City Blocks¶

A City Block Floor fills a closed area surrounded by roads and junctions, such as the ground of a city block, a park or a plaza. It follows the inner edges of the roads around it, and updates when they change.

Creating floors¶

1. In the Roads panel, click Create City Block Floors. While it's on, the button reads Exit Creating City Block Floors.
2. Hover a closed region between roads. It's highlighted.
3. Click to create a floor there.

Regions shown in orange already have a floor. Press Esc, or click the button again, to stop. Starting the tool turns off Edit Road Points, and the other way round.

While the tool is on, the box under the settings says how many closed regions it found.

Settings for new floors¶

The fields under the button are the starting values of new floors:

Top Material, Wall Material and Bottom Material

The floor surface (or the top of its shell), the shell walls and the shell bottom. Empty wall and bottom materials use the top material.

Fill and Cell Size

How the surface is divided: Quad, Hex, Delaunay Subdivisions or None. Cell Size is the size of the quads, hexes or subdivisions.

UV Tile Size

World units covered by one texture tile.

Shell

Gives the floor a thickness: the distance from its base to its top. Zero keeps a single surface.

Extrusion Direction and Base Offset

The direction of the shell, in the floor's local space, and a distance that moves the surface along it before the shell is built. Negative values move it the other way.

Add Top, Add Walls and Add Bottom

Which parts of the shell are built.

Flip

Reverses every face of the floor, turning the surface and its shell inside out.

New floors also turn on Auto UV in world space on their Editable Mesh, so the texture continues across neighbouring floors, like on the roads around them.

Settings¶

Three components on the floor object work together:

City Block Floor

Finds the region the floor belongs to and writes its outline into the spline below, every time the roads around it change.

Spline Container

Holds the outline as a closed spline of straight segments. The floor rewrites it whenever it rebuilds, so edit the roads, not this spline.

Editable Primitive

A Surface primitive that fills the outline. Its Surface settings hold the shape of this floor: fill, cell size, shell, extrusion and the top, wall and bottom materials. See Surface.

The City Block Floor inspector shows the floor's status and two buttons:

Rebuild

Rebuilds the selected floors' surfaces, even when their outline hasn't changed.

Reassign Region

With one floor selected, starts the creation tool: click the region the floor should fill.

When roads change¶

The floor follows the roads around it. When they rebuild, the region is found again, and the floor's outline and surface update. Linking or unlinking a junction along the block's edge keeps the floor on the same block.

The status in the inspector tells you when the floor needs attention:

If the Surface primitive can't build the floor, its error shows in the status instead.