How to make cities like Nemo....

January 28, 2000, 17:14

At the request of another civer, I've made this tiny step by step tutorial of how I made the Trans-America Tower in the style of Nemo who did his cities in the style of Sim City 2000.

To begin, I'll say that it is much easier to make cities Nemo's way then any other I've tried. One reason is becuase all of the building are slanted at an easy angle to work with. Another is that many of the buildings require few colors to work with. Lights are on one side and shadows are on another.

Here are the steps I used in making the Tower:

Click Here to download this image!

#1
I made the skeleton of the tower. This was tough because I didn't know what the exact angle of the tower should be at.

#2
In this step I was trying to make the little part the doesn't angle, but that goes vertically around the top of the tower. I began by making a square inside the original base of the tower.

#3
Still making the inside tower here, I made the base into a rectangle instead of a square because the vertical part only shows up on two sides of the tower.

#4
I then moved the skeleton of the inside vertical tower into the main outline. This made it easier to make the vertical part.

#5
Although it looks like I made a lot of progress, I just filled in the bubbles, so to speak.

The shadows are the important thing to learn here, because they are one of the integral parts of any buildings made in this style. Most of the light-shadow colors should have the same ratio as other colors (r-y-b), but as long as it looks good it doesn't matter. You may notice that the vertical tower the runs through the middle isn't where the skelaton was. The reason for this is that, through trial and error, I learned that it looked better if it wasn't where the original sketches said it should have been.

#6
In this drawing, you can see that I'd added more details to make the final building. The two colors in the light and the two colors in the shadows have the same difference in color, but I don't reme,ber what it was. The whole thing took me about three hours to make, and much of it was just screwing around.

#7
This is a picture of the building in a city. I took the basic design of Nemo's cities from 2194 Day's of War and edited them a little for my own use.

So in conclusion, before this, I thought that I couldn't draw. Well, I learned that it wasn't just talent that Alex, Nemo, and all the other artists have, it's the ability to sit on their ass for a couple of hours until they get the damn thing right!

So everyone needs to get out there and draw!

[This message has been edited by Fast_Eddie (edited January 29, 2000).]

NickC · January 28, 2000, 19:35

Excellent! Thanks a ton!

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Captain Nemo · January 28, 2000, 20:52

Excellent tutorial and nice to see that what I did can be reused...Very nice city BTW.
Another tip: You can make tanks and airplanes exactly the same way! It's a little more complicated as far as the shapes and proportions, but a tank is just a bunch of geometric shapes stacked on top of eachother.

January 28, 2000, 21:07

Thank you! The only thing I don't like about it is that blue building in the back...perhaps I'll change it.

I'm glad you like it CN!

BTW, other buildings are MUCH easier to make. The toughest part of that one was making the little vertical part come out at the right direction. I almost gave on that until I decided to make the little red and blue structures. Once I made that, then the rest was easy!

Captain Nemo · January 28, 2000, 22:09

How do you place images in a thread? It looks very nice and I would love to include pictures in some of my discussions.
Like adding screen shots and units?
[This message has been edited by Captain Nemo (edited January 29, 2000).]

January 28, 2000, 22:41

First you have to place them on the web. I have AOL so I just use my AOL space to upload the pics. Other providers have space you can upload them to as well. I messed up the first time I tried to upload and made it so that you could only download the image, but in the end it made more sense because that imgage wasn't large enough at all.

Anyway, you could also go and get some webspace from geocities or another service like that, not for a site, but just for uploading images to include in threads.

After you get them on the net, then you use the img (image) tag provided by the nice people at UBB.

Then you put in the address between the [ img] and [ /imag] but without the spaces.

That's it.

[This message has been edited by Fast_Eddie (edited January 29, 2000).]

Michael Daumen · January 28, 2000, 23:13

Wow, Eddie, that city looks great! I did much of the same things when ripping off Nemo's European cities

January 29, 2000, 00:26

Thanks Mike!

I was busy making this image of the Brandenburg Gate and I ran into a little trouble...

I'm not sure how to approach the Quadria of Victory (The Green Statue at the top). I tried to mess with a bunch of green pixels, but that didn't work! Any help would be great!

BTW, right-click on the image, copy it, and then paste it into a paint program to get a closer look at it...

[This message has been edited by Fast_Eddie (edited January 29, 2000).]

Stefan Härtel · January 29, 2000, 05:24

I couldn't download the pics

Would you mind sending them to me by eMail? (adress in the profile)

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NickC · February 12, 2000, 09:49

Ok, now, we just need to find out how to do tanks like Nemo, and artillery, and, infantry, etc like Alex Mor!

Civfan · May 22, 2000, 20:15

Just looked for some advice on building cities and maybe someone else wants to take a look again too.

Thanks

May 24, 2000, 11:24

Hey, Eddie, this is super-neat. Any chance you could turn the insights you and Nemo have come up with into an SLeague design tip?

I certainly learned something here.

May 31, 2000, 00:50

I dunno. It's not like this is new or anything. Like I said, this is just the same way that those SimCity buildings are drawn, except much smaller. It would be possible to make a tip about it, but I dunno...this little thing seems to do the trick for most people.

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St Leo · December 9, 2001, 16:26

Neat thread.

Case · December 9, 2001, 18:23

Wasn't there a 'How to make tanks like Nemo' thread as well?

ravagon · December 10, 2001, 01:22

I don't know about a tank thread but I distinctly remember something with a WW2 aeroplane in it.
We need more of these threads for the artistically challenged among us. ie: Me

Case · December 10, 2001, 01:37

Quote:

Originally posted by ravagon
We need more of these threads for the artistically challenged among us. ie: Me

Are you working on any scenarios Ravagon? I've always thought that the maori wars would make a good scenario...

ravagon · December 10, 2001, 03:22

Heh. I'll take it under advisement but I think that would pretty much amount to throwing warriors against musketeers for pretty much the whole game - From what I know there wasn't really a lot of variety in weapon specialization, spears and clubs (called patu's) - nor much of a need for it as NZ at the time was pretty much all forest/bush and most forms of ranged combat beyond thrown spears (and I'm not actually sure they were thrown

) wasn't highly useful.
Wrt the Colonials versus the Maoris I think it was more a series of skirmishes, with the different tribes never really cooperating in a way that could have given them a chance ... similar to the Indian wars in North America I think...