boldlybuilding

A little update. The Kluczynski building and the post office along with the Flamingo will be one asset (made of sub-buildings of course). The Dirksen building will be its own asset so it can be placed across a street as it is in real life or wherever.

I just can't stay away - I have to do at least one more building. Or in this case, two or three buildings. I haven't decided how exactly to split up the set, but that's not a concern right now. The buildings are part of Chicago's Federal Center. This will include the Kluczynski Federal Building, the Dirksen Courthouse/Federal Building, the Chicago Post Office/Loop Station, Federal Plaza, and the Flamingo sculpture by Alexander Calder. For the most part, it's an incredibly simplistic set of modernist buildings. Even their roofs are barren and lacking in any real detail - in fact, the tallest of them had their window-washer tracks removed at some point. The biggest details will just be the Post Office and tower lobbies using clear glass and low-detail interiors again, with the hardest part being the sculpture. My main motivation for making this, though, is an incident I remembered from 2010: I was in Chicago taking photos in Federal Plaza - a public space - of the Flamingo sculpture, when an officer or agent (Chicago Police, Homeland Security, guard, not sure) came up to me, stopped me, and questioned why I was taking photos "of the Federal Buildings," that I shouldn't do that because the FBI or people in them or whatever will come out and confiscate my camera nad question me. He then escorted me away from the plaza and left me on my way, in a rather pissed off state, I might add. I still haven't gotten over that, as I did nothing wrong and it's not illegal to photograph Federal building exteriors from public space, even though I wasn't even doing that really, and hundreds, thousands, many more, take photos around there of the buildings and sculpture and each other and themselves on their phones and cameras all the live long day. So instead of merely taking photos, I'm going to make wonderfully detailed models of these Federal buildings and stick them right up in Cities: Skylines

I keep coming back to this library to improve or add to it. I suppose partly because I see it as my biggest thing (aside from maybe the WTC), and because I'm probably not gonna be able to work on anything else again for a while after this month. I didn't like how the low-detail winter garden looked. It was too low-detail for my taste. So, I redid it and expanded it. I also didn't like how the lighting looked on the huge flat windows at the top, and wanted to further experiment with glass things. It resulted in an additional sub-building with a far more detailed Winter Garden. Aside from that area and the basic event halls, there's actually just pretty plain corridors and walls running behind these glass windows, so I didn't have to do too much there. I also fixed some colors on some stonework detailing, as well as their normals, and used the space freed up on the sculpture texture to make a better base for the street-level wall lamps. The asset has already been updated, so that should update in your game, too. You can also see the new stuff in the SketchFab preview: https://sketchfab.com/models/05c0ac39b61f403ba3693a2a8c6498b7 Anyway, here's a bunch of screenshots...

It is finished! Get it here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1361716493 Inspect it on SketchFab: https://sketchfab.com/models/05c0ac39b61f403ba3693a2a8c6498b7 The main building, walls, and roof are the primary building, which is about 30k tris. A sub-building includes the acroteria (sculptures) and winter garden interior, as well as the fancy lamps lower down and a couple other details. That's about 20,000 tris. A third sub-building is just the winter garden glass. In all it comes out to over 50,600 tris. It's definitely a lot, but then between wanting fairly sharp textures and limited texture space and the sheer amount of ornamentation the building has, I don't think a high count could be avoided while making it look good. The acroteria alone eat up tris. But those things are as big as houses, so maybe that's fine. In all it's about 376 tris per tile, taking up 136 tiles. To make myself feel better, I looked at the tris count of that opera house on the Workshop. In all that's over 130k tris. In any case, it's all there. The acroteria with their owls and variations, the shield and leaf designs along the roof line, the catwalks, ornamental railings, those decorative poles with the "spiral" tips, the stonework on the upper walls, cornstalk designs with heads at the bases, designs on the arched windows, scrollwork along the base, stonework, fancy lamps, arched doorways, west glass wall, glass roof and low-detail winter garden, right down to the dedication plaque near the main door. I also tried to light the acroteria as best I could, and the winter garden has tables in it, though I don't know if cims can use it. Here's a ton of pictures if you don't feel like going to the links right now, and because something happened with Postimage and right now no other images on this thread can be displayed:

Another quick update... It's pretty much done now, except for the roof sculptures, which are next. Also the lamps along the lower walls, which will be part of the model because I don't like the idea of making people subscribe to additional props. I also added the basic interior for the winter garden, which will stay simple and just be the backdrop for the glass roof.

I'm far too tired right now to write anything substantial, so here's a quick mini-update in two pictures: EDIT: I just realized a possible way to shave off a bunch of tris. Right now I have those brackets under the walkway/overhang, and each one is its own little model. But instead, I could have one, stretched all the way along the side, with a tiny sliver of the texture tiled with the bracket faces on it. It won't keep it under 15k, but 2-3k less tris can't be bad. I just hope it'll look good...

