Ground-level shops, stalls, and facilities all place on the ground-level TurnU piece.

While the elevated TurnU piece comes with railings and posts the ground-level version of this piece doesn’t. Raised TurnU pieces will transition into other pieces when they’re placed one next to the other. Ground-level TurnU pieces remain unchanged regardless if they’re placed singly or in groups.

Let’s add paths to this arrangement so we can attract some guests.

For my own needs I’ve decided that the lesser of the two problems with Path Creator ground-level paths is to have the path border inner corners displaying at the same time as I place the paths. To offset this I’ve made a decal in a matching texture so that when my paths are completed I can cover those unwanted corner arrangements that appear in the centers of my plazas.

After the placement of the plaza decals the path border inner corners are where they should be and the corner arrangements that are in plain view in plazas have been concealed.

Ground-level paths will always need their inner border corners but not every park will have plazas in it so I’ve decided that for me it will be more convenient to include the inner path border corners with my Path Texture A and for me to just put the decals in my plaza centers at those times I do include ground-level plazas in my park. These decals will also be suitable to cover these same sorts of corner arrangements out in the middle of ride baseplates. For now let’s integrate this area with the rest of the park …

Now that we’ve put up our suspended paths it’s easy to see that we’re missing fencing on our ground-level paths. CSO fences add so much more to the appearance of our bordered paths and, when we make them over from our Path Creator pre-import sets, will blend our ground-level paths beautifully into our suspended paths.

It’s rarely possible to achieve such a coordinated look by using a path set made by one Custom Artist, fences downloaded from another, and CSO’s that’ve been shared with the community by several other artists.

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While the purpose of making CSO’s to match our paths and queues is to achieve a tailored look for our parks, to make the different areas of our parks more interesting we’d create several sets of paths, queues, and CSO’s so as to give variety to the overall appearance of the park, just like we might have different areas of theming throughout our park. Again, we’re less likely to achieve a tailored look throughout our park if we rely on CS sets created by different artists.

As each Custom Content Artist has a different style we’re really better off creating most of our own custom content. If we want to kick up our park building skills, although creating our own paths is an excellent start we’ll give ourselves a wider range of park design options if we also create our own CSO’s. Pre-import sets that you wish to import as standard CSO’s need a fresh start. Although you can copy your pre-import folder and use its contents to get a jump on importing them you’ll need to make over your texture OVL and then re-import each piece that you want to use as a CSO.

Creating our own paths will give our parks that much more of the total package. When customizing the rest of our parks with our own content the sky’s pretty much the limit.

Viewing Our Results In A Park Setting

Let’s see what the results of our Path Creator efforts and optional CSO’s look like in a park. This park is Hillside On The Lake.

In addition to seeing guests using my custom paths and queues this park also served to see how far I could go with path supports & supporting CSO enhancements that were more than simple uprights beneath each path piece. I also wanted to determine just how much I could put into path & queue textures that joined seamlessly, and to learn for the first time how much could be achieved with path & queue texture decals.

Hillside On The Lake began as a park I was only going to put a few hundred path & queue pieces into along with a few guests as an example park but I got caught up in the spirit of park building and here we are, a complete park!

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I’ve made the trim on the path bottoms a darker color for this set. It displays well, suggests that steel has been placed externally on the path bases for additional strength, and enhances the overall appearance of the paths & queues when they’re viewed from beneath.

The stairway in the previous image was specifically built to determine how I might design diagonal supports from a central upright column.

My goal in making these support CSO’s was to sufficiently support the paths and queues without the overall appearance of the park being pulled down by a sea of uprights. I like to think there is more steel and reinforcement rod than there is poured concrete inside these paths, queues, and supports. At the bottom left in this next image can be seen the supports beneath the west food court.

I like the way these supports give the park property the impression that it remained undisturbed while the park itself was lowered into place from the air.

Most of the supports in this supports set are diagonal supports. They hardly show from above the paths, as can be observed in this next image of the same area in the park.

After they’ve gotten used to the daily noise of the park, it’s easy to believe that beneath these supports small woodland animals that live in the area will have little trouble in reaching the lake or in getting around on the terrain below the paths. In fact, when any animals make an appearance they add interest to the visit of park guests who enjoy observing the property’s wildlife whenever the opportunity arises.

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