Working with 1:1 real parks in RCT (Using Image editing software)

[JoshuaJacobs]

Hi,
this is my take on sharing a bit of a working pipeline that I came up with while working with a real park in ORCT2. Might be already in use and be just unknown to me since I am by far not as experienced as some people that are designing beautiful Parks in the game but I will talk about how I do it. (suggestions are welcome!)

Crating real parks was impossible for me to do before the new safe format because of the limited park size. Real parks are huge. Marcel Vos made a wonderful Video about dimensions in RCT. https://youtu.be/wMbxkzbyW4E

Intro
Wanting to create a real park, I needed to figure out a way to reference the layout of rides/paths/everything to the real world. Having a detailed reference image in-game so to speak. The only way for this so far is to use an image in the world generation menu in the scenario designer. (Mabey some addon could be made, to color tiles according to an image. But that addon is not known to me.)
This is the park i was working on so far:

My Pipeline
That's what I do: I open a huge screenshot of the park in Photoshop (or gimp) and redraw the rides with a digital brush.

Now I scale them down to a size where a pixel responds to approx. 3m (turn Anti-Aliasing off for clear pixels).

Then generate a scenario with the result.

I build my objects. Here I use secondary references like on-ride videos and eg. height stats of the real ride and transfer them to the final .park file. (copy-paste-addon; save rides. Then use tile inspector to place them in the correct position)

More specific
It is super hard to detect what bumps on the construction park are meant to represent. So I generate many different parks for different rides. Or path or buildings- etc. All use the same transformation and rotation so that they stay relative to the map edges. (super easy in Ps by using a "smart object" that can be edited).

Rotation
Some rotations of parks will work much better in an isometric translation. Do keep in mind that it is not necessary to have one edge of your park facing north. Mabey you need to shift some rides individually in place, losing on realism but making them buildable on a grid.
To keep eg pathing consistent, there are tools in Photoshop to manipulate only small parts of your map with very uniform distortion (Puppet warp)

Reference ideas
Reference for me is Google maps, open street maps, google street view, official park plans, Ride stats on a wiki for height and number of trains, etc. also on-ride videos.
Especially transport on-ride-vids contain beautiful detailed views of a whole park.

Tell me how you take references and lets improve on this.

Greetings
Joshua