Nürburgring
The Nürburgring is one of the most iconic race tracks in the world. The Grand Prix Circuit (5.15km) and Nordschleife (20.83km) wind their way through the Eifel Forest in Germany, just south of Köln and west of Koblenz. The course is named after the tiny town of Nürburg, which sits within the northern loop, its castle at the top of a hill surveying all that takes place below. Hot metal and oil tear up the tarmac on race days, with the annual 24-hour endurance being the most popular race of them all. The treacherous nature of the track earned it the nickname "The Green Hell," coined in 1968 by the legend Sir Jackie Stewart. The Nürburgring is undeniably one of the hallowed halls of motorsport.
The terrain was created by importing open data provided by the Rheinland-Pfalz region of the German government. The original source is DGM1 (Digitale Geländemodelle) at one-meter resolution, in the local Coordinate reference system (CRS) of EPSG:25832. I have converted the data with QGIS (open-source Geographic Information Software) and exported it as a heightmap for Cities Skylines. I chose the Lanczos algorithm, which is able to find the most useful values, to downscale the data. Even at the 16m-node-raster resolution of the game terrain, the result is stunning!
data credit:
Landesamt für Vermessung und Geobasisinformation Rheinland-Pfalz (LVermGeo)
This map publication is accompanied by four custom overlays that I have exported in the same CRS to perfectly match the terrain. Each image is highly detailed at 16384×16384 pixels in lossless .png format.
- Nuer-GE-sat (Google Earth "satellite view")
- Nuer-DOP20 ("True Orthophoto" from 20cm-raster imaging by German govt.)
- Nuer-DTK5-RP ("Digital Topography Map" diagram by German govt.)
- Nuer-OSM-tweaked (Open Streetmap at high zoom level with colors tweaked)
The "DOP20" overlay is a sight to behold — it is a perfect top-down ortho view that has been meticulously cleaned. You will not see any sides of buildings and it is so precise that you can plop roads from it directly.
Download the four overlays from my googledrive here[drive.google.com]
This map has 895,679 trees — all of which have been plopped by hand! There is an inner circle of around 500k custom workshop asset trees, an outer circle of around 250k vanilla trees, and finally around 20k vanilla shrubs that span the entire map. The custom workshop trees all belong to my Ami’s Berlin Trees collection. I went full tryhard on the inner circle, almost representing actual real-life trees one-by-one. My tactic was to use the GE-satview overlay, which was taken during the winter, to isolate the deciduous trees that appeared as brown leafless areas and plop them with deciduous brush compositions. Then I went to the DOP20-overlay, which was taken during the summer, to fill in the remaining evergreens. I used the same approach to do the outer areas, but with extremely limited vanilla brushes. I’ve saved and shared each trees layer in a new Nuerburgring Restore category on allbuilds[www.allbuilds.org]. Be sure to sub to the workshop trees collection and allow at least 1 million trees in Tree Control mod by algernon before you load the map.
This map requires Mass Transit DLC primarily for the two-lane two-way highways that service the map. The Nürburgring GP Circuit and Nordschleife are represented by a simple vanilla highway onramp. I made heavy use of macsergey’s Node Controller Renewal mod to tweak the nodes of the racecourse and intersections of the highways. You can easily upgrade the track to my custom Racetrack 8m asset if you like. I will also release an allbuilds export of the track that will include the various IMT curbs and custom fence assets in the near future.
Thanks to patrons: Graham Jenkins, Jojo R, wopiTV, TobbySkylines, Oleg Leirich, Timo Häßler, Mike Goldsberry and schohns
[www.patreon.com]
If you would like to see more stuff like this, please consider supporting me on Patreon.
Now let’s send it!
Required DLC:
These DLC should be installed in order to use this item.
Cities: Skylines - Mass Transit
