Realistic Cities For Dummies

[catty]

I can't stop as I was just logging out, but I can see I will be spending some time here   

[zwitser]

First of all, my compliments for all of the great work and effort you put into this. I really like it, and its very useful material. 

Second, do you have these lessons as a download for me in a PDF file or something like that, for reference? I`m kinda lost sometimes in the pages here 

Keep up the good work!

[benedict]

Congratulations on being the number 6 MD on Ben's Top MDs for the year.

[smileymk]

Hello everyone. I apologise for the severe delay in getting this lesson up. Unfortunately my university timetable for this term is pretty heavy, and I've had a number of assignments to complete, especially during the past couple of weeks.
Fortunately, I'm past the heaviest period of the term now in terms of work, the Christmas holidays start in 2 1/2 weeks, and terms 2 and 3 are much less heavy in terms of lecture and seminar time, so updates should go back to being fairly regular pretty soon.
Thanks once again for your understanding and patience.

Swordmaster: Thank you. I do enjoy detailing riverbanks because of the rewards you get at the end of it, even though it's a pretty laborious and time-consuming task. Indeed quite a bit of time in my side projects has been spent doing riverbanks. It's a very useful skill and we'll be going over it in more detail in future lessons.

art128: Thanks. In fairness I have had a lot of practice!

bucksie: Thank you, and well done for coming out of lurking mode, I know from experience that it takes a bit of courage. (I just need to stop lurking in real life now ;-) )
Regarding your comments about Lot Editor, I would like to point you in the direction of Project 2, Lesson 25, in which I explain how to use the Lot Editor to tinker with lots, a lot of which involves adding, positioning and deleting props, which you'll need to do a fair bit of if you want to create UK-style housing estates. I also use Lot Editor in some of the early Project 3 lessons, so have a look at those as well and it should help you get to grips with Lot Editor, at least on a basic level. And, as always, please ask if you have any questions.
And about the Tudor houses, I agree, and have got rid of them:


SimEurocat: Your development problems are most likely caused by urban development in your city killing off any and all agricultural demand. Project 1 was written before the SPAM agriculture mod came out, so I didn't use it in that lesson and so the farms were still at the mercy of Maxis game mechanics.
Since then, however, the SPAM has since been released, and it changes everything for the better. It was used in Project 2's rural land lesson (Lesson 24) to great effect, so, in short, install the SPAM and it should help.

catty: Thanks for coming, and I hope you enjoy your stay.

zwitser: Thank you. I never thought of making PDF versions of the lessons. It's a good idea, and will be implemented at some point in the future. But it's a fair way off, as creating PDF versions of all lessons posted will take time. I will probably do it at the end of Project 3.

benedict: 6th for the year? That's quite impressive, and I'm quite proud of that, so thanks for telling me. I do look at your Top 10 + 10 thread occasionally and see RCFD there a fair bit, so I must be doing something right. I won't be stopping here, though, there's a place in the Classics section to be had, and I'd quite like to turn that 6 into a 1 next year. Onwards and upwards!

Onwards and upwards indeed. It's time for Lesson 12.

Lesson 12 - Business Parks

I'm going to start by defining exactly what a 'business park' is, at least for the purposes of this MD. A business park is an estate, usually located on the outskirts or fringes of a city, dedicated to commercial office use. It's essentially the commercial equivalent of a suburb. The estate is comprised of numerous office developments used by a variety of companies, and is a useful source of jobs in any city.
UK examples include Westwood Business Park in Coventry and Capability Green in Luton, for those wanting inspiration.

So how do we build one? The first task is to create the street layout. Most business parks have one or two road access points, at least one of which will be within reach of a main road. Smaller side streets then branch off the main route to serve additional offices, so we should recreate this. All roads within a business park should be streets:


We've also created a street leading to the GLR station serving the business park. Of course, GLR and cars aren't the only way potential workers might want to get to the business park. They might also wish to go in by bus, so let's provide for this with a couple of bus stops, one on the main street and one on a one-way road turning loop next to the GLR station:


Right, now it's time to place the offices. First, make sure you have adequate power and water supply to the business park, otherwise it'll quickly become a dilapidated eyesore.
Once that's sorted, plop groups of 1-4 similar office buildings (using plobbable RCI lots or the LotPlop cheat), such that there's about two or three short rows of tiles left for parking, the buildings face this parking area as much as possible, and do not touch any of the streets, as far as possible. Then provide the parking and road access using SAM-1 parking lot streets. You should fill the area you've left for parking with SAM-1. It's best to drag out the car park layout first, and then place starter pieces. You may require a few starters to get the right result, but perseverance, as always, pays off:


Note that the buildings are fairly modern. Business parks are quite recent innovations and, as a result, do feature modern architecture.

