Building Towns in TS2009

[cookiebinks]

Hi,
I've been working on a couple of routes over the past few months and was wondering if someone could give me some tips on building towns. When I try to make them they usually end up looking like big square of buildings packed together, which looks unrealistic and is not very framerate-friendly. How can I make the towns look realistic, eye appealing and framerate friendly at the same time?
Thanks,
Erik

 

[NJCurmudgeon]

Hi Erik,

I've had the same issues. The best thing I've done is to simply look at reality. If you travel by a real train, look out the window and study what you see - sounds simple, but as Yogi Berra once said, "You can observe a lot by just watching."

What I've been trying to do is keep the "complex" stuff close to the tracks. That's the roads with car traffic, traffic light intersections, people, etc. These are the things you'll see from the train and will add to the effect. But once you get beyond a certain distance, simplify it so it eats up less resources - no point in having a realistic intersection that you don't really see enough of from the train to appreciate! You can bend roads or use hills to "hide" distant stuff while still looking relatively real.

I don't know if any of this helps - and I'll be interested to see what others come up with.

Good luck!

Gordon

 

[mezzoprezzo]

Hello Erik.

Try varying the ground height. It need not be by very much. Most places in the world aren’t flat!

Use different height buildings as well. This gives a better illusion of depth.

Many route builders, at first, think that towns should be all buildings and the countryside should be all foliage.

In reality nothing could be further from the truth. Probably the most important aid to achieveing a "real" look is to place trees in between buildings.

Doing this will help define the outlines of walls and rooflines, and separate each on from its neighbours. It improves the illusion of reality enormously. Just the smallest amount of greenery poking around/above buildings can enhance the scene.

I also place and odd building or two in countryside scenes. Simple things like having a rooftop just visible above a tree line can work really well.



Cheers
Casper

 

[mjolnir]

Take some field trips, and examine the small towns you see. Take a notebook and camera along, and visit Norway, Fairview, Springville, Lisbon, Ely, Fairfax, Walton, Atkins, and Newhall, and see what is there, and try to find out what used to be there. Don't just examine the commercial sections, either; explore the residential areas. How close together are the buildings? How old are they? Take a pencil and notebook, and a camera, and take lots of pictures and make lots of notes for future study. Go to the library, and get some books surveying urban development. Every town developed the way it did for a reason. Try to find out what the reasons were, and how they affected development. Then use that as a model for how your town developed. A very small town will have one commercial center; a larger one will have a primary commercial center, and a couple secondary ones. If the town was founded before the railroad came through, the commercial center may very likely be away from the train station. ON the other hand, if the town was founded by the railroad, or after it came through, the original commercial center would likely have been around the railroad station. But it's possible urban blight in that area might have resulted in that area now being a secondary commercial center, with the primary one being some place else, perhaps around the big box store at the edge of town.

Remember that very often the view seen from the railroad is the back of buildings, not the front, and pay as much attention to the views in the alleys as you do to the views from the street.

One thing you may find, is that in old cities and towns, the area immediately around the commercial center is occupied by larger dwellings of the merchant class, with smaller dwellings around those.

ns

 

[johnwhelan]

Look at the content carefully, each scenery item comes with a 500 poly equivalent overhead. So if you can find a block of four buildings in the same mesh this is good. Watch the poly content as well, some assets are more performance friendly than others. You want to avoid ones with lots of textures. Aus house multi 60 is an example of four houses for the price of one but probably doesn't fit with your geography.

Cheerio John

 

[mjolnir]

Another thing to keep in mind about villages, towns, and cities: the smaller the municipality, the smaller the density. A really small town will have a few houses not necessarily very close together. A larger community will have more houses, with less distance between, and a city, will have even more buildings, many of which have no space between.

Another thing to remember is that most cities, towns, and villages have a "look and feel" that is different from other cities towns and villages of the same size. If one looks at photos of a small town in one part of the world, it will look different than photos of a small town in a different part of the world, even if the distance between the two is small. There will be common features between small towns of the same size in the US state of Georgia, and in Iowa, but there will be differences, too. In like manner, there will be subtle differences between small towns in one part of a state, and another. For example, looking at photos of a small town in Northern Iowa, and photos of a similarly sized small town in the far Southern part of the state, I'd expect to see that the roof pitch on the houses in the North tends to be steeper than the roof pitch on houses in the South, which are steeper than the pitch on houses in Southern Missouri. This is more noticeable on older buildings than on newer ones. On the other hand, if all three houses have porches in the front, I'd expect the house in Missouri to have a deeper porch than the house in Southern Iowa, and both would tend to be deeper than the porch on the house in Northern Iowa.

ns

 

[JCitron]

Here's a couple of images from my own route.
http://img487.imageshack.us/img487/3134/pembrokefromthecottagehwx8.jpg

The city is placed on the hill with smaller buildings along the track. Eventually to the right are houses setup in a development, then the houses get more spread apart as they move beyond the city and into the suburbs.

http://img487.imageshack.us/img487/6947/somehousesalongthetrackdb7.jpg

Behind the camera is the industrial area, and the reason the city exists. Pembroke is a mill city and the mills line a canal with a falls and various industrial buildings with sidings.

http://img487.imageshack.us/img487/1194/whatmadepembrokesobigwo8.jpg



I based this on some of the local towns and cities around where I live in New England.

John

 

[Kon1786]

a little tip to when using move hold the control button and it will lock the building to the grid, so if your using all the same items such as houses it makes for easy alignment.
A City i just got allot of work done tonight..

 

[Euphod]

I see much good advice in this thread, well done all.
My tip would concern the use of land. Railroad right of ways were originally purchased on the cheap where possible, so most don't run through prime real estate. Often breaking up the concentration of buildings can be hard, so I recommend any assets that use large plots of land. Cemeteries, golf courses, quarries, farm fields and other assets can be invaluable in these circumstances.