How to Build Realistic Interchanges in Cities skylines 2

hey everyone I'm Tim eisterer and welcome to my guide on creating real estate freeway interchanges freeway interchanges are a vital piece of road infrastructure in any City around the world an interchange is a place where two freeways meet or where a freeway and another road meet an interchange has at least two levels so traffic going through is not interrupted and the different levels are connected by on and off ramps Highway interchanges come in all shapes and sizes to serve different purposes but regardless of what type you build here's some tips and tricks you can apply to make your interchanges not only function good but look realistic as well okay here I am in the game I have a stretch of highway running through here and I'm going to show you how to build a realistic looking Diamond Interchange to start with now although this is a very simple design a lot of what I'm going to be showing you today can be applied to any type of interchange no matter how big or small so first I want to review what a lot of players or a lot of new new players will do when building an overpass which is not inherently wrong but if you're aiming for realism there's some things you can do to improve on this so a lot of players what they'll do is build a road from Ground Zero like this and raise it all the way up to 10 m and just build a simple overpass just like this now if this were to be done in real life it would be incredibly expensive because you're building a bridge all the way from ground Zer up to 10 m and then back down to ground zero for the run-of-the-mill diamond interchange on pretty much any stretch of highway in the world this is a bit Overkill and no government body would sign off on this so I'm going to show you how to create a much more realistic overpass so the first thing that you're going to want to do is go into your Road menu and actually select the three lane asymmetrical Road and I'll talk about the reason why in just a little bit the second thing you want to do is bring your elevation step down to the smallest increment or the one just before it and what you want to do next is raise your road up to 7.5 M which is the minimum clearance required for an overpass then you can simply create a bridge that spans your stretch of highway and I like to create my bridges as close to 90° as I can possibly get them and you don't want to make your bridge too long I think this length is okay you just want to span it a little bit past the width of your entire highway now if you're lucky if you create your bridge at just the right length you can actually place a pillar in the middle of the median which is a very realistic feature on a lot of overpasses and you can simply do this by double clicking in the middle of your bridge and there we have it a nice support column however this only works if you see a silhouette of a support column when hovering your mouse over your bridge now that our bridge is complete we're going to work on a little bit of landscaping to create elevated roads on either side of the bridge so head on into your Landscaping menu and you want to select your shift terrain tool and I like to reduce my brush strength to about 30% to make it a bit easier to manage the terrain next what you want to do is raise the terrain on either side of your overpass to just above the height of the surface of the road if you go too high that's not a problem simply go into your level terrain tool if needed you can reduce the size of your brush to make it a little easier and as you can see here if I zoom in you can see contour lines that indicate the height of the terrain you want to select a Terrain height that is just ever so slightly higher than the bottom of the overpass in this case I may have gone a little too low you can test this by selecting another type of Road make sure you're down to 0 m in elevation and your road should be flat in this case I lowered my terrain a bit too low so you can simply go back into your shift terrain tool raise it ever so slightly and then using your level terrain tool we can flatten it out to hopefully the same height as the top of the bridge we can test that again here and as you can see this is now at a perfect height so I'm going to do the exact same thing on the other side of the bridge going to try to get this as close as [Music] possible and this looks pretty good and there we have it a good portion of our overpass is now complete I'm now going to work on the slope hopes back to ground zero and this is very easy go into your level terrain tool and stretch this out for as far as you want it really and then using your soften and terrain tool you may need to increase your brush strength to make this a little more powerful you can then smooth out the terrain to make a nice sloping road back to the ground surface and again I'm going to do exactly the same thing over on this side you can then stretch your road off into whatever Direction you need it to go ultimately you want your overpass to be similar to this one this is a much more realistic example where instead of having a bridge from point A to point B the bridge is only as long as it's needed and elevated roads are connected to the bridge on either end so essentially the goal is to use the landscaping tools to create much more realistic interchanges you can even apply the same logic when creating underpasses as well simply do the exact opposite of what I showed you already elevate your Highway roads above your regular roads and you can have some nice underpasses just like this example here now that my overpass is complete let's work on the off and on ramps onto my perpendicular Road here so I'm just going to change this segment of Road into a three lane asymmetrical Road and let's start to work on our on and off ramps so I'm going to go back into my level terrain tool and what you want to do is extend your flat area just like this you want to make sort of two T's on either side of your Highway a little something like this and then once you have it to maybe about this length you can simply soften the terrain similarly to how we did with our road and this will set the Landscaping needed to