martinusK wrote: ↑29 Aug 2020 11:37
Had a quick look at your work. There's quite a few issues which I'll highlight, but don't take it as demotivation.
First off, the density. You've added a lot of companies to Jurmala, and together with Riga, this area is now among the most densest on the map. Often enough less is more and you'll find that a more relaxed and open road network, and less companies, means that the driving is more pleasant and you can add more interesting scenery - for instance, having Livu Akvaparks represented instead of the Rimi is far more interesting and gives you a landmark.
The road network itself - you've done some really interesting things in Jurmala, but again, there's the density question - up to you. Do try and keep your roads less bendy - use free node rotation, so all nodes on a straight road have the same rotation and line up with each other. Other curves, like the railway bridge at Dzintari - just make the curves less intense, because it's not pleasant to drive in it's current form at all. I haven't checked in editor, but it seemed to me that you're using Scandinavian and Baltic DLC prefabs/roads mixed all together - use all the same, preferably Baltic - and try and match asphalt textures. It just doesn't look nice at all when there's four different asphalt colours in 500m, and all the intersections are in a completely different colour altogether.
Other than that, it's just a bit sloppy - houses sticking out on the road, low-poly buildings right next to the road (this is a big no-no!), missing shoulders or brushing...But this all comes with time and practice, ofcourse.
It's really nice to see that you took up this project and I hope you improve. You've done some cool stuff with this mod and if you spend some time polishing it, it could be really nice. But I would still really advise a less dense road system and less companies - otherwise you'll also have the issue of, for instance, too many jobs to a small Baltic town, or Jurmala being bigger than several massive European towns
Hey, thanks for the critique! I understand that Jūrmala is way denser than it should be as compared to other maps, and some of the company prefabs look pretty dated, so I might take them out. As for road prefabs and roads, I basically only used dlc_balt ones and I don't remember using dlc_north at all in terms of road design–maybe only buildings and models.
Also, I am terrible at Blender modelling, so making landmarks like Līvu akvaparks and Dzinaru koncertzāle would be hella difficult for me. I gotta admit, the Rimi prefab does not really reflect Lielupe that well.
The extensive usage of different road variants also looks bad, I agree, and I did that because I was just learning how to map at the time, so I'll probably make those more consistent as well.
As for the bends: it's hard to map such an area where SCS did not intend one to be, so I was very liberal with the layout and tried to squeeze everything together, which, by even using some free rotation on the road nodes still left it bad. At this point, I am too lazy to smoothen out the layout, but I totally get your frustration.
Lastly, I didn't check if I was using low-poly models sometimes, which left the whole thing distored and I couldn't be bothered to terraform and add fences everwhere, so it all comes down to sloppy planning and laziness. Also, because of my bad organisation of Bezier patches, roadside terrain and terrain, brushing became hard in some places.
All in all, I've learnt a lot from mapping this, but in the end, planning is extremely important it turns out and maybe I need to engage in more modelling practice for Blender to create unique and distinguishing features.
