Getting terrain and lot to match?

[therebel292004]

Okay, I've tried searching, and lookin thru the tuts, but couldn't find what I was lookin for.
Basically, I want to get the neighborhood terrain to match my lot's terrain. The majority of the lot is raised, but then slopes down in the front to the street level. But the border on the sides and back have the sharp sloping from high to neighborhood flat level. How am I supposed to get the terrain to match the lot? I have tried moving the lot, but that doesn't seem to do anything.

[Mootilda]

The game will automatically change the neighborhood terrain at the edges of your lot to match the edges of your lot.

I know that this isn't what you've said, but it sounds like what you really want is to change the edges of your lot, to raise them up so that there is no slope down at the sides and back. Is that correct?

If so, then the only way (that I know of) to do this is to use the TS2GridAdjuster to adjust level 0, which is the ground level of the lot. I can help you with that, if I'm understanding your problem correctly and you want to try using the GridAdjuster.

[therebel292004]

Okay, have some screen shots of the problem.
Pretty much, yeah. I want to get the lot to level with neighborhood terrain. I have tried moving the lot around, but the neighbor hood terrain won't match up to it. Pretty much I think the problem becomes obvious with the screenshots. I would also like to drop the house foundation down to about 1 or 2 high if possible?

[Mootilda]

Okay, have some screen shots of the problem.
Pretty much, yeah. I want to get the lot to level with neighborhood terrain. I have tried moving the lot around, but the neighbor hood terrain won't match up to it. Pretty much I think the problem becomes obvious with the screenshots.From your screenshots, it looks like you have two options:

1) You want the lot to be flattened from front to back and side to side. If so, then remove the stairs near the sidewalk, type in the cheat "boolprop constrainfloorelevation false" and use the terrain flatten tool to drag from one front corner of the lot to the back opposite corner. Then set CFE true again. If you're going to flatten a lot, it's a good idea to flatten everything to the level of the road.

2) You want to keep the hill on your lot and keep the stairs near the sidewalk. If so, then you need to adjust the lot edges, i.e. the outside row of tiles on your lot. There are several ways that you might be able to accomplish this. This post will show you how, using the TS2GridAdjuster:
http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=327439

Several posts down, I've included a synopsis of how to accomplish the same goal using the LotAdjuster. The LA method might be simpler, so check out both before you decide which to use.

To adjust the terrain at the edges of the lot, you first need to determine what elevation you want. An easy way might be to count the number of stairs to get from the road to the top of the hill. Each stair is 1 click. Looks like your terrain is 6 stairs high, which means that you want to raise the lot edges at the sides and back of the lot by about 6 clicks.

If you want to be more precise, you can try lowering the terrain next to the edge until it is flush with the edge and count the number of clicks. Or, you can try this technique assuming 6 clicks and adjust later if it's not quite right.

There is also a cheat which will give you the exact elevation of a tile in floating point. Hold down the shift and alt keys and hover your mouse over a tile. A popup window will show you the elevation of the tile. To use this value, you will have to turn off the "Clicks" checkbox.

The game insists on having a slope between major vertices, which occur every ten tiles, at the edge of the lot. So, the strategy will be to slope from the road elevation to 6 clicks higher in the first 10 tiles, then you can just flatten the terrain to 6 clicks around the rest of the lot. This will require several sessions in the GridAdjuster: one for the slope at the front left, one for the slope at the front right, and then 3 additional sessions to flatten the back left, back right, and back edge of the lot. If you're willing to flatten the entire back area of the lot, then those last three sessions can be combined into one.

First, backup your game, just in case.

Let's start with the front left. Here are the parameters that you'll want to specify, an explanation of the parameters follows:
http://thumbs2.modthesims.info/img/5/8/9/2/5/2/MTS2_Mootilda_1055823_AdjustFrontLeft.JPG
Level(s): The ground level on any lot is level 0.

