Delta's Creations

[DeltaGamer 13]

Greetings fellow humanoids and city-builders!

I have, for quite some time, been following all the amazing creations that you've been making, and first of all, I want to say thanks to all of you for your awesome assets and supportive attitude, you've really made Cities Skylines a much better game . As you'll likely notice, I'm new, and I have also been interested in creating models for the game for quite a while.

I want to create more modern, even futuristic, buildings (not sci-fi, just high-tech-eco-buildings), and more modest and realistic modern buildings, and some larger structures (like malls, apartment complexes, public service buildings, schools, modern factories) if I can (once I get the hang of it), and some other random things maybe. I will probably take a long time to make and publish things, though.

I, however, have almost no experience with using 3D Modelling software and texturing, and virtually no experience programming (it's the idea that counts, right?). So, having seen how many of you have given your support to others, I'll be uploading progress and be looking for help here, so I can make "good" quality assets. I do have Blender, and I'll be using that for modelling.

So, I know there are many resources here for help, which I'll be using, but if anyone can give me pointers as to which topics, articles, etc. I should prioritise consulting, and where to start, being such a newbie, I would be very grateful.

Cheers 

 

Also, I would like to mention that my computer's specs are barely enough to even run the game (integrated graphics, I know ), so, above all, I will take priority in making sure my models are as efficient as possible so as to not lag my own computer to death. So any recommendations to make a model lighter would be very welcome.

[Matthias King 348]

The things you listed are all things I've been wanting to see more of, so I'm looking forward to seeing what you create.

There are several really good asset creators who frequent this forum, so you're definitely in the right place. Avanya, Zed, and several others are great at creating quality assets with very modest file size and tri count.

I wish you luck.

[Mr_Maison 2,426]

Hi DeltaGamer and WELCOME! We can always use more talent. One can have all the 3D skills in the world but without a passion for ideas, the tools mean nothing....you seem to have the passion so that's great news

For starters, if you didn't see it already, read through the threads that most interest you in here

It all starts from an idea. Just call into being what you want to see in game and express it here...there's plenty of help in this community. Wishing you all the best on your journey

[Macronomicus 128]

Welcome and good luck! Blender is an awesome app to learn its really got a lot of abilities, and it only keeps getting better every release. 

Im looking forward to see your creations, and of course will help if I can.

[Avanya 2,605]

Welcome! Always good to see another one join the "team" and make stuff for CS.   Experience isn't a requirement for sure. I'd never done anything in 3D before I did stuff for CS - I had some experience with graphical work though. Patience with yourself and stubborness to keep you going is a good help.

As for tips to optimize models: Sometimes faces don't need to connect everywhere to each other. On the pic below the highlighted faces only connect to the windows in the green circles. They don't need to connect to the blue points to look right in the game - here it saves about 6 tris, but when it's done alot on a building you can save alot. For texturing keep in mind that faces that have the same texture can overlap on the texture map - you might have to do some tweeking to get it to line up. And remember textures don't have to be squares - 512x1024 works just fine. Lastly it might be a good idea to use modtools to export a few models and see how other people and the devs have done it. I found that very helpful.

[DeltaGamer 13]

Thanks for all your support everybody!

BTW, Is there a way to know how the amounts of triangles you're using in Blender?

[Avanya 2,605]

Yup, it's on the bar in the top. You've got the version of blender, verts, faces and tris. Tris is what you're looking for.

[DeltaGamer 13]

Ah, yes! I can't believe I've never noticed that .

 

Anyway, I have a bit of a dilemma regarding aesthetics. You see, I've played both Simcity (2013) and Cities Skylines (no other city-builders though), and I've always really liked Simcity's aesthetics, especially when compared to vanilla Cities Skylines, and I would personally want to follow that style (or something similar), but it is very different from the general aesthetic of Cities Skylines, including assets made by the community, so I don't know which type of style I should follow, are there any recommendations for this?

 

[Mr_Maison 2,426]

49 minutes ago, DeltaGamer said:

Ah, yes! I can't believe I've never noticed that .

 

Anyway, I have a bit of a dilemma regarding aesthetics. You see, I've played both Simcity (2013) and Cities Skylines (no other city-builders though), and I've always really liked Simcity's aesthetics, especially when compared to vanilla Cities Skylines, and I would personally want to follow that style (or something similar), but it is very different from the general aesthetic of Cities Skylines, including assets made by the community, so I don't know which type of style I should follow, are there any recommendations for this?