It is also OK, and encouraged, to place single large buildings occasionally, usually near the back of the business park. Again, leave room for parking. It's a good idea to test fit the lot beforehand, so you can decide exactly where the building should go, in what orientation, and where to place parking.
The buildings don't have to technically be commercial buidings either. This lot is actually a high-tech industrial lot, but, as you can see, it can pass off as a commerical office block perfectly well:


This lot also required the use of a fake street connection (covered in the Pumping Stations lesson) to visually connect the SAM-1 parking to the on-lot parking. (Can you spot it?)

We fill the business park by continuing on like this, until we're satisfied with the number of offices in the business park. It's important to use lots of different buildings so that the business park doesn't become boring, so go to the STEX and LEX and get pillaging:


Looks pretty good. But we're in Project 3 now, so we can't even think about calling this complete until we've detailed it.

Let's start with that street going under the bridge next to the GLR station. At the moment it seems rather useless. Let's give it a purpose by adding an MMP path from this no-longer useless street to one of the car parks north of it:


But our no-longer-useless street is still missing something, as indeed are most of the streets in the business park. That something is pavements. Because we placed buildings away from the streets, the game didn't put any pavements in for us. So we've got to make it put the pavements in, and the way we're going to do that is to fill the empty areas of the business park with grass fillers, like we used in the Airport lesson:


As you can see, this set has diagonal overhang fillers as well, again like we used in the Airports lesson, so make sure you take advantage of them. This picture shows where the diagonal overhang fillers really come into their own:


You can see that the edge of the grass fillers runs parallel to the diagonal street. Had we been restricted to square non-overhanging fillers, we'd have had to settle for those annoying jagged edges we're all familiar with. So the diagonal overhang fillers provide a massive improvement in both aesthetics and realism.

The business park still looks a little bare, so let's finish it off by running some seasonal trees around the borders of the estate. We covered using seasonal trees in the last lesson, so consider this good practice:


Nice. Let's fast forward to summer and see how things look then:


Awesome. Note that we've filled the small empty area in between the GLR line, the freight rail line and the main street through the business park with seasonal trees, just to fill it in as an unused space so it's done.

And this business park is now done, as is this lesson. Yes, it was a short one, but hopefully an interesting and rewarding one.

In Lesson 13 we'll be continuing to fill in the suburbs and business parks around Mapleford Airport, with the aim of getting industrial demand up to a level where we can construct the industrial estate on the other side of the bay, where the power station is.
We'll also be exploring some ways to vary your estates so they're not all the same, and some more detailing ideas and techniques.

See you then,
Chris

[Harry29]

Great lesson; been looking forward to it for weeks. Well worth the wait. 

[Swordmaster]

Nice update! Interesting layouts with the roundabouts and all, very good.


Cheers
Willy

[Gugu3]

Nice job!

[smileymk]

Hey guys.

I'd like to start by thanking whoever was responsible for giving me a +1 karma. Although I'm not doing this MD to get karma points, it did come as a nice surprise to get one, and it is appreciated.

Now it's time for the replies:

Harry29: Thank you.

Swordmaster: Thanks Willy. And great work on the RRW by the way, it looks set to revolutionise SC4's railways and I'm really looking forward to seeing what it can do when the full version of NAM 32 comes out.

Gugu3: Thanks.

And now, an early Christmas present for you all. It's time for Lesson 13.

Lesson 13 - More Suburbs and Business Parks

In the last two lessons we constructed Mapleford's first suburb and first business park. In this lesson we continue with this topic and build some more suburbs and commercial areas, as well as filling other areas around the airport in, so that by the end of the lesson, most of the northern land area of the tile we're working on will be filled in and complete.

So let's begin this lesson by constructing a second business park to the immediate north of the first one. It's built in much the same way as the first one, except this time I've used one big office lot in 3 different places. This gives a consistent look, yet makes the second business park very different from the first:


Notice that we have a single street running throught this business park, connected to the airport access road at one end and a one-way roundabout with filler inserted at the other. That roundabout filler is an important detail, so don't forget to stick them on all of your roundabouts.

Also notice that we've added a café for added interest:


We now need to detail the interior of this business park. Let's turn our attention to the lorry park for the airport cargo terminal at the north end of the business park.
It would be nice to fence this off so as to clearly separate it from the business park. To do this, we're going to use the IRM industrial fillers, which contain some nice corner and striaght fence lots we can use.
However, we need to do a bit of work to them first, because we'd like to have a consistent texture on our lorry park, and the closest match, obtained using the I-M fillers, is still not great:


We need to change the texture to that used in the lorry park, i.e. the RMIP apron texture, and we could do with getting rid of those cars as well, because we don't need them here.
This is a job for the Lot Editor. We will work with the high-tech fillers, since these provide the best fences for this situation. Let's start with the corner fence piece:


We need to change the base texture and delete the car and orange pole props on this lot. The street light can stay, as it will provide lighting for the lorry park.
We've gone through changing base textures and deleting props in Lot Editor a good few times now, so you should be more than capable of changing what you see above into this:


The straight fence piece now needs to be modified. Let's open it up:


We need to do a similar job on this one - get rid of the cars and change the base texture:


If you're a little rusty on changing textures and manipulating props in Lot Editor, then you must go back to Project 2, Lesson 25, as well as the earlier lessons in this project where we do modding in Lot Editor, and get up to speed before proceeding any further with this project and this lesson. I can't keep going over this again and again, so I'm going to assume you know how to manipulate textures and props in Lot Editor from now on.

