tutorial How to create a high quality road map of your SC4 City / Region

[TakemeThere 5,834]

Before we begin...
This is the first and by far most important step! Before doing anything else back up your city(s) save files! 
This is so that you don't accidently save the city while having transportation buildings and certain networks demolished which will be required to simplify the map making process.

Be forewarned; a certain degree of familiarity with image editing programs goes a long towards making the map making process somewhat easier and less time consuming. As for myself, I more or less learned on the fly so it was quite time consuming, but I was very highly motivated which is why I didn't give up until I finished the process.

Alright now that that's done the first step in the actually map making process is demolishing all transportation related buildings(not networks) in your city with the exception of ones which sit directly on top of roads and tracks, such as te-enabled bus & train stations.

Next you have several options on how to process after this point which depends on how complex your cities are and how complex you want to make your map.

If you have subway lines running through your city your going to want to destroy those subway lines. Don't worry this is only temporary afterall you're not going to be saving this city and even if you did that's ok, remember you made a backup of the city save file. Subway paths running underneath can obscure and confuse the actual surface routes on top which will make things more confusing when your drawing out the surface paths. 

Next demolish any te enable none-network lots such as parking garages & pedestrian paths etc.

Now depending on how complex your surface transit lines are(rail, elevated rail, GLR, monorail, HSR, etc) you may want to demolish all these lines as well. This can be quite time consuming but it's probably less time consuming than having to double check later if that line on that map is actually a road or a railway. However if you feel like you know your network pretty well it's probably less time consuming to keep these networks in place and distinguish them later rather than to demolish them all now(I kept mine in). Or if your mass transit system is fairly simple or your just mapping out a small city than you can skip this step as well. 
 

Open up the Date Views menu and click on transportation network.

Take a snapshot of the map, here's a screen shoot of me doing it. It doesn't matter how big or small your snapshot is as long as you include the entire traffic map within the Dataview;

Leave the game and open up the screenshot in an image editing program. The one I use happens to be called paint.net but I'm sure most programs will work for this next step.

All we need from the above image is the data map of the transit network seen here; Cut out the entire map from the snapshot.


Do not save as a jpg! It's important to save this in a lossless format like png. Otherwise it will make it more difficult for you to trace out the paths especially in areas with a high density of roads. 
If you have a subway network and want to incorporate it into your map you can do it one of two ways. If you don't mind being somewhat imprecise you can simply draw the subway paths later on an their approximate routing. I more or less do this with rail tunnels through mountains especially when there are curves involved(see the very last map). The real tunnel path would be jagged which isn't very realistic, however I allow myself a little creative license when drawing out these paths because they cannot be seen in game in any case. Otherwise if you want to be precise the quickest way to add them is to literally demolish everything on the surface(goes without saying I think - but do not use the obliterate city option!) and then take another snapshot of the data view as shown above. You might need to run the game clock for a bit before the game registers that all the networks above ground have been demolished. And then follow all the steps below to create a system wide background dataview subway image.  

The next question becomes do you just want to create a map of one city or the entire region? If you plan on making a map of multiple cities it's best to get the dataviews images for each and combine them into one image right away. Keep in mind that you'll have to resize the dataview map depending on the city size before combining them into one.

Here is a combined map for my entire region, this includes both road & rail networks. This was a map I made years ago before I rebuilt the entire highway system.


Just having a dataview map of your region like this alone is very helpful(and pretty cool!) in and of itself. It made me realize certain flaws/shortcomings, like how I needed to incorporate more smoother curves for networks and that I should add more FAR angles as well. 

Next comes the most time consuming part, the actual map making and for this I'd recommend some better software. I personally use Inkscape as it was recommended to me years ago but the program has quite the learning curve. However any image editing program that will allow you to have seperate layers should work just as well.

Once you found the the right software to use now you can begin drawing out all the transportation network paths on top of the dataview screen shot. Unfortunately there is no quick way to go about this, you have to draw out a line which follows each and every single road on the map. Using 'fill' won't because your diagonal networks will end up being jagged lines. Not to mention the red spots on the network for the congested areas will stop the fill in its tracks.

It's best to work on each network individually - separate files for the shoreline, streets, roads, avenues, highways, railways, and any other networks you may want to incorporate into the map such as pedestrian paths, rail spurs, highway ramps(the most time consuming of the lines to draw for me ), hydro corridors, city boarders, abandon networks, etc. all of which I like to make use of. 


This is what it looks like after removing the dataview image layer and combining several of the transit networks together. Do not combine any of the networks like this or remove the underlying dataview image until you've completed covering each individual type of network (streets/roads/etc) with lines. It's just an idea of what it looks like together without the dataview.


 
Updated image after coloring and sizing out the networks for Roads, Highways & Rail to the proper sizes and combining them together. You can easily add a border to all lines drawn in inkscape, this creates the red outline outside of the yellow filled zone for the roads seen below. Lines can also be dashed, as for the railways. And you can adjust the level of each individual line so as to control which one passes over the other for making under and overpasses on the map. 

Going back to before you start combining the lines  > Once you've completed the bare lines for each network then you can widen those lines and choose whatever color template you want for each network.

I follow Map Art's colors as that's what I'm used to;

Here's an overlay of several completed networks(Shoreline, Streets, Roads, Rail, Highways) on top of the dataview for a large city tile. You can see I've already started to fill in the zoning type in the center. That comes after I've completed the and combined the transportation networks and is generally easier to do because you can use the fill tool for it.  


Here's the template I use for zones and for other items that I include in my maps: 

Once you have all the networks in place and you've filled out the spots in between based on the type of land use you can add these other items. After creating a symbol in inkscape you can paste a copy of it anywhere. Keep in mind you can use whatever symbols you like and you can include whatever types of buildings, it can be more or less inclusive that what I use above.

And by all means you can copy my choices as well - imitation is the most sincere form of flattery afterall 

The last step in the map making process for me is naming. Quite simple and straightforward in most image editing programs. It's a good idea to use different font sizes and colors for different uses. Black typically for roads, blue for bodies of water and so on. (I high recommend being creative, no one likes plain names ) 

After you've completed naming and itemizing all that you want you'll need to export the image out of inkscape at a high resolution. However the image size may exceed to storage allowances for many online sharing sites, which is why I had to upload some of my maps in a compressed format(jpg). Some of the sharpness is lost as a result as you can see in the largest map below verse the others. 


End result examples;
Small city map


Medium city map


Large city map


Multi city map (7x8km)


If there's any question or confusion about any step in the process feel free to ask me. 

[RobertLM78 1,598]

Frickin' awesome....  thank you for posting this.  

I've been on some non-SC4 stuff the past couple weeks, but when I get back on it I'll have to try this out - I'm already a bit familiar with Inkscape and even more with GIMP, too...... 

[Huggy-Bear 36]

This is amazing. Really not sure if I can do it, but I'm going to try.

[ByeByeBayou 1,939]

So I used this tutorial as a guideline to create my own map. Instead of Inkscape, I used Illustrator. Also, I wanted to focus on highlighting the cities mass transit and neighborhood connections rather than the highway and road system.

 

In order to make this, I followed the tutorial instructions but tweaked it a bit. I used the traffic congestion maps and traced over each map.

The challenging part is it can be difficult to trace if you have a hilly or mountainous terrain like mine. The white traffic line can start blend in with the background and difficult to see.

Anyrate, thanks again for this tutorial forum @Takingyouthere!!! It's a very clever idea. Hopefully, we see more people trying it and posting the results.

[RobertLM78 1,598]

So thought I'd try this out finally with the Shakako region:

 

[RobertLM78 1,598]

So here is a map of just the main city.