Watching from the side lines as I love all these wonderful building tricks!!!
Hello, Meagan! *waves*
Lurkers are always welcome, but your lovely self would also be welcome as an "official" member of the class.
The bonus for us would be your fabulous work in the Blackcat Builders(IF you decided to do the homework and post a thread link-- no pressure even if you did join the class roster).
Welcome, Zoo Uers! I hope everyone is in comfy clothes (PJs with fuzzy slippers is the preferred Zoo U attire) and make sure you have the required supplies (i.e. snacks and icy chocolate milk).
Get settled in and let’s have some fun!
This lesson is going to be a bit different than some Zoo U classes as we will be looking at several things that are all really separate topics. You will read about a topic and see examples of it and then go into your game to practice that topic, then come back to the lesson for the next topic.
I plan to be here for at least two hours (part of that will be spent posting the lesson, and that takes varying lengths of time depending on how cooperative the Sims site and PhotoBucket decide to be). There will be time for you to read the entire lesson if you don’t do any of the practice, but I don’t think you will be able to do your practice for the entire lesson in two hours.
I have practice built in for each topic, but if you are concerned that you will have a lot of questions and you would like me to be available to give you an immediate answer, you may choose to read the lesson and not do any practice until after reading the entire thing. It is entirely up to you how you approach this. Any practice that you don’t do during class can just be added to your homework.
Of course if you do the practice during class and don’t make it through the whole lesson in two hours and later find yourself with a question, you can just post it on this thread and I WILL answer it, but it may not be immediately. I will be checking this thread at least daily, especially over the next week or so, and posting answers to any questions as I find them.
Thanks for attending Zoo U and here’s hoping you enjoy the lesson and that you learn some things that will be useful in your builds!
Zoo
Here are the parts of the lesson in outline form:
1. Rug Trickery
* Elaborate layering
* Triangular Floor Tiles and CASt
* Combining A. and B.
* Stepping Stones, Fountain and Fireplace Parts
3. Stained Glass Window Trickery
* With Existing Windows
* Windows Where You Can’t Put Windows
4. Dragon Trickery
* Dragon Nests
* Dragon Aeries
* No trick Dragon Habitats
* Dragon Cages
* Dragons Everywhere!
* What we can learn here even if we AREN’T using dragons.
5. Hidden Entries
* Mundanely Hidden Doors
* The Foundation Trick and Hidden Doors
* Fake Fireplaces and Hidden Doors
* Hidden Doors and Hidden Rooms using Tomb Tools
* Building to make space for Hidden Doors
6. Hidden Goodies for Downloaders
* One Builder’s Philosophy
* Mundane Goodies and Secret smiles
* Leaving the trail of breadcrumbs
* Should they have to tear out the wall?
I love patterns. Anyone who has ever viewed any of my builds will know that for a true statement as I almost always use a lot of patterns and make them (in my own opinion in any case) work together to create a pleasing effect. It is one of the things that makes me have to really reel myself in when I’m building something modern, which typically doesn’t have pattern layered upon pattern.
This love goes wonderfully with Victorian homes, but I have been frustrated with our rug choices. We have more now, but when we only had a few choices, I quickly became bored with the way they were sectioned off in order to allow us to color parts of the rug to create center motifs and borders. But real-life rugs have MORE areas than just center and border! When I discovered rug stacking it placated me for awhile!
FIRST:
The game is twitchy about which rug is on top and if you mess with your rugs after they are placed you will often have to completely re-place everything. ALWAYS CASt EVERYTHING BEFORE PLACING. It is really hard to click on a rug that LOOKS as if it is clearly on top in order to use CASt on it.
SECOND:
You will very likely want to use “disableSnappingToSlotsOnAlt on” (without quotes) and keep your finger on the ALT key as you place the rugs on top.
Sometimes a stack of rugs will show when a Sim walks over it (her feet may look as if they are sunk into the rug), but they cause NO ROUTING ISSUES that I have ever seen and I do this in every build.
EXAMPLES:
Some thoughts (and my own personal opinions) on layering rugs and using all these different patterns in a way that won’t make the viewer’s eyes explode:
1. When using several patterns in a single room, especially to create a single complex rug, pick a color palette of two to four colors and choose patterns that allow for that many color channels to be redone. Try making new patterns using the same colors and altering only the VALUE (how dark or light) of the color without altering the actual color. For example, you don’t want a lime green in one pattern and an aqua in another pattern (it may be okay to have both colors in BOTH patterns, but you don’t want one pattern with one green paired with a different pattern with a totally different green). You could have two patterns that both used the same color of lime green with one just darker than the other; that should be fine.
2. You will see designer fabric and designer rugs and designer wallpaper that all have the exact same pattern, but in general you don’t see this all used together. Be careful about using a wallpaper pattern in the rugs or furniture that you are going to use in that room. It doesn’t look like a real house if you splash the exact same pattern all over everything. A special peeve of mine is seeing the same exact pattern on walls and in curtains, but in fact they DO do that in real life. To be honest, even in real life I think it usually looks odd, but that is likely personal taste. It is okay, and likely even something a designer would create, to take ONE of the patterns used in a multi-patterned rug and put it on furniture or curtains or walls. Maybe it is even okay to take one of the patterns for the curtains and a different one of the rug patterns for the sofa, but have a care as you will be in eyeball-exploding territory if you get too much going on.
3. I WILL use an assortment of rugs in a room that all have the same three or four patterns used in different areas of the rugs, because you DO see this in real life. Rug designs are in fact often like this so that you can get all the rugs for a large room and have them look nice together without all having to be the exact same rug or exact same pattern in different sizes. What I use for a border on one rug will be a central area on another one in the same room.
4. When choosing rug border patterns, it is good to experiment with how a pattern is placed on the particular types of rugs. Some of them will take a pattern and wrap it around an edge (so that linear patterns will wind around the outside the way that real rug borders do), but some will just place it top to bottom. If you have a rug that places patterns top to bottom without making it make turns at the corners, you wouldn’t want a linear pattern for the border because it would look weird.
5. Look at it the next day to see if you still like it or if it is, in fact, eye-meltingly busy. Sometimes you can get so involved in the fun of CASt-ing all those rug patterns and layering them and you think it looks AWESOME and then you look the next day and... not so much. If it really IS way too busy, try making one of the areas of the rug a solid color to help break up all that pattern-on -pattern.
P.S.
See that photo of Julianna Tester and her Simbot, Zoo U Bot? That stack of “rugs” is builder trickery. The dance floor from the dance studio venue in the Store doesn’t have any wood lines stenciled on it, so you can recolor the whole thing as if it were ANY medium, including carpet. It even has a nice little edge that you can recolor to give extra dimension when it is layered with a rug.
I don’t know if anyone if familiar with the work of the excellent builder LariFari, but her work changed my life and here is how: She uses the wall and floor tiles and uses CASt in unexpected ways.
After I saw what she was doing, I had a “DUH!” moment, because in retrospect it is obvious and simple, but I’m not sure I would have seen it without her.
So, using this idea, you have all that lovely floor tiles in the “wood” section of the Build catalog that have various sections of the single tile with different channels that you can redo in CASt. WHO SAID YOU HAVE TO USE WOOD IN THOSE CHANNELS??
If you put other patterns, florals and geometrics work especially well, into those floor tile areas you can create an infinite amount of different tiles. Combine that with the very powerful ability to lay down triangular pieces of flooring and combining it with the ideas of pattern mixing that we just discussed and you get amazing results. You can use this idea outside as well, to make really interesting paths and patios by mixing “stone” and “masonry” patterns in the slots instead of wood.
EXAMPLES:
Okay, I think you guys get the idea. Now, let’s put the two ideas (rug stacking and the triangular pattern pieces) to get some really great results:
Here are a few of my favorite tiles and some non-wooden re-patterns:
So that the color isn’t so distracting, let’s use the two that are black and white and shades of gray to make some rugs:
Are you seeing the “infinite possibilities” here?? And when you add color and different patterns and different rug stacks--- there is no reason for you to ever get bored with the rugs available in your game again.
I have a dollhouse hobby in real life. My favorite thing is to repurpose something and use it in a way it was never intended to make something in my dollhouse. Remind me sometime and I will show you the “leather” swivel easy chair in my main dollhouse that was made using parts of a 2-liter pop bottle and a nail.
SO, this idea of using stuff in unexpected ways is one of my favorite things to do in a build. Since we are talking about rugs, let’s look at some examples of rugs used for something that was NOT their intended use.
1. * Stepping Stones, Fountain and Fireplace Parts
I really like the look of stepping stones, but I really don’t like the way that the terrain paints look to do them. For one thing, a real stepping stone has dirt showing around it a lot of the time, and also they would all be turned just slightly different and you can’t do that with terrain paint (the pattern has the same orientation every time). And it is limiting where you can use terrain paints.
I started looking at that smallest rug and decided it was perfect for stepping stones. But what if you already have painted paths in terrain paint? Will it look weird if the stepping stones don’t match the path? Likely it WON’T look weird, but I wanted them to match, so CASt to the rescue!
EXAMPLES:
I really got into making homemade fountains and homemade fireplaces (giant ones) recently, and I used rugs here, too.
The bottom rectangle of this fireplace is a rug.
The top of this homemade fountain is a rug. That’s right, that blue isn’t water (and neither is the bottom part, that is edging with floor tile recolored as water in CASt).
In order to get that last effect, I used the fact that that a rug would sit atop a display column from the Buy Catalog. I don’t know which rugs will do that, maybe some of them must only sit atop something that reads as “floor”. If that is the case you can still use the rugs up off ground level, just make something with foundation and floor it, then delete sections of foundation one at a time, replacing floor tiles, and when you have enough floor tiles that you can place the rug on the floor tiles (but hide the floor tiles with the rug) then you have what you want.
OKAY! This is a good time for you to stop reading and start doing!
DIRECTIONS:
1. Open your game. BEFORE choosing a lot to play, open the cheat window and use “testingCheatsEnabled true” followed by “buyDebug on” and then by “moveObjects on” and then “disableSnappingToSlotsOnAlt on” (all without the quotes)
2. Open a new game in a Builder’s Blank neighborhood OR OPEN ANY GAME YOU DESIRE.
3. Put a Tester Sim on the lot if you have not already done so.
4. Use the phone to cancel the newspaper.
5. Shift-click the mailbox and choose “Set Needs To Static” (we are building, not playing, and we don’t want to have to pause because our tester Sim wants to eat or sleep or pee)
6. Go to Build Mode and Turn Off Auto-Roof (because it’s evil).
7. If you have Seasons or Supernatural or both, go to Options and choose Summer as the only season and Sunshine as the only weather and set the moon phase to static and choose any phase OTHER than full moon (we don’t want our Tester having to dodge zombies or balls of hail as we are trying build).
