like Blunder I often miss them/don't read them because they're in the forum section which I feel is especially clunky in the ST forums (though not so much on SC4D; maybe it's the interface that makes ST so user friendly as a forum that I find dooms it for CJs...Who knows?).
 
This update was really nice, though, and I really liked the parks and the rail networks.
 

Replies:
 
jmsepe: I love gridbusting and laying down agriculture.
 
packersfan: To answer your question; no, I have never used the Lot Editor and I haven't even downloaded it! I don't have time for LE so I rely on a lot of BATs, fillers, MMPs and lot textures to give the illusion of lotting work. As for MMP farming I reckon it is the best way to go for organic looking fields, it is a very time-consuming process but the payoff is well worth it.
 
Donician: Give it a go with MMP farming! I would love to see this method be used by other members.
 
tankmank: Thanks for the compliment! Agriculture is my favourite aspect of SC4, but I love the urban to. With all the custom content I have been downloading I am finding it easier and easier to diversify city areas.

To be sure, you have some excellent farm fields, though I felt (personally) that for what you got for all that MMP maybe 1/3 was worth it (those pasturelands are great), and the rest could have been done via the standard method. Many other very high quality CJs/MDs have had excellent farmlands (3RR and NORO as some examples) by the standard method, and I kept feeling like something was missing from your farms for all the extra work that MMP fields require.
 
Then I saw this picture in this new MD over at SC4D:

and everything made sense!   Well, sort of .

I'll just leave this here for you to mull over and get some new ideas. Grid busting is the future age of MMP farms, I tell you.

[Schulmanator 5,799]

Great new pix! I like the area a lot. Maybe it's time for a vacation there!

[bitsaul 9]

Truly spectacular stuff!  You've inspired me to make something great today and contribute.

[TekindusT 3,809]

Knowing how much does it cost to get those curved rail tracks right, this update deserves big kudos!

[Charlie_Zane 963]

Must have taken a while to get all those tracks in place, nice work!

[47ply 1,100]

awesome job your dedication pays off in spades. love how you mix all the park bits together

[Benedict 3,119]

Nice work, your CJ was number one again for the week ending September 18th.

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

Replies:

 

APSMS: Fasan's Krokanien MD is pure genius. Thanks for the link! His work has given me all sorts of ideas and all kinds of things to consider.

 

Schulmanator: Thank you.

 

bitsaul: Thanks, and good luck with your city and/or CJ.

 

Tekindus: Thanks a lot, but laying down those curved tracks was not as irksome as I initially thought it was. The terrain levelling was more frustrating though!

 

City_Master: Cheers!

 

47ply: SC4 is my obsession during my spare time. Also it is the first time I have used Paeng's parks in a city.

 

Benedict: Great stuff.

 

 

---

 

 

Update 46: Midnight is Where the Day Begins

 

As promised here is San Widge's CBD at night, it also comes with a couple of night-time pictures from other areas of the city. Enjoy!

 

///

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Vitoraju 675]

WOW! Very Cool

[tonyr 926]

Superb update! Thanks for sharing.