Californian Coast - Rocky Beach Waterworks

[Simulanten 681]

Here we go again - The desert isn't deserted yet but I felt that I wanted to move towards the coast for a change. Great new assets (like the So Cal suburbs and King Leno's apartment blocks) made it tempting. I'm experimenting with the visuals, tried to tidy up my 4200 assets (bringing them down to 3800 - a nightmare) but for some reason C:S is lagging recently. Not quite sure what's the problem as I rather simplified my mod set up. Anyway - this is a first glimpse of the Santa Barbara-ish atmosphere I'm about to create:

 

[Simulanten 681]

Just took the exit to central Rocky Beach. It's growing - soon more pics to come.

 

[Simulanten 681]

Here's more. I'm really getting satisfied with the atmosphere in this little town close to the ocean. The detailing gets heavy on the frame rate - but hey, it's still looks nice.
After so much desert I enjoy planting all kinds of trees and make some lush gardens...

And here's an overview over the area covered so far:

And to end this a Californian sunset.

[barcasam7 185]

Damn! They look incredible. Great job. I felt like I was in Cali just looking at your images. 

[Simulanten 681]

There's another one - the Pacific Mall is one of the older shopping malls in Rocky Beach. All those cars are a bit heavy on the frame rate I suppose...

[Matthias King 348]

The mall looks great. Very realistic. This is very similar to what I'm going for.

[Simulanten 681]

It took me ages to build the "Date Grove Estates" - I guess it's rather expensive real estate then.
Something I wonder: About a week ago my C:S got a surprising performance boost after days of lagging (I thought it was due to the heavy savegame and prop madness) - now I didn't change the mod set up and still overnight I have about 5-8 fps more. Anybody experienced the same?

 

 

[Matthias King 348]

22 hours ago, Simulanten said:

It took me ages to build the "Date Grove Estates" - I guess it's rather expensive real estate then.
Something I wonder: About a week ago my C:S got a surprising performance boost after days of lagging (I thought it was due to the heavy savegame and prop madness) - now I didn't change the mod set up and still overnight I have about 5-8 fps more. Anybody experienced the same?

 

 

I love this so much I might just rip it off for my city. What assets are those?

[Simulanten 681]

2 hours ago, Matthias King said:

I love this so much I might just rip it off for my city. What assets are those?

Feel free to use this idea of course! It's one of the Las Colinas buildings by King Leno. I adjusted the color with a color mod and added a few props like AC boxes, antennas, small brick walls etc. It was quite finicky because the whole street is on a slope - it took a lot of tweaking with Move It - working endlessly on the angles and heights of each building and node. Las Colinas are one of the most underestimated assets - with a little work added they make great suburban So Cal / Vegas style neighborhoods - looking a lot like the Rancho Rosa Estates in Twin Peaks the Return :-)
But I also discovered a few very usable Vanilla assets just recently - red tiled villas and houses that you just have to clean out of all the ugly and bloated props and trees and redecorate. I'll show some of those residences in one of the next batches of images. In the screen above you can spot one of these vanilla villas just behind the horseshoe of the compound.

[Matthias King 348]

Nice. The city I'm building is SoCal, so any appropriate assets are always welcome. There are a handful of vanilla low residential assets that can easily pass for SoCal, especially if you get the rest of the neighborhood around them looking right. I wish there were a few more Victorian houses. There are a number of those in some of the older neighborhoods.

[Simulanten 681]

After adding lots of custom made residential lots, gardens, driveways and more with hundreds of props I was up to an elementary school next to the two office buildings close to the highway. It turned out very satisfactory.

The whole neighborhood looks great IMHO

And here is an overview - all I covered so far. More detailed shots soon.

 

[Leeijo 314]

Damn you make my houses look good!

[Simulanten 681]

9 hours ago, Leeijo said:

Damn you make my houses look good!

Waiting for those dingbats ????

[Matthias King 348]

That does look good.

[The British Sausage 5,449]

You have a good sense of detail and are pretty good with Cities: Skylines! Keep it up.

[Simulanten 681]

Just before the break with the new patch coming up two pics of the So Cal style train station. Surf Liner incl.