8. In Options, you will want to also turn off Story Progression, Aging, and Autonomy for Sims and Pets.
We might not have needed ALL this for what we are about to do, but that is my general list of things that I do when I start to build on a new lot. I don’t like to be bugged by stuff in the game when I’m building!
Now, do all of the following:
1. Recolor some of the “wooden” floor tiles in the Build Catalog with floral or geometric patterns in the channels instead of wood. Do this with at least two tiles (three is better).
2. Choose one of these floor tiles and hit Control and F at the same time to allow for triangular placement.
3. Create a rug using these triangular floor tiles for your patterns.
Now choose at least two of the rugs in the Buy Catalog and recolor using the same patterns that you used to recolor your “wooden” floor tiles.
1. Layer to make a nice rug.
2. Use a combination of the floor tiles and the rugs to make a different nice rug.
Once you have at least three nice rugs (one of floor tiles only, one of rugs stacked only, and one of a combination), take some photos to show on your Zoo U homework thread.
Did you go into your game to make rugs? If not, just add that task to your homework (IF you decide to do the homework, of course, no pressure).
This part of the lesson uses the Dive Wells from the Tomb Section of buyDebug and you can only do this part of the lesson if you have World Adventures which gave you these tools.
Don’t worry, if you don’t have World Adventures, you will still be able to do the next part of the lesson, so just skip the Dive Well section.
As I already confessed, I LOVE to use things for a purpose they were not intended. So I really really like Dive Wells.
You can use them on any surface that reads as “floor” and if they aren’t too high up, Sims can still use them for their INTENDED purpose.
* Consider the fountain that we already saw in the Rug Trickery section of the lesson.
I used the white “carpet” floor tile and recolored to match water and I colored the center of the small round rug with the border the same way. I colored the rug border as if it were stone and colored my dive well the same way. I recolored the edging around my fountain with the same stone pattern.
Then I recolored a column in the “display” area of the Buy Catalog in the same stone pattern and grabbed some dragons from the roof decor section and a chess piece from Showtime and recolored them as if they were solid stone.
Then I stacked as shown and put fountain pieces from the Build Catalog to make the water effects.
Pretty fun, right?
You can make really nice, very simple fountains, too, just plop down a dive well and add a fountain piece inside it.
* Wishing Wells
The trick for getting the classic “wishing well” look is that you need a little roof, which means you need to use support columns (or walls) as the side pieces on your well. Here are a couple of examples. The first one uses castle exterior pieces around the dive well. The second uses those square modern columns INSIDE the dive well (I used a bunch of them and placed them carefully to give the correct shape).
Here are the pieces used to MOO the last Wishing Well:
I needed the one display column because the one I actually made the well out of won’t allow the bucket to sit on it. I just hid the support column inside the other kind.
* Hidden Entries
Want to know the trickiest thing about making fountains and wishing wells using the dive well? If you do it right, it still works as a Dive Well!!
The Dragon Fountain and the last Wishing Well (the one with the columns inside) are both fully functional dive wells.
It turns out that the target area that Sims need to “see” in order to be able to use the Dive Well is really small, but there is one area for being able to enter and one for being able to exit, so you have to try your tester going IN and OUT using your MOO’d fountain or well.
In the Dragon Fountain, Julianna Tester could go in just fine, but she was unable to climb back out until I went into Build Mode and moved one of the dragon pieces just slightly. After that she could get in and climb out.
I was really dubious about the Wishing Well that had all those columns inside it, but Julianna didn’t “see” any of that, she went in and out without a problem. It DOES look weird (she is going right through the sides) but for her those columns aren’t even there so it doesn’t affect your game at all.
In creating that last wishing well, I tried stacking two dive wells (they won’t stack on their own, but I used foundation to place floor tiles and deleted the foundation, the top dive well sat on the floor tile without problems).
Julianna could climb into the TOP well as long as the bottom one wasn’t there (she wasn’t bothered by the slight elevation at all). But if I put ANYTHING under the well, she had a foot stomping fit if I told her to use it. After I decided to go the column route I wondered if she would have been able to use the BOTTOM well if the top one was in place. I didn’t try that, but I may at some future time.
OKAY, BACK INTO YOUR GAME!
Do the following:
1. Use the Dive Well to create a fountain that your Sim can still use.
2. Use the Dive Well to create a Wishing Well that your Sim can still use.
3. Take photos of these to share on your Zoo U homework thread.
4. Come back to the lesson!
Did you go make a Fountain and a Wishing Well? If not, that is okay, just add that to your homework!
Did you go through Zoo U Course 11: Enhance Your Builds with Photography and CAP as a prerequisite for this class? If not, then now is a good time to do it because you won’t understand much about part three of the lesson if you haven’t viewed that course.
3. Stained Glass Window Trickery
* With Existing Windows
* Windows Where You Can’t Put Windows
This whole section of the lesson falls under the “CAP plus Photography Trickery” heading. If you went all the way through Zoo U Course 11, then you already know that not only can this combination of tools be used for an unlimited variety of artwork in your builds, but it can also be used for signage, posters and maps from places you have created in Sims (there is a Zoo U poster and posters of my Walt Simney World parks in MANY of my own builds), and for gift shop displays that look as if there are hanging clothes or stacks of boxed goods or similar effects. I recently made a superhero headquarters and used this combination of tools to make a “display case” with a superhero costume in it.
So, now we use this combination to do some really awesome-looking stained glass for our builds!
DIRECTIONS:
1. Use your favorite Internet Search Engine to locate photographs of stained glass windows. You want rectangles that are perfectly vertical and absolutely straight on (so someone’s photo of a window in their home may not work at all because things will be angled). You want an image that you can photograph and have it look as if it is looking straight into the image, not from an angle sideways and not above or below it. Ads where people are selling stained glass are often a good place to get images to use.
2. Make sure that the photograph looks like cut glass (as opposed to some “stained glass” which is painted instead of cut--- that doesn’t give as good an effect I don’t think). Use this photo to create a Pattern in CAP as described in the previous course. If you have been through Course 11 you will have a good idea of how to orient it so that the rectangle is neither too square nor too stretched out to photograph well, but you can put a background (generally solid black) that could look like the edge of the window and that will be a little bit forgiving when you get in game and start to photograph it.
3. Go in game and photograph it in the appropriate size (large portrait, small portrait, and medium landscape can all be used to good effect for stained glass). Even panoramic photos can be used if you do it right.
Let’s look at some examples where these photos are laid into existing windows (both inside and outside the house).
You can see a few things from the photos above. First, when I have two images of the same stained glass used on a window they are lined up EXACTLY the same and you might be wondering if I am just that good at photography. In a word: NO!
I actually just barely limp along at the photography part, but (if you have testingCheatsEnabled true) when in Buy/Build Mode you can shift-click on a photo and you will get a pie menu with a “clone” option and if you choose it you will get an exact copy of your photograph! SO useful and I didn’t realize it until I started doing a bunch of stained glass windows!
Another thing you may have noticed, I was not at all impressed that the “tower” piece of the Then and Now Manor set was non-functional. I made my own functional one and I thought stained glass would look good there.
Speaking of the Then and Now Manor set, which I love, I was disappointed that the roof pieces have non-functional windows. They are on the outside of the roof piece only, and the inside is just a solid color.
Well, I wasn’t having THAT either. Look at the roof right above the porch. See the windows? I used the stained glass pieces from Showtime to fill those in. On the inside I did something to make it look as if I had windows as well.
Look at the roof above the first floor here. There are some of my homemade stained glass pieces. I had to slightly move the roof pieces to get this effect (since photos must be where a wall would be) and it made me have to MOO in a few extra roofing pieces, but I think it was worth it. On the inside of this room there are also these same stained glass pieces (set into a window that is only visible inside the structure).
All this stubbornness with insisting that I WILL have windows made me start to think of other times when I would like a window and my game says no. Like inside roofs or in a dormer where there is no window that will fit. Now I will just put fake stained glass in those areas.
If real windows can’t be used, you will only have the photo’s frame as the window frame, and it is a little thin for that, but you can sometimes use curtains and/or more than one stained glass piece to make it look more substantial on the inside of the room (outside you can use siding choices that make the “window” frame seem more substantial).
This is two “large portrait” size photos side-by-side. This is inside a roof piece and there is no window here at all. I used buyDebug lights to make it seem as if light was coming in through the windows any time I put these on the inside of a room where a window can’t go:
A NOTE ABOUT PLACEMENT:
Using ALT, all photos will slide freely up and down walls, but they still must be where a wall could go and they still won’t slide horizontally except to “snap” into specific places. “Large Portrait” size photos will line up side to side while “Medium Landscape” and “Panoramic” sizes line up top to bottom.
The following example was tricky to do. I made as large a CAP pattern as I could without making it overlap or get repeats that are too close together to get a clean photo.
I then put the image on the wall and took THREE panoramic photos, carefully positioning the camera so that the final effect is like three horizontal panels of one huge image. A nice effect, I thought. This is intended to be a stained glass decorative wall, not a window, but you could definitely use this idea to make a window.
Fake stained glass windows flank the shower (this is in an attic room with no windows):
Fake stained glass window in the dormer where no window will fit:
Now it’s time for you to try it!
1. Find some images of Stained Glass that you like and turn them into CAP patterns.
2. Go into your game and photograph them.
3. Make a simple wall if you are on an empty lot (if you are on a lot where you have a building, use a window in the building) and use your photos in combination with existing windows to make stained glass windows. Put the photos inside and outside the window, sliding them so that the view inside and out is as it should be.
4. Photograph your results for your homework thread!
5. Come back to the lesson!
Did you make stained glass windows and take photos? If not, just add that to your homework assignment.
4. Dragon Trickery
* Dragon Nests
* Dragon Aeries
* No trick Dragon Habitats
* Dragon Cages
* Dragons Everywhere!
* What we can learn here even if we AREN’T using dragons?