Hello all, it's been a while! I'm sure all of you have already seen my stuff on Facebook or directly on Steam, but for the sake of not leaving this thread dead in the water, and to post about my latest work, I wanted to post something here. So... For the last year, I've been quite busy on the Titanic project and related matters. I had a brief period to work on C:S stuff late last year, but I wasn't really feeling it at the time. For the last few weeks, however, I've had both a tiny bit of free time and the motivation to do some new things. So far, I've made the following assets in the last month: Fire Station 2 I wanted to start with something small, so I made the fire station that's down the street from me and always catches my eye when I pass by it. It's an understated building and perfect for bland American towns, but just interesting enough to look kind of nice. Workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1319185521 SketchFab: https://sketchfab.com/models/b47b36fec43b4fb19670ff39d5c12095 Saturn V Rocket After the Chirp-X update came out and then Armesto released a custom rocket while custom rocket mods were released, I decided to go and rip my old Saturn V model out of my Sagan-Tyson Center, reshuffle the textures so it's just the rocket, and publish that as a launchable rocket. Workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1329097226 SketchFab: https://sketchfab.com/models/88f68de3b3e9435582560e02a52b325d Prentice Women's Hospital After the first couple latest assets, I decided to dip into something bigger. I've been eyeballing various buildings in Chicago for some time, and I wanted to make the Lurie Children's Hospital, a new skyscraper of a hospital built to replace Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago, where I was treated for leukemia as a child. However, the Lurie Hospital is adjacent to and sort of built to compliment the Prentice Women's Hospital, also built to replace the old Prentice hospital (which I also plan to make at some point). The new Prentice hospital was simpler, or so it seemed, so I went with that. It's hefty on tris, like all my assets (ha ha ha) and has a detailed roof. I still maintain that roofs are important to get right, or else it just looks weird. Eventually, I'll make the Lurie hospital eventually, too. Workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1331430903 SketchFab: https://sketchfab.com/models/c3c0cee257c34db1b8f51b9e81f03c1d Dari-Dip After the daunting Prentice hospital, I wanted to do another small asset. So, I made Dari-Dip, a charming little ice cream stand in my town. It's been around for over 50 years and is the only place around here that serves strawberry ice cream cones. Do you know how hard it is to find strawberry ice cream without seeds and fruit bits in it? These people have it, as well as other tasty food. In fact, you can probably almost read the full menu on the side of the building. Like Prentice, this building's planter bed is empty so you can place your own plants. Workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1341515634 SketchFab: https://sketchfab.com/models/010da5eacd0e4cd9a59fac8947192743 And that brings me to my current little project, which I wanted to start over a year ago but couldn't find the motivation to really get a start on. The... Harold Washington Library Center Built to serve as the new central library for the Chicago Public Library, the Harold Washington Library Center was completed in 1991. Opinion has been divided about its appearance, with its somewhat bland, grey interiors subject to criticism. However, it's still, in my opinion, a nice building with some interesting features. I've already a good way into the process. In fact, it's actually quite a simple building when you get into the details. Lots of repeating areas, tons of tile-able parts... This asset does promise to be a monster of tris. Nothing too horrifying, certainly (I hope) not like a few of my other assets. But I wanted to keep it at or under 15k tris, since the game now yells at you if you go over, but I simply don't believe that's possible without either using literal magic with the textures (or making features super lo-res), or stripping the detail and "resolution" from the model, none of which I'm a big fan of. So I'm just going to keep working and see where we end up. There are other questions I've yet to get into to. The entire central section of the roof is a huge skylight over a lovely winter garden: ...It remains to be determined whether I'll simply make it opaque, or utilize the rotor shader to make it see-through and put a super-low-detail model of the winter garden beneath it. I certainly would not devote any real detail to it, just plain walls and floor with small bits of the texture dedicated to it, or its own sub-building with its own tiny texture if there's no space. Considering the detail in the rest of the model, I don't see why not. At this point, what's a few hundred extra tris? There's also the biggest question, the literal crown, so to speak... The acroteria. They weren't installed for a year or two after completion of the building, but they're an important and distinguishing part of its architecture. I could just make flat planes and slap some photos on it and be done, but you know I can't be THAT plain. It needs to be done a little more justice than that. Just how much justice, I'm not yet sure. It'll need to be a nice balance of texture and tris. It'll also be a pain in the bum. We shall see... On the plus side... ...almost the entire west wall of the building is glass. That should save a good 5k tris or so. So yeah, that's where I stand at the moment. I don't know how much logner I'll have before things get busy again, and depending on how things go, they could get very busy very soon. But I should be able to finish this library, then we'll see if I can do anything else. One last note: The World Trade Center. I haven't forgotten, I just didn't want to dig back into it right now, honestly. Perhaps eventually, maybe even later this year, if time permits, but not now.