[Simulanten 681]

Finally I had some time to work on Rocky Beach. I must say that Pres' Calavera Beach inspired me a lot - although he started his series after I had my start with RB. But he's doing an incredible job on the coastline so I used some of his methods to create these cliffs and beaches. I added some nice properties on the coast, a hotel close to the Amtrak station and a diner close to a public beach parking. I will post a lot of pics of this big and detailed area very soon. Here's an overview as a small appetizer.

 

[The British Sausage 5,449]

That's amazing!

A small place but an amazing place!

Nice one.

[Evanjs 602]

51 minutes ago, Simulanten said:

Finally I had some time to work on Rocky Beach. I must say that Pres' Calavera Beach inspired me a lot - although he started his series after I had my start with RB. But he's doing an incredible job on the coastline so I used some of his methods to create these cliffs and beaches. I added some nice properties on the coast, a hotel close to the Amtrak station and a diner close to a public beach parking. I will post a lot of pics of this big and detailed area very soon. Here's an overview as a small appetizer.

 

Start a YT. I’d love to watch it! 

[Simulanten 681]

A quick pic for the weekend to celebrate the reopening of the US government. Lifeguard is on duty again.

[boformer 3,169]

It looks so realistic. unbelievable!

[Simulanten 681]

Another one. Close to the Amtrak station there's a Holiday Inn Express on Main St. This reminds me of a few coastal towns between Santa Monica and Santa Cruz - it has a bit of everything. Hope to have time to make more screens soon instead of building - can't stop right now. I'll never do a youtube series though - no time and skills for that...

[Simulanten 681]

Now I had the time to make some screenshots of the large new area on the edge of town and especially close to the beach. It's a lot of pictures and I try to comment a bit on the assets that I used.

First I finished the suburban area close to the elementary school and sports fields. I found a nice version of row houses that have a bit of a Californian look. The baseball field in the background was managed with the Paintermod to control the far too vibrant textures. Now it blends in nicely: The fields are popular - parking in the background is always full.

 

Another asset that needed heavy modding to cover ugly ground textures and hedges. Now it's a decent Californian home. Although there are quite a few American suburban assets now in the workshop I feel there is still a lack of generic houses...

 

Props galore in an older part of the build. The odd shaped lot is being used for an open air garden / plants store. I just tried to use every available plant/pot/garden prop there is. Here's where Rocky Beach residents get ther pruned date palm seedlings:

And now for the glorious coastal area. Heavily modified vanilla and workshop assets, new rock and coastal decal textures, abundant vegetation create a nice lush neighborhood with expensive lots and real estate. The Amtrak Surf Liner goes right through this area.

One of the bigger mansions of Rocky Beach. Has its own tennis court, a large pool with a wind protecting glass wall and a comfy guest house. And access to a private beach.

View from the water. I got some ideas for detailing the cliffs from Pres' Calavera Beach. The vanilla "High Vegetation" from Park Life make good bushes on the rocks. BTW Paintermod is great for adapting the luminosity of many vanilla and workshop buildings. But I always dream of a crp unpacker to directly adress the textures....

Another one of my newly discovered vanilla assets. Just a little tweaking with Prop it up Mod and completing it with additional props and gardening they make fantastic modern villas like this beach house on the cliff.

It sits on a small looped street that has just about a dozen of houses on it. There's a small public beach between these houses. Maybe it's a good surf spot? No idea.

The actually French Aquitana houses make good Californian single story residences - especially when combined to larger houses. These two sit on a little hilltop in the middle of the street loop. Even the ugly chunk of vanilla building looks like nice real estate after some prop and Paintermod treatment.

Exiting the railway underpass - the two apartment blocks needed some new roof textures (ploppable asphalt positioned on the flat roof) but with the surrounding palm trees and their position on the beach they look more luxurious...

A more general view from the Amtrak station area with the Holiday Inn Express down to the beaches. The terrain didn't allow any grid down there - looks nice.

A Japanese family feeling homesick owns this property. A great excuse for using all those splendid Japanese assets...

But there is a great sushi restaurant in town. It has a nice garden patio with a small temple gate. Up front there's my very own Pine Motel in all its glory (and with a decent pine tree to justifiy its name...

Again a more general overview of this part of Rocky Beach. It has a few commercial buidlings and a police stationalong the tracks. The larger residential buildings behind the tracks are waiting to be accompagnied by the dingbats that are lurking somewhere in Leijo's toolshed.

