Thanks, @rosemow ! I agree about the trees ... and I had to do a bit of trickery to get them to show on the gallery picture, because they weren't showing up initially. I figured that this was because the camera was too close to the lot -- you know how trees disappear when you get too close to them. So I put a false second floor under the roof, without any walls, and set it as having medium-height walls. This fools the game into thinking the building is a bit taller than it actually is; so the camera takes a step back to capture the whole building, and that in turn gives the trees the distance they need to not disappear.
It was a great way to get the trees to appear in the Gallery photos! You are very creative! Thanks for telling us what you did. The resulting pictures look great!
Challenge 13 was about renovating a church. As is usual for these challenges, @Zita1966z provided the shell of the building (and, in this case, also the monumental cross outside) and the task of each participant is to renovate it: wall finishes, floor finishes, furniture, room assignments, landscaping; in this case, also the interior walls (creation of rooms), the roof, and the doors and windows. I ended up not touching the roof except to change the colour and pattern, but I did meddle with everything else.
Properly, it's the Church of St Joseph of Cupertino, but that name doesn't fit into the space that the game allows for a build name. It was inspired by the fact that sims with a certain amount of expertise at meditation can levitate while meditating, and one of the miracles ascribed to St Joseph of Cupertino was his tendency to levitate while praying.
Interior view:
I made it a Catholic church, since that's the tradition I know best, so there are a bunch of details that are specific to that. There's a confessional on one side of the sanctuary, and what is probably a very much undersized sacristy on the other. There are fourteen wall hangings around the interior, meant to stand in for the stations of the cross. And of course there are kneelers ... well, meditation stools. I found (happily) that the meditation stools can still function perfectly well when placed much closer to each other and to the benches (pews) behind them than their footprint technically allows.
The build is marked as a "generic" lot, but it occurs to me that it just as easily function as a spa ... or, at least, a centre for meditation. Something would have to be done about the locker in the sacristy first, though, or everyone's going to want to go in there the moment they show up.
So this build won! This meant that I was to be a guest judge for the next challenge and not eligible to enter as a contestant.
Challenge 14 was a little different. This time, we got three different floorplans and were challenged to build the house as well. Of course I built my own judge's take on it, and actually got the thing finished before anyone else ... but I held off on uploading it just in case it might influence anyone.
I took a few liberties with the original plan. All the built-in closets were eliminated (though some of the entrants did some good work replicating them) and the laundry room became a bathroom.
An interior view:
After spending the whole week scrutinising other people's builds and asking myself what works for me and what doesn't and why, I came back to this and discovered a bunch of things that I found just a little unsatisfactory. I never found a wall/floor finish for the kitchen that I felt worked perfectly in relation to the rest of the build, for one thing. And there are walls here and there that feel like they really need a painting or something on them. But, well, I did want to keep within the budget even if I was not in the running and was technically just building this for myself; and also, sometimes it's just not worth the time and effort to try and find a solution for everything. There comes a point where you just have to accept that you're not going to get it perfect, you just have to get it to be the best "acceptable" it can be without losing your mind.
No, I wouldn't give myself a perfect score for this. I wouldn't even give myself the best score for this. But I still think it's a really good build, and I like it, and that's what matters.
I will repost here what I wrote on the challenge thread about the builds.
St Joe Cupertino Church is very nice! It was nice reading the accompanying descriptions to explain your build. It is great that you have placed an airplane outside the front of the Church to reflect Joe Cupertino and aviation. The sky blue tiling texture of the towers looks very nice! The plants are nice touches on the front patio. Very nice wooden texture of the cross. The three tall trees behind the cross give a very look, and the flowers look pretty at the base of the cross. It looks very nice how you have placed the tombstones in the graveyard! The hedging fencing and the arch entrance to the graveyard looks nice. The side garden is very pretty! It looks very nice how you have used the terrain paint to create the cross patterns on the grassy areas! The flowers look very nice in the middle of the cross. Sims will enjoy sitting restfully and quietly on the seat benches there. It is nice how you have shown the light falling onto the garden area. Very nice furnishing of the interior of the Church! It looks very nice how you have set up the pew seats for the sims to sit on and watch the service. The cross on the wall in the front area of the build looks very nice! Very nice fenced front section! The walls of candles look very pretty there. The purple colour of the curtains suits well the type of build.