I actually took screenshots of almost every single SC3KU building across all styles, with the exception of little junk lots and stuff, with 4 views each. I did it to model them to Cities: Skylines, but it could be used for other projects. Perhaps I can dig up the archive and upload it somewhere...

Well it seems a lot has happened since I last posted here! New developments in the modding community, new expansions, a whole season, the Cubs winning the World Series, the United States' first satirical president... the list goes on and on. Even after I stopped posting here, I went on to build my biggest city yet, and made a whole set of office buildings. I won't bother showing those here, since it's been months and you all must know of them by now. I suppose it was just easier and quicker to post updates on the Skylines Guild Facebook group. Over the last 3 months, I've also been working on Titanic: Honor and Glory. Specifically the new demo that's due out soon (hopefully sooner rather than later ). It's taken up all my time, so I've had no chance to do C:S stuff. But once that's done, I'm going to see about taking a little bit of time to put into C:S, if only because I need a break from Titanic for a bit. Which brings me to an idea I have... I was thinking of revisiting my biggest asset: The World Trade Center. I want to revamp it, to use a little of what I've learned about modeling and texturing to improve it visually, and implement the latest stuff from the game's continuing development. A sort of "HD" version. It would have a higher polygon count, but I think it'd be worth it. These are some of the things I'd like to do: 1: Redo the UV maps and textures. The current models have huge chunks of the texture devoted to large parts of the model. An entire portion of a roof or plaza taking up much of the UV map. I want to change this to a more tiled approach, so details on roofs and plazas look sharper. The same goes for other building elements. I would probably redo the entire facade of 7 WTC. Affected objects would be subdivided more, but it'll look better, sharper, cleaner. The downside is less or almost no Ambient Occlusion. AO's difficult for me to make sense of on things that have tiled and repeating parts. I'd also switch up the column maps a bit. Right now there's a variable lightness/darkness to the aluminium panels on the towers, but it's the same shade across columns on each floor. This was always supposed to be varied. The main reason for redoing these maps and tiling, though, is to make things much sharper... 2: Do away with Sub-Buildings Enabler. It will still have sub-buildings, but will instead use the game's own system, so no mods will be necessary. On a related note, I may also break the complex down into more sub-buildings. It currently has 11 parts, but since it'll come in "one" asset, and because it was honestly difficult to fit everything into even 11 parts, I need to see what can be either divided up or combined into more or fewer lots. 3: Add metro station. The WTC's PATH Station was a major feature of the complex, and it should be added. 4: Add a fire station and police station as sub-buildings. The WTC had its own FDNY fire station. In fact you can see the garage doors for it on my model. This functionality should be added. 5: Correct errors and add or smooth detail. I want to go back over my references and see if there's anything I missed or that could be added, or which needs fixing. This includes a funky piece of texturing on 7 WTC, which I'll be redoing anyway. 6: Redo LODs. The current LODs for the towers look weird. 7: Redo night lights. I've learned a lot since rushing night light edits for the WTC set in the days after AD. They could be much better. Better variation, detailed. More like my Chicago Aon Center. 8: Possibly make the overall shape of the complex more accurate to real life. I don't know if I'll do this, but I had to trim off some areas to make it fit a square footprint. It'd be nice to make it more accurate. Which would necessitate... 9: Adding roads to the base ploppable asset. No more building them yourself. You'll have to use the Touch This mod (or whatever it's called) to change them, of course. 10: Implement the transparent glass shader. This would be most useful for the covered entrance to the North Tower. It would also be useful for my final idea... 11: Adding interior lobbies to the towers. Yes, you read that right. Why? Because I HATE how the bases of the towers look now. There's nothing but a picture of the lobbies used as a flat plane. It makes the bases look strange, unimpressive, and it doesn't do these towers justice. I want to take advantage of the glass shader to make the large gothic windows of the tower bases transparent and add the lobbies inside them. The lobbies would be sub-buildings, and fairly low detail. How low detail, I'm not sure. I'm debating whether to make them ultra low detail (practically LOD level poly counts), or make them finer detailed so they'd look okay even entering them. That would be, to me, an interesting possibility. If it was any other building, I wouldn't bother. But it's the World Trade Center, how can I not? The only question is how they'd be lit, either with point lights, or the entire models having a subtle glow applied with an illumination texture. Here are some pictures of the lobbies: They were relatively simple, bare, wide-open spaces, allowing views straight through the towers. I think it would look impressive, but maybe that's just me. Those are my main ideas for revamping the set. Let me know if you think I'm crazy, or if you have your own ideas for something you'd like to see with the WTC complex. (Keep in mind I have no plans to touch the new WTC complex.) (TL:DR - I want to rework my WTC asset/s to be way more amazing with better lights, better textures, better sub-buildings, glass shaders, and more. Read on for specifics.)