And finally a Bird's view of the whole area between the train tracks and the water. It was fun but also tedious with all that residential detailing - now I'm moving on to some other parts of town I guess.

 

[Leeijo 314]

These are some really good looking screens of a really well executed build! Looking forward to more, and thanks for the motivation to finish the Dingbats  They are in production but currently on hold while I finish some other assets I'm sure will be fitting here as well

[The British Sausage 5,449]

Incredible! The best bits are the cliff faces!

[Simulanten 681]

23 minutes ago, Leeijo said:

These are some really good looking screens of a really well executed build! Looking forward to more, and thanks for the motivation to finish the Dingbats  They are in production but currently on hold while I finish some other assets I'm sure will be fitting here as well

Drool... Thanks for your nice comment!

[boformer 3,169]

On 29.1.2019 at 4:00 PM, Simulanten said:

But I always dream of a crp unpacker to directly adress the textures

Actually that's why I made Resource Replacer. It doesn't extract the textures from the .crp file (you can easily do this with ModTools), but allows you to replace and live-test textures and color variations.

I really like your use of the vanilla assets. You are primarily using the ones that were added in one of the first updates. The quality of those assets is really high, except for a few oversaturated textures and the props.

[Simulanten 681]

Thans boformer for the hint! I stayed away from ModTools and Resource Replacer (being on the consumer end atm) but this might be a good moment to dive in.

Here's a preview of Rocky Beach cemetery. It's quite a big thing and was inspired by Santa Barbara and a few L.A. spots. More pics to come very soon.

 

[Simulanten 681]

Now for Rocky Beach Cemetery. It's something I wanted to do for a while: A decent burial place for Rocky Beach residents. The usual Deathcare buildings are far too small and walled in - and I wanted to get it real in terms of size and atmosphere. Fortunately there are a lot of great assets on the workshop - only thing missing are good SoCal service buildings (red tile roofed and mission style) and funeral homes. Now I have a massive cemetery with dozens of hearses driving around town - I wonder how to tweak their service radius (I remember that the respective mod doesn't work anymore?). Is there a way to assign services to districts or so?

Anyway, here we go: The cemetery sits on the hils behind the coastal highway - there are nice views...

I like the driveways with the patched cracks - The whole area is heavily inspired by Santa Barbara Cemetery - it looks quite similar with the grassy lawns, kind of trees and a few larger mausoleums. One of them has a nice vista point with benches and sits on the highes hill.

My Rocky Beach is some kind of ideal California - that shows in the much greener grass because it rains more frequently on my map than IRL...

In the distance you can see the hills south of Rocky Beach. The map comes from the real north end of Big Sur - if my RAM and prop limit allows it I will develop into that hilly coastal area and make a National Park...

Here you can see the funeral chapel of the Rocky Beach Cemetery Association. It has two different assembly halls. I adapted one of the workshop churches (red roof...)

There's a funeral right now... The chapel is surrounded by these great tall pine trees.

The cemetery is close to the highway. I reduced traffic on the highway by having only one entry to the map. I hate those busy roads going from nowhere to nowhere...

On the chapel I covered the window with the cross to keep it religion neutral... I like the Californian late afternoon atmosphere in this pic.

Another view of the upper entry that doesn't go past the chapel. It's actually another part inspired by Santa Barbara, amazing how C:S can look on eye level...

That's how proper deathcare looks like! These great assets by BTB are perfect. The Rocky Beach Cemetery Association has the gardening facilities here (also growing flowers for the services) and the crematory serves a few funeral entreprises of the greater RB area. It's a bit set back in a discreet corner of the cemetery.

Close to the chapel there is a sculptor an his monument workshop.

This intersection with the entry gate, the big palm tree road island and the surrounding buildings is also inspired by SB. In the Rocky Beach version there is a nice restaurant next to the monument shop.

I love how this intersection turned out.

Here's the area south of the highway that links the area covered so far with the cemetery. I added a few smaller service builidings close to the sound barrier to get coverage in the large suburban residential area.

And finally a complete view. At the bottom there's the hillside - a future development area for larger properties with a view. It was an extremely satisfying thing to work on this cemetery. Hope you like it too.

[Leeijo 314]

Wow, I'm just speechless!