 

The key is in how you prepare your textures. Cities Skylines is very aggressive with color saturation. When making your textures, darken the levels a bit and desaturate a LOT. You will most likely be going back and forth in game to get the desired look.

[Avanya 2,605]

What Mr_Maison said. I usually make my assets a little bit more saturated than I actually want them - this way they don't look completely grey and boring even with LUTs that desaturate alot. But in general I make it less saturated than the default stuff, because I like it better that way. In the end the choice is yours I'd say. Your assets = the colors you prefer

If you're using a LUT then make sure you check your asset both with that and without.

[DeltaGamer 13]

I couldn't get inspiration for what I should make as my first building for learning, so, I decided to copy a little commercial building from Simcity. It has 187 Tris at the moment. Anyway, this is mostly just a try at how to do things, I won't publish it unless there is demand for it, but feedback is very much appreciated... now, for the textures... 

 

 

[Darf 1,439]

Could you show us what you based it off? Tris count is pretty good! But you might want to spend a bit more to reduce texturesizes.

[DeltaGamer 13]

This is the original building, I wanted to start with something simple and easy. BTW, sorry for the low res, I didn't want any lag

[Matthias King 348]

I'd be willing to bet people will want you to publish this when you're done. There's a lot of demand for buildings from SimCity 4/2013.

I wish you luck on the texturing.

[DeltaGamer 13]

I seem to be having difficulties doing the UV-Wrap things, can anyone give me an example of how they do it, or point me towards a good tutorial, or have some advice?

[Avanya 2,605]

I used this little guide to learn the basics and then just trial and error. Found this one too - it explains the options a bit. You'll want to have as little wasted space as possible. Let me know if you'd like to see some examples of UV maps and seams on a model and I'll grab some screenshots of mine.

Generally try and imagine you have to fold out your model to a flat surface (kinda backwards making a house of paper) and make seams where it opens up. If you unwrap your model and don't like the result, you can always add more seams/clear seams and do it again. You can also just select a few faces to unwrap instead of the whole model, if you just want to redo those. And on the UV map you can scale things up or down depending on how much detail you want on there.

[DeltaGamer 13]

Thank you! 

And if it isn't too much of a problem, I would like to see some examples. 

[Darf 1,439]

I don't have any experience with uv mapping in Blender. But generally with texturing I start with the most recurring parts of my creation to the right of my texturemap like on this example. I generally start with a texturemap of 1024x512 and expand from there to 2048x512 or 4096x512 if needed. I made some templates like this one: template.psd.

[Avanya 2,605]

No problem.  I've put them in an album to not flood this post with pics. Some have lots of overlapping and good used space, some could have used the space better. There's also some simple buildings and some larger complex and weirdly shaped. I hope it gives you some ideas to how it can be done.

As for the texturing part I haven't really settled on one method. Sometimes I do all the unwrapping and arrange them in blender, then export an image of the UV map and "fill it in" with texture (usually I have to go back and move some things in blender). Sometimes I do it more like Darf, where I plop in texture and then place the faces on them. I usually look at the bits after having done the seams and pick a size to go with - also keeping in mind what size of building (or prop) I'm doing). I spend alot of time moving stuff around trying to fit in as much as possible. Sometimes I scrap stuff and then have areas of empty space - sometimes I cut faces up into smaller bits to overlap and save space. Lots of fiddling for my part, but I'm getting faster and not so bored with it as when I started.

[Macronomicus 128]

yeah it really depends on the asset, for some things like my biltmore I've chosen to make/apply the materials in blender, then bake UV with those as texture, also im making much the detailed geometry so I can bake those into the normals, and of course even with that I will need to optimize and reuse certain areas of the diffuse etc in final optimizations.    Other assets im making I am using pre-exising graphics for most of the textures, and/or touching up in photoshop, etc etc.... its always depending on your needs... and for me, whatever seems more fun at the moment is quite important too. 

[DeltaGamer 13]

Hey! So, I've been fiddling about with UV-Maps and, since it's my first try, I over-estimated the amount of space I might need

Is it possible, then, to, like crop the UV-Map to half the size it is right now? Because that's a lot of wasted space

[DeltaGamer 13]

Well, I kind of fixed it, but now, for some reason, when I import the asset into CS, even though I seem to have everything ready, when I click on "continue", it just freezes, do any of you know why this is happening?