These new lots can now be placed in the game to give a nice border to our lorry park:


Now it's time to wait until September 1st (game time), and then pause the game and surround the business park with seasonal trees, as well as filling in a couple of small unsued areas in between transport routes:


I found from my work on Lesson 12 that it was quite difficult to place the trees on the grass fillers we're going to build now, and so decided to do the trees first for this business park.
So coming along secondly is the grass fillers - namely the same ones we used for the first business park. Around the edges, it's best to place the lots on the second tile going into the business park, using the overhang to cover the first tile. This ensures as few trees as possible are removed in the process of placing the fillers, and so reduces the number of trees we have to replace:


Excellent. But what's that I see above the business park, to the right of the airport cargo terminal?
Well, to fill this little area in, I decided to place a small retail park. As the name suggests, this is an area consisting of numerous retail outlets. They can be large stores used by big-name retailers, or they can be much smaller stores used by small-scale enterprises, as we will build here.
On the left are a couple of garages. In the middle are a couple of rows of SAM-1 for parking and road access. Note that this car park is kept one tile away from the main street, to make it look nicer. On the right is a fast food outlet - feel free to choose your favourite one.
Above the car park, we're going to place the shops. For this, I've used some strip mall lots, which are perfect for the job. Be sure to use multiple lots to acheive some variety in the businesses that occupy the shops for a more realistic effect:


The space in between the retail park and the main street needs to be filled with MMP grass, like you see above. I've also added an MMP path to connect the pavement on the street to the retail park, so walking customers don't have to walk on the main street to get to the shops:


It is not necessary to add a bus stop for a small-scale retail park such as this, and I haven't put one in here, but you can add one if you want.

With the retail park complete, now is the time to turn our attention to the suburbs planned for the area to the east of the airport.
Now we are very close to a major airport, so these suburbs need to be laid out very carefully. Many people do live under the flight paths into major airports, so it's not unreasonable to put homes near low-flying and noisy aircraft. However, you can't expect anyone to want to live right next to the airport itself. So there needs to be a good few tiles of clear space between the airport and any homes you plan to build. So I've avoided putting any streets near the airport, so we can't build homes too close to the airport fence:


In particular, we don't want homes near the runway, since this is where the planes will be at their noisiest.

Also notice that in the bottom suburb we've left space for a middle school, so let's put that in now, together with the requisite bus stop and car park:


Now let's add a field using MMP grass and a boundary fence using the RMIP fences. We don't need to add a football pitch, because a small one is included in the lot - it's unmarked but you can see the goals:


This is quite nice, but we can make a few improvements. Firstly, the playground, shed above the basketball courts and buses all need to be removed since they are inappropriate for a middle school. Furthermore, we need to move the fence included on the lot so the field can be accessed from the classroom but not the outside, as opposed to the other way round like it is here, and we can also add some overpath props to provide access to the car park in the bottom-left corner of the lot. Finally, we should concrete the area around the basketball courts to provide a proper concrete playground.
This is nothing you guys can't already do on Lot Editor, and the end result is as follows, with the modifications circled in red so you can see what we've done:


That's much better. Let's move to the other suburb we're building, where we're going to put in a small park before proceeding.
We've already done small playgrounds and big fields, so let's do something a little different here. A small field coupled with a hard sports court (usually a small football and/or basketball court in the UK) is an easy and realistic way to provide entertainment for your local residents, and such parks are seen all over the UK at least:


We can now develop the suburbs using the techniques outlined in Lesson 11:


Now, the alternate zoning technique covered in Lesson 11 will usually ensure your 1x1 plots are filled with 1x1 lots. However, the game will try to make larger lots when it gets the chance.
In Lesson 11, I stated that larger lots could be stopped from growing by using the Make Historical feature on every other lot, but that this would be excessive. And it would indeed be excessive to do this.
Instead, it suffices to use the tool only on houses located on the inside of corners or junctions, as well as alternate houses anywhere where it is possible for 2x2 or larger lots to grow.

For those who don't know, you make a growable lot historical by querying it and clicking the 'Make Historical' button that appears on the query dialog:


When the button has a cross in it, the lot is historical and so cannot be developed over, preventing any lots bigger than 1x1 taking over the existing lot.