That's certainly one thing I absolutely love about CS. While not a perfect process or tool, it's SO easy to get stuff into the game. I'm a self-taught modeler, with still a good bit to learn here and there, but I'm not that bad. (Maybe a bit high in the tris.) But the process of getting things into SC4 has always daunted me. I've never even remotely thought of trying it, I could just tell it wasn't particularly easy. Even for me now it would be a massive struggle. But with CS you export the damn FBX then import the damn FBX. As long as you vaguely know what you're doing, which isn't much to know, you're fine. Of course, much like how "anybody can become president" is probably a bad idea, the fact that anybody can so easily put anything into the game does lead to, quite frankly, a lot of terrible stuff being put on the workshop. But it's worth it to make modding of the game more accessible to those who just don't want to go through the hell of whatever process SC4 puts you through. I don't know, maybe SC4 isn't that horrible, but CS is surely a whole lot simpler.

I know we all have our little nitpicks, and I had my own issues with the game on the last page, but of all the issues I think the bigger zones one is one of the most important problems we need to solve. At 4x4 it's just too darn small to be realistic. And from what little I've seen done already, and your assurances, Boformer, I'm sure it can be fixed. We can get the bigger zones, fix or do away with the ridiculous leveling, and the asset creators like myself and the rest can make the buildings, and much more. There's no reason it can't be done.

I don't have much to add, except two points: 1. I'm probably one of the rare few who really wants disasters. It's more a personal preference, as I have a fascination with disasters. I watch disaster films, disaster documentaries, read about disasters, and I'm working on a game about a disaster (Titanic). There's just some sort of strange fascination there, and I like the idea of being able to have a bit of fun destroying my cities. It gets boring plopping stuff after a while, and the challenge might be nice, plus the added services and dynamics to consider. Besides, while it's not everyone's cup of tea, "DISASTERS PLZ!" was probably one of the loudest chants in the earlier days of the game. 2. I agree with Boformer that the graphics are awful. The default graphics you get with the base game anyway. I've been meaning to post something about this somewhere, some sort of comparison for fun between modded and un-modded graphics. Point is, every time I look at unmodded screenshots or even the new DLC footage directly from CO, it just looks... bad. The buildings aren't very realistic, more stylized, the coloring is terrible, just so very... yellow. Harsh shadows, and the default LUTs aren't that great. Not to mention the lack of AA. And it actually got worse after AD. If it weren't for daylight classic, custom LUTs, softer shadows, dynamic resolution, ambient occlusion, and ultimate eye candy, we wouldn't get any realistic graphics out of this game. I don't even use the game's default buildings anymore mostly because they look weird with the better quality and more realistic custom buildings surrounding them. One could build a city that doesn't use a single default building and show it with graphics beefed up by mods and it would look like an entirely different game. Much nicer. That's not to say all of it CO's fault. The default buildings aren't overly awesome and are all over the place in styles, but that's why they gave us the ability to make our own, and that's all right. But the graphics could really use improvement.

Thanks! I think roof details are important. One can argue against putting lots of details at a lower level of the building if they'd like, but even with the default camera you'll always be able to see the roof up close, and you spend a lot of time looking down on roofs. Because of that it always annoys me when people don't bother to put any detail in their roofs. Even if it's fairly plain and flat, a mere decent texture would help. Solid colors are the worst, too. Just the absolute minimal effort. A detailed roof makes all the difference. This one was annoying because of the window washer machine. Many buildings have them stored inside penthouses. That's what was nice about Willis Tower. But this one they just leave it right on the roof, because there's nowhere to store it. Others have a system where the machine is lowered below roof level, like on the former World Trade Center, or those other twin towers in L.A., the City National and Paul Hastings towers. Also I just had a though: Perhaps I'm confused as to what Boformer means. While the 3072 may have an actual smaller file size after being processed by the editor, what if it still takes up 4096 worth on the video card when being rendered in-game? So 3072 in file size, but 4096 worth of memory to handle? But then even if that's the case, wouldn't it still be worth it for the smaller file size, maybe that would reduce load times and use less RAM still?

Actually I think it might make a difference. I imported two more versions to test this. My original 3072 tall CRP file is about 10mb. The 2048 tall version is about 8mb. The 4096 version is about 12mb. So the 3072 version does seem to be right between the 2048 and 4096 ones in terms of file size and does make a difference.

I wondered about that. I saw an asset on the workshop that had a texture size like that, I figured it must have worked. If it gets counted as 4096 though, maybe I should try reducing it to 2048 and see what happens.