JaWood

So CAPS LOD for the main model, and lower case lod for the diffuse map. That's inconsistent. Seems like an accidental oversight in the coding to me.

That is good to know. I bought a brand new machine right before Cities: Skylines came out so I've already been running on all high settings, but I would have never guessed that would have been a problem if I was running on lower settings.

Texturing is progressing nicely. Using a 512 x 1024 diffuse map.

I'm sitting at about 2000 right now. The roofs aren't causing trouble at all, really. The tanks on the side and the vacuum station in the corner are taking the bulk of the poly count, but for now I'll take 2000.

This is my first attempt at a building mod for Cities: Skylines. A lot of trial and error, experimentation, and scrapping and restarting have led me to feeling confident enough to move forward on this first attempt. It's not perfect, it's not a masterpiece, heck it's not even textured yet. But I have succeeded in proof of concept by loading it in the game, getting it to grow, and seeing people commute and work at it. It will be a fun little car wash lot when it's all done. But right now, it's time for bed.

The frustrating thing is Sketchup (what I like to use for modeling) merges and welds geometry together by default. I can get around it by creating portions separately out in open space, grouping the faces together, then bring all the groups together to assemble the full model. A little more time consuming, but way fewer polygons.

Yes, I agree there are some frightening looking buildings from CO in this game, and I can't wait to mix in enough modded buildings so they won't pop up nearly as much. If CO buildings appear to be affected, I wonder if it's not an intentional feature. Maybe they're trying to create a different variety every time you load the game. It seems like a strange way to go about it, though, if it's true. SC4 had a better approach using "NY" "Chicago" and "Houston" styles with the ability to build all styles at once or let the game cluster styles together as you zoned new neighborhoods, creating this cool, sort of dappled appearance to your city layout. I would usually still go with "build all styles at once".

Well if I can get away with intersecting geometry, then I will. I haven't tried importing it both ways yet. I guess I ought to.

Well, I've been modeling my first building for C:SL and here are some of the things I've been noticing as I've been going along. The building I'm creating is a small car wash facility on a 3x3 lot called the Super Suds. I'm going for a kind of stylized look with fun shapes and colors. Remember these downloadable buildings from Maxis for SC4 back in the day? http://www.wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Sobchak_Lanes_%28DLC%29 http://www.wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Lucky%27s_Hang_Ten Shorty Burger (Can't find a link to it.) I'm kind of going for a fun stylized, kind of retro feel while using those lots as inspiration. So my building has a car wash tunnel, the a central office attached to the side, a vacuuming area, storage tanks on the side of the tunnel holding soap/wax (more for a fun visual appeal than for realism), and a big tall stylized neon sign next to the street. There's swooping arced roofs with v-shaped posts supporting some of them where they overhang the building, and curbing to show how traffic is to flow through the lot. Sorry I don't have pictures. I'm not ready to show it off and I'm away from my main computer anyways. Now here's the thing. I'm almost, but still not quite done with the modeling portion of this building. My poly count is probably 2000-2500 triangles at the moment. I am aware of Paradox Forum's suggestion to stay at or below 1000, but I just can't seem to get anywhere near that level. I've made sure the arched roofs are low poly, and have reduced their number of faces a couple times during modeling. I've kept all pole, pipe and post diameters at 6 sides or less. Some modeled details are one dimensional only. The building doesn't have a bottom since you won't see it. In desperation, I loaded the Asset Editor and started studying the in-game buildings that are roughly the same size as my car wash. I don't have a way to gather their exact poly count, but I can't believe most of them are holding to the 1000 or less rule. There's just no way! Some simple houses have fully modeled railings going around the building with 3D rails and rungs, fully modeled rain gutters, fully modeled window frames, some with 3D trim and inset window jambs, some have arced features, and the list goes on. They're not any less detailed than what I'm modeling, that's for sure. And here's the other thing. I read somewhere that our models need to be one continuous connected shell with no intersecting faces. So whenever I have something like a vent coming out of the roof, I cut a hole in the roof where the vent meets and connect the edges together. This majorly breaks up the triangle count for the roof, or wherever else I weld stuff together like that, but It's what I read to do and it's supposedly the correct way to model for S:CL. If I could model the building in sections and group the sections only to themselves, like make each roof section their own groups, the building sections their own groups, the overhang supports their own groups, etc, and they don't weld to each other, then The poly count would be waaaay lower. I don't know what to do other than ignore the 1000 triangle rule and just keep going while still trying to be as conservative as possible while still maintaining a descent amount of detail.

No, I'm planning on only using one jpg file for the diffuse map, with all the custom textures needed laid out on it, like brick, shingles, metal, doors, windows, etc. Then as I texture in Sketchup, I use the paint bucket tool to paint every textured surface, then rotate zoom and stretch with the texture positioning tool until the portion of the diffuse map I want to use is aligned with the appropriate faces. The only downsides I see to this is being limited to 1024 resolution for the whole map, and not being able to tile/repeat textures. Then, once I export into Blender, if I want additional layers like a normal map, alpha map, illumination map etc. I can load the original diffuse map into Photoshop and use it as a guide to create the other layers, and save them with their appropriate "_(letter)" suffix. I have found there is no need to Unwrap my Sketchup model once in Blender. If you position everything where you want it in Sketchup, then export the 3DS file, all the positioning should be retained when opened in Blender. UV Unwrapping will just screw everything up and move all your UV polygons to wrong places, then you'd have to reposition all of them all over again. Just import into Blender to add additional texture layers if desired, then export to FBX.

