How To Create Plugins

[doug_w]

I would love to start making lots of Sydney, Australia buildings.

Could someone please advise what software I need to do this and are there any simple tutorials on how to do it,  for dummies like me

[mgb204]

Making buildings is not something that is really easy to do, it requires knowledge of 3D modelling and creating graphics assets to pull off.

SC4's official application for making models is called the Building Architect Tool or SC4 BAT for short. Find that in the "Official Maxis Files" section of this site (check the left bar in black). However this is not a stand-alone application, you'll need another, gMax, to use SC4 BAT, this can be downloaded from here. SC4 BAT comes with a very basic help file, but it's not a lot of use if you've never used 3D modelling software before. There is a separate downloadable tutorial for gMax (see previous link, under gmax Help / gmax12_tutorials.exe), but that's really most help in learning how to use the application itself. Note that SC4 BAT is a set of scripts for use with gMax, so it looks/works pretty much identically, but has tools for exporting the final result into a format SC4 can utilise. After that, the most comprehensive tutorial I know of can be found on Simtropolis here.

In order to make anything that looks decent, you'll need to get the hang of working with textures too. So if you've experience with GIMP/Photoshop it will be a big advantage.

[doug_w]

Many thanks MGB204, appreciate the quick response to my post. Many thanks for the links. Have downloaded all. Have installed GMAX and registered it. Now it will be a steep learning curve, which will hopefully produce some good results.

Cheers

Doug