JRSly

Great, thanks very much. I'm hoping that with as simple as the graves are, they might be an easier first step into Blender. I'll dive into the course this week.

I just may. Blender certainly is intimidating, every time I open it I feel like I've walked into the cockpit of a 747. I guess I was leaning towards it because it was free and, probably because of that fact, there were a lot of tutorials directly relating to Cities Skylines. I'll keep 3DS Max in mind and do some research.

Right, that's how I've set it up. I'm using SketchUp..I know it's not the most respected program, I'm just at that point where I'd rather fight with a more limited program that I can get around in better than fight to learn a better-suited program, but I'm slowly trying to get a handle on Blender...and with SketchUp, similar to how you describe, faces are color coded to show whether they are reversed or not. I did the same method as you, I made my first "billboard, copied it and reversed the face and flipped the texture so it looked right. I just checked again, and all the outward facing faces are in the proper orientation. So that aspect of things seems fine...I might think it was something else SketchUp might do differently than other programs, but the billboards work perfectly fine in the one direction, so it's not something fundamentally wrong with using SketchUp. And I forgot to mention, it looks correct in the Asset Editor. NickKerr, as I said, I'm using SketchUp, so I don't know how much insight any screenshots from it would provide for you.

The last day and a half I've been trying to just get my footing in making nice, tiny LODs for all my Cemetery Block assets and I'm starting to go a little crazy. It's already daunting enough with 30+ assets to deal with, but it's been a lot of frustrating hours trying to make things work how it feels they should be working and running into issues. Anyway...from Shroomblaze's advice, what I'm doing is adding planes in front of and behind the rows of graves and making a flat texture of each row and applying it to these planes, kinda turning each row of individual graves into one big transparent billboard. It's super efficient and looks good in game..when it works. Here is where I'm at now. When I look at the LOD from one side it looks almost right... But spin the camera around and they disappear, except for the shadow being cast from the whole rectangular plane and not the graves. What makes this even more maddening is that I actually had it working perfectly, but wanted to adjust the brightness of the diffuse texture and when I made the asset again, this is what happened. And I have no idea what I did differently to make it go wonky. I've been trying to troubleshoot and gone through the help in most of the similar threads...like, I've added all the various dummy maps for the LOD, added an alpha map and didn't rely on transparency in the diffuse map. I'm not trying to accomplish wild, bizarre feats and it feels like I've done everything by the book, including the workarounds for the bugs in there. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Doesn't seem to be working for me either. I'll mess around with it later. Since it can't be as simply as just typing in numbers in Mod Tools, my ghetto, clunky way to try to get exact colors is navigate to the color section in Mod Tools and leave it up. Change the colors in the asset editor to where you think you want them. Save, load the asset again and the colors will be updated and you can see the new RGB values in Mod Tools. Rinse and repeat until you get the right values or you're frustrated enough to call it fine. It's not elegant and can still be tedious, but in the end at least you are (almost, unless you're really determined and keep at it) getting the exact values that you can apply to other assets to keep them consistent. And at least you can save and load in the same session, you don't have to back out of the Asset Editor or close the game or anything...so it's fairly quick to do.

After trying to figure out how to easily color a dozen assets as close to identically as possible, I was happy to come across this solution...but, as is my lot in life, something isn't working. I can find the color fields in ModTools fine but the changes never seem to commit. I can change the values and see the color block in ModTools change, but the color doesn't change in the AssetEditor (I assume it should update live) and if I try to use the props in game they haven't been updated. I've had some trouble finding any detailed ModTools tutorials, so I don't know what I might be doing wrong. I've tried closing and reopening over and over to see if it made a difference, but nothing has worked yet.