How to Create Custom Assets for CIties Skylines 2 (Rough Guide)
Hey guys, tons of you have requested this video, and its finally arrived. This is a very rough and quick, guide to asset creation. Follow me for an hour as I walk through creating a small fire house from the moment I come up with the plan, to the moment it is on PDX mods.
MASSIVE DISCLAIMER:
This is not the only, or the best way to make assets, I have only been doing this for a few months myself. There are likely mistakes I have made. I want this to be helpful to people, especially visual learners like myself. That said, PLEASE reference the linked resources for more complete guides and information!
Official Wiki (YOUR FIRST STOP) https://cs2.paradoxwikis.com/Modding
Modding Discord / discord
3D Modeling & Geometry
Blender https://www.blender.org/
An open-source 3D creation suite used for modeling, UV mapping, and rigging the main 3D meshes of your assets.
Onshape https://www.onshape.com/en/
A cloud-native, parametric CAD platform excellent for precision-modeling clean, hard-surface architectural elements or mechanical parts before exporting them to a mesh editor.
Texturing & Image Editing
Substance Painter https://www.adobe.com/products/substa...
The industry standard for 3D PBR (Physically Based Rendering) texturing, allowing you to paint materials, wear, and grime directly onto your 3D models.
Adobe Photoshop https://www.adobe.com/products/photos...
The go-to raster graphics editor for building, tweaking, and fine-tuning raw texture maps (diffuse, specular, normal, illumination).
NVIDIA Texture Tools Exporter https://developer.nvidia.com/texture-...
A standalone tool and Photoshop plugin used to compress and export texture maps into game-ready .dds files with proper mipmaps.
Utilities & Organization
IrfanView https://www.irfanview.com/
A lightweight, lightning-fast image viewer ideal for quickly checking batches of textures, reviewing asset screenshots, or performing rapid image conversions.
Windows PowerToys https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/win...
A suite of system utilities including "Image Resizer" for batch texture shrinking and "ColorPicker" for instantly grabbing hex codes from source photos.
Visual Studio Code https://code.visualstudio.com/
A powerful text editor used to modify asset configurations, write scripts, or tweak .json data files for modding dependencies.