Pretoria Metropolitan Area

Great entry , very well planned . 

Amazing industry and great mosaics. I see you are using Bipin's concrete supports for elevated roads/highways.

A very convincingly layed-out industry ! (and de-gridded, too !) Great mosaics ! I like the way the NAM snakes through it (and the parkings !)

The depth and detail here is outstanding, and coupled with great city building, that is a match made in heaven! Great work takemethere!  

I very much like the "regional" approach you're taking. 

This is something I'm trying to implement in my region -- making cities more purpose-dedicated and less the "shotgun" approach.

The indisputable master of the networks... just WOW

Another masterfully crafted industrial area! There's some great use of fillers here (are those some custom IRM-compatible parking ones that I see?), and your road/rail networks are nice and cohesive, given how busy this area is!

There's some nice variety in industry. Interesting how #8 chose to build their shiny new lab in the middle of some rather undesirable looking industries - for classified research it sure does feel like they didn't quite get the inconspicuous agenda...

Love your new format. The little bits and blobs are making these entries very engaging. Keep it up!

Love how it ties into the region as a whole. Cool pics!

@raynev1 Thanks mate!

@Ln X Thanks and yes those supports/concrete embankments by Bipin sure look great don't they. He's working on a updated version of them too. Though I had to make a custom lot for almost every instance I use them but that's largely because the scenery around each one of them is different eg. an empty space, a rail line, a parking lot etc.

@tariely Yeah the NAM sure does does wonders, I hope your able to make good use of it in the near future.

@michae95l I try my best to mix both the visual appealing aspects and the city/region building approach of the game together so thanks very much for the regards!

@Dreadnought Glad you like that aspect of it. I think the 'shotgun' approach you employ is good for generating ideas and developing your own style to city building. If functionality is important to you, as oppose to stickily trying to make visually appealing cities, I think you should try working on a medium or even a large city tile next before taking it to the regional level. It might be difficult to integrate many small size cities into a region that will function cohesively for example traffic trends to not want to travel more then one tile over and small cities next to each other can result in an endless loop of traffic. It's also more difficult to plan out and coordinate your highway, rail, subway, electrical, etc networks if there crossing over many boarders between small towns as oppose to a few large or medium tiles.

@Kim Sunwoo and there's plenty more visuals of winding and crossing of networks to come.

@kingofsimcity TY and yup thats exactly what they are. I had to make several different custom parking and filler lots to get the effect(s) I was looking for here. Oh man I have so many modular parking lots already and you just went and gave us a bunch of more great options to play with, thanks a lot! And hah! When you put it that way they do seem to be a little out of place don't they. Maybe they figured no one would think they could possibly be doing anything all that important inside there being located next to an incinerator?

@gviper Thanks!   

I've came back to play simcity4 again, after a looong pause, lost lots of CDK3 props and what not... hoping to get back with something to show - finding a good region to start.

This is a masterpiece, your 9th symphony( not that I follow your work, but I will try to keep up now)!!!! Love this!!
Tell me, that intertwined avenue to road piece, what is that?

Great work!

Man that's a nice industrial sector ya got going.

Although one thing did bother me. That Kaolin plant in pic 21 seems a bit small for a Kaolin plant. Most of the ones I am fimiliar with are huge refinery type complexes such as the one in Sandersville,GA

 

 

Just wow !!! amazing !

Absolutely fantastic update! The images are superb and the level of detail is impressive. The final mosaic is just wow!

Can I ask where the Golden Dragon parcel BAT is from though? 

@Fatjuice Thank you very much for the compliment. Industry was not really something I spent too much time on until recently, aside from power plants. I was inspired by some of the work shown in CJ entries last year by Ln X, Belfastsocrates and others. So I spent the last two weeks rebuilding this industrial area by downloading new BAT's, re-loting them and new modular parking and filler lots, realigning the road and rail networks where needed, picking and choosing what buildings to place where(the fun part!) and adding little touches with fillers & mmp's. I'm glad all that effort shows through

I found the piece you mentioned on a Japanese simcity4 site, here's the specific link for it;
http://www.bripizza.net/sc4/1107overcrossroad/1107overcrossroad.html
There's several other useful BAT's on that site as well, check it out;
http://www.bripizza.net/sc4/transport.html

Good luck with your new region btw, I'll definitely check it out if you post it up.
 

@DavidDHetzel Thanks for the input. Any advice on how to improve thing and make them more realistic is always appreciated. I'm not to familiar with the Kaolin industry, so I did a quick goggle search on it and came across something that looked like that building in one of the first images. Guess I should take more time checking things


@v701 Glad you like it


@Belfastsocrates Thanks for the regards! That last mosaic is my own favorite as well, love making the railway wind it's way through the town.

And no problem at all, I'd be glad to help. Turns out the Golden Dragon Industrial Center is labeled by its initials on the exchange, makes it harder to find then the others;

 

@takemethere That could be an older Kaolin building in fairness.

Wow, what detail in such a small space !  Great variety of industries and rail and road very well integrated. Marvelous entry, well done !

Before I bomb you with questions I must say that you whole region is something which is rarely seen on forums. I appreciate a lot good looking and funcional industrial zone. I also have IRM but I need really big Industrial zones to sattisfy job demand, and than approximately 70-80 % of my city is industrial which i dont like. 
Anyway, great work !  