To do everything from except the last thing in the list, you will need baby dragons, which means that you will need Dragon Valley (or in the case of the Black Dragon you will need the Duke of Bows venue). We are going to apply some of what we learned in working with dragons that applies to other things in the game, so you should read that last part even if you don’t have dragons.
First off, WHY do we need tricks to deal with dragons? Well, you don’t if you just want to carry them and interact with them, but if you want to display them on your lot you DO (unless having the dragon just sitting in the middle of the living room floor is what you are after).
I love that EA gave us dragons, but, like A LOT of things I would have made some changes to how they did things. Obviously it would have been cooler if dragons could grow up and you could fly around town riding them (and, let’s be honest, having them fry the butt off anyone in town who has ever annoyed you). Now, I can kind of see how that would be too much to expect from a Store item, BUT was it really too much to expect that they would give us a dragon cage or a dragon bed or SOMETHING like that?
It is especially bad because Sims will sometimes just decide to set their dragon down somewhere and you might NEVER find it again! You can’t call them to come to you. Since there is no cage or bed there is nothing to click on to give an option to tell your Sim to put the dragon in there. Presumably the Sim knows where she put the dragon but you have no way of telling her to go get it.
Also, I like the idea of having a display for a dragon. I decided that I would just make one and that would have been easy EXCEPT for the “brilliant” coding choice that doesn’t allow dragons to sit anywhere except “floor” or “ground” (or on your Sim). You can’t put them on displays, tables, or shelves and you can’t use any of the pet habitats from Pets for them.
You can STILL make one, but it is much more complicated to do something fancy because of this coding.
Let’s start out easy: Nest boxes:
Here all I did was use the interior platform in the foundation tool and then edge it. You could just paint the inside of it with something that looks like grass or straw, but I really wanted hay for this so I made a hay pattern in CAP and used it on sand piles from WA. I think it gives a nice effect. Adding food bowls from Pets adds to illusion that they are real animals (though baby dragons don’t need to eat and will never starve or require any other sort of attention from your Sims--- the game treats them like objects and not animals).
In this same build, I made a dragon aerie right up above where this nest box sits. This is also really easy, you just delete some floor tiles in the room above and trace over the area with edging using the fencing tool. These are dragon perches (and dragons can sit on them if you have enough flooring left in that room so that the squares where the edging is still appear as grid lines in Buy/Build Mode).
Here is how that looks:
Sims can access this aerie (you can see the walkway in the photo) via a ladder in the room with the nest box.
This next thing was just for fun, but you COULD use this if you just wanted it to look like your dragon had a bed. By the way, Pets treat dragons just as they would any object that they cannot interact with--- in other words they ignore them unless they are in the way and cause a route fail when the pet is trying to get to a different object.
Okay, I couldn’t resist setting this up as both cat and dragon were asleep:
You can also make “homes” for your dragon that don’t require a lot of building tricks, just some imagination:
But let’s suppose that you want something that DOES require builder tricks. Then you need to play with the floor levels in order to create your dragon habitat.
The very easiest thing is if you have a room that is two full stories tall. This looks good, it is fancy and fun, BUT it is really huge. You can do this in your huge rambling mansion or your huge rambling castle, but somehow I don’t see this in the spare bedroom of your mobile home:
I put the cat tree in the cage to add a little something with height to the bottom story. Obviously, dragons can’t use it, but cats and Sims can enter both stories of the cage, so the cat will sleep in the cage “visiting” his dragon friends.
Whatever you build, don’t forget the little details. Did you see the mice in the food bowl? AND in the red dragon’s claws? Did you see that there were stuffed toys and piles of gold for the hoard? They are babies, so I think they would like to cuddle with a soft stuffed bear, don’t you? And even a baby dragon needs a hoard.
So, what if you don’t want the massive two story cage? You STILL need two stories, but one of them can be much less than a full story. The easiest way to do this is to make a room where part of it is on a foundation and part of it is not. Any sort of split-level structure can be used to create a dragon habitat. Here are some examples:
This next photo is of a simple nest box, but having the dragon fountain above it gives the illusion that baby dragons would get up in there to get a drink or have a bath. I also thought that gold statues of Julianna Tester would be agreeable to a dragon for its hoard.
By the way, in my world view baby dragons love to eat hot peppers, and they will fly up to *** one off the string of them when they want a taste. You will notice peppers hanging above several of my dragon homes.
All of the following would work great OUTSIDE a structure (and actually not even CLOSE to a structure as it will mess up all the wall heights and you can’t put one of these inside a room as you will not be able to roof it).
They are all made by using CFE and making floor levels that aren’t one full story:
Here I made foundation and then used a frieze to get some flooring , then deleted the frieze but leaving the floor back in so that the dragon will have a place to stand, then MOO’d in the large bird tree from Pets:
Here is step by step for this last structure:
Here is the critical thing to remember for dragon placement: If it is a place where floor tiles could go, a dragon can go there.
SO, if you have MOO active, you can put dragons on top of columns (floor could be placed on top of a column, right?) and then, just as you could delete the column and have the floor stay, you can take away the column and the dragon will stay!
So you can have dragons everywhere in your trees, just place a column and orient your dragon to look as if it is sitting on a tree branch, then remove the column.
WARNING: Dragons can freeze and get stuck in a single position. This happens sometimes when you upload, download, or just take the dragon in and out of the inventory. Fortunately, this is incredibly easy to fix.
You will need testingCheatsEnabled true. Go into Buy/Build and Control + Shift + Click on the dragon. You will get a pie menu, choose Reset. Works every time I’ve encountered the problem. In fact there are red dragons in the buyDebug catalog, which always come out frozen, and this reset always fixes them.
So, we have done everything but the last part of our outline for Dragon Trickery, let’s talk about this:
What we can learn here even if we AREN’T using dragons?
Well, dragons aren’t the ONLY objects that will only sit on things coded as “floor”. There is a really nice painting in a Store set that I never use because I don’t want it to sit on the floor and it is coded to only do that. There are also Voodoo dolls and bears and some plants that will only sit on floor or ground. What if you want to use some of this stuff and have it look as if it is on a shelf? Or a mantel? Or a table?
You will have to make something that LOOKS like a shelf or mantel or table, but have it actually be made with floor tile. Here are a few examples:
You will notice that in the photo with the wagon gift shop (which is in a western town area of an amusement park), Julianna Tester is sitting in the wagon (in the park it is considered a photo opportunity area for guests). Actually, Julianna doesn’t see that wagon at all, I used MOO and positioned it carefully so that that would be the case. What she sees are the stairs, the flooring (which is used on the other side of the wagon as a shelf) and the seat that I put on the flooring.
You will also notice in the Egyptian-themed gift shop (from the same amusement park, in a different area) it LOOKS as if I managed to get those mummy bears to sit on a table, which they will not. Actually, this room is multi-level and there is a “floor” area that my bears are sitting on, then I just MOO’d a table into place under them on the level below that “floor”.
You see all sorts of objects on my home-made fireplace mantel that won’t usually sit on a fireplace mantel. This is a huge two-story room and the game reads that mantel as flooring.
We won’t make a dragon cage during class, that requires some time and planning, so we’ll save that for homework!
5. Hidden Entries
* Mundanely Hidden Doors
* The Foundation Trick and Hidden Doors
* Fake Fireplaces and Hidden Doors
* A Word about Hidden Doors and Hidden Rooms using Tomb Tools
* Building to make space for Hidden Doors and Rooms
A great deal about hidden doors has to do with the difference in the way WE see the world versus the way OUR SIMS see the world.
By Mundanely Hidden Doors, I mean doors that we just put something in front of and Sims can still use it. That can be done by realizing that some things that WE see are invisible to Sims in terms of routing.
Curtains are one of the things that Sims will walk right through.
Here is just a simple foundation with a wall cutting through it with a door in the middle. There are stairs only on one side of the door, so in order to get to the other side of the wall, Sims will have to go through the door.
Now, I will camouflage the door with a curtain (it needs to be one that completely covers the door so that HUMANS can’t see it), but as you can see, Julianna doesn’t see the curtain at all.
There are several curtains that work well for trick.
Turns out there are OTHER things that are invisible when it comes to routing. Artwork (notice that I didn’t put this flush with the door because if I did you could see the door facing through the particular artwork that I chose). You would have to disguise this spacing somehow if you wanted to use this (or use different art).
This is an “art” piece from the Gothic set, this one I DID place flush with the door since the wrinkles keep any of the door from showing through.
One of the most powerful things is that two of the “large portrait” size photos, one on top of the other, will just about completely cover the door (a tiny sliver shows at the bottom but could be mistaken for photo frame). Here I show it with something that you wouldn’t use, but what about making a stained glass window (top photo would be the top of the image, bottom half would be the bottom of the image) or some other special-effect pairing of photos?
Now, not EVERYTHING is invisible to our Sims. For example, view Julianna’s foot-stomping fit when I ask her to use the door with a shelf across it.
And yet...
Why wasn’t the shelf visible to her the second time? Because the second time I used “the foundation trick”.
Sims “see” things that are on the same level of flooring that they are on, and basically ONLY the stuff on that level. So, in order to have Julianna not see the shelf, I went down one level (to the ground level, while the door that I want Julianna to use is on the foundation level).
When I put my shelf in (and I can slide it up and down, just make sure you STAY on ground level as you do your sliding, and end up with shelving nearly to the top of the door.)
Since it is built, from the game’s viewpoint, INSIDE foundation, it will be really dark unless you also build lights on the ground floor (I like the buyDebug lights for this).
See how it fixes the lighting on the shelf?
Whatever you put on the shelves will also be invisible to your Sims and you can use the siding to disguise the door. Here is an example in one of my builds:
Here is was at an earlier stage, see how Julianna walks right through all the shelving and their contents?
You can use other things besides shelves with “the foundation trick”.
How about a bookcase?
Well, that looks horrible. It doesn’t do the job if we can see the whole top of the door. But, we can adjust the ground inside the foundation. Let’s see about that.
BETTER! We still have a few issues. The bottom looks weird, so maybe white carpet isn’t a good choice here. Also the lighting still looks a little dark. Let’s work on both of those things.
By the way, this bookcase is unusable, but your Sims won’t TRY to use it since they don’t see it.
What other things can we use “the foundation trick” on?
Actually, lots of stuff! I’ll show you one more example of a good one.