Now we turn our attention to the trees, and again we need to be careful here.
Under no circumstances should trees be placed anywhere near airfields. (By 'anywhere near', I mean there needs to be a distance of at least a few tiles, and ideally more, between airfields and trees.) This is because trees attract birds, and so if trees are placed near airfields, there is a good chance of birds ending up in the path of flying aircraft, and you need only look at the Hudson River crash to see what can happen when birds meet jet engines.
So when we place trees for our new suburbs, we make sure not to place any between houses and the airport:


But that area in between the suburbs and the airport still needs to be filled, lest our city looks incomplete. But if we can't fill it with trees, what can we fill it with?

We can start by using the retail park we built earlier in the lesson to our advantage. There is one tile in between the shops and the airport fence, so let's fill in that space using the IRM industrial fillers:


Yes, these fillers are designed for industrial areas, but that doesn't mean we can't use them creatively, and the results speak for themselves.

The remaining empty land can be filled using MMP grass, followed by adding numerous MMP flowers to the grassed area for added effect. You should use many different types of flowers to get a varied and interesting result - here I've used no fewer than 10 different flower MMPs to obtain a colourful and aesthetically pleasing scene:


Awesome. Let's move now to the area south of the airport. There are a couple of areas that need to be filled in, and since we're near an airport, I thought that a couple of hotels would be the best way to fill them.
There are plenty of suitable ploppable lots available for you to choose from, so take your pick. The only real requirement is that they should not be too large. The 3 hotels on the right of the picture below are about the size you want, maybe slightly smaller. The one on the left is a little taller than I'd have liked, but it still looks good, so I'm keeping it. As is so often the case, choosing the right lots is down to you and your good judgement.
Oh, and don't forget to supply ample car parking for your hotels, as you see here:


Are we just going to leave them like that? Of course not. Let's start by providing a bus stop to serve the hotels on the right, and connect it to the car park by means of an MMP path:


On the other side of this car park, we have an open space. It doesn't make a lot of sense to put development there, but there is a GLR station at the other end of this open space. So to add further detail and interest, let's connect the hotel to the GLR station using an MMP path:


It remains only to detail the sections of coastline covered by these open spaces using green rye grass, like we did in Lesson 11, and then fill the rest of the space in with trees. Be careful not to place trees on your MMP paths - it's easy to do and the best way to avoid it is to tree alongside the paths first:


OK, so it might look at first glance like I've disregarded my own advice here, but if you look closely, you can still see lines in the trees where the paths are.

These hotels are now done. Let's move west and lay out the streets for our next suburb:


We need another primary school here, since we're quite far from the one we built in Lesson 11. For added realism and variety, we're going to use a different building to the one we used last time. It's built just like any other primary school:


There's even car parking on the lot, which we've provided access to by means of a fake street connection, but there are two things that we can make better here. The first is obvious - that missing dependency. The second is that the car park on the lot is pretty narrow and doesn't leave much room for turning, which makes getting in and out of the spaces pretty hard.
The first issue is easy to fix - just go into Lot Editor and delete the missing prop. (In this case, it was a flagpole, which you would never see outside a British school anyway.) The second requires the use of an asphalt filler with a diagonal overhang to create a space for the cars to turn around in, fenced off using MMP fences:


That fence should really extend across the whole car park to eliminate the possibility of any cars or chavs getting out, and this was done after taking the picture.

Right then, let's turn our attention to the GLR station further up the road. Being a suburban metro station, we need to supplement it with some parking:


Initially I was going to put parking on the other side of the tracks and connect it to the suburb with an underpass. But there's no FLUP under diagonal GLR piece yet, so I did this instead.
But this means that we don't need that access on the other side, since nobody will be entering the station from that side. So we can replace this bilateral access station with the unilateral access version:


That's far more realistic, and does a better job of closing off the suburb.

We've now done all the infrastructure needed for this suburb, so let's add bus stops and get zoning:


As you might expect, the next job is to detail the coastline and add trees:


Again, be very careful not to place trees too near the airport. You can see in the above image that there are no trees along the top in the north-west corner of the suburb.

The last thing we're going to do this lesson is to construct a long, thin suburb along the northern edge of the city tile, north of the power lines. This suburb will extend into the next city tile, so we'll need to build a good few street neighbour connections when laying out the streets to facilitate this.
Due to the narrow nature of the suburb in the city tile we're working on, we're inevitably going to have to put in some S-curves as well, unless we really want a 2-mile long dead straight street:


Now hold on a minute. That's more of a kink than an S-curve, yet that's the best you can do just by dragging the street tool.
So to improve the apperance of this S-curve, we need to take a different approach to constructing it.
I'll give full credit to Samgoogolplexian for the following technique, since I found out about it whilst watching his 'Let's Play' series on YouTube. What we do is we demolish the two 90-degree curve sections of street, and in its place we put in the short diagonal street construction piece (the third item in the Diagonal Streets tab ring) like so:


After placing the piece, you should have the following:


I think you'll agree that this is a significant improvement over what we had before. The potential this technique has should be obvious, and we'll be using it a fair bit in this project I'm sure, so it's well worth practising.
You may be wondering why we didn't use the S curve available in the Rural Roads plugin in the NAM. It's for 2 reasons:
- I'm not sure the S-curve piece even exists for SAM-7! (I'll check.)
- Even if it does, we won't get the pavement textures by using this puzzle piece, whereas with the diagonal street construction piece method, we will.

