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Make your own CSUR road asset

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Andrew Sun edited this page Sep 19, 2020 · 6 revisions

This article gives a tutorial about creating custom CSUR road assets for Cities:Skylines. All requires steps are numbered.

  • You don't need to know anything about 3D modeling, asset creation or modding in Cities:Skylines. Just correctly follow the steps and you will be able to make your own road asset.
  • You are NOT allowed to publish custom CSUR assets on your behalf. Due to how the models and textures for CSUR are licensed, any public distribution of CSUR assets must be made by the CSUR development team.
  • In case the same road asset created by yourself is also available on the Workshop, you should not delete your own one because the game regards them as two different assets despite the appearance and functionalities are identical.

Prerequisites

  1. You need to have the Steam version of Cities:Skylines. Distributions from other platforms do not work with the CSUR code.
  2. Download and install Blender, make sure that the version of Blender is 2.8X or 2.9X.
  3. Add Blender installation path (e.g., C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 2.83) to your PATH environment variable. You can follow the guide as in this link. This step can be confirmed by opening a Powershell window on desktop, type blender and hit Enter, Blender will be opened.

Installation of CSUR software

You can either use git clone or download each repository as a ZIP file.

  1. Download the CSUR repository from Github. This repository contains the code to create CSUR road assets and the Cities:Skylines mod for automatic asset import.

  2. Download the RoadElements repository from Github. This repository contains the models and textures for CSUR assets.

  3. CSUR and RoadElements should be put into the same folder, as in this screenshot: Otherwise the csur.ini configuration file needs to be modified to correctly specify the relative path to RoadElements.

Create your road asset

  1. The make.bat file in the CSUR repository is the entry program to create CSUR assets. Open a Powershell window in the CSUR repository folder, type ./make.bat followed by the name your road asset, for example, ./make.bat 10DC.

To learn about how CSUR modules are named, see this video and this article.

Other options for road generation are also available:

  • Adding an -r argument will also create the reverse asset of input, for example, running ./make.bat 4R=4C -r will create both 4R=4C and 4C=4R.
  • Road variants with no bike lane or sidewalks or with only sidewalk can be created by adding _express or _compact after the name of the asset, respectively. For example, ./make.bat 8DR_compact. Note that the the road variants only have the ground mode available.
  • You can also create multiple roads in a single run by listing all the assets for example, ./make.bat 1R6P 1R5P=1R6P 1R6P=2R6P 6R=5R1R6P -r
  1. After the program successfully runs, a "Blender quit" message will appear on the Powershell window:

Install the RoadImporter mod and asset source files

Now your desired road asset has been generated. The models and asset parameters are located in the output/ folder of the CSUR repository. To import them into the game, we need to install the RoadImporter mod distributed with the CSUR repository.

  1. In your local Mod folder of Cities:Skylines (C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Colossal Order\Cities_Skylines\Addons\Mods), create a folder called RoadImporter, and copy the bin/RoadImporter.dll from the CSUR repository into this folder.

  2. In the Cities:Skylines Appdata folder (go up two levels from the local Mod folder, C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Colossal Order\Cities_Skylines), also create a folder called RoadImporter. Then copy the output folder from the CSUR repository containing the files generated for your road asset into this folder, rename it as import.

  3. Copy the imports.txt folder from RoadImporter/import to the root folder of RoadImporter.

  4. Copy the textures folder from the RoadElements repository into the root folder of RoadImporter. After this step your Cities_Skylines\RoadImporter folder should look like this:

Import the road asset into Cities:Skylines

  1. Fire up Cities:Skylines, we will be using the road editor to import the source files into the game. The -noWorkshop mode is strongly preferred because with many assets subscribed the road editor will be extremely slow. Enable the RoadImporter mod in Content manager.

  1. Open Asset Editor by clicking Editors -- Asset Editor -- New, select any theme. After Asset Editor is loaded, a window will pop out listing the road assets found to import:

  1. Selecting Roads -- Six-Lane Road as the asset template. Using other roads as template will cause problems when connecting to existing CSUR roads at an intersection.

  1. Hit CTRL+L to start import. The UI of the road editor will automatically run. The import is finished after a save windows pops out and closes, and you will be able to freely move around the camera.

  2. Exit the game, start the game again, and disable RoadImporter. Then you will be able to use your own CSUR road asset in your city!

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