We don’t have anything that looks like that in Sims and so I decided to make my own.
You know, it just dawned on me that nearly every single thing in the lesson starts out with my being dissatisfied with what we were given and, instead of just living with it, pitching a big fit and stubbornly trying to find a way to circumvent the rules. That actually sounds a lot like the way I live my life...
ANYWAY! Here are some efforts at the huge fireplaces using Sims building tools and the Fog Emitter to get the fire (lots of codes work but “firepit” doesn’t make a lot of smoke so I kind of like that one):
I decided to put a “grate” on using fencing (I think it looked okay without it, too).
After I worked out all the bugs and was happy with how this looked, it occurred to me that there was a lot of space inside this fireplace that was hidden from view. That seemed like a great place for a hidden door.
You could put one in the back (and have the secret room directly behind the fireplace), but I chose to put it on the side and have stairs that leads up to the secret area. No matter where you put the secret door it will work, but you have to carefully place all the logs (and I used a coffee table that I MOO’d into place with the logs as I think it looks like a rack, AND it gives me a second level to put the Fog Emitter since it will sit on a table) so that your Sims can get to the door. The Fog Emitter is invisible to Sims, so you only have to worry about the other stuff.
Here is Julianna using the secret door:
Here is another example (in this build there is a ladder that leads up to the secret room so there doesn’t have to be a big secret space behind the fireplace):
Obviously there are some INTENDED ways of having hidden doors in the game. If you have Supernatural there is a bookcase that Sims can use as a secret door into a room behind the bookcase. Even that can be cleverly done.
Here is the second floor of the two-story library where the last fireplace was built. Notice the two identical bookcases? The one on the right is a regular bookcase and the one on the left is the tricky one that has the door in it.
BUT here’s the thing, there is no ROOM behind that bookcase. What there is is a little space inside a “bow” shape on the house and I used this as a little passage between the bookcase door and a door hidden with curtains.
There are also hidden doors (and hidden staircases) using the tomb tools from World Adventures. There is an entire Zoo U class about building a tomb and Lissykin did a FABULOUS job of explaining all about how to use them, so I won’t go into all that again. I just want to touch on a few things.
If you are building a house with secret doors, doors that your Sim family wants to KEEP secret, then it isn’t like in a tomb where you discover a door and then it is unhidden from then on. For a secret door to stay secret there has to be a way to REHIDE the door and it has to be something that can be done over and over again.
The tools for World Adventures are intended to make tombs that your Sims will explore once and then all the traps are sprung, the switches are used, and the doors are unhidden. How can we use these tools for the UNINTENDED purpose of making a door that can be re-hidden over and over again?
The way that I do it (and there may be other ways) is to use the floor switch.
Here is the great thing about the floor switch, it has TWO different possible triggers. You can trigger an event by stepping ON the switch and you can trigger a DIFFERENT event by stepping OFF the switch. I will make the door start out as hidden, but make it discoverable and turn on auto-open which means that once your Sim discovers it, it will open automatically.
Now, I will set a floor switch so that when you step ON the switch, it HIDES the door and when you step OFF the switch it resets the switch (that last is important if you want to be able to do this as many times as needed). Also, if you are going to have a hidden door to a secret room, you likely want the door to be hidden when you are in the room as well as when you are not, so I put a floor switch like this on BOTH sides of the door.
Floor switches are re-colorable in CASt and you can almost make them invisible depending on what the floor pattern looks like.
Building to make space for Hidden Doors and Hidden Rooms
Certainly, some opportunities for a hidden door or a hidden room will just show up organically during a build. You will see a small area that isn’t big enough for a room, but it is big enough for a ladder and a door, instant secret passageway.
But, in my experience, the build should really be planned around, in general, where you are going to want your secret doors and secret rooms.
Hiding secret rooms in the basement is a good idea, BUT there has to be a good way to GET to the basement. One of the things I generally do is build the basement bigger than I think I will need it (realizing that it is always easy to trim it down to size) and, in a place that I KNOW I will keep some of my basement area, I will put in the stairs.
Stairs can be stubborn. I will put in stairs to every level of a build, at least one set, before I do much else in the way of decorating. This is especially true when you have a basement, especially if you have an “old style” basement AND a “WA style” basement in the same house.
Good places to add secret stairs are right beside non-secret stairs, then you have a mundane basement from one set of stairs and the secret basement rooms from the other set.
The shape of the building can also lead to good places for passageways. Be on the lookout for areas of the build with odd shapes where you won’t be putting a window because those can be good candidates for secret passages.
If you really feel at a loss and would like an example of using hidden stuff in a build, I recently made a huge, rambling Queen Anne estate called The Gray Lady that is RIDDLED with secret stuff. Here is the thread that started as my WIP for this build.
You don’t have to look at it at all, or you can look JUST at the photos and the “all secrets revealed” post (links for those are in post one of the thread) or you can read the whole thread and sort of see how I went about developing the build as I went. I took pains not to reveal all the secrets during the build since the person I was building for was reading the thread and I wanted her to have the fun of exploring her lot without my telling her everything right up front.
Now, go into your game and do the following:
1. Make a room with a door, then hide the door using art or photos. Have your Sim walk through the door and snap a photo of this.
2. Make a room with a foundation and put a wall in the center with a door in the wall. Hide the door using “the foundation trick” and take a photo of your Sim using the door.
Did you make some hidden doors and photos of Sims using them? If not, just add this to your homework.
6. Hidden Goodies for Downloaders
* One Builder’s Philosophy
* Mundane Goodies and Secret smiles
* Leaving the trail of breadcrumbs
* Should they have to tear out the wall?
One Builder’s Philosophy:
I build for a request team, so I know who I’m building for right from the start, but there are many faceless downloaders who are also going to be using that build. In my head as I build I’m trying to see the lot as they will see it. I like to think about the connection I am making with those people through the artwork I’m making using Sims as the medium. I like to put things in that I think will bring a surprise or even a laugh when they see it.
LOTS of my builds have secret stuff in them, and sometimes I don’t say one word about that secret stuff in the description on the Exchange or in any thread on the Sims site (though if that is the case the house itself will generally have a clue if they are looking close enough). I like the idea that there are people who have played out a whole legacy in houses I’ve built that they never realized have a secret basement full of treasure or a vampire coffin in a hidden passage in the wall next to the nursery. Perhaps that says something about the nature of my sense of humor, but I love the idea of one of those people one day realizing that in that closet storage area they had me build was a treasure chest full of Death Flowers and bags of money sitting right out there in plain sight beside the shoe rack.
Mundane Goodies:
I like to spoil people who download something I’ve built, so I almost always upgrade all the plumbing and appliances (since this is also a good way to test to see if your Sim can access these items, I just count this as my play-test of those items).
Sometimes I do other things, too, like stocking the kitchen bookcase with all the cooking and mixology books and all the recipes. If there is a music room then I might stock a bookcase in there with all the music books.
If there is a nectar cellar, sometimes I will make nectar with special names (like Tester’s Hot Blooded Nectar for a nectar Julianna Tester made from Flame Fruit and Plasma Fruit, for example). Likewise maybe there will be books with special titles from a writer tester Sim.
None of these things is obvious, but they make living in the house a little more comfortable or a little more fun.
Leaving a Trail of Breadcrumbs:
If I put something secret on the lot, I have a few rules that I have for myself.
1. If I don’t mention anything in the lot description to say that there are secrets, then there should be a way for people who are observant to find these secrets.
2. The more difficult to find or the more hoops I make them jump through, the more I make it worth their while to find it.
3. If there is NO clue given, then things should be in plain sight, but maybe you have to look closely to see them.
4. If I hide something with tomb markers, then it should be something that a reasonable (if devious) person could find (either with the hints I give or by observation).
5. I use WA signs, and SOMETIMES they are clues, but sometimes they are just for fun (like a sampler on the wall).
Should they have to tear out the wall?
If there is a room that won’t have to be entered over and over (like a secret magic room), if it is just a place they will go once to get treasure, then YES I am okay with it being hidden inside a wall. Now, they won’t REALLY have to tear it down, they can just go in Buy/Build and drag it out into the middle of the floor, but in a real life house would you tear out a wall to get a valuable treasure? HECK, YEAH!
I am also okay with having to Zenoport into a treasure room BUT if I put something like that into a house I will give a good clue.
I once built a very traditional house from a house plan. In the living room, in an arrangement of other wall art, I put a WA sign (colored like fabric as a sampler would be) and it said something like “Those who meditate will find a treasure right underfoot” and two floors below that very spot was a room with a skeleton and a bunch of treasure chests and ancient coins scattered on the floor. IF they read the sign as if it were a clue and just moved the camera down two floors they would plainly see that room, it was unhidden, but I wonder how many of the hundreds of people who downloaded that house ever found it.
I hope you have enjoyed this Zoo U course! And now the fun continues with HOMEWORK!
This is an ambitious homework assignment. I want you to build a house (any style) and it should have all the following in it:
1. Stacked rugs and/or triangular-tiled rugs
2. A wishing well or fountain. If you have World Adventures, this should include a dive well that Sims can use. BONUS POINTS: Connect this dive well with another on the lot, you may have to look at the Zoo U on tomb building to learn how to do this.
3. Fake stained glass windows.
4. If you have Dragon Valley, then make a dragon habitat of some sort.
5. A fake fireplace with a secret door inside it that leads to a secret passage or secret room.
6. At least one more hidden door. BONUS POINTS: Have a mundanely hidden door, a bookcase door (if you have Supernatural), a WA Hidden Door with Floor Switches (if you have WA), and a door hidden using “the foundation trick”.
DUE DATE IS AUGUST 1st.
This is nice, long due date. Why do you suppose that is? Could it be because I am trying to encourage participation in this contest?
We won’t have another lesson in this course, HOWEVER, if you want to post questions to me next week at the same time, I am going to make some time next Saturday, at the same time, to check the thread to see if anyone has a problem or needs some advice.
It is good that I started posting a half hour EARLY, as it took me AN HOUR AND A HALF just to POST my lesson that was already typed with all the links in it!!!
I know this is long enough for TWO lessons, so that makes sense I suppose.
Also, Word and the forums have a different idea of formatting and there were issues (and some very bad profanity) to get it all up and readable.
Okay, Zoo U students, feel free to post and visit on the thread.