Moving on, the suburb we're building now is served by a diagonal GLR station, and we'll need to take the street over the GLR line. This might seem problematic because of the narrowness of the area we're working in, but it isn't, mainly because most of the station is just an overhanging prop, and so we can place the overpass directly over the station, like so:


Indeed, only the centre two tiles of the station are actually occupied, so you can build an overpass anywhere over the station, apart from those two tiles.

Again, this is a suburban GLR station, so it needs parking:


Don't worry that one of the car parks is right next to the airport runway, because it doesn't matter. Nobody lives in a car park, so it's not sensitive to noise, unlike a house.

Of course, it matters where your houses go relative to the airport, and to keep homes away from the runway I've kept a 1-tile gap between the power lines and any residential plots or trees:


It's the suburb at the top if you can't find it. What you should be able to find is the big open area around the western and northern edges around the airport that we have yet to fill.
We can't put development here because it's too close to the airfield. In fact, there's not a lot we can realistically do apart from fill the whole area with MMP grass:


I wasn't kidding when I said all of it. Filling this area with grass took me a good couple of hours, but that is the time you have to put in to get realistic results. I'm sure you'll agree that the ends justify the means here.
This task required me to apply grass around power poles. We may have covered this before, but you should apply grass around the pylon to such a density that the base is barely visible, like you see here:


We do this to hide that unsightly and unrealistic base that features on the pylons, creating a more natural effect.

And that's all for this lesson. As you can see in the second-to-last picture, we've filled in a large part of this city tile now, and our population has risen from just under 10,000 to a very healthy 21,000.

This has created a healthy industrial demand, and so in the next lesson we'll be building the big industrial estates for this tile.

I won't be posting Lesson 14 until after the holiday season has been and gone, so I would like to wish all of you a very merry Christmas and a happy, prosperous New Year. Hopefully 2014 will be the year when this MD is promoted to the Classics section.

See you next year,
Chris

[Swordmaster]

Well done Chris. The end result is very nice. There's always something to learn here for any kind of user; I have to admit I wouldn't have thought to do that diagonal street trick (and that's coming from a NAM team member ).


Cheers
Willy

[Donician]

Thanks so much for putting this together.  Mayor's Diaries are great for getting ideas and new concepts, but this takes it to a whole new level.  It is so valuable to have veterans of the game explain how to do different things in the game.  Looking forward to your next update.

[mrdobalina]

Really nice to see an empty landscape being filled in, and filled in nicely. The lesson I take from your 'lecture' is to think big, give things some space (like the refinary).

Sorry to bother you for this, but I am highly interested in the curved glr-to-subway transition you used in lesson 9 part 4, near the light rail depot. I've been searching for it a lot since I saw it, actualy I have thought before that such a thing would be cool to exist,  but only saw it in your post. Is it for download somewhere?

Keep up the good work! (and enjoy it)

[smileymk]

Hello folks.

Swordmaster: Thanks. As I said in the update, I have to give credit to the Youtuber Samgoogolplexian for that diagonal street technique, otherwise I would never have thought of it myself. It just goes to show how useful it is to see others playing the game, and I'm pleased to be able to impart the knowledge I've gained, from others as well as personal experience, onto others to further their games.

Donician: You're welcome. I wouldn't regard myself as a veteran, but I'm happy you're finding this useful.

mrdobalina: Thank you. It is important to do big things like refineries first, in order to ensure you have sufficient space to do them realistically. As for that curved GLR ramp, I'm 95% sure that it came from the STEX, but I can't find it either I'm afraid. I'll keep looking.

And now, industry:

Lesson 14 - Heavy Industry

In this lesson we'll be constructing the heavy industrial area around the previously built port, power station and oil refineries.

Since this industrial area is very central and is right next to the port, we can reasonably presume it's an old industrial area dating from the Industrial Revolution era. So this estate needs to be carefully built to look like it dates from that period, as far as possible.

Let's start, like we so often do, with the street layout. Long roads with few curves are best here, leaving enough space between streets to fit in large factories:


Oh, and try to avoid level crossings with main rail lines as far as possible. You can get away with crossings on branch tracks serving individual ports/industries, but that's as far as it should go with level crossings. FLUPs are the best way to get a street through a railway line in an urban area if you need to.