The exterior design of Crystal Classic looks very grand! It looks very nice how you have used the columns in the build! The roof trimming looks very nice how you have used it! The upper glass windows look very nice how you have used them in the build.The trees look very nice on the edges of the home! The flowers are pretty in the front of the home. Very nice backyard area. Sims will have fun playing on the monkey bars or enjoy growing plants in the gardening boxes. It is great that there is the woodwork table there sims to enjoy doing wood crafting on. Very nice outdoors chess table area for sims to enjoy sitting playing chess in the midst of the flowers. Sims will enjoy painting on the easel in the sunshine. Very nice furnishing of the interior of the home! The kitchen is very nice! It looks nice how you have placed the cabinets there. The fruit bowl is a nice touch on the dining table, and the floor rug adds a nice look to the room. You have reflected the floor plan very well!
It was nice reading your thoughts about your builds here in this thread, and what the furnishings in the Church build represented.
The homes are very nice
2 lovely builds! My favourite is the church! Looks so realistic! Great architecture and interiors. The Crystal classic looks very greek from outside. Like the old greek architecture! Very imposing and beautiful!
While I do admit that this particular building form seems most familiar in clapboard, I ... I don't particularly like clapboard as a finishing material, especially for larger houses. So I went with brick and plaster. My story is that after nearly a hundred years in clapboard, new owners bought the place and completely redid the exterior, modernising a bunch of things. That's why this "Victorian" house has a flatscreen TV in the drawing room.
Street view:
More pictures below the tag:
Back yard:
This picture shows that a column is missing from the back porch. It has since been fixed for the upload.
Birchbower Manor is a very nice home! The design of the exterior of the home is very nice! The roofing and the way you have used the roof trimming looks very nice! The brick and plaster texture of the exterior gives a nice look to the build. The open shutter windows look very nice in the home. The double sided front steps entrance to the home looks very nice! The flowers look pretty along the front of the steps area. It looks very nice how you have used the hedging in the build. The back outdoors living and pool patio is very nice! Very nice games and fitness areas on the patio! Sims will have fun playing games on the card table or enjoy doing training on the fitness equipment, enjoying being in the outdoors air. Very nice seat bench sitting nook for sims to enjoy having a drink from the bar in the sunshine. The flower cart is pretty for them to see when sitting there. Very nice drawing and study rooms! The wall paneling is very nice. The grandfather clock in the corner nook and the globe on the fireplace ledge in the drawing room are nice home touches there. Sims will enjoy sitting resting on the red sofa and armchair there, watching TV. and enjoy sitting to the desk in the study using the computer or reading a book from the bookcase. The white flowers on the desk are pretty for sims to see when using the computer there.
The home is very nice !
Thanks, @rosemow ! Of course, now that I look at the pictures again, it looks like I left out a couple of columns in the back porch. I'll have to fix that.
ETA: And fixed. Old upload has been taken down, and gallery link has been updated to the new upload. All this for a single column....
Thanks, @yanti68 ! I wish we could line the ridges of our roofs with that low, wrought iron fencing. That would go a long way towards completing the look.
This one was an entry into the Quality Control Contest and came in a very close second. The only thing that's not mine is the shape of the island. It was mentioned in the critique that, given how much under budget I was, I could have spared some attention towards landscaping the "ocean". True, a bunch of rocks along the bottom of the "ocean" would have broken up the hard, straight line and made it look less like the swimming pool that it ultimately actually is. I admit I'm pretty reluctant to use the MoveObjects cheat. Most of my builds, and this one included, avoid it entirely. But it also occurs to me now that the model sailing ship decoration object, blown up to life-size and moved to the bottom of the ocean floor, would have been SO COOL.
Well, anyone downloading this can try it out. The build's on the gallery and is sufficiently cool as it is. It's not like the sunken ship would have made it a whole 20% cooler or anything like that.
The general view. Harry Belafonte's "Island in the Sun" was earwormed into my head over the last few hours of the building.