Class is going to start in about 24 minutes. Typically it takes about the first half hour just to post the whole lesson (and I won't be answering questions or responding to students until the lesson is up), so I am going to go ahead and start posting.
Ooh, am I the first here? Ready for the lesson and I'm gonna miss the footy game (Germany - Ghana) for this class. That's how much I like ZooU! I'm a footy fan during the world cup only.
Got notepad, pencil, Icy chocolate Milk (Borden, but milk & chocolate syrup on standby if need more), And almost home alone. I will need to go for about 30 mins to drop off youngster, but I am a quick read & will be back before end of the lessons.
Soooo Excited right now I can hardly stand myself!
Comments
Hello, Meagan! *waves*
Lurkers are always welcome, but your lovely self would also be welcome as an "official" member of the class.
The bonus for us would be your fabulous work in the Blackcat Builders(IF you decided to do the homework and post a thread link-- no pressure even if you did join the class roster).
Zoo
Get settled in and let’s have some fun!
This lesson is going to be a bit different than some Zoo U classes as we will be looking at several things that are all really separate topics. You will read about a topic and see examples of it and then go into your game to practice that topic, then come back to the lesson for the next topic.
I plan to be here for at least two hours (part of that will be spent posting the lesson, and that takes varying lengths of time depending on how cooperative the Sims site and PhotoBucket decide to be). There will be time for you to read the entire lesson if you don’t do any of the practice, but I don’t think you will be able to do your practice for the entire lesson in two hours.
I have practice built in for each topic, but if you are concerned that you will have a lot of questions and you would like me to be available to give you an immediate answer, you may choose to read the lesson and not do any practice until after reading the entire thing. It is entirely up to you how you approach this. Any practice that you don’t do during class can just be added to your homework.
Of course if you do the practice during class and don’t make it through the whole lesson in two hours and later find yourself with a question, you can just post it on this thread and I WILL answer it, but it may not be immediately. I will be checking this thread at least daily, especially over the next week or so, and posting answers to any questions as I find them.
Thanks for attending Zoo U and here’s hoping you enjoy the lesson and that you learn some things that will be useful in your builds!
Zoo
Here are the parts of the lesson in outline form:
1. Rug Trickery
* Elaborate layering
* Triangular Floor Tiles and CASt
* Combining A. and B.
* Stepping Stones, Fountain and Fireplace Parts
2. Dive Wells Trickery
* Fountains
* Wells
* Hidden Entries
3. Stained Glass Window Trickery
* With Existing Windows
* Windows Where You Can’t Put Windows
4. Dragon Trickery
* Dragon Nests
* Dragon Aeries
* No trick Dragon Habitats
* Dragon Cages
* Dragons Everywhere!
* What we can learn here even if we AREN’T using dragons.
5. Hidden Entries
* Mundanely Hidden Doors
* The Foundation Trick and Hidden Doors
* Fake Fireplaces and Hidden Doors
* Hidden Doors and Hidden Rooms using Tomb Tools
* Building to make space for Hidden Doors
6. Hidden Goodies for Downloaders
* One Builder’s Philosophy
* Mundane Goodies and Secret smiles
* Leaving the trail of breadcrumbs
* Should they have to tear out the wall?
* Elaborate layering
I love patterns. Anyone who has ever viewed any of my builds will know that for a true statement as I almost always use a lot of patterns and make them (in my own opinion in any case) work together to create a pleasing effect. It is one of the things that makes me have to really reel myself in when I’m building something modern, which typically doesn’t have pattern layered upon pattern.
This love goes wonderfully with Victorian homes, but I have been frustrated with our rug choices. We have more now, but when we only had a few choices, I quickly became bored with the way they were sectioned off in order to allow us to color parts of the rug to create center motifs and borders. But real-life rugs have MORE areas than just center and border! When I discovered rug stacking it placated me for awhile!
FIRST:
The game is twitchy about which rug is on top and if you mess with your rugs after they are placed you will often have to completely re-place everything. ALWAYS CASt EVERYTHING BEFORE PLACING. It is really hard to click on a rug that LOOKS as if it is clearly on top in order to use CASt on it.
SECOND:
You will very likely want to use “disableSnappingToSlotsOnAlt on” (without quotes) and keep your finger on the ALT key as you place the rugs on top.
Sometimes a stack of rugs will show when a Sim walks over it (her feet may look as if they are sunk into the rug), but they cause NO ROUTING ISSUES that I have ever seen and I do this in every build.
EXAMPLES:
Some thoughts (and my own personal opinions) on layering rugs and using all these different patterns in a way that won’t make the viewer’s eyes explode:
1. When using several patterns in a single room, especially to create a single complex rug, pick a color palette of two to four colors and choose patterns that allow for that many color channels to be redone. Try making new patterns using the same colors and altering only the VALUE (how dark or light) of the color without altering the actual color. For example, you don’t want a lime green in one pattern and an aqua in another pattern (it may be okay to have both colors in BOTH patterns, but you don’t want one pattern with one green paired with a different pattern with a totally different green). You could have two patterns that both used the same color of lime green with one just darker than the other; that should be fine.
2. You will see designer fabric and designer rugs and designer wallpaper that all have the exact same pattern, but in general you don’t see this all used together. Be careful about using a wallpaper pattern in the rugs or furniture that you are going to use in that room. It doesn’t look like a real house if you splash the exact same pattern all over everything. A special peeve of mine is seeing the same exact pattern on walls and in curtains, but in fact they DO do that in real life. To be honest, even in real life I think it usually looks odd, but that is likely personal taste. It is okay, and likely even something a designer would create, to take ONE of the patterns used in a multi-patterned rug and put it on furniture or curtains or walls. Maybe it is even okay to take one of the patterns for the curtains and a different one of the rug patterns for the sofa, but have a care as you will be in eyeball-exploding territory if you get too much going on.
3. I WILL use an assortment of rugs in a room that all have the same three or four patterns used in different areas of the rugs, because you DO see this in real life. Rug designs are in fact often like this so that you can get all the rugs for a large room and have them look nice together without all having to be the exact same rug or exact same pattern in different sizes. What I use for a border on one rug will be a central area on another one in the same room.
4. When choosing rug border patterns, it is good to experiment with how a pattern is placed on the particular types of rugs. Some of them will take a pattern and wrap it around an edge (so that linear patterns will wind around the outside the way that real rug borders do), but some will just place it top to bottom. If you have a rug that places patterns top to bottom without making it make turns at the corners, you wouldn’t want a linear pattern for the border because it would look weird.
5. Look at it the next day to see if you still like it or if it is, in fact, eye-meltingly busy. Sometimes you can get so involved in the fun of CASt-ing all those rug patterns and layering them and you think it looks AWESOME and then you look the next day and... not so much. If it really IS way too busy, try making one of the areas of the rug a solid color to help break up all that pattern-on -pattern.
P.S.
See that photo of Julianna Tester and her Simbot, Zoo U Bot? That stack of “rugs” is builder trickery. The dance floor from the dance studio venue in the Store doesn’t have any wood lines stenciled on it, so you can recolor the whole thing as if it were ANY medium, including carpet. It even has a nice little edge that you can recolor to give extra dimension when it is layered with a rug.
I don’t know if anyone if familiar with the work of the excellent builder LariFari, but her work changed my life and here is how: She uses the wall and floor tiles and uses CASt in unexpected ways.
After I saw what she was doing, I had a “DUH!” moment, because in retrospect it is obvious and simple, but I’m not sure I would have seen it without her.
So, using this idea, you have all that lovely floor tiles in the “wood” section of the Build catalog that have various sections of the single tile with different channels that you can redo in CASt. WHO SAID YOU HAVE TO USE WOOD IN THOSE CHANNELS??
If you put other patterns, florals and geometrics work especially well, into those floor tile areas you can create an infinite amount of different tiles. Combine that with the very powerful ability to lay down triangular pieces of flooring and combining it with the ideas of pattern mixing that we just discussed and you get amazing results. You can use this idea outside as well, to make really interesting paths and patios by mixing “stone” and “masonry” patterns in the slots instead of wood.
EXAMPLES:
Okay, I think you guys get the idea. Now, let’s put the two ideas (rug stacking and the triangular pattern pieces) to get some really great results:
Here are a few of my favorite tiles and some non-wooden re-patterns:
So that the color isn’t so distracting, let’s use the two that are black and white and shades of gray to make some rugs:
Are you seeing the “infinite possibilities” here?? And when you add color and different patterns and different rug stacks--- there is no reason for you to ever get bored with the rugs available in your game again.
SO, this idea of using stuff in unexpected ways is one of my favorite things to do in a build. Since we are talking about rugs, let’s look at some examples of rugs used for something that was NOT their intended use.
1. * Stepping Stones, Fountain and Fireplace Parts
I really like the look of stepping stones, but I really don’t like the way that the terrain paints look to do them. For one thing, a real stepping stone has dirt showing around it a lot of the time, and also they would all be turned just slightly different and you can’t do that with terrain paint (the pattern has the same orientation every time). And it is limiting where you can use terrain paints.
I started looking at that smallest rug and decided it was perfect for stepping stones. But what if you already have painted paths in terrain paint? Will it look weird if the stepping stones don’t match the path? Likely it WON’T look weird, but I wanted them to match, so CASt to the rescue!
EXAMPLES:
I really got into making homemade fountains and homemade fireplaces (giant ones) recently, and I used rugs here, too.
The bottom rectangle of this fireplace is a rug.
The top of this homemade fountain is a rug. That’s right, that blue isn’t water (and neither is the bottom part, that is edging with floor tile recolored as water in CASt).
In order to get that last effect, I used the fact that that a rug would sit atop a display column from the Buy Catalog. I don’t know which rugs will do that, maybe some of them must only sit atop something that reads as “floor”. If that is the case you can still use the rugs up off ground level, just make something with foundation and floor it, then delete sections of foundation one at a time, replacing floor tiles, and when you have enough floor tiles that you can place the rug on the floor tiles (but hide the floor tiles with the rug) then you have what you want.
OKAY! This is a good time for you to stop reading and start doing!