The existing railway lines are just part of the infrastructure we'll have to build around. By and large, getting around infrastructure shouldn't be an issue - we've already built roads going under all of the railways and motorways.
However, sometimes your infrastructure will block your street routes, like this railway viaduct does here:


Like roads, streets can't be simply dragged under railway viaducts. So you'll just have to demolish the relevant viaduct pieces and drag the streets through:


Then it's just a matter of rebuilding the rail viaduct, using Rail over Street pieces where appropriate:


To finish, you can see some of the viaducts are covered with the rail arch/catenary lot that we made in Lesson 9. Now that we know where our streets are and the viaduct has been rebuilt, we can finish off the rest of the rail arches, at least on the orthogonal section:


Unfortunately, the link to those rail arches is hiding in the shadows to the extent that I can't locate it, but any Victorian-style (i.e. brick) set of lots will do. This particular set I'm using has many different varieties of lot, so if you recognise it and decide to use it, be sure to include different lots for a varied and interesting effect.

Good. Those rail arches look like the home to lots of small industrial ventures. We're now ready to start zoning the rest of the industrial estate.

Being a central, important estate, we should use high density industrial zoning here. We're going to zone plots using the same 'parcelised zoning' technique we've been using since Project 1 - namely, create individual plots of industrial zoning, holding down the CTRL key whilst zoning to ensure that the area is zoned as a single large plot.
A big advantage of this method is that it allows us to create individual plots of any size - and since we're in an old, established industrial estate dating back to the Industrial Revolution era, huge dominating factories are very appropriate. This means that you can create plots up to around 10x8 tiles in order to boost your chances of seeing huge factories grow.
However, don't get too carried away. Your plots should be individual and separate from each other, and you also want to leave space to put in fillers later on, so zone carefully with this in mind:


You can also place some ploppable industrial buildings to help fill in your estate. Make sure they're appropriate though - modern high-tech lots have no place in an old-style industrial area:






That last plopped factory is actually 3 separate lots in one set - namely the BRT Industrial Brickworks set.

Diagonals are a bit different, because you can't zone anything wider than 1 tile without the plot looking dumb. Fortunately, there is a solution: Paeng's GridBuster warehouses, which are specifically designed to work with diagonals and are hence an invaluable tool in creating interesting and realistic industrial estates:


Continue zoning until the entire estate is covered:


The next item of business is bus stops. As always, don't just plop at random - determine appropriate routes for your buses and place stops along these routes:


Before we move on, let's deal with a slightly annoying issue regarding one of our previously built bus stops:


The problem is obvious. Because the bus stop is adjacent to the motorway, it accepts traffic from the motorway, since the game doesn't care about direction and elevation when dealing with transit switches (which bus stops are). So it allows traffic to switch from the motorway into the bus stop and exit through the road, because the traffic simulator doesn't care that one road is a motorway and the other a surface road.
This is an unfortunate side-effect of the simulator and there's not a lot that can practically be done about it. So we're forced to relocate the bus stop to solve this issue:


There's now a 1-tile gap between the motorway and the bus stop, preventing traffic from transferring from motorway to road via the transit switch that is the bus stop.

The basic infrastructure is now complete, and hopefully some of the plots will start to grow. This is a point at which you need to be careful to make sure the lots that appear are appropriate for an old-style industrial area. Generally speaking, we want dirty and manufacturing lots to appear. High-tech lots and modern lots are not appropriate and should be dezoned and rezoned (not demolished, since this will delete the designated plot as well as the building itself).
For example, the blue building on the left is not suitable and should be removed:


This building is high-tech, so it needs to go too:


These buildings are manufacturing lots, but they are too modern and don't fit in with the old-style feel we're trying to create, so out they go:


Be very strict and rigourous when it comes to deleting unsuitable lots. That goes for any estate you build, not just old-style heavy industrial areas. Any lot that doesn't fit into a particular area will ruin that area, so you need to be prudent if you want the best results.

What we've done so far is not really that advanced, and is just revision of the material covered in earlier projects. It's time to take this industrial estate to the next level.
The main way in which we do this is to use fillers. Specifically, we'll be using the NightOwl concrete diagonal fillers and the IRM Dirty Industry Filler Set. Although there is a fair bit of manufacturing development in the estate we're building, we're sticking with the dirty fillers because, as you will see, they feature a red brick wall, which is a very Victorian building material. This will help to create that old-style effect we're after.

Let's start with the IRM fillers. The core idea is to surround each industrial plot with a concrete area around the plot. Each of these areas should have car access (using the gate lot, which has a TE street connection), be closed off using the wall lots, and have space for the cars to get to the parking spaces (use the open area lot for this). You can fill in any leftover areas using the other filler lots - things like pipes, containers and car parks are all provided. These kinds of fillers should be placed adjacent to the industrial plots, and the type used should be appropriate to the building it adjoins. For example, it's no good putting barrels next to somewhere that produces pipes. Looking at the props on a lot is a good way of determining which filler to use:


You can see in this example that these factories are complemented by concrete blocks (perfectly reasonably for this kind of building), and some car parks.
This example also uses diagonal walls. When placing these, an orange box will appear in the preview. This should be on the inside of the filler area - i.e. in between the wall and the factories that the fillers surround:


Dumpsters are also a good way to add extra detail. These also feature an orange box on the preview, and again, this should be in between your wall and the factory:


