TUTORIAL: Neighborhood Terrain Surgery
J. M. Pescado:
Quote from: Kristalrose on 2005 August 18, 16:47:49
This is really interesting!! I have been playing around with this for the past couple of nights. I have had problems with moving the lots with the hand tool, though. When you move the out of water, the land comes up and forms a square island, so your lake/river/ocean is marred. When you move them out of a hillside, the land caves in and is no longer useful for placing a lot on it.
So I'm experimenting with making a terrain with SC4 that is comparable to my original terrain in levels, so my lots appear on the same level and do not have to be hauled out of a mountain or the water.
One thing you can do is "iterative improvement". Once you've placed your initial terrain, "unbury" your lots. This will partially mutilate your existing terrain, but try to put them on "valid" ground matching the roads, so that they now sit levelly on clear terrain in your new neighborhood. Some hillsides and lakes may be mutilated as a result. Then REPEAT the terrain replacement procedure using those same extracted files. Now the houses should be sitting on level ground for your "new" terrain, and when you re-replace it, you overwrite the damage inflicted while unwedging lots.
Quote
JMP: Can I link this thread to Worldsims? :)
I can't really stop you, so I'm not going to worry about it.
Kristalrose:
Thanks, JMP. I just thought I'd do the polite thing and ask 1st. :)
Ancient Sim:
Is there any way this can work with the Downtown neighbourhood? I put a house on that turned out to be unplayable, so I bulldozed it. Unfortunately, the house caused the road to rise upwards and it didn't go back down when I removed the house. I tried putting a larger house on to hopefully level it down, instead it made the road split in half and veer to the side, exposing blue stuff underneath. It not only looks hideous, now I can't put a house there at all. I would have thought it would have gone back as it was, but it hasn't.
Will I have to completely replace the main neighbourhood to get the Downtown one back as it should be, or can I do Downtown on its own? I don't have many Sims living there so it would be no big deal to move them out and back in if I can somehow replace the terrain with the one in the main EA File, which I would have thought was possible but doesn't seem to be.
Hegelian:
Quote from: veilchen on 2005 July 30, 19:27:00
Witch, I've tried the terrain and it's very nice. This is the first time I downloaded terrain that properly displayed in the template chooser, all the others had the grid thing going. I just deleted them, perhaps unecessarily, but I am a little edgy as far as my computer is concerned.
Okay, I know this is an old post, but I thought I'd make this observation since no one else did.
The neighborhood images displayed in the neighborhood chooser are simply 400x300 PNG files that reside in each neighborhood's folder in the Neighborhoods folder in My Documents>. . . . The grid thing is just a placeholder that displays in the absence of a proper image for the neighborhood. If a terrain you download comes with an image file you can use that (use an image-editor to change it to PNG format if necessary) by renaming it N00x_Neighborhood.png, where x is the number of the neigborhood, and moving it into the appropriate Neighborhood folder.
You can use any image you want—an in-game aerial view of the neighborhood, snaps of your sims, whatever. If you're a Photoshop wiz, you could do something with fade effects that shows your sims against a background of the aerial view, or use some other tool to make the motion views that come with the Maxis neighborhoods (I have no idea how to do that). For a static image, just make it 400x300 and you're good to go.
It may be possible to use a BMP or JPG file without converting to PNG, but since the Maxis image files are PNG, I just make the conversion and have never tried using an image in another format.
blubug:
I was wondering, can we do this to uni and downtown neighborhoods? If so, how, because 'UNK' Files differ in number. ???
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