1. Open your game. BEFORE choosing a lot to play, open the cheat window and use “testingCheatsEnabled true” followed by “buyDebug on” and then by “moveObjects on” and then “disableSnappingToSlotsOnAlt on” (all without the quotes)
2. Open a new game in a Builder’s Blank neighborhood OR OPEN ANY GAME YOU DESIRE.
3. Put a Tester Sim on the lot if you have not already done so.
4. Use the phone to cancel the newspaper.
5. Shift-click the mailbox and choose “Set Needs To Static” (we are building, not playing, and we don’t want to have to pause because our tester Sim wants to eat or sleep or pee)
6. Go to Build Mode and Turn Off Auto-Roof (because it’s evil).
7. If you have Seasons or Supernatural or both, go to Options and choose Summer as the only season and Sunshine as the only weather and set the moon phase to static and choose any phase OTHER than full moon (we don’t want our Tester having to dodge zombies or balls of hail as we are trying build).
8. In Options, you will want to also turn off Story Progression, Aging, and Autonomy for Sims and Pets.
We might not have needed ALL this for what we are about to do, but that is my general list of things that I do when I start to build on a new lot. I don’t like to be bugged by stuff in the game when I’m building!
Now, do all of the following:
1. Recolor some of the “wooden” floor tiles in the Build Catalog with floral or geometric patterns in the channels instead of wood. Do this with at least two tiles (three is better).
2. Choose one of these floor tiles and hit Control and F at the same time to allow for triangular placement.
3. Create a rug using these triangular floor tiles for your patterns.
Now choose at least two of the rugs in the Buy Catalog and recolor using the same patterns that you used to recolor your “wooden” floor tiles.
1. Layer to make a nice rug.
2. Use a combination of the floor tiles and the rugs to make a different nice rug.
Once you have at least three nice rugs (one of floor tiles only, one of rugs stacked only, and one of a combination), take some photos to show on your Zoo U homework thread.
Now go back to the lesson!
This part of the lesson uses the Dive Wells from the Tomb Section of buyDebug and you can only do this part of the lesson if you have World Adventures which gave you these tools.
Don’t worry, if you don’t have World Adventures, you will still be able to do the next part of the lesson, so just skip the Dive Well section.
2. Dive Wells Trickery
* Fountains
* Wishing Wells
* Hidden Entries
As I already confessed, I LOVE to use things for a purpose they were not intended. So I really really like Dive Wells.
You can use them on any surface that reads as “floor” and if they aren’t too high up, Sims can still use them for their INTENDED purpose.
* Consider the fountain that we already saw in the Rug Trickery section of the lesson.
I used the white “carpet” floor tile and recolored to match water and I colored the center of the small round rug with the border the same way. I colored the rug border as if it were stone and colored my dive well the same way. I recolored the edging around my fountain with the same stone pattern.
Then I recolored a column in the “display” area of the Buy Catalog in the same stone pattern and grabbed some dragons from the roof decor section and a chess piece from Showtime and recolored them as if they were solid stone.
Then I stacked as shown and put fountain pieces from the Build Catalog to make the water effects.
Pretty fun, right?
You can make really nice, very simple fountains, too, just plop down a dive well and add a fountain piece inside it.
* Wishing Wells
The trick for getting the classic “wishing well” look is that you need a little roof, which means you need to use support columns (or walls) as the side pieces on your well. Here are a couple of examples. The first one uses castle exterior pieces around the dive well. The second uses those square modern columns INSIDE the dive well (I used a bunch of them and placed them carefully to give the correct shape).
Here are the pieces used to MOO the last Wishing Well:
I needed the one display column because the one I actually made the well out of won’t allow the bucket to sit on it. I just hid the support column inside the other kind.
* Hidden Entries
Want to know the trickiest thing about making fountains and wishing wells using the dive well? If you do it right, it still works as a Dive Well!!
The Dragon Fountain and the last Wishing Well (the one with the columns inside) are both fully functional dive wells.
It turns out that the target area that Sims need to “see” in order to be able to use the Dive Well is really small, but there is one area for being able to enter and one for being able to exit, so you have to try your tester going IN and OUT using your MOO’d fountain or well.
In the Dragon Fountain, Julianna Tester could go in just fine, but she was unable to climb back out until I went into Build Mode and moved one of the dragon pieces just slightly. After that she could get in and climb out.
I was really dubious about the Wishing Well that had all those columns inside it, but Julianna didn’t “see” any of that, she went in and out without a problem. It DOES look weird (she is going right through the sides) but for her those columns aren’t even there so it doesn’t affect your game at all.
In creating that last wishing well, I tried stacking two dive wells (they won’t stack on their own, but I used foundation to place floor tiles and deleted the foundation, the top dive well sat on the floor tile without problems).
Julianna could climb into the TOP well as long as the bottom one wasn’t there (she wasn’t bothered by the slight elevation at all). But if I put ANYTHING under the well, she had a foot stomping fit if I told her to use it. After I decided to go the column route I wondered if she would have been able to use the BOTTOM well if the top one was in place. I didn’t try that, but I may at some future time.
OKAY, BACK INTO YOUR GAME!
Do the following:
1. Use the Dive Well to create a fountain that your Sim can still use.
2. Use the Dive Well to create a Wishing Well that your Sim can still use.
3. Take photos of these to share on your Zoo U homework thread.
4. Come back to the lesson!
Did you go through Zoo U Course 11: Enhance Your Builds with Photography and CAP as a prerequisite for this class? If not, then now is a good time to do it because you won’t understand much about part three of the lesson if you haven’t viewed that course.
3. Stained Glass Window Trickery
* With Existing Windows
* Windows Where You Can’t Put Windows
This whole section of the lesson falls under the “CAP plus Photography Trickery” heading. If you went all the way through Zoo U Course 11, then you already know that not only can this combination of tools be used for an unlimited variety of artwork in your builds, but it can also be used for signage, posters and maps from places you have created in Sims (there is a Zoo U poster and posters of my Walt Simney World parks in MANY of my own builds), and for gift shop displays that look as if there are hanging clothes or stacks of boxed goods or similar effects. I recently made a superhero headquarters and used this combination of tools to make a “display case” with a superhero costume in it.
So, now we use this combination to do some really awesome-looking stained glass for our builds!
DIRECTIONS:
1. Use your favorite Internet Search Engine to locate photographs of stained glass windows. You want rectangles that are perfectly vertical and absolutely straight on (so someone’s photo of a window in their home may not work at all because things will be angled). You want an image that you can photograph and have it look as if it is looking straight into the image, not from an angle sideways and not above or below it. Ads where people are selling stained glass are often a good place to get images to use.
2. Make sure that the photograph looks like cut glass (as opposed to some “stained glass” which is painted instead of cut--- that doesn’t give as good an effect I don’t think). Use this photo to create a Pattern in CAP as described in the previous course. If you have been through Course 11 you will have a good idea of how to orient it so that the rectangle is neither too square nor too stretched out to photograph well, but you can put a background (generally solid black) that could look like the edge of the window and that will be a little bit forgiving when you get in game and start to photograph it.
3. Go in game and photograph it in the appropriate size (large portrait, small portrait, and medium landscape can all be used to good effect for stained glass). Even panoramic photos can be used if you do it right.
Let’s look at some examples where these photos are laid into existing windows (both inside and outside the house).
CONTINUED
I actually just barely limp along at the photography part, but (if you have testingCheatsEnabled true) when in Buy/Build Mode you can shift-click on a photo and you will get a pie menu with a “clone” option and if you choose it you will get an exact copy of your photograph! SO useful and I didn’t realize it until I started doing a bunch of stained glass windows!
Another thing you may have noticed, I was not at all impressed that the “tower” piece of the Then and Now Manor set was non-functional. I made my own functional one and I thought stained glass would look good there.
Speaking of the Then and Now Manor set, which I love, I was disappointed that the roof pieces have non-functional windows. They are on the outside of the roof piece only, and the inside is just a solid color.
Well, I wasn’t having THAT either. Look at the roof right above the porch. See the windows? I used the stained glass pieces from Showtime to fill those in. On the inside I did something to make it look as if I had windows as well.
Look at the roof above the first floor here. There are some of my homemade stained glass pieces. I had to slightly move the roof pieces to get this effect (since photos must be where a wall would be) and it made me have to MOO in a few extra roofing pieces, but I think it was worth it. On the inside of this room there are also these same stained glass pieces (set into a window that is only visible inside the structure).
All this stubbornness with insisting that I WILL have windows made me start to think of other times when I would like a window and my game says no. Like inside roofs or in a dormer where there is no window that will fit. Now I will just put fake stained glass in those areas.
If real windows can’t be used, you will only have the photo’s frame as the window frame, and it is a little thin for that, but you can sometimes use curtains and/or more than one stained glass piece to make it look more substantial on the inside of the room (outside you can use siding choices that make the “window” frame seem more substantial).
This is two “large portrait” size photos side-by-side. This is inside a roof piece and there is no window here at all. I used buyDebug lights to make it seem as if light was coming in through the windows any time I put these on the inside of a room where a window can’t go:
A NOTE ABOUT PLACEMENT:
Using ALT, all photos will slide freely up and down walls, but they still must be where a wall could go and they still won’t slide horizontally except to “snap” into specific places. “Large Portrait” size photos will line up side to side while “Medium Landscape” and “Panoramic” sizes line up top to bottom.
The following example was tricky to do. I made as large a CAP pattern as I could without making it overlap or get repeats that are too close together to get a clean photo.
I then put the image on the wall and took THREE panoramic photos, carefully positioning the camera so that the final effect is like three horizontal panels of one huge image. A nice effect, I thought. This is intended to be a stained glass decorative wall, not a window, but you could definitely use this idea to make a window.
Fake stained glass windows flank the shower (this is in an attic room with no windows):
Fake stained glass window in the dormer where no window will fit:
Now it’s time for you to try it!
1. Find some images of Stained Glass that you like and turn them into CAP patterns.
2. Go into your game and photograph them.
3. Make a simple wall if you are on an empty lot (if you are on a lot where you have a building, use a window in the building) and use your photos in combination with existing windows to make stained glass windows. Put the photos inside and outside the window, sliding them so that the view inside and out is as it should be.
4. Photograph your results for your homework thread!
5. Come back to the lesson!
4. Dragon Trickery
* Dragon Nests
* Dragon Aeries
* No trick Dragon Habitats
* Dragon Cages
* Dragons Everywhere!
* What we can learn here even if we AREN’T using dragons?