The "aerie", the platform deck just skimming the crowns of the palms. This was the first Interesting Thing I thought of when I considered the challenge, and the high point of the build. A word about the plants on the ground level, though: I placed them with clear paths leading to the various interesting areas, and even cut off a couple of points of the beach with an idea that those places should only be accessible by swimming to them. But it turns out that most of these plants do not actually block a sim's path, and my test sims were able to walk everywhere. C'est la vie, I suppose.
The ground floor of the main building is completely open -- I'm not sure, but I think it might even register as "outdoors" for outdoorsy sims.
The design and layout of Robinson's Retreat looks so very nice! The plants, trees and flowers through the island look so very great! It looks very nice how you have done the stairs up to the lookout patio! Sims will enjoy playing the guitar there and having a drink from the drinks tray. Very nice outdoors dining and bar area! Sims will enjoy cooking meals on the BBQ and eating them at the picnic table enjoy dining in the sea air. They will enjoy sitting there having a drink from the bar whilst listening to music from the stereo. It is nice that there is a massage table for them to lay and have a relaxing massage on. Sims will have fun playing chess outdoors in the air. Very nice gazebo building! The living and dining rooms are very nice! Sims will enjoy sitting on the sofa watching tv and reading a book from the bookcase. It looks nice how you have angled the tv. in the corner. The ceiling lights in the living and dining areas look pretty. Child sims will have fun playing on the monkey bars. Very nice outdoors gym area! Sims will enjoy keeping fit using the gym equipment there. It looks nice how you the roof covering over the bridge pathway to the island.
It is such a very natural and restful looking , floral, plants and trees island build! It is very nice!
Thanks, @rosemow . I think I should mention that there's actually a game-dictated reason for the covered bridge: I needed to put a door there, blocking off the whole island from the road, to register as the front door. That's how I could make the living/dining/kitchen area as open as I did, without having visitors go all the way up to the bedroom doors, or around to the sauna building, to "knock on the front door".
Hi! I'm still alive! I'd like to say that I'm back, but I'm not really ... life gets WAY busier when you leave the 9-to-5 in favour of (cough) something else. Who knew. What's been going on over the past 6 months?
Everything looks so great! animals would be really neat in game. I'm excited for what we can do when the restaurants can come out. i wonder what features they will be sharing with us!
Comments
It was a great way to get the trees to appear in the Gallery photos! You are very creative! Thanks for telling us what you did. The resulting pictures look great!
http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/817478/hello-come-and-introduce-yourself
http://tinyurl.com/OneRoomOneWeek
http://tinyurl.com/rosemow
My Showcase thread https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/948861/rosemow-s-rooms-showcase
Challenge 13 was about renovating a church. As is usual for these challenges, @Zita1966z provided the shell of the building (and, in this case, also the monumental cross outside) and the task of each participant is to renovate it: wall finishes, floor finishes, furniture, room assignments, landscaping; in this case, also the interior walls (creation of rooms), the roof, and the doors and windows. I ended up not touching the roof except to change the colour and pattern, but I did meddle with everything else.
Gallery link: St Joe Cupertino Church
Exterior view:
Properly, it's the Church of St Joseph of Cupertino, but that name doesn't fit into the space that the game allows for a build name. It was inspired by the fact that sims with a certain amount of expertise at meditation can levitate while meditating, and one of the miracles ascribed to St Joseph of Cupertino was his tendency to levitate while praying.
Interior view:
I made it a Catholic church, since that's the tradition I know best, so there are a bunch of details that are specific to that. There's a confessional on one side of the sanctuary, and what is probably a very much undersized sacristy on the other. There are fourteen wall hangings around the interior, meant to stand in for the stations of the cross. And of course there are kneelers ... well, meditation stools. I found (happily) that the meditation stools can still function perfectly well when placed much closer to each other and to the benches (pews) behind them than their footprint technically allows.
The build is marked as a "generic" lot, but it occurs to me that it just as easily function as a spa ... or, at least, a centre for meditation. Something would have to be done about the locker in the sacristy first, though, or everyone's going to want to go in there the moment they show up.
So this build won! This meant that I was to be a guest judge for the next challenge and not eligible to enter as a contestant.
Challenge 14 was a little different. This time, we got three different floorplans and were challenged to build the house as well. Of course I built my own judge's take on it, and actually got the thing finished before anyone else ... but I held off on uploading it just in case it might influence anyone.
