r0g3r

Thanks again for the comments, appreciated. @ Apankou - I'm the same way I pore over details of impressive CJs here and I know I will never match them. It's still fun to try ;) As for the SW corner, that's going to be an industrial seaport town, it's planned to be the slummiest area of the whole region. The skyscrapers will extend down into the SE corner, where I will have more of a commercial port city....Farms will be in both northern corners.  Thanks for taking interest in my CJ, I appreciate it. And i still agree with your assessment of the plaza thing, you actually found an idiosyncracy in my building style. I know that the ped-malls are there in the park menu, and yet I always use plazas. I need to actively make myself stop doing this in areas where the pedestrian malls would clearly look better.

Just a small update because I wanted to show you what the region is currently looking like. And this is just something extra, unrelated......I think this region is going to be my next CJ. I rendered it from my daughter's ultrasound image, I think it will look nice with lots of detailed landscaping. Definitely a more challenging and ambitious region than this one.....and also 4x larger:

Thanks all for the comments. Apankou, very good eye to spot such a detail, and I think you're right, so I'll change it, though I don't know when I'll re-visit this city....

Very nice suburbs.

I love the way you handle complex terrain. Awesome CJ, I'll be following.

Thanks for the kind words, they are very encouraging. So the two mosaics were just a teaser, there is much more to see in Isengard. Keep in mind that I'm choosing first to show you the "slums" of the region....saving some of my best ideas for later and for other parts of the region.

Had enough of nature yet? This suburb of Valinor is a bustling town that supplies most of the power for the region. Dharma Island mostly supplies nuclear power, but also uses oil plants, incenerates garbage, and recycles. The island generates pollution and some say nuclear waste escapes from time to time as well. Some residents claim to have spotted three-eyed fish, though no specimens have ever turned up for study. Just a teaser to introduce you: Welcome to Isengard At Night:

I can't even come up with the words to tell you how inspirational I find this CJ. I haven't had time to absorb it all, but I plan to study every bit of it in detail, in hopes of one day accomplishing something 1/10th as good as the most modest part of it.

Thank you tepedon.  If anyone uses this in their CJ, please drop me a link in here, I'd love to see what you've done with it.

@usfwoody - I will see what I can do, I have never tried to do a tropical shore. I'd probably have to look up a tutorial! 

You guys are very welcome @ImVhOzzi - I wouldn't mind at all if this became a part of the Omnibus. Anyone else having trouble seeing the pics?

Excellent tutorial, very helpful, thanks for sharing.

Ok I finally got enough time to do the tutorial I promised for my next update. I'd like to reiterate that I'm not the best at this, and there are probably better tutorials out there. In fact, I learned some of this from tutorials, but I have also come up with some of my own ways of doing things, which is why I decided to share this with you all. This tutorial is to show you how I handle shorelines with in game water (as opposed to ploppable water - which I handle in a similar manner anyways), when I want them detailed and rocky. Here are the mods you'll need: HBS Grassy Rocks Gizmo Water Flora PEG Pond Kit RRP Pasture Flora Set This last one is optional, but I find it easier to blend things with this than the default: Black Sand Beach Mod The key to getting things to look natural is the element of randomness. Don't worry about making anything perfect, nature is not perfect. Avoid straight lines. STEP 1: Starting with the HBS Grassy Rocks, fill in your intended detail area. Clicking once gives you some midsized rocks, twice gives you smaller ones, and more clicks yield various boulders. I usually use the medium rocks with the a double click for smaller rocks overlapping the medium rocks, then add the boulders randomly. It looks like this: STEP 2: Finish filling in your designated area with rock clusters. "Paint" them into the area you just added the HBS rocks to. Overlap with the waves in the water, so that they mask the transition. It looks like this: STEP 3: Paint the land facing edge of your designated area with pebbles. Just paint a curvy line following somewhat the edge shape of the rocks you have laid down already. It should have some overlap with the rocks. It looks like this: STEP 4: Paint another curvy line just like you did with the pebbles, this time using "shoreline small" as your brush. Again overlap with the pebbles is what you want. It looks like this: STEP 5: Using brown rye grass, click along the land facing edge of your area, overlapping the pebbles and shoreline small as much as possible. Space out each click so that each patch of rye grass overlaps barely or not at all with each other. It looks like this: STEP 6: Repeat step 5, except this time use green rye grass. Have the green grass overlap the brown grass, but not other green grass, just like you did with the brown. It looks like this: STEP 7: Add random weeds. Multiple clicks yeild different variations, and holding the mouse lets you paint them on. STEP 8: (optional) Add random water flora: And finally you should have something that resembles this: Thanks for checking out my CJ, and I hope the tutorial has been helpful.

Beautiful work.

Nice, your city is looking better. I have one more suggestion for you. Add some trees. You're taking your time and building slow, which is good. Keep it up.

Thanks again for the compliments. Much appreciated. I will try to make my next update a nature tutorial. There are certainly people far better at it than me, but I'll be glad to share what I know.

I like your idea of presenting the Journal natural growth style. A simple thing you can do to make your screenshots look better is turn of the U-drive-it zots. Click "My Sims" then click the car icon. The reason everyone is saying you need agriculture and industry is because early on there is much more demand for those kinds of jobs, rather than commercial. Get some dirty industry up and running, and your city will grow much faster. Keep up your work....I've been playing this game for the seven years it's been out, and I'm still learning. Good luck with your city.

Once again thanks for the comments @WiltonWarrior: My dogs names are Dharma and Zen, but I did name Dharma after LOST,and chose Zen's name because it goes well with Dharma. Ok, yet more landscape, almost done though. Since everyone seems to like my landscaping, I will probably give a tutorial of how I do nature.

Awesome mining town. Everyone said it already, but I have to compliment you on your use of effects. Also the street layout really looks like a small town.

Thanks for the comments, you guys are too kind. @ Plane-Crash12000 - those would be from this set of retaining walls: https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=168

Awesome....inspires me to try to do more with my airports.

First off, thanks for the kind words. One of the reasons I post CJs is for that encouragement to keep working on my project and it's greatly appreciated. Reikhardt, if I'm able to pass on anything I know to you through this CJ, I'd be very glad. I learned what little I know completely from following CJs and tutorials on this site. So, if I can reciprocate, even in the smallest way, that makes me very happy. Now, continuing our look at the unspoiled region: This small bit of road and culverts are the only construction in the region right now, they were placed only so I wouldn't forget where I wanted the stream crossing to be.

I'm especially impressed at the dedication it takes to work on a single project for years on end. Kudos! 

Excellent work. This is the kind of CJ that inspires me....either to get better or give up entirely! This rural area is very convincing.

This CJ marks my return to creating CJs after a very long hiatus. This is my third City Journal, but my least ambitious, because I never could complete the other gigantic regions I chose. Arda will be very light on story, and more focused on the terraforming and city building aspects of the region. I wanted a compact region with a lot of flat space, but also just a little bit of everything (mountain, lake, hill, stream, river, ocean, bay, island etc.) My plan is to turn this area into a "Minitropolis" with outlying suburbs and farmland, and use what I learn here to create more ambitious CJs in the future. Hope you enjoy, and thanks for checking out my Journal. Here is the region in it's pristine state (enjoy it now, because I'm going to build right over all this detailed terraforming soon!): A look at the Geography of Arda: A zoomed out view of Erebor: Erebor Detal 1: Erebor Detail 2: I will continue the region tour in the next update.