To do everything from except the last thing in the list, you will need baby dragons, which means that you will need Dragon Valley (or in the case of the Black Dragon you will need the Duke of Bows venue). We are going to apply some of what we learned in working with dragons that applies to other things in the game, so you should read that last part even if you don’t have dragons.
First off, WHY do we need tricks to deal with dragons? Well, you don’t if you just want to carry them and interact with them, but if you want to display them on your lot you DO (unless having the dragon just sitting in the middle of the living room floor is what you are after).
I love that EA gave us dragons, but, like A LOT of things I would have made some changes to how they did things. Obviously it would have been cooler if dragons could grow up and you could fly around town riding them (and, let’s be honest, having them fry the butt off anyone in town who has ever annoyed you). Now, I can kind of see how that would be too much to expect from a Store item, BUT was it really too much to expect that they would give us a dragon cage or a dragon bed or SOMETHING like that?
It is especially bad because Sims will sometimes just decide to set their dragon down somewhere and you might NEVER find it again! You can’t call them to come to you. Since there is no cage or bed there is nothing to click on to give an option to tell your Sim to put the dragon in there. Presumably the Sim knows where she put the dragon but you have no way of telling her to go get it.
Also, I like the idea of having a display for a dragon. I decided that I would just make one and that would have been easy EXCEPT for the “brilliant” coding choice that doesn’t allow dragons to sit anywhere except “floor” or “ground” (or on your Sim). You can’t put them on displays, tables, or shelves and you can’t use any of the pet habitats from Pets for them.
You can STILL make one, but it is much more complicated to do something fancy because of this coding.
Let’s start out easy: Nest boxes:
Here all I did was use the interior platform in the foundation tool and then edge it. You could just paint the inside of it with something that looks like grass or straw, but I really wanted hay for this so I made a hay pattern in CAP and used it on sand piles from WA. I think it gives a nice effect. Adding food bowls from Pets adds to illusion that they are real animals (though baby dragons don’t need to eat and will never starve or require any other sort of attention from your Sims--- the game treats them like objects and not animals).
In this same build, I made a dragon aerie right up above where this nest box sits. This is also really easy, you just delete some floor tiles in the room above and trace over the area with edging using the fencing tool. These are dragon perches (and dragons can sit on them if you have enough flooring left in that room so that the squares where the edging is still appear as grid lines in Buy/Build Mode).
Here is how that looks:
Sims can access this aerie (you can see the walkway in the photo) via a ladder in the room with the nest box.
This next thing was just for fun, but you COULD use this if you just wanted it to look like your dragon had a bed. By the way, Pets treat dragons just as they would any object that they cannot interact with--- in other words they ignore them unless they are in the way and cause a route fail when the pet is trying to get to a different object.
Okay, I couldn’t resist setting this up as both cat and dragon were asleep:
You can also make “homes” for your dragon that don’t require a lot of building tricks, just some imagination:
But let’s suppose that you want something that DOES require builder tricks. Then you need to play with the floor levels in order to create your dragon habitat.
The very easiest thing is if you have a room that is two full stories tall. This looks good, it is fancy and fun, BUT it is really huge. You can do this in your huge rambling mansion or your huge rambling castle, but somehow I don’t see this in the spare bedroom of your mobile home:
I put the cat tree in the cage to add a little something with height to the bottom story. Obviously, dragons can’t use it, but cats and Sims can enter both stories of the cage, so the cat will sleep in the cage “visiting” his dragon friends.
Whatever you build, don’t forget the little details. Did you see the mice in the food bowl? AND in the red dragon’s claws? Did you see that there were stuffed toys and piles of gold for the hoard? They are babies, so I think they would like to cuddle with a soft stuffed bear, don’t you? And even a baby dragon needs a hoard.
So, what if you don’t want the massive two story cage? You STILL need two stories, but one of them can be much less than a full story. The easiest way to do this is to make a room where part of it is on a foundation and part of it is not. Any sort of split-level structure can be used to create a dragon habitat. Here are some examples:
This next photo is of a simple nest box, but having the dragon fountain above it gives the illusion that baby dragons would get up in there to get a drink or have a bath. I also thought that gold statues of Julianna Tester would be agreeable to a dragon for its hoard.
By the way, in my world view baby dragons love to eat hot peppers, and they will fly up to *** one off the string of them when they want a taste. You will notice peppers hanging above several of my dragon homes.
All of the following would work great OUTSIDE a structure (and actually not even CLOSE to a structure as it will mess up all the wall heights and you can’t put one of these inside a room as you will not be able to roof it).
They are all made by using CFE and making floor levels that aren’t one full story:
Here I made foundation and then used a frieze to get some flooring , then deleted the frieze but leaving the floor back in so that the dragon will have a place to stand, then MOO’d in the large bird tree from Pets:
Here is step by step for this last structure:
Here is the critical thing to remember for dragon placement: If it is a place where floor tiles could go, a dragon can go there.
SO, if you have MOO active, you can put dragons on top of columns (floor could be placed on top of a column, right?) and then, just as you could delete the column and have the floor stay, you can take away the column and the dragon will stay!
So you can have dragons everywhere in your trees, just place a column and orient your dragon to look as if it is sitting on a tree branch, then remove the column.
WARNING: Dragons can freeze and get stuck in a single position. This happens sometimes when you upload, download, or just take the dragon in and out of the inventory. Fortunately, this is incredibly easy to fix.
You will need testingCheatsEnabled true. Go into Buy/Build and Control + Shift + Click on the dragon. You will get a pie menu, choose Reset. Works every time I’ve encountered the problem. In fact there are red dragons in the buyDebug catalog, which always come out frozen, and this reset always fixes them.
What we can learn here even if we AREN’T using dragons?
Well, dragons aren’t the ONLY objects that will only sit on things coded as “floor”. There is a really nice painting in a Store set that I never use because I don’t want it to sit on the floor and it is coded to only do that. There are also Voodoo dolls and bears and some plants that will only sit on floor or ground. What if you want to use some of this stuff and have it look as if it is on a shelf? Or a mantel? Or a table?
You will have to make something that LOOKS like a shelf or mantel or table, but have it actually be made with floor tile. Here are a few examples:
You will notice that in the photo with the wagon gift shop (which is in a western town area of an amusement park), Julianna Tester is sitting in the wagon (in the park it is considered a photo opportunity area for guests). Actually, Julianna doesn’t see that wagon at all, I used MOO and positioned it carefully so that that would be the case. What she sees are the stairs, the flooring (which is used on the other side of the wagon as a shelf) and the seat that I put on the flooring.
You will also notice in the Egyptian-themed gift shop (from the same amusement park, in a different area) it LOOKS as if I managed to get those mummy bears to sit on a table, which they will not. Actually, this room is multi-level and there is a “floor” area that my bears are sitting on, then I just MOO’d a table into place under them on the level below that “floor”.
You see all sorts of objects on my home-made fireplace mantel that won’t usually sit on a fireplace mantel. This is a huge two-story room and the game reads that mantel as flooring.
We won’t make a dragon cage during class, that requires some time and planning, so we’ll save that for homework!
* Mundanely Hidden Doors
* The Foundation Trick and Hidden Doors
* Fake Fireplaces and Hidden Doors
* A Word about Hidden Doors and Hidden Rooms using Tomb Tools
* Building to make space for Hidden Doors and Rooms
A great deal about hidden doors has to do with the difference in the way WE see the world versus the way OUR SIMS see the world.
By Mundanely Hidden Doors, I mean doors that we just put something in front of and Sims can still use it. That can be done by realizing that some things that WE see are invisible to Sims in terms of routing.
Curtains are one of the things that Sims will walk right through.
Here is just a simple foundation with a wall cutting through it with a door in the middle. There are stairs only on one side of the door, so in order to get to the other side of the wall, Sims will have to go through the door.
Now, I will camouflage the door with a curtain (it needs to be one that completely covers the door so that HUMANS can’t see it), but as you can see, Julianna doesn’t see the curtain at all.
There are several curtains that work well for trick.
Turns out there are OTHER things that are invisible when it comes to routing. Artwork (notice that I didn’t put this flush with the door because if I did you could see the door facing through the particular artwork that I chose). You would have to disguise this spacing somehow if you wanted to use this (or use different art).
This is an “art” piece from the Gothic set, this one I DID place flush with the door since the wrinkles keep any of the door from showing through.
One of the most powerful things is that two of the “large portrait” size photos, one on top of the other, will just about completely cover the door (a tiny sliver shows at the bottom but could be mistaken for photo frame). Here I show it with something that you wouldn’t use, but what about making a stained glass window (top photo would be the top of the image, bottom half would be the bottom of the image) or some other special-effect pairing of photos?
And yet...
Why wasn’t the shelf visible to her the second time? Because the second time I used “the foundation trick”.
Sims “see” things that are on the same level of flooring that they are on, and basically ONLY the stuff on that level. So, in order to have Julianna not see the shelf, I went down one level (to the ground level, while the door that I want Julianna to use is on the foundation level).
When I put my shelf in (and I can slide it up and down, just make sure you STAY on ground level as you do your sliding, and end up with shelving nearly to the top of the door.)
Since it is built, from the game’s viewpoint, INSIDE foundation, it will be really dark unless you also build lights on the ground floor (I like the buyDebug lights for this).
See how it fixes the lighting on the shelf?
Whatever you put on the shelves will also be invisible to your Sims and you can use the siding to disguise the door. Here is an example in one of my builds:
Here is was at an earlier stage, see how Julianna walks right through all the shelving and their contents?
You can use other things besides shelves with “the foundation trick”.
How about a bookcase?
Well, that looks horrible. It doesn’t do the job if we can see the whole top of the door. But, we can adjust the ground inside the foundation. Let’s see about that.
BETTER! We still have a few issues. The bottom looks weird, so maybe white carpet isn’t a good choice here. Also the lighting still looks a little dark. Let’s work on both of those things.
By the way, this bookcase is unusable, but your Sims won’t TRY to use it since they don’t see it.
What other things can we use “the foundation trick” on?
Actually, lots of stuff! I’ll show you one more example of a good one.
I really like this look:
We don’t have anything that looks like that in Sims and so I decided to make my own.
You know, it just dawned on me that nearly every single thing in the lesson starts out with my being dissatisfied with what we were given and, instead of just living with it, pitching a big fit and stubbornly trying to find a way to circumvent the rules. That actually sounds a lot like the way I live my life...