Gallery link: Crystal Classic
Exterior view:
The plan:
I took a few liberties with the original plan. All the built-in closets were eliminated (though some of the entrants did some good work replicating them) and the laundry room became a bathroom.
An interior view:
After spending the whole week scrutinising other people's builds and asking myself what works for me and what doesn't and why, I came back to this and discovered a bunch of things that I found just a little unsatisfactory. I never found a wall/floor finish for the kitchen that I felt worked perfectly in relation to the rest of the build, for one thing. And there are walls here and there that feel like they really need a painting or something on them. But, well, I did want to keep within the budget even if I was not in the running and was technically just building this for myself; and also, sometimes it's just not worth the time and effort to try and find a solution for everything. There comes a point where you just have to accept that you're not going to get it perfect, you just have to get it to be the best "acceptable" it can be without losing your mind.
No, I wouldn't give myself a perfect score for this. I wouldn't even give myself the best score for this. But I still think it's a really good build, and I like it, and that's what matters.
St Joe Cupertino Church is very nice!
The exterior design of Crystal Classic looks very grand!
It was nice reading your thoughts about your builds here in this thread, and what the furnishings in the Church build represented.
The homes are very nice
http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/817478/hello-come-and-introduce-yourself
http://tinyurl.com/OneRoomOneWeek
http://tinyurl.com/rosemow
My Showcase thread https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/948861/rosemow-s-rooms-showcase
While I do admit that this particular building form seems most familiar in clapboard, I ... I don't particularly like clapboard as a finishing material, especially for larger houses. So I went with brick and plaster. My story is that after nearly a hundred years in clapboard, new owners bought the place and completely redid the exterior, modernising a bunch of things. That's why this "Victorian" house has a flatscreen TV in the drawing room.
Street view:
More pictures below the tag:
This picture shows that a column is missing from the back porch. It has since been fixed for the upload.
Side view:
Drawing room:
Study:
The home is very nice !
http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/817478/hello-come-and-introduce-yourself
http://tinyurl.com/OneRoomOneWeek
http://tinyurl.com/rosemow
My Showcase thread https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/948861/rosemow-s-rooms-showcase
ETA: And fixed. Old upload has been taken down, and gallery link has been updated to the new upload. All this for a single column....
This one was an entry into the Quality Control Contest and came in a very close second. The only thing that's not mine is the shape of the island. It was mentioned in the critique that, given how much under budget I was, I could have spared some attention towards landscaping the "ocean". True, a bunch of rocks along the bottom of the "ocean" would have broken up the hard, straight line and made it look less like the swimming pool that it ultimately actually is. I admit I'm pretty reluctant to use the MoveObjects cheat. Most of my builds, and this one included, avoid it entirely. But it also occurs to me now that the model sailing ship decoration object, blown up to life-size and moved to the bottom of the ocean floor, would have been SO COOL.
Well, anyone downloading this can try it out. The build's on the gallery and is sufficiently cool as it is. It's not like the sunken ship would have made it a whole 20% cooler or anything like that.
The general view. Harry Belafonte's "Island in the Sun" was earwormed into my head over the last few hours of the building.
The "aerie", the platform deck just skimming the crowns of the palms. This was the first Interesting Thing I thought of when I considered the challenge, and the high point of the build. A word about the plants on the ground level, though: I placed them with clear paths leading to the various interesting areas, and even cut off a couple of points of the beach with an idea that those places should only be accessible by swimming to them. But it turns out that most of these plants do not actually block a sim's path, and my test sims were able to walk everywhere. C'est la vie, I suppose.
The ground floor of the main building is completely open -- I'm not sure, but I think it might even register as "outdoors" for outdoorsy sims.
It is such a very natural and restful looking , floral, plants and trees island build! It is very nice!
http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/817478/hello-come-and-introduce-yourself
http://tinyurl.com/OneRoomOneWeek
http://tinyurl.com/rosemow
My Showcase thread https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/948861/rosemow-s-rooms-showcase
http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/817478/hello-come-and-introduce-yourself
http://tinyurl.com/OneRoomOneWeek
http://tinyurl.com/rosemow
My Showcase thread https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/948861/rosemow-s-rooms-showcase