whenever i make a park, i never really do much in the way of scenery and terrain editing, mainly because i am not very good at either one of them.

i have seen a few pictures of parks other people have made and they look awesome. i wouldn't know where to start with the stuff they produce.

if you are one of these people that make parks look as awesome as possible, where do you start? and how do you get the final layout of the area?

I don't make awesome parks, but I think before you start building in Rct, you design the park on paper. So you can easily erase area's or design new ones.

Well, i think there are two different ways to start a good park:

1) start without any plan/notes and build what you think, called "intuitive"
2) before you start, make notes about it what things you would have later in the park -> so "Riiickerttt"s post is an good idea

Another thing is to start with small parks, maybe a little bit smaller than the sandbox scenario.
An option for the size could be 75x75 squares, or 50x50. Later you can go slowley bigger and bigger, but dont forget, huge parks with alot of scenary (especially high polygon/lod) can crash the savegame!

One thing that makes every park nicer is to play around with the pathcover-sets to build smoother looking curves with some S-parts in it and other different angles than only the standart diagonal ones.
To know were your pathcovers be placed, you can use an terrainpaint to preview your pathway.
This can helping you, to know which area could be used for what attraction.

In the end it's the same like "good/great" coasters: practice, practice and practice
No one of the Coaster/Park/CSO Designer/in starts as an pro

Let's Plays could be helpful, too -> Silvarret's are an option, they are timelapse but they would do it well

Lg Cheleste

Each park I create I find it helps if I pull in the reins and not be too anxious to open the game and start using the mouse in the menus before I know what it is that I want to go where. Planning is very important at all stages of park building, particularly at the beginning when you've got that big empty lot staring back at you challenging you and your ideas.

The first thing I like to do is decide where I want the entrance, then where I want the paths in relation to the entrance, the pool complex (there's one in most of my parks) and where I want the food courts, plazas and promenades. If you want hills, valleys, lakes and ponds, now is the time to consider and/or place those. It’s handy when the trees move with the landscaping if you’ve placed them before terraforming but terraforming can be death for structures and everything doesn’t always go back to where it was by re-forming the ground. If you really must terraform after building, save the building as a structure, terraform, remove the mess that’s left of the old building and replace with the saved structure.

I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't make any sense to put paths all over the place anticipating that strategic placement of no entry signs will get the guests to cover all the paths you've created. It seems the more paths are placed the more paths the guests will ignore. And more paths need more path extras and more staff which mean more of a drain on the game engine and less other things you can get into the park for your enjoyment. A good rule to try and stick to is to make one path that travels directly through your park through all the attractions one time. A single circuit route will do. It does not need to be an exact square or an exact rectangle – just a single circuit. This will also minimize lost guests.

Up until a year ago my parks always started out at 254 x 254. Now that I'm seriously using CS and CTR's I've had to cut the park area down. Most times the default 128x128 park is too big small for what I want to eventually put into it but an experienced park builder really can’t get by with less than that. Because I've really gotten into CS now, I can no longer a hundred shops & stalls, more than twenty toilets, a dozen information booths, ten first aid stations, some 400 staff and a path system where guests and staff pass themselves already coming on their way back – getting a really massive park built was the only good thing about the game before all our terrific custom stuff came along.

As suggested above it’s a good idea for you to start with a smaller park. It’s possible to get a park as small as 32x32 in RCT3. One can begin as small as they wish and then later increase the size of their park in scenario editor.

If animal enclosures are to be included the animal enclosures are next sketched out. I do this by placing scenery (usually a chess board square painted white) at the corners of where I think I want the enclosures, which are always rectangular in my parks although you may want more complicated shapes for your enclosures. I use the chess board square as a marker because when I consider my layout I can zoom way out away from the park and still see the squares, and they're easy to delete later. Whack up all your graphics options at this time so you can see everything while you're zoomed out like this.

The final positioning of the pool complex is in direct relation to where I want the food courts, where I hope the paths will go, where I want the pool shops plaza, how the entrance plaza might look, all of which need to blend into the path system and all this needs to work well with the enclosures (which need to take into consideration where the zoo outbuildings and other staff buildings will go if there will be any of those in the park) while leaving room for the aquarium, the dolphin & orca shows, the park shuttles, the coasters & rides and areas of land with only park scenery. Unfortunately one has to understand one can’t have all these in one park and then load it with CS so choices of elimination will have to be made early so as to strike a balance on what you want to actually have in the completed park.

The plazas, courts and promenade are sometimes sketched out either with the scenery (already saved as a structure) after before the shops and stalls are placed. If I’m striking out in a new design direction and have nothing already saved then terrain paint, as suggested above, is the next best thing. At this point I will make a final consideration if the paths are where they should be and can finalize where the aquarium will go, and then the dolphin and orca shows.

I’m probably one of the few in the community to build a park where the last thing planned or considered is where the coasters or rides are going to go. I get more enjoyment out of the other things going on in a park. Rides and/or coasters are required to draw the guests in addition to staff & utilities, and shops & stalls.

Always save your games before making major changes. If I don't like where the pool is or where I've put the food court I can simply go back to the last iteration and try again rather than spend time deleting the items which will then only leave traces for Park CleanUp to eradicate. And save areas of scenery as structures. This way each successive park in which you plan to use something similar will be that much easier. What a shame staff patrol areas or paths can't be saved in this way.

I’ve gotten into custom stuff in a big way lately and have found myself spending a lot of time fine tuning a single building and building a park around that. Others are totally into coasters, will invest time coming up with their dream track and then build their park around that. In addition to the observing some of the advice you’ve gotten in your thread you’ll also need to find what works best for you.