ANYWAY! Here are some efforts at the huge fireplaces using Sims building tools and the Fog Emitter to get the fire (lots of codes work but “firepit” doesn’t make a lot of smoke so I kind of like that one):
I decided to put a “grate” on using fencing (I think it looked okay without it, too).
After I worked out all the bugs and was happy with how this looked, it occurred to me that there was a lot of space inside this fireplace that was hidden from view. That seemed like a great place for a hidden door.
You could put one in the back (and have the secret room directly behind the fireplace), but I chose to put it on the side and have stairs that leads up to the secret area. No matter where you put the secret door it will work, but you have to carefully place all the logs (and I used a coffee table that I MOO’d into place with the logs as I think it looks like a rack, AND it gives me a second level to put the Fog Emitter since it will sit on a table) so that your Sims can get to the door. The Fog Emitter is invisible to Sims, so you only have to worry about the other stuff.
Here is Julianna using the secret door:
Here is another example (in this build there is a ladder that leads up to the secret room so there doesn’t have to be a big secret space behind the fireplace):
Obviously there are some INTENDED ways of having hidden doors in the game. If you have Supernatural there is a bookcase that Sims can use as a secret door into a room behind the bookcase. Even that can be cleverly done.
Here is the second floor of the two-story library where the last fireplace was built. Notice the two identical bookcases? The one on the right is a regular bookcase and the one on the left is the tricky one that has the door in it.
BUT here’s the thing, there is no ROOM behind that bookcase. What there is is a little space inside a “bow” shape on the house and I used this as a little passage between the bookcase door and a door hidden with curtains.
There are also hidden doors (and hidden staircases) using the tomb tools from World Adventures. There is an entire Zoo U class about building a tomb and Lissykin did a FABULOUS job of explaining all about how to use them, so I won’t go into all that again. I just want to touch on a few things.
If you are building a house with secret doors, doors that your Sim family wants to KEEP secret, then it isn’t like in a tomb where you discover a door and then it is unhidden from then on. For a secret door to stay secret there has to be a way to REHIDE the door and it has to be something that can be done over and over again.
The tools for World Adventures are intended to make tombs that your Sims will explore once and then all the traps are sprung, the switches are used, and the doors are unhidden. How can we use these tools for the UNINTENDED purpose of making a door that can be re-hidden over and over again?
The way that I do it (and there may be other ways) is to use the floor switch.
Here is the great thing about the floor switch, it has TWO different possible triggers. You can trigger an event by stepping ON the switch and you can trigger a DIFFERENT event by stepping OFF the switch. I will make the door start out as hidden, but make it discoverable and turn on auto-open which means that once your Sim discovers it, it will open automatically.
Now, I will set a floor switch so that when you step ON the switch, it HIDES the door and when you step OFF the switch it resets the switch (that last is important if you want to be able to do this as many times as needed). Also, if you are going to have a hidden door to a secret room, you likely want the door to be hidden when you are in the room as well as when you are not, so I put a floor switch like this on BOTH sides of the door.
Floor switches are re-colorable in CASt and you can almost make them invisible depending on what the floor pattern looks like.
Building to make space for Hidden Doors and Hidden Rooms
Certainly, some opportunities for a hidden door or a hidden room will just show up organically during a build. You will see a small area that isn’t big enough for a room, but it is big enough for a ladder and a door, instant secret passageway.
But, in my experience, the build should really be planned around, in general, where you are going to want your secret doors and secret rooms.
Hiding secret rooms in the basement is a good idea, BUT there has to be a good way to GET to the basement. One of the things I generally do is build the basement bigger than I think I will need it (realizing that it is always easy to trim it down to size) and, in a place that I KNOW I will keep some of my basement area, I will put in the stairs.
Stairs can be stubborn. I will put in stairs to every level of a build, at least one set, before I do much else in the way of decorating. This is especially true when you have a basement, especially if you have an “old style” basement AND a “WA style” basement in the same house.
Good places to add secret stairs are right beside non-secret stairs, then you have a mundane basement from one set of stairs and the secret basement rooms from the other set.
The shape of the building can also lead to good places for passageways. Be on the lookout for areas of the build with odd shapes where you won’t be putting a window because those can be good candidates for secret passages.
If you really feel at a loss and would like an example of using hidden stuff in a build, I recently made a huge, rambling Queen Anne estate called The Gray Lady that is RIDDLED with secret stuff. Here is the thread that started as my WIP for this build.
http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/750212.page
You don’t have to look at it at all, or you can look JUST at the photos and the “all secrets revealed” post (links for those are in post one of the thread) or you can read the whole thread and sort of see how I went about developing the build as I went. I took pains not to reveal all the secrets during the build since the person I was building for was reading the thread and I wanted her to have the fun of exploring her lot without my telling her everything right up front.
Now, go into your game and do the following:
1. Make a room with a door, then hide the door using art or photos. Have your Sim walk through the door and snap a photo of this.
2. Make a room with a foundation and put a wall in the center with a door in the wall. Hide the door using “the foundation trick” and take a photo of your Sim using the door.
6. Hidden Goodies for Downloaders
* One Builder’s Philosophy
* Mundane Goodies and Secret smiles
* Leaving the trail of breadcrumbs
* Should they have to tear out the wall?
One Builder’s Philosophy:
I build for a request team, so I know who I’m building for right from the start, but there are many faceless downloaders who are also going to be using that build. In my head as I build I’m trying to see the lot as they will see it. I like to think about the connection I am making with those people through the artwork I’m making using Sims as the medium. I like to put things in that I think will bring a surprise or even a laugh when they see it.
LOTS of my builds have secret stuff in them, and sometimes I don’t say one word about that secret stuff in the description on the Exchange or in any thread on the Sims site (though if that is the case the house itself will generally have a clue if they are looking close enough). I like the idea that there are people who have played out a whole legacy in houses I’ve built that they never realized have a secret basement full of treasure or a vampire coffin in a hidden passage in the wall next to the nursery. Perhaps that says something about the nature of my sense of humor, but I love the idea of one of those people one day realizing that in that closet storage area they had me build was a treasure chest full of Death Flowers and bags of money sitting right out there in plain sight beside the shoe rack.
Mundane Goodies:
I like to spoil people who download something I’ve built, so I almost always upgrade all the plumbing and appliances (since this is also a good way to test to see if your Sim can access these items, I just count this as my play-test of those items).
Sometimes I do other things, too, like stocking the kitchen bookcase with all the cooking and mixology books and all the recipes. If there is a music room then I might stock a bookcase in there with all the music books.
If there is a nectar cellar, sometimes I will make nectar with special names (like Tester’s Hot Blooded Nectar for a nectar Julianna Tester made from Flame Fruit and Plasma Fruit, for example). Likewise maybe there will be books with special titles from a writer tester Sim.
None of these things is obvious, but they make living in the house a little more comfortable or a little more fun.
Leaving a Trail of Breadcrumbs:
If I put something secret on the lot, I have a few rules that I have for myself.
1. If I don’t mention anything in the lot description to say that there are secrets, then there should be a way for people who are observant to find these secrets.
2. The more difficult to find or the more hoops I make them jump through, the more I make it worth their while to find it.
3. If there is NO clue given, then things should be in plain sight, but maybe you have to look closely to see them.
4. If I hide something with tomb markers, then it should be something that a reasonable (if devious) person could find (either with the hints I give or by observation).
5. I use WA signs, and SOMETIMES they are clues, but sometimes they are just for fun (like a sampler on the wall).
Should they have to tear out the wall?
If there is a room that won’t have to be entered over and over (like a secret magic room), if it is just a place they will go once to get treasure, then YES I am okay with it being hidden inside a wall. Now, they won’t REALLY have to tear it down, they can just go in Buy/Build and drag it out into the middle of the floor, but in a real life house would you tear out a wall to get a valuable treasure? HECK, YEAH!
I am also okay with having to Zenoport into a treasure room BUT if I put something like that into a house I will give a good clue.
I once built a very traditional house from a house plan. In the living room, in an arrangement of other wall art, I put a WA sign (colored like fabric as a sampler would be) and it said something like “Those who meditate will find a treasure right underfoot” and two floors below that very spot was a room with a skeleton and a bunch of treasure chests and ancient coins scattered on the floor. IF they read the sign as if it were a clue and just moved the camera down two floors they would plainly see that room, it was unhidden, but I wonder how many of the hundreds of people who downloaded that house ever found it.
This is an ambitious homework assignment. I want you to build a house (any style) and it should have all the following in it:
1. Stacked rugs and/or triangular-tiled rugs
2. A wishing well or fountain. If you have World Adventures, this should include a dive well that Sims can use. BONUS POINTS: Connect this dive well with another on the lot, you may have to look at the Zoo U on tomb building to learn how to do this.
3. Fake stained glass windows.
4. If you have Dragon Valley, then make a dragon habitat of some sort.
5. A fake fireplace with a secret door inside it that leads to a secret passage or secret room.
6. At least one more hidden door. BONUS POINTS: Have a mundanely hidden door, a bookcase door (if you have Supernatural), a WA Hidden Door with Floor Switches (if you have WA), and a door hidden using “the foundation trick”.
DUE DATE IS AUGUST 1st.
This is nice, long due date. Why do you suppose that is? Could it be because I am trying to encourage participation in this contest?
http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/756416.page
Why, YES, that is EXACTLY WHY!
We won’t have another lesson in this course, HOWEVER, if you want to post questions to me next week at the same time, I am going to make some time next Saturday, at the same time, to check the thread to see if anyone has a problem or needs some advice.
Go forth and BUILD!
Zoo
It is good that I started posting a half hour EARLY, as it took me AN HOUR AND A HALF just to POST my lesson that was already typed with all the links in it!!!
I know this is long enough for TWO lessons, so that makes sense I suppose.
Also, Word and the forums have a different idea of formatting and there were issues (and some very bad profanity) to get it all up and readable.
I will now see what questions people are having!
Zoo
Class is going to start in about 24 minutes. Typically it takes about the first half hour just to post the whole lesson (and I won't be answering questions or responding to students until the lesson is up), so I am going to go ahead and start posting.
WELCOME TO ZOO U! I AM SO GLAD YOU ARE HERE!
Zoo
I'm a footy fan during the world cup only.
Soooo Excited right now I can hardly stand myself!
I brought snacks!
Zoo: is there a responsible SimGuru I can ask to delete my post?