City outline

Building the city outline has had its fair share of challenges, grid-like road structures were pretty straight forward, however uncommon road formations like roads that merge into each other or roundabouts have been harder for the game to reproduce cleanly, so for this reason, a mod called Node controller renewal was used, this mod is able to control road transitions on a spline level which is pretty powerful, and there’s many experimentation to be done to reach its full potential for achieving a clean streamlined workflow.

An attempt at making a roundabout without Node controller:

By using node controller with tweaking just a few parameters in fraction of the time:

As for the full city outline, around 95% of it was done with the only remaining parts being outside of the high resolution reference photos, so more modifications to the mega reference image will have to be done.

Other types of intersections used bridges over roads, and for this Fine road anarchy was used as the game didn’t allow roads to overlap each other.

Building Kaust

Luckily, the city’s residential areas have a few house designs that are repeated across large areas, so for this reason, a single house 3D model was enough to cover a pretty substantial area, with the remaining house designs being able to cover the rest once they’re done and fully cleaned up.

As for accessories such as fences and trees, the fences have to be placed manually using a mod called Hedges which allows placing bush like fences using splines like roads.

A short timelapse of how they’re quickly placed and adjusted

“Underground” view, pretty neat for visualizing 3D assets.

Mods that were used worth noting:

Extra landscaping tools Used for defining the beach area, can later be used for massively “painting” vegetation and trees over large areas.

Ultimate eye candy Used for controlling/stopping time of day and applying color correction for visual purposes.

City limitations

With the 81 tiles mod enabled, the workable area is 324 square km (18*18 km), which is more than enough to build the entire city of KAUST.

Demonstration of the city compared the entire available building area.

So for this reason, this mod might be disabled in the future for its redundancy as it also introduces a bunch of known issues stated in its steam workshop description.