Anyone know how dormer windows work?

Nore · November 2017

I have watched a few tutorials but they all involve a full gable and a giant 2 story roof to make dormer windows. My question is if there is any way to get the window to work with the top floor of my building. I linked some pictures below to show the gable accent roofs and the windows and top floor. Thank you in advance!

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reanseih · November 2017

Clarify what you mean by “work”? You mean, attics?

The thing with attics is that below a certain height it’s inaccessible to sims. I do believe it’s slightly lower than wall height tho, you’ll have to check on that. These don’t actually need walls to work. You can actually walk right into a roof if there’s a door, or a staircase for that matter. Only problem is that it’ll have outdoor lighting, which I’ll mention later why.

Or, delete the ceiling of the floor below. No idea the term, but basically making it an extra tall room with ^ shape ceiling. Yes, the windows will show properly of everything inside. You can also remove partial ceilings by creating a room above and removing the floor of that instead. There’s a number of neat tricks you can play with these, such as using fences to create beams.

A few things to keep in mind is that roofs are hollow in TS4. In other words, everything but the wall sides of a roof are not solid, including the bottom. So if you peak through a window placed on a roof that has another intersecting it... or peak up from below, you’ll see that it can bug out and look real weird. Outdoor lighting is also due to this, as mentioned the roof isn’t solid and thus considered outdoors with missing walls. Easy ways to fix this is to split the roof up into two pieces, utilizing the wall side of the roof that’s solid to divide and hide the parts that bug out. As for the bottom of roof, add a room there, and get rid of the walls, it’ll add a floor and thus a solid bottom. Bonus is that now you can add floor trims to top floors.

Nore · November 2017

@reanseih thank you for all that info haha! It was definitely interesting.

I apologise I should've been clearer what I meant. In the pictures I linked you'll see an aerial view of the top floor. On 3 sides of this floor are 5 small table roofs. From the other pictures you can see I places windows in these roofs, on the wall part of the table rather than on a wall I built. I'm wondering if there's any way to connect the wall of the gable with the wall of the floor so that the windows could allow light into the floor. Or of there was some way to create that effect and maintain the appearance of the exterior I have now.

Thank you again!

reanseih · November 2017

@Nore ah yes, that should be as simple as making a room where the roof is, and deleting the walls and floor. c: It may or may not actually let in light downstairs though, not entirely sure on that.

Nore · November 2017

@reanseih thank you for getting back to me! I apologise but I don't quite understand what you mean haha. Would you happen have any pictures explaining this or if you could point me to any guides or builds with this then I could maybe better understand haha. Thank you again!

reanseih · November 2017

@Nore I can’t get on the game atm, but I do have an example in my last build and a few others if you wanna reference that. Or I’ll take some screenie in the morning, almost 3am here. xD;;

Edit: Gmorning, back with screenies!

So you build a room with no walls up top where you want the ceiling to be solid first. Basically you're using a floor to simulate a ceiling. It's good practice to do so even if you aren't using dormers really, as mentioned the bottom of a roof isn't solid.

Then of course you gotta remove the actual ceiling to the room below.

Voila! The red lines indicate the divider roof btw.

And these two pics are just to show what I mean by the roof is hollow and can look rather bugged out without a divider. It's fine if you don't have a window and can't actually look in, but the moment you do...

Nore · November 2017

@reanseih Thank you for clarifying! I cannot seem to figure out how to make it work for the build above. I recreated the set-up to simplify what I mean.

I also linked it to the Gallery: Roofing

I took some pictures as well.

Here is basically how I created the roof, a gable accent in front of a walled room.
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Here is the view from inside, where as you can see the window placed in the gable doesn't allow light into the inside.
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And here I tried to delete some of the interior walls to see if it would let light through but it just shows the back of the gable roof instead.
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I have a feeling there's no way to make the windows work with this set-up but just wanted to see if anyone knew if there was a way haha.

reanseih · November 2017

@Nore ahhh! I get it now! So you're trying to let the light into the second story room out back and not the lower floor! That's even easier, you'll just need to add another window lol. You see, there's two walls on either side of a roof. You can think of a roof as a room for now, it's not exactly the same but it's the same in terms of having walls.

So to put it simply, you need a window to see from out to in, and another window to see from in to out (back).

The example I gave before was if you wanted to let light from out to in, and then in to down. Thus you remove the floor.

Unfortunately though, for the earlier, there's no way to just remove a gable roof shaped opening, they can't be just deleted like you can with staircase walls, unless you use cc. Prolly doesn't exist but if you know how to make one, it's possible to achieve by using a glassless window cc that's the shape and size you need. You know, faking a transparent wall. Otherwise you'll just have to work with seeing two windows instead of one directly letting light in.

Nore · November 2017

@reanseih Ah the solution was so simple haha! Thanks for that

I'm yet glad you explained the other stuff too as it might be useful sometime!

hepe1977 · January 2018

Thanks, great tips.

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Anyone know how dormer windows work?

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