All this stuff i still have to learn about and experiment with. I'll be using Sketchup Pro for both modeling and texturing, at least initially. The nice thing about texturing in Sketchup is I can easily take the diffuse map and rotate it, scale it, zoom it, position it, and stretch it to fit the geometry faces exactly how I want it to. Plain white window frames can be textured with a tiny 5px by 5px square on the UV map by zooming way in to the square in Sketchup, just like it was mentioned above. I'll be doing "ambient occlusion baking" manually in Photoshop with the dodge and burn tool or with the drop shadow effect, on a custom tailored diffuse map to simulate dirt and grime, as well as making the base of buildings darker than the top of buildings. If done right, all UV mapping can be done before even loading into Blender or 3DS Max. Maybe later down the road I can start to learn how to do this stuff in Blender, but for now I feel confident with Sketchup and Photoshop. Sketchup also tells me how many triangles are in the model when I export to .3DS format, so I can keep tabs on those numbers as I go.

The river I recently made starts and ends on virtually the same height level. Here's what I did for the map I made and recently uploaded (Mountain Valley). At the head of the river, I raised the valley floor up just a bit to create a small mound with the highest spot right on the edge of the map. At the foot of the river at the other edge, I lowered the ground level a bit. Then I manually dug a narrow trench roughly equal in width to its depth, stretching from one end of the map to the other, snaking and twisting around as I went, again making sure that the beginning of the trench was a bit higher than average and the end was a bit lower than average. I used the level tool to dig the trench to ensure the bottom level was consistent. I also made sure sea level was lower than the bottom of the trench (my map had no sea or coastline so I pushed sea level as low as it would let me.) Then I created a water spawn at the head of the trench, adding a steep back wall of earth to ensure none of the water accidentally spilled backwards over the edge of the map. You don't see this part when the map is loaded because of the mist at the map's edge. I made the spawn's diameter at small as possible (flow), and stretched it's height pretty high, like skyscraper height (supply amount). After several minutes of waiting, the water reached about half way along the entire trench length until the flow stagnated and the progression stopped. I added a second water spawn up river, same size and height, where the water was slow and low but still moving a bit. This added extra oomph to the flow again and got things moving all the way to the trench's end. EDIT: Oh one more thing. Monitor the trench as it fills up. Occasionally I would find a small bottle neck where the trench bottom wasn't dug out all the way, or the trench was dug too narrow, and the water would refuse to crest over the point. I'd grab the leveling tool, push the bottle neck open, and the flow would usually resume no problem. It reminds me a lot of playing in the sandbox as a kid, digging trenches and putting water through them. Same kind of problem solving skills are required. The troubleshooting mentioned above was for a very long but very narrow river. Larger wider rivers will need higher flowing spawns and probably won't give you as many problems.

"_d" was the issue. I get it now, and I was finally able to get a textured model to show up in the Asset Editor. Yes, I am under the impression that all textures used on the model must be included in one single UV diffuse map as a .jpg or .png in pixel multiples of 2 up to 2048x2048. That will be frustrating on models where high detail is desired, but doable with some clever Photoshop aligning, rotating and nesting. I think I'm up to the challenge. I think I'm done with testing for now. On to some real modeling! Edit: The other thing I notice is when I exported from Sketchup into Blender, the model shrunk by 1/2. I exported as a .3DS file, made sure to set the units during export as meters, but it still came in half size in Blender. Scaling by 200% was not hard to do once in Blender though, and then exporting to a .FBX from there, so if it continues to do that to me in the future I know how to handle it.

Well, I though I had figured it out using Blender, but I guess not. Frankly, the program is way over my head and I can't figure out how to navigate it worth beans. I was able to export a simple house shaped model as a .3DS file from Sketchup into Blender (with textures already applied) I perform a UV Unwrap, which totally screws up the alignment of the textures I already applied in Sketchup, but oh well, this is just a test and I want to make sure I'm following the steps exactly. Then I export it as a .FBX from Blender into the Colossal Order "Import" folder. I followed the instructions in the video above, making sure the correct buttons were checked upon export, etc, and I place the .JPG file used for texturing in the "Import" folder as well. But when I open the model in the asset editor, all I get is a flat grey model with no textures. What am I doing wrong? I don't get it. UPDATE: I tried again. To eliminate Sketchup being the problem, I started over starting with Blender. I created a simple cube. I placed a 512X512 brick textured JPG in to the "Import" folder, then attached it to my Blender cube using the UV Unwrap tools. I exported the .FBX file just as the video describes to into the "import folder". Once again, inside the Asset Editor I get a model, but no textures on the model. Still stumped.