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Question about the actual size of 1 "block"
xn1t3
Posts: 4
Hello, I am wondering what the realistic size of one block might actually be. I'm trying to reconstruct my house virtually in the Sims, and if my calculations are correct, 1 block should represent roughly 2 square feet. Does anybody know the exact specifications on this?
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http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/680739.page
I have been working on re-creating my house as a Sims House and it's not easy! Some things just don't translate well into a Sim Build. Wonder if it will become easier in Sims 4?
I can play at last TS2 TS3 and TS4 So great that toddlers are here!!!
But it really does not make sense. A standard door would be 3 feet wide. And in game, they are a one tile object...they always look a bit too narrow to me. And a standard depth upper cabinet is only 1 foot deep, but in the sims, they match the lower cabinets, thus by my reasoning, makes them 2 feet deep. And they look widely out of scale to me.
Dining room table look too narrow...single beds look too narrow. Most end tables look too wide to me.
But you have to work with what you have! Just remember it all makes sense in the Sim World!
There really isn't a set measurement to a "square grid". You just have to eyeball the scale as best you can. Building from a floor plan will not come out exactly as the floor plan because you cannot build in anything but the grid's predetermined size. So my advice into use a floor plan as a guideline as best you can. Use it for inspiration, and adjust as you need to in game. Eyeball the scale and placement as you go and it will turn out Simmified!
If you see the double beds as approximately a queen-size bed for two people (60" x 80" mattress size with approximately 18" overhang for structure) the 30" (or 2.5 feet) per square fits.
But if you want to be precise in design, you can use the scaling cheat in the object placement to scale the furniture up and down to your specifications (if I were building my own bedroom I would need to scale up the bed to a California King size, which is just barely half a square over in width of the standard size.
Most people take up approximately 30" of physical space as well.
One meter (39" or three feet and a bit) seems a bit much.
It does make the lot sizing a bit strange - the standard city lot in my neighborhood, on my street (multiple lot sizes) is 120' from sidewalk to alley, and 40' wide. In Sims lot sizing that comes out to a 48x15 lot - which are very rare in the game.
If and when EA lets you customize lot sizes on the map or it lets you create your own neighborhood/maps, you could quite easily make the right size lots for your projects as you want, but so much of the game is way off realistic proportions or timing (the cost for hardwood flooring is 4 simoleons for 6 square feet. Bwahahahahahahahahahaha hoo boy) that making accurate depictions of an actual space to see how it gets used is kind of a fool's errand.
Trying to obtain technical accuracy for replication of a house, structure, or social space is going to be hard. For example, my neighborhood green mermaid logoed coffeehouse, redesigned and installed in a shotgun shack-style storefront, for example, is designed with a different metric than a house built 120 years ago from a Sears Roebuck kit. For one thing, I'm way taller than the average Sim (one thing I hate about Sims 4 is the inability to change Sim physical sizes in height, but from a programming perspective I understand why they cut it).
To get around this, take three or four objects in the game Sims/humans use very often (every day at least 10 times), and measure analogues in your living space for those.
Windows, doors, hallways, beds, dining room chairs, etc. You will probably wind up with a much better measurement system for your specific builds than using an arbitrary number gleaned from the community.
You can use this method to come up with as much spatial accuracy for your project as possible, but still keeping in mind that there is always going to be a fudge factor for a recreation project of any kind.
For my purposes of building out potential renovation changes to my kitchen, living room, front-of-house deck, etc., it works on the 2.5"/30"/76cm standard, while other houses and homes in other parts of the country or world might be on a 2'/24"/55cm standard. Again, that's entirely due to subjective perspectives and design translating between a video game and actual architecture.
You can probably use the Sims 4 as a limited simulator for certain living spaces but it does have limitations.
But as far as the "standard" goes, I have found that 30" to a single square functions better as an estimate than anything else so far.
It most certainly fares better than the 39"/1 meter square presented as a standard for kitchen builds; I have been able to find 30" wide/deep dishwashers, 30" wide/deep refrigerators, 30" stoves, and most of the cabinetry available for sale remains in the 30" range. But I've never, EVER seen a dishwasher that's a full meter wide outside of commercial applications.