The main bulk of the empty space around your factories should be filled in like this. Don't be afraid to get creative either - here I've used the street gate as a pedestrian back entrance to a lot:


There are some situations, however, that these fillers will not cover very well, namely small empty spaces and areas around the GridBuster warehouses.
This is where the NightOwl concrete fillers come in. They feature lots with diagonal extenders, similar to those we used when creating the business park, which not only complement the GridBuster warehouses, but allow you to extend the concrete texture right to the pavement of a diagonal street, substantially increasing realism:


The diagonal extenders are also good for filling in odd corners, like this one:


Or this one:


Some of the GridBuster lots have gaps in their perimeter fencing to allow lorries to get in. Fake street connections can be used to provide a visual connection to the road network for these lots:


There are times, however, when you'll need to use other lots because they will look better in a certain situation. Take this factory for instance:


Neither the IRM Dirty fillers nor the NightOwl concrete fillers will look good here. So I've turned to the open area lot in the IRM manufacturing set, which I think you'll agree does a far better job of complementing this factory.

Filling in the industrial estate is simply a case of continuing to add these fillers in the same way. This is an example of what you should end up with:


However, you do occasionally need to be careful. Fillers should not go under power lines, or on steep slopes (such as railway embankments). We'll look at how to deal with these cases a little later.
In addition, at the edge of a city tile, you can (and should) place fillers to give the impression that the 'filler area' extends beyond the city tile boundary, like you see here:




This will help later on when we blend the city tile borders - a vital part of region building.

Here's our industrial estate with all the fillers put in:


Our industrial estate is really starting to come together. There's still a lot to do though - look at all those empty spaces!

Let's continue by filling in around the coast. You can see in the above picture that I've left the coast area blank up until now, and that's because this coastal area requires a bit of extra work to get it looking nice.
The main problem with this area is the coast itself. Given that we're creating a dense urban area, a seawall is the best option for dealing with it - however, because the terrain transitions smoothly into the coast, simply placing a seawall and filling in things next to it on a slope is going to look pretty awful.
Therefore, we need to flatten the coastal area before we can do anything else. Go as far into the water as the game will let you:


We also need to look at the zones themselves. Before I tell you, see if you can see what is wrong with the plot in the centre of this picture:


The problem is clear for all to see - the zone is bumpy terrain-wise. When this develops, we're going to get a bumpy and unsightly lot, with the bump accentuated by the presence of flat terrain around it. So we need to dezone, flatten and rezone any and all such 'bumpy' plots:


Here's what your landscape should look like after terrain preparation is complete:


Once all the terrain preparation and zone adjustment is complete, we can construct the seawall. It's best to leave the single road tiles where they are for now, and we'll see why shortly:


This is the NBVC Riprap seawall we used with the port. We've stuck with it here for consistency. But it has other advantages - one of which is the presence of overhanging lots, allowing you to take your seawall under bridges:


When done, you should have something like this:


This is quite a nice seawall, but there's still one pressing issue. As you can see in the above pictures, some of the land protrudes beyond the seawall into the sea. This doesn't look right at all, so to deal with this we need to push it back using the Mayor Mode terrain lowering tool.
This is a dangerous job. It's very easy to take out whole areas if you're not careful, so make sure to hold the CTRL key whilst using the tool to minimise the brush size, and position the cursor in the sea, just close enough to nudge the protruding land back behind the seawall. Oh, and make sure to save before starting this, and go very slowly, doing a little bit at a time:


Unfortunately, you are bound to demolish the seawall you've just placed. This is why it's best to do this a bit at a time, so that you can replace the seawall as you go.
If you find that you've moved the terrain behind the seawall, simply make use of the single road tiles you've kept to reflatten the affected area:


When done, make sure to save, because I'm sure the last thing you want after doing that is for the game to crash, forcing you to do it all over again. Then stand back and look at your beautiful seawall:


Excellent. Now we can fill in the land next to the seawall using the same lots and techniques we used earlier in the lesson:


To fill in an odd corner, I've also put in an extra car park using the grey version of the HH Modular Parking lots - we've used the black version extensively in our previous work, so those of you who've read through from Project 1 should not have any difficulties using the grey lots:


Let's continue by doing the coastline north of the passenger railway bridge. There isn't much space between the main road and the coastline here, and it's a diagonal coast, making use of the riprap seawall a bad idea here owing to the lack of diagonal lots.
So we're going to have to fill the area in with MMPs. But before we can do that, there's a minor but important issue to deal with:


The road's pavements are completely built on one side of the road, but there's bits missing on the other side. This looks daft, so we've got to put those pavements back in - and the only way to do that is to make the game think there's deveopment next to the missing pavements.
But how do we do that without messing the terrain up with a lot or zone? The answer is to use a little zoning trick.
What you do is get a zone tool out (any one will do), and drag from an enpty tile into the road. Dragging into the road is important - don't stop next to the road. But there's more - you need to do this whilst holding the CTRL key.
This picture illustrates the correct dragging technique. Notice how the preview of the zone disappears when you drag into the road - when you see this, you know you have dragged the zone out correctly:


Do this wherever you have missing pavements, because look what it does if done correctly:


The pavements have appeared! This is because we've tricked the game into thinking that there is development next to the previously empty tiles. And if you're worried that these 'invisible zones' might develop, don't, because they won't.
This is a powerful little tool, and we'll be using it a fair bit in the future, so get practising.

