[Tutorial] Creating & Applying Custom Props

[TallgeeseIV 8]

I had some trouble with this and I've noticed a lot of other people having trouble too, so I decided to write up a quick tutorial on it. I started modding Cities: Skylines yesterday so I may not have all the answers to please forgive any mistakes.

 

Importing your model: Importing a prop works much the same way that it does for buildings or other assets, with one difference that I've found: Scaling.

I don't know if it's a bug or intentional but scaling a prop during importing produced errors for me. This may only occur at higher scaling values. I worked around it by scaling it in 3ds Max first, resetting transform, and importing it at scale 1 in C:S. For example, if you wanted to scale your object by 5, go back into your modelling program, increase the object scale by 500%, then reset transforms and export again. It should now be the same size it would have been at scale 5 in C:S.

 

Once you've got your prop imported, it's time to save (since there are no other tools to use). Make sure you give each one a unique file name AND asset name. Think of it like giving a word document a file name, and a title. The file name might be "word_doc_1" but the title might be "Professional Resume". The file name text in the left box must be unique or it will overwrite an asset with the same file name. The asset name text box on the right must be unique because apparently the editor requires unique asset names and will only load the first created asset with the same name. For example, You cannot have 2 props named "Park Bench" but "Park Bench 1" and "Park bench 2" will work fine, and you will be able to see both in your props list when it comes time to apply them.

 

You may have noticed that unlike when creating assets, when creating props there is no camera tool to take a screenshot. You may also notice that in the lower right corner of the screenshot place holder image of the prop save screen, there is a little folder icon. Clicking that will open this prop's screenshot folder in windows explorer (or Linux's? I don't know, I'm on windows). There you can paste your own image file. File name doesn't matter, and I'm not sure which formats are valid but I know jpg and png work. Return to the game and you'll see your image on the right, and you can scroll through images if you pasted more than one.

 

After saving, you cannot immediately create/load an asset and add them, you must first return to the main menu, then create/load from there. I'd imagine the main menu calls the function that searches for newly created props and adds them to the content manager, and that function has to be called before you can add them.

 

After returning to the main menu, and creating or loading an asset, your newly created props will appear under park assets (park bench button > park bench tab). I haven't found a way to categorize assets, but if they were created and saved correctly, that's where they should be.

 

And finally, there are almost no error messages in place yet, but I've noticed, at least in my game, that if you ever have to click continue more than once, something went wrong.

Hope this helps. It's a finicky workflow for now, but it does work.

[Misanthrope 2]

thank you, this was very helpful.

[DethKwok 238]

I keep getting an error message after loading asset editor again after saving a custom prop.

Broken Asset:

Custom assets [myasset] generated info has zero size.