And now i wanna ask are those some kind of fillers or it is a terrain mod? how is that grass so good looking? 
and i like those trees. if you could tell me which are those mods i would be grateful

These are some serious looking industrial areas!

@DavidDHetzel Yeah it did look pretty old. I guess you can say it's an old industry that's a heritage structure so it hasn't been demolished.

@kschmidt Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
 

 @TekindusT What can I say, I'm a hardcore industrialist

@gen. Falcon Thanks mate. Yeah you need a lot of industry to satisfy job demand for a large city in comparison to commercial. Before I went to work on the industry in this city there used to be about 25,000 industrial jobs mostly uneditted dense maxis industry with few custom lots. That along with another 25,000 commercial gave me a total of 50,000 jobs which was enough to keep the city properly functioning with a population of about 90,000. After I improved the industrial area the number of total jobs dropped to about 40,000(13,000 industrial & 27,000 commercial). In the same time the population grew to about 100,000. That's when major abandonment started to happen and the city started to die. Turns out I forgot to connect one of the highways to the next city over after rebuilding it and the city came back to life. Now almost 20,000 people take that highway out of town while before it was lightly used by maybe 3000 sims. If you don't have the jobs then you really have to build up the transportation network/connection, of which my cities have many, to get sims to where the need to be. 

I use the Columbus terrain mod for the base textures which can be found on the LEX here;
https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=170
You have to be registered with the site to download it if your not already, but it's easy to do.

That was one of the first custom terrain mods to come out and even after experimenting with numerous other newer terrain mods that have since been released it's still the one for me. If your into creating natural scenes there are other ones that I would recommend over it as they have a more natural tone of green(as in less bright) and with more detailed textures(only really noticeable in closer zoom levels) such as the Sudden Valley Terrain Mod or the Berner Oberland mod which are all the rage these days. But for someone like me who's more into creating urban scenes, especially transportation networks(I work in that industry), the Columbus mod creates a greater degree of contrast that makes the rail and roadways stand out more while the sudden valley terrain mod mutes them. I'll show exactly what I mean when I cover "The Transfer" in a future entry.

For the grass I'm guess your referring to the parts where I've applied mmp's - "mayor mode ploppables". I used multiple mmp's from different files to add those textures but the one that I probably use the most and which is the most comprehensive of them all is Chris Adams RRP Pasture Flora. It can also be found on the LEX here; https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1886

As for the trees, oh man there are so many I use from about two dozen different mods. Since this is an industrial area there's a lot less of them in the scenes I'm guess your referring to the ones which replace the standard maxis trees the file for which can be found below.

Hope that helps! If that's what you we looking for if not then you might have to be more specific and point out the picture/building number and what your looking for in it.

That was pretty much comprehensive reply for my questions . There are few who answer extensively like this. Thank you very much  .

I supposed it was Columbus. I installed it recently. Before this i used meadowshire but i think columbus is better. I also heard for berner oberland when terrain grass NAM apeared and i wanted to try that terrain mod with TGN but couldnt find it on SCD4. Says the file is moved or removed. I tried TGN with appalachian and pyrinean but i dont like it. Its not really for city building but for some mountain town and villages. 

And one more thing which i forgot to ask in earlier reply. I see you are using IRM for industrial. Do you use CAMpatible version of IRM ( i saw it recently on stex) or just regular non campatible IRM ? 
Thank you again, you are awesome. keep doing great job  

Also, where'd you get the smokestack next to Acme Boiler and the billboard in the mosaic?

Dat's sum epic!

@MilitantRadical Thanks mate!
 

@gen. Falcon Not a problem! I liked to help out and interact with other members, especially ones that follow my CJ closely and take an interest in what is shown in them. 

Yeah I'm not sure why, but it seems that the berner oberland file was removed from the LEX exchange. I tested that terrain as well but I stuck with Columbus for the reasons mention before. I did keep one part of it - I changed the mountain textures to the one that came from oberland. The one I was using before was not from columbus but a sandstone type. Though I'm stating to not like the oberland one as much as I did at first. While the textures alone looks phenomenal, if your into using mmp's it's not as easy to blend them in with it. Hmm, not sure if I deleted it I probably did but it might still be in the recycling bin. If you'd like I could send it to you if I can find it in there.

As for the IRM I just use the regular version and not the campatible one. I can't recall what it was but there was some kind of drawback that deterred me from using it when it first became available. Anyhow, thanks again for the regards!
 

@DavidDHetzel I'm glad you asked about that stack - since that's one of my custom creations
I released it as part of a smoke set I made over a decade ago!(now I feel a little old.... )
Anyways, it's available here;

I've been planning on release an update version of some of them in the future using far better textures. Just haven't gotten around to completing that little project, a bit too bogged down with other things at the moment.

As for the billboards... yup you guess it - they're the same ones you asked about and I couldn't figure where I got them from before. Maybe someone will know if you post it in the Can't Find It? - Ask Here! thread. Also the base on these aredifferent because I just replaced it with my own custom made prop;

Spoiler

 

Where do you find the lafarge cement and mondi paper?