support our off-ramps so for your off-ramps depending on what type of interchange you're building a one lane oneway Highway May suffice or if you're anticipating a lot more traffic on your interchange you may need to go with a two-lane oneway highway but for this example a one lane oneway Highway will do just fine so for building your off ramps um this is totally up to you and and and this is a bit subjective on how you want your Interchange to look um and and what kind of scale you want it to have have but generally I like to have my exit start at maybe about this far away from my interchange so um for building your off ramps uh it's totally up to you what works best I find that disabling snapping works the best because it allows you the most freedom and uh and it makes it easier for creating nice smooth curves just like so so I'm going to do the exact same on the other side and personally I like my diamond interchanges to be as symmetrical as I can possibly get them so I'm going to try to create my exit to be the exact same length and I think that's pretty good now for your onramps it's a little more complicated if we're talking about functionality and this again applies to any interchange that you're ever going to build bffa often refers to this as Lane mathematics we have to do Lane mathematics to ensure that our highways function as smoothly as possible and that we're not suffering from any traffic bottlenecks so what I need to do in this case is create a merge lane so for this step you're really going to want snapping to be on because if you don't have snapping enabled it's going to make upgrading your highways to three lanes much more difficult so in this case here I got lucky because my merge lane that I just created here is at exactly the right point where my onramp is going to meet the highway in some cases you may not get as lucky just like over here on this side so we can see that my merge lane I find should start at about this point but unfortunately it starts over here what you need to do is Select pretty much any type of road but personally I like using any one one lane road as they're very narrow and easy to work with you want to enable snapping for this step for sure and you just want to create a little spur like this exactly where you want your merge lane to start and then you can head on over back into the desired number of lanes and then simply downgrade to that number of lanes in this case too and you can delete your little spur and now my merge lane ends at exactly this spot now if I want to extend my merge lane a bit past where it is currently I can apply the same logic but the opposite and I'm going to make my merge lane just a little bit longer to give drivers a chance to merge onto the highway properly there so now I can simply go back into my one lane Highway and create an onramp back onto the highway and again you want your curves to be as smooth as you can possibly make them I think that looks pretty good if I say so myself now at this point it may look like our interchange is mostly complete but there's a couple of things you can do to make your interchange function even better so if I zoom in here this support column that I created in the very middle of the bridge not only looks realistic it actually enables us to improve the functionality of our interchange by creating a left turning lane now for this example you're going to have to turn off snapping and be very careful as your road will most likely do all sorts of wonky movements like this but if you're extra careful you can create a turning lane that will allow traffic to turn left onto an on-ramp without impeding traffic going straight and there we have it we have a nice Diamond interchange the only thing left to do is to do a bit of landscaping around The Interchange by smoothing it all out to get rid of those sharp edges and just to generally get it all smoothed out to make it look all nice and there we go now City skylines is a bit limited on detailing right now so there's not a whole lot you can do except going back into your Landscaping menu I always recommend maybe adding a few bushes here and there around The Interchange maybe some trees whichever trees of your choice and over time when these trees start growing it's just going to add another layer of detailing to your interchange and there you go that is how you create a realistic Diamond interchange City skylines is however very finicky so you may have to play with your terrain a little bit uh you may have to redo some of your on and off ramps a few times to get them to to act just right but with a little bit of patience and perseverance you can create some wonderful interchanges in City skylines 2 with nothing but the default tools that come with the game now again I'm using a very very simple design here a diamond interchange is probably the most common type of interchange in the world but no matter how big or small The Interchange that you're creating is you can apply a lot of the tricks that I've shown you in this video to make your interchange function and look fantastic so the only thing you really need to keep in mind is make sure you use the landscaping tools to your advantage to make your Bridges look more realistic but also make sure to use things like turning Lanes wherever you can to improve the efficiency of your interchanges wherever possible so that's going to be it for this tutorial um let let me know down in the comments if you would like me to show you how to create some different types of interchanges in the future maybe such as a parlo interchange which is quite common maybe a clover leaf or even a four stack major interchange uh would be really cool to show you guys so let me know down in the comments what you think um if you thought this tutorial was informative and useful to you make sure you leave a like and be sure to subscribe to the channel to get notified for future city skylines 2 videos that are on the horizon thank you everybody for watching and I will see you in the next video

Channel: Timeister

Views: 17,570

Keywords: cities skylines 2, cities skylines

Id: wQnYzQmS6d4

Length: 14min 34sec (874 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 22 2023