Koesj

Have been messing around with quays, the overpass network and some downtown freeways to create this WIP urban interchange:

Check out what I'm working on right now at the end of this thread; my initial post continues below... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hiya people! I've decided to bite the bullet and (re-start) my modeling efforts for Cities: Skylines. My last effort kinda faltered at not knowing how to have a decent enough workflow going, and real-life commitments being in the way. Still, as a pretty long-time SketchUp modeler, I really felt like I should pick up this hobby of mine again and apply it in-game. As you might be able to discern from the picture at the right, I quit in exasperation at the point where I had just figured out object instancing in 3ds Max (my intermediate software solution) and some kind of UV-mapping workflow Fixing up normals, efficiently doing multiple texture maps, and lods were still out of my grasp though. However, after putting a number of decent-sized (and seemingly popular) interchanges on my C:S workshop page (http://steamcommunity.com/id/koesj/myworkshopfiles/?appid=255710) I decided to really delve into getting a nice building done. And immediately bit off more than I can chew, because I wanted to do this one: 1000 de la Gauchetière in Montreal. Yeah. As a first building? Yikes! However, I came prepared with a ton of free time, and an urge to prove myself in this, so let me sum up the 10-day long process of trying to get this thing done with pictures and some descriptions I luuuurve Sketchup, too bad that it generally produces nasty models for games: By being really disciplined about your modeling, stuff can definitely get done right, though: Through instances, for... instance: So I started UV-ing: And filling up my texture atlas: Then After Dark came out, deadline missed , and my model still had some faults: I feel like I'm pretty much done with the geometry though, and a quick diffuse for a post-modern building like this one isn't that difficult either: Never mind specular and illumination, those pretty much build themselves. Still, I feel like I've still got some nasty challenges ahead of me. Somehow my instantiation messes up normal maps (even after resetting normals post-collapse in Max), and properly baking stuff into textures kinda eludes me at the moment - with my lod showing stupid mistakes all round. Also, my texture atlas is an inefficient mess, with lots of empty space and stupidly rotated elements (before I 'got' what normal maps are for). But... My first building! It's not yet done, but it could have been so much worse Footprint: 10x10 Height: 206m (I think the extra meter is either something going wrong with my crown, or at the building's base) Tris: 4575 Texture maps: 1024x1024 - 10cm surface detail resolution throughout the model. And yeah I'm kinda regretting this right now! To continue the discussion we were having in your thread, AJ3D... Yeah I'd already figured the baking into the diffuse channel out myself Re: SketchUp. To be fair, I've kept ngon creation to such a bare minimum that it has only affected me once throughout the entire building. I look out for tri interpolition throughout my modeling workflow by importing into Max and checking the polys there. And honestly, SketchUp is so intuitive to me (in years of mucking about) that I'd rather stick with it until I've fully figured the texturing side of Max out. Only afterwards comes the point at which I'd consider upping my modeling game by learning to do it in another program, since right now it's way ahead of all the rest of my skills. 3ds Max is of course the place where I already do my UV-ing mind you. Let me check up on the normal map situation because I'm tearing my hair out over it!

I've transferred the asset, there's still hope haha!

@Leeijo is picking this one up I think

What does the geometry look like before you apply the UVW Unwrap modifier? Just straight op editable poly > polygon selection > edit triangulation. Or back your file up and go and mess with vertext selection > connect on a fresh version to figure out how your file is being read by Max. I myself started out with some Sketchup models and zero Max skills, and ended up completely doing my stuff in Max since the import process creates all kinds of problems (duplicate vertices and polys, ngons, mirrored and inverted faces, etc.)

Thanks for the support people! I've been iterating on my layout and materials and I've come up with a stucco, wood paneling, and stone 7-unit complex. Still got tons of stuff to do:

I've been sitting at home with a nasty ear infection so I guess I've got a great excuse to mess around with a new asset idea for a bit... Dingbats! A couple of streamers have been showing off their fantastic Sunbelt cities, but I feel like there's a dearth of good low-rise apartment buildings available on the workshop. This should probably be a pack, and going off of some info I found floating around there's at least six or so basic types that IMO should be added to the game as soon as possible: Regrettably I haven't used my assetbuilding skills at all for the last one and a half years, so it's been slow going since yesterday, but I've been prototyping some designs and zeroed in on one I like: a hipped-roof, two story, not very boxy box Let's wait and see what comes of this. I don't particularly care for the ornamental googie elements on the IRL designs, but this kind of bottom-tier high residential asset is exactly what C:S needs right now.

