mcdrye

If you remember me I left some unfinished projects behind some time ago. I hope to finish them along with some other projects no-one knew about till now.. First up is Churchway Station, a fictional Circle Line station on Churchway, Camden, London situated in between Kings Cross and Euston Square stations and would be within walking distance of Euston for interchange. It once had 4 platforms but as you can see a refurb demolished the rarely used platform 4, a stub left for emergency detraining. It's not finished as yet...What are your thoughts? What can I improve?

Fountain looks great! I haven't had a chance to check it out in game yet, have you managed to animate the fountain?

Hi all! I thought it was time for me to return to Simtropolis and share with you my building creations for Cities: Skylines. I originally released content for SC4 a few years back as mcdrye and have recently started creating assets for CS. My first asset was the Sunken Plaza which you probably have already downloaded, as it was the most popular item on the Workshop for several weeks. You might notice I have a penchant for Las Vegas style architecture which I think CS is sorely lacking. Below are some recent creations. Today I just released the High Roller Casino which can be downloaded here

It's back! Currently working on remodelling the Lucky Penny Casino. Originally a laughable 900,000 tris, now around 5000. Actually looking forward to texturing.

Unfortunately the max file and textures were lost as far as I'm aware but I'm in the process of finding the old stuff so hopefully yes. I intend to remake the Lucky Penny anyway for CS which would make it easy to convert to SC4 also, the old model was ridiculously inefficient, like 100,000 tris and took hours to render.

Thanks guys, back in the day it took several hours to render a BAT on my old computer, partly because I modelled so inefficiently but partly the computer. I lost interest and had some RL problems (Father passed away) and left behind many unfinished buildings, some of which I hope to redo for CS. For the newer members of the forum I've put up some old images of stuff I released/never finished. Modelling for CS is much different and I had to learn a lot about Poly Editing (should have done for SC4BAT really) but it's much easier and less time consuming.

Here's a night shot, need to sort out the pool lighting I think. Also not sure if I mentioned before, but if you look at the bulb lighting there are some bulbs that are out.

Thank you! The flora is just a bunch of models I've 'borrowed' from GTAIV and Dead Rising 2, previous attempts to do it myself were crap so I looked to the pro's. They don't transfer to 3dsmax perfectly though, took alot of work. EDIT: Another view

Thank you murimk but what I really need is for base textures to have both solid and missing bits on the same tile which I don't think is possible. I've also been playing with a kinda 'sunken wall' version of it as a means to overcome these issues, as suggested long ago, but that in itself presents problems with NAM overpass networks passing level over the 10m deep railway, I don't want humpback bridges all over the place. The easy route is to just have eye candy lots, but I would rather they had moving trains. Now I'm still working on the casino, and, as I said earlier, I had to rearrange the parking ramp. Here is it's current status, BUT please ignore the palm trees, I've no idea why they rendered like that but it's not intended, plus, the roof texture needs work, plus other little tidbits. P.S. Boy does this casino take forever to render, like 30mins, annoying when you change one thing and want to see how it looks, I've tried to optimise parts but I think its all the fancy reflections and such.

Help!... It seems Simcity does not like my SSR curve. The lot is using invisible base textures (or is it just hiding base textures?) so I understand why the lot looks black, but I'm not sure how I'm going to get this working. The curve needs a large lot (4x4) for pathing (I don't know how to path mutliple tiles btw).

Thanks for all the great support guys! I'm still here! Spent two weeks trying to work out why everything in my viewport was semi-transparent. Turned out it was viewport anti-aliasing that was the problem. Meanwhile in an effort to fix the issue I changed the display driver in Max to DX10. Big mistake! All it did was crash and corrupt my files! Thankfully I had backups. So back on DX9 with anti-aliasing off, I'm carrying on. Below is the curve for SSR, a few glitches but you can get the general idea from the picture. Also my casino has to be rearranged slightly so that the parking ramp aligns to the game grid, I'll post a picture shortly.

The red could easily be toned down, I'll try that. The ramp texture is actually the games texture, just modified in size, also the roof textures are the Bellagio's from satellite view, just colour altered and resized. I can understand why palm trees aren't too welcome but this is a casino, it's decoration is supposed to stand out, and you won't be placing 20 of these in your city, I just do think generic bushes will do it any favours. Here a picture of the front, please bear in mind its a bit grainy like the one above as I lowered some settings to speed up rendering for preview purposes. Also the front canopy texture isn't really that dark, theres an error there, that strange line underlining the big sign is it's shadow but it looks weird.

DocRorlach as I said in my post, alignment issues should be ignored as they will be fixed for the final version, also the train dipping is unfortunely due to the NAM piece that connects the 2 end pieces uses a different pathing height, which I'm trying to sort out. Currently I'm (re)working the 90degree turn piece to fit in with the new height and design Also as promised, here is a look at my Lucky Penny Casino As you can see, it's nearly done, but I'm open to critique!

Yay I managed to get trains flowing through using FLUP from NAM! Works like a charm now, except the FLUP piece has slightly lower pathing, would it be possible for them to provide a piece with a higher path? (Please ignore misaligned pieces as this is still in testing)

Thank you all for the positive comments! armpit43: Yes I do somewhere on my old backup, I'll dig it out at some point as the old link is dead. Right, I've been working on the end piece for the SSR but I've hit a wall (and so have the trains) with regards to visible automata. When automata reach the end of an end-piece and appear to enter a tunnel/arch, they disappear, as to be expected since it is leaving the lot. So I tried placing 2 end pieces in a 1x4 lot with an avenue passing through the middle so that trains would seem to pass underneath. I don't think it is possible though to transit enable a lot with 2 modes of transport (it already has El-Rail to display automata). Is there a way around this? I was thinking of having bridge arches as props so trains could pass freely underneath but that still wouldn't allow roads etc to cross over it. I could just have a 1x1 lot with the end-piece but automata would appear and disappear, and U-Drive would be unusable. On a lighter note, I'll be posting a picture (or two) of the Lucky Penny Casino very soon...

armpit43, this station I made a while back is a very similar style to a City Thameslink station expect the signage is London Underground. Update! I got a normal quality render in with my walls and it looks okay, obviously I'm going to need to do some tweaks and put them on my own lots (NOB's pathing is non-UK for a start)...

DocRorlach it's hard to explain so I'll quote the Simtropolis Omnibus: "SimCity is not a 3d game, and all the models in SimCity are only "semi-3d." A LOD is a box shape that your model is "projected" onto. that is what shows up in the game, not your full polygon 3d model. Anything inside the LOD will not show up in the game. " So if I have a square building and want it to show in SimCity I must enclosed it inside a box shape called an 'LOD', I render the building and the game takes the rendered images and places them onto the 3d LOD, this gives the impression of a 3d building with things disappearing behind it etc. The problem is, say I have a station and I want trains to pass through it, if I just cover the whole station with a box shaped LOD the trains will disappear into the LOD and you won't see them. So I have to make an LODshape that takes into account the platform, the canopies etc so that the train will be seen but also hidden by canopies, basically copying the shape of the building in more detail as opposed to a box. Have a read of the full Omnibus article. Here is a picture of the model in 3dsmax, firstly with LODs hidden, second with the LOD I currently use, and the third being a more detailed LOD that I'm gonna test to see if I should that instead. It's not much more effort and at least then the set would could be pathed in the future without re-rendering. EDIT: And here is the result of the test, I was a bit naughty and used NOB's lot but it was the quickest way to test this out, the render was intentionally quick and dirty.