With that sorted, let's get those MMPs out and go back to doing the shoreline.
Our aim is to get a similar texture to that provided by the seawall lots, in order to create a consistent look to the coastline.
To start, place moss along the shoreline:


Then place small rocks on the immediate land side of the moss:


And that's the shoreline done. Notice how it almost matches the riprap seawall texture. This is what we were aiming for, and the results are quite pleasing.
To fill in the area between the shore and the road, I'm using a simple concrete MMP:


Yes, it's basic, but we're building a dense, old-style industrial area, so it's not inappropriate or out of place.

Is there anything else we can do? Of course. We've got some more missing pavements to deal with for a start:


This presents us with a different challenge to the one we had last time. Because we're dealing with power lines, we can't use the 'invisible zone' technique outlined earlier, because this will demolish the power line, and we won't be able to put it back until we get rid of the 'invisible zone'.
But there is another way. Again, we need to make the game think that there's development or lots next to the tiles with missing pavements. So one way of sorting this out is to create a cosmetic street lot using Lot Editor and SC4Tool, which is just a tile of street with some pavements on, and does nothing else. We can then place this lot adjacent to the tiles with missing pavements:


It shouldn't be too hard to find the relevant textures in Lot Editor, and then it's a simple transit-enabling job in SC4 Tool. I'll leave this for you to do as an exercise to practice your modding skills.

Whilst we're dealing with power lines, let's fill the area under the power lines in with a concrete MMP to bolster the grungy, industrial feel of the place:


We're almost done now. To finish, let's construct some retaining walls along our steep slopes - in this case, bridge abutments and a slope next to the ferry terminal (off camera to the left in this picture):


Any suitably grungy concrete wall style will do. This particular one also has overhanging lots designed to go under bridges, so let's add those where we can. I've also created a wall lot with a catenary mast to go next to the passenger railway line:


There are still a few untouched, inaccessible corners to take care of. A good way to fill these in is with weeds, so let's place these down anywhere they will fit:




And with that, this industrial estate is finished. Let's take a look at the final results:




Of course, some more development would be nice, but we'll have to get the demand up to get that development in later lessons. This lesson is finished.

You may have noticed some of the railway lines converted to RRW specifications during this lesson. This is because the new NAM came out during the creation of this lesson, so in Lesson 15 we're going to upgrade the whole railway system in this city tile to RRW standards, as well as making a whole host of upgrades and improvements to the work we've done so far.

See you then,
Chris

[Schulmanator]

Impressive work on this area

[Gugu3]

Excellent couple of updates! The last one especially is simply great!looks like a proper UK industrial estate

[r4ndi]

what a great MD Chris (if I may call you that  )
a lot of lesson that I can get from your MD.
Dummy question from me, always wondering in my mind, what mod is this (the black picture) ? (i circled in red)



thank you
really appreciate your works.   

[kassarc16]

Looks like the transparent base bug.

[thebagleboy]

Very nice guide and good timing as I've been working on my industry area.
The riprap seawall has an addon here containing diagonal seawalls which would make diagonal a lot easier than using MMP.

Looking forward to future updates.

[mgb204]

What can I say that hasn't already been said somewhere in these comments. I spent a few evenings a while back flicking through every update, and this MD brilliantly combines a realistic looking city journal with so many useful tips which have dramatically improved the way I think about building in SC4. Thanks for all the hard work you've put into this, I'm sure many others are grateful for the way you really do try to explain everything.

The two tips for a Diagonal S Curve and adding textures to bare roads are so useful when I first read about them I had to excitedly fire up the game and test them myself. Countless times I've changed a street layout to avoid that nasty squiggle!

I noticed something about adding pavement textures too... if I do it using Low Density Commercial, I'll get a grass texture, if I use Med density I get a pavement texture ($$) and using high density I get a $$$ pavement. So it would appear you can also manipulate which texture appears to fit the surrounding ones. This is a revelation for me, no more using grass or fillers along every empty road to keep the sidewalks. 

[benedict]

Yet another helpful update with some amazing results, particularly the rail network.

And congratulations, your MD is number one on Ben's Top Ten for the first time.

Edit: and you've held on to the top for a second week - good work.

[mungojerry311]

Sorry if I'm a little late to the party, since I am starting on Project 1, but would you recommend terraforming with SC4 Terraformer for that project?

It just takes soooooooooooooo long to drag out the river like you show in that lesson.

Thanks!