Messing around with some visual mods as well as @Ronyx69's ploppable Grass: e: here's a detail shot

@Ronyx69 T 3 2 L is missing its LOD and IIRC there's another one floating around that's incomplete: e: I'd do unspeakable thing for these highways to have a ground mode btw

Slowly working my way towards a city that makes full use of the Expressways @Ronyx69 provided us with. No pillars on this monster interchange up until now:

That'd be really cool. Right now I'm doing a project that can only be labelled as megalomaniacal and it'd really help if there were some handy long pillars around:

@Ronyx69 maybe I’m looking at the wrong ones but it seems your expressway pillars are too short to provide for a full fourth-level, 24m height

Your expressways look fantastic.

Messing around with custom roads. I probably won't ever release them since @Ronyx69 is working on much better stuff.

@Ronyx69 That's fantastic! I've been messing around a bit more with my 4m/8m wide highway segments from the beta days and these smaller scale roads works pretty well IMO. The nicest thing about them is being able to have really shallow merges. I'd love not having to manually detail all my untextured work like in the picture below:

Sketchfab! Sketchfab!! Sketchfab!! Sketchfab!!!! What is it? It's a way for us assetbuilders to showcase our work! It's got Steam integration: the first pic, done via Add / Edit Images & Videos - enter a Sketchfab URL. If enough people are willing to add this functionality to their assets' Workshop pages, we can easily preview stuff without having to download first and potentially getting a sad face afterwards. Getting alpha maps to properly work with your assets requires some horsing around; I've already forgotten how I managed with 2Pru, I'll post about the best settings here in this thread when I've got the handle on it, but BOY is this already a nice way of showing off!! Here's my profile: https://sketchfab.com/koesj. Get going! Upload your work! Add me as a friend Thank you @Darf for bringing this to my attention!

There's been no crashes for me while using the -noWorkshop toggle even after the latest patch

we are the pride of the north WE ARE

4x4 is the max growable size. But we've got the ploppable RICO mod to get beyond those tiny footprints with still-functioning buildings, so the problem has been mightily reduced in size IMO.

Did you have to post it twice?

Whoa

In real life there's the ubiquitous examples along Toronto's 401 of course, but closer to home, and in place I've driven myself I might add, I'd consider the A2/A12 around Utrecht as well as the A2 around Eindhoven as prime examples of local/express setups in Europe. There's a number around Madrid as well IIRC, plus in Italy where cities like Bologna have very interesting local highways alongside the through traffic ones. Also, wikipedia has a nice list To me, a logical transition point would be either at interchanges around both ends, at a place where there's a Y-merge of two freeways who continue along the same path afterwards, or beginning from a very heavily traveled junction which is very close to the next one (necessitating stuff like braided ramps). Anyway, I had a ton of L/E setups going on in my first true-to-life city. But, since it doesn't seem to help very much with solving in-game traffic congestion, I've just moved on to super tight braided connectors to local streets. Here's some screenshots of my older stuff which might inspire you. Good luck in your freeway building endeavors!

I wasn't talking about the stone looking nice But I'm going for a recently refurbished/possibly newly-built asset, so grime like in that second pic is out. It's plaster as well, not marble or anything; gotta figure out how to make it look good.

Well whaddaya know, it doesn't even look bad.

Speaking of attention to the normal map: I was quite irritated by my entrance because I couldn't hand-draw a nice texture, and consequently didn't work on this little project for a couple of days. Now I'm trying to do something cool by rendering normals and AO from a quite complicated neoclassical ensemble to a flat texture. It might not work out in the end - I've got the nagging feeling that I'll need to spend some tris to make it look good - but at least it's better than the horrendous solid-color stuff that I had as a placeholder before...