Building KAUST
Building Kaust is a massive task, for this reason the workflows must be streamlined from adapting art assets to placement into the game.
A cumbersome process was used to generate a high resolution (8192x8192) image of the map that was captured to be exactly 17280 x 17280 meters in size, which is the scale of a full cities skylines map, 9x9 tiles. This guide was followed to generate that high resolution image of KAUST:
As for terrain generation, no height map data of the city was found, so I had to create my own height map using some photo editing, by selecting water and land and giving them solid gray values to represent their height.
This eliminated the need for cumbersome manual terrain carving in game and then a scaled terrain with a scaled high resolution reference image was obtained in game. No manual adjustments were needed ingame as the images were perfectly matching in resolution and aspect ratio
Now that I’ve had a perfect 1:1 scale of the map, I wanted to double check that everything is perfect, so I used the scaling reference to scale the models in blender
Surely enough, when imported into cities it sits perfectly above its silhouette in the reference image
The next part was modelling the roads, roads were tricky as the only reference I had was low resolution satellite imagery which was only good for knowing the widths of roads, this worked fine but a mod called Network Extensions 2 was used to add more roads options, this came in handy as some roads were thinner than the roads that come stock with the game.
Here is a timelapse of a part of the building process
And the outcome:
As for the rest of the city, more 3D scans of buildings and/or detailed reference images with approximate dimensions will be needed to build and plop the rest. Depending on how successful collaboration will be the complexity of this process will be determined. It’ll surely need a lot of art labor though.