Cities: Skylines

Cities: Skylines

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Guide to making limited animated assets
By Jerenable
This guide will show you how to make animated assets using the very limited features supported by the game. I this guide I will show my workflow using Blender.
   
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Introduction
Hello everyone I this guide I will try to show you how you can add very limited animations to your assets in Cities: Skylines using blender. If anyone is interested in creating the part of the guide where im Software specific for another 3d program please contact me I only know how to use blender.

All credits go to this guy: bozekj0803 I just made a more in depth guide on the subject, dahm I feel like Edison.

For this you will need:
  • Cities: Skylines
  • Afterdark DLC
  • common sense
  • blender for now at least

The asset used in this guide: Animated Tv
The guide part of the guide

So here is my model, pretty simple tv with 2 screens.


I uv mapped the model as I normally would. I also added an extra face were I will add the animation later on.

The animation or rather uv scrolling works as following: the face that is used for the animation will scrol over the uv area at an set speed from the top of the uv map to the bottom. You can change the visual speed of the animation by making your uv face bigger in the Y axis. This also means that you will see the uv mapped image twice while the animation is running and that the image will be cropped in that axis ofcourse.


The red arrow points the UV of the face i used for the animation. If I move the orange edge of the face in the y-axisin the positive direction the animation will slow down because a larger face will take longer to cycle the whole distance than a smaller face. Knowing that a UV map repeats itself in every axis + or- direction i can tell the image will be cropped in the scaled direction. So if you scale your UV to twice the size in the y-axis the animation moves slower, remember because the animation has a set speed so it takes longer to cycle the distance. But your animated image will be cropped to 50% and be shown twice in this case.

Now for the ''TRICKY'' part. I say tricky but it is really actually not :3


Go to object mode and press v. You will now have opened the vertex painter mode in Blender.


Set the collor of the vertex painting brush to black. Make sure the brush is set to black otherwise your asset won't be animated. Select the desired face and paint it.


Set the shading of your object to solid. You will be able to see the vertex paint better in this mode. As you can see in the picture above my to be animated face is collored black. Make sure all the corners of are collored black. Now export your asset and import it into the game.


Make sure you import the asset as ether the fancy fountain or one of the other animated assets using this method. If the animation is not working make sure the normal of the face the animation is on is rotated the right way, that ALL the verts of that face are collored black and that the asset is imported using the right template. If it is still not working sorry man I dunno contact me or something well try to figure it out.

Now you are done making you asset animated kind off, have nice day.
4 Comments
Crazyglueit 15 Sep, 2016 @ 6:57pm 
Video killed the radio star! Thank you for the guide!
Jerenable  [author] 28 Aug, 2016 @ 4:42pm 
Yes of course it is possible as long as the sub building uses the fountain AI
Pirazel 28 Aug, 2016 @ 4:14pm 
Congratulations. This is a major breakthrough. Do you think its possible to combine animated objects with the sub-building enabler? For example a casino with animated lights?
bozekj0803 20 Aug, 2016 @ 4:46pm 
nice guide! thanks!