20. How to: Blunder up a Creek Area: Mt. Hood / Mt. St. Helens boundary Tile: Cyspus Dam Welcome back folks! Thanks again for all your comments and pageviews (~2300!!!) last week. I hope when this week's BTT comes out last week's entry cracks back into the Top Ten... Speaking of last week, we're going to continue in that same mode of work by giving you a step by step view of how I construct some of my flora in the Ring of Fire. (warning: long update ahead). Also, I'm skipping including an update on punching a highway across uneven terrain because its really not that impressive. If you really, really want to see it you can find it over on simpeg. But on to this week's update! IMO, the very first consideration to make in city planning in SC4 (and one of the first IRL) is 'Where is the Water?' Usually when i play a tile, my order of operations is a-sketch out the major waterways (if ploppable) or roughly modify coastlines (if game), b- sketch the transit. c-zone. d-flush out the transit and zoning as the tile grows, and finally e-flora it out. Because i wanted to do a flora tutorial i skipped the water until now, so let's get started. (Also, always leave the grid on when doing flora, and because it's really needed this time: CLICKY FOR FULL!!!) 1. I placed the waterfalls and major rapids first (jeronij water effects). We have a waterfall on the left and two rapid streams on the right. I went overkill on the streams because later we will be filling in around it with trees. So much so that the only that white 'spray' from the rapids will show, making detailing the streambed pointless. 2. Sketching out the creek using the new RFR (think i got that right) ploppable water pack that you may have seen Framly using. It must be placed highly accurately click by click; that makes it unsuitable for using over a whole large tile. After the lower end of it we will transition to something else. Just this little bit took me something like 45 minutes. (The water effects didn't show up in this pic thanks to some oddities with IRfanview, framerate, and graphic stuff). 3. A closeup of the creeks' junction. There are some very nice textural possibilities with the set. Clearly it's best used on a small scale for highly detailed specific scenes. 4. Ah, the effects show up again. We will place another rapids to transition out of the RFR water and into jeronij's transparent ploppable water. 5. And we will quickly trace out a rough of the river's path through the rest of the tile. Ah jeronij's water, my old friend; its been too long. 6. I like to build a 'painters pallet' of things i will use somewhere near my work area, just for a visible reference so i'm not relying on my memory (that's what you see in the left foreground). Next we start by plopping the big stuff. In this case murimk's bedrock stuff (rough and grey cycles). Yes it looks really wierd now, like there's a disconnect in the depth between the plopped stuff and the terrain, but before we're done the terrain won't be visible anymore. 7. Next we fill in with nbvc's rock clusters. We don't drag any of these, they are deliberately placed. 8. Next we use Heblem's sand (specifically the grey) to make the sandy base of our streambed. This too is placed click by click. This is very, very important. If the sand is drug through and not clicked the game won't think we have room to plop stuff later. You'll also notice that using the RFR water on an uneven terrain, like i did here, shows all kind of graphical oddities. We can dress all those up so it's fine, but from now on we should stick to only using it on fairly flat ground and probably not in the bottom of a draw like gorge like this. 9. Back at the creek junction I placed some PEG ppond boulders. They don't quite blend right visually but this was an experiment to see what works good with the new water, so now we know for next time. All the little green spots visible through the gravel don't really matter, they will all be covered later. 10. Zooming out. For this update we're going to focus on the area between the two largest forks. 11. We go back to Heblem's pack and use the light dirt to lightly fill the edge of what will be the surrounding forest. 12. Next we add in murimk's large and medium rocks. 13. Before we finish up to the creek we'll fill in just a bit of the forest to see how we want to do the edge between the rockbed and the flora. Again starting with the big stuff then going progressively smaller, we bust out C.P.'s temperate rainforest trees. 14. Since this isn't quite the temperate jungle that those trees come from we'll restrict our use of those to the area nearest the creekbed's and switch to Western Red Cedar behind them. What I filled in here was thicker than what i should have probably. One mistake people sometimes make when putting waterways in mountainous areas is that the errosive effects in the high country are monstrous, and this means that in places where the mountains see a lot of rain the river's have rock riverbeds several times the size of the river. The errosive effects also create a narrow 'zone' where winter and spring flooding wash out larger trees, and only smaller deciduous trees, bushes, and grasses have time to grow in the time between floods. An extreme example of this is the upper Nisqually river on Mt. Rainier (but it's the only example i have handy) Of course little tiny streams don't experience this, nor do one's in drier areas: 15. River's that aren't that ridiculously steep have smaller younger trees where the edges of that rock are in the above picture. To mirror that we're going to grab the Grand Fir - Summer from Giraffe's winter fir pack to simulate the younger, smaller trees, and some smaller pines from....im not sure where. 16. We also add in some of C.P.'s lodgepolie pine (I went overboard again with those, ideally there should be fewer). And to vary the age of the trees near the stream we use giraffe's conifers and even a couple of the droopy looking cedars from Simfox's set. When erosion washes out conifer's in the Pacific NW, deciduous trees frequently replace them for a time because they grow quicker. To mirror that we will use Giraffe's norwegian maples, which are quickly becoming one of my new favorites. Because I accidentally used evergreens here instead of seasonal I had to come back and redo this section later anyways. 17. We more on to the small stuff. I really should have used more grass in here, but I'm currently in love with the VIP seasonal ferns and giraffe's seasonal bushes, so I used them. By this time the space is getting pretty full and once the ferns are down it's hard to get anything else to plop. 18. Next comes the afore mention bushes. We also add some of nbvc's darker stones to give a little color variation to the creekbed. 19. Now we backfill every scrap of useable space in the creekbed with nbvc's lighter grey rocks. This really adds a new dimension of depth and detail to the creekbed. Before these rocks we would have been using the ppond gravel, stones, and whatnot. You can see the contrast of using these new stones between the left bank and the right bank where there isn't any yet. 20. What our forested edge looks like in fall. At this point I still haven't filled that forest in with doug first yet. 21. Rolling the clock ahead to spring. 22. Zooming out, we see what our finished slice (although it was redone later) looks like vs. the other parts still in construction. All in all a good start. 23. ...But there's still so much to do. Well that's all for today. I hope you enjoyed seeing how I approach some aspects of my flora. I also hope your eyeballs made it to the end of this entry without getting tired from the length. Next time we will work on that creek with the waterfall on it and redo those maples so that they're seasonal. As always comments are greatly appreciated, and feel free to rate / +1 if you wish to. Happy gaming folks. @soer_II, iowndiscti, wustmann, mrtnrln: Thank you all very much for your comments! @NMUSpidey: Thank you, sir. Yeah the same approach works with waterfalls, but there usually only using 1 tile height is sufficient. The waterfall kit from simpeg really helps out with doing that too. @emperordaniel: Thanks for the link. I didn't even know heblem had done a set like that, and had forgotten that espanol site existed, thanks for sharing. @Gugu3: Well that's what the 'previous' button is for, and I hope I can show it off soon. @Yoshiisland: I hope that tool works good for you. I forgot to add that to turn it off: ctrl->x, then type: terrainquery off @huntingfire: Thanks for the reminder. I seldom get a chance to browse the forum section of the website, I'll have to go take a look.