The amount of stuff you can do! I certainly wish I was more organized mentally.
So here's the thing, I keep on looking at all the stuff I need and jumping all over the place. But I think the key to good world building will be focusing.
Last night I tweeted that I felt like Slartibartfast when he was making the fjords. And I do! Since last night I was just working on the beach and the beach alone. It's a small beach, but I have to paint it, place the rocks, place the effects which include the ocean surf and some crashing waves. All of this is a lot harder than it sounds.
When painting, at first it looks weirdly disorienting. From the high up view, it look splotchy and unnatural. That's just because you're so far away, you're getting a view of where the paint is.
For example, here is a rocky mountain on the beach I'm working on. I couldn't help going, "Yeesh!" And spent a little time trying to make it better, smoother and more natural.
So I think I tried to zoom in, and then I saw this:
It looks exactly the way I wanted it to look. Grass dispersed on shale like it's growing through the rocks. When I peek at the world in game, it looks even better, more detailed and more natural.
Another example, the ground near a farm I worked on last night before actually focusing.
It was driving me nuts. I wanted the ground to be dirty with sparse grass growing, not perfectly green and lush.
Up close, this is what I have, which is exactly what I wanted.Edit in game is an annoying misnomer to me. For one, unless I'm missing something (and I might be), you can't actually edit it further than checking to see if a lot fits. Which is pointless anyway because if you have anything installed in your game, it takes forever to load. An hour or more for me, and that was only with the few sims3packs I have installed.
So to get the game to load so I can take a peek with the "edit in game" I have to remove all my downloads. Including the lots I picked up specifically for the project.
Then once I am in game taking a peek, I cannot tilt the camera out of its default setting. The controls are there, but they don't work. It's a little hard to see if the rocks I placed on the beach are floating when I'm looking down at them from above.
On another note that is awesome-- they have our trees. They call it "Monterey Cypress". I think I'm a little too excited about that.
4 comments:
The ground coverings look great - really realistic and I can't wait to see what you've been doing on a larger scale.
That's a shame about the edit in game aspect though. Just to be clear, World Builder is completely separate from TS3? You can't switch from World Builder to TS3 and back again without shutting one down and reloading, right?
You know what I forgot to add? The ground coverings all have different sounds. Like the floor tiles in TS2, and there are TONS of sounds to select from including glass, long grass, shallow water, and plastic.
Yes and no. CAW is completely separate, but you hit a button and it will pull up the test land in the game for you so you can see what it looks like. This is kinda helpful to see if you have any hills that are too steep and stuff like that.
But if you want to properly look around, I found I had to extract it and install it into my game to see from a sim's point of view.
These are fantastic Lunar! You've made such huge progress in the short time you've been playing around with the program. I can't wait to see the end result of the world you're crafting.
I have to admit to a lot of frustration - I still can't wrap my head around it and I can't help but feel like such a huge stupid head at the moment. I'm pretty close to giving up. I just don't think I have the talent for world sculpting! However, I am enjoying everyone else's progress with the program.
I read on one of the forums that apparently edit in game doesn't work due to corrupt lots?? It was something I read on I think the CAW thread at MTS and the official TS3 forums.
Don't give up! I bet you do have the talent. How familiar are you with programs like GIMP or photoshop?
I think I will work on writing a tutorial or something simple, because once you get it, pretty much a lot of it falls into place. It's actually pretty repetitive.
The hardest parts are turning out to be the laying of the lots and the roads. Because scale is just too difficult. So what I have done is imported it into the game and tested it out with my sim running around in it, me looking around, and testing out how lots lay together.
As for corrupted lots, I don't think so in my case. What I've done was take all my CC out and rename my documents sims 3 folder. So I had nothing, and the edit in game still didn't work great. But it comes in handy when you want to lay down lots I think so that the neighborhood comes packaged with all the lots you want it to have the way Riverview did.
So at some point, it will come in handy for me.
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