Depth: The road at the front of any lot takes up tiles 0 to 10, which is why we're starting at 10 and going to tile 20.

Width: We're doing the left side of the lot, so we want to specify 0 tiles from the left. If we were doing the right side, then you'd specify the entire width of the lot.

Slope: We want to slope from the standard road elevation of 0 to 6 clicks above that.

Rotate: Note that the rotation for your lot may be different than the lot that I'm using; the important information is that we are sloping "From front to back".

Once all of the parameters have been entered correctly, click on the Finish button. Assuming that the adjustment completed successfully, restart to run the next session. Alternatively, if you want to be sure that you like the new edge so far, you can exit the GA and run the game to check the edge, then exit the game and run the GA again; obviously this method will be slower.

Let's continue on with the left hand side of the lot:
http://thumbs2.modthesims.info/img/5/8/9/2/5/2/MTS2_Mootilda_1055822_AdjustBackLeft.JPG
Depth: This time, we want to start at 20 and adjust to the back of the lot. Your lot may be a different size than mine, so specify the full size of your lot, rather than 30.

The other parameters should be obvious.

Continue the other adjustments in exactly the same way. Then, run the game and ensure that everything looks the way that you want it. Finally, go back to the neighborhood view, pick up your lot and place it down where you want it. The neighborhood terrain should move up to match the new edges of your lot.

Tip: When adjusting the right side, try entering the end of the range before you specify the beginning of the range. This is because the GridAdjuster won't allow you to specify a beginning which is larger than the end.

[Mootilda]

I would also like to drop the house foundation down to about 1 or 2 high if possible?Yes, it's possible with the TS2GridAdjuster. However, there are some caveats:

1) Stairs must be a minimum of 2 clicks high to function correctly in the game.

2) The TS2GridAdjuster affects only the grid and things associated with the grid, like walls and floors. It will not move objects like windows, doors and furniture.

Because of this, you might want to consider building a temporary foundation on some of the empty space on your lot, adjusting the elevation of that foundation to 2 clicks above the terrain using the GridAdjuster (8 clicks total, if my previous calculations were correct), and then using the CFE cheat to flatten the grid from the top of your temporary foundation to include the entire foundation of your house. I believe that the CFE cheat handles objects better than the GridAdjuster does.

Alternatively, you can use the GridAdjuster to adjust your lot, then pick up each object which is in the wrong place and place it correctly. This isn't a problem if your house isn't furnished yet, but could be a bother if you have lots of objects on your lot.

Level: Your foundation will be at level 1. You'll probably want to adjust all of the levels above level 1 as well, so that your house still has standard height walls.

You'll need to count the number of tiles from the front left to determine the Depth and Width.

If you specified a range with multiple levels, you'll see a new option: "Add per level". This will ensure that your entire building is adjusted, not just the foundation level. A standard wall height is 16 clicks.

[Mootilda]

I thought of another way to adjust the edges of the lot, using the LotAdjuster:
http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=384656

First, expand your lot on both sides and at the back. Then terraform where the old lot edges were, to raise them to the level of the rest of the terrain. Finally, shrink your lot back to its original size. Use the Advanced option "Lot Edges: Smooth", which will ensure that your new lot edges meet the minimum requirements of the game.

[therebel292004]

I'll give it a try. Probably won't be til later tonight, but will try. I could just shrink the lot probably. When I started building this lot, I had to enlarge it twice. First so I could build the garage, (back wall is on back border). Then I had to widen it so I could add the driveway, (sloping was causing problems with raising the driveway). Just in case, I'll save this page for reference, lol. I'm lousy at remembering anything longer then a sentence.

EDIT:
Okay, for the most part the terrain is leveled with the lot now.
I tried the grid adjuster,,, and made a BIG mess of the lot. It chang4ed the roof angles back to 45, and the lot dropped to ground level. Good thing I packaged the lot before hand. With it packaged, I just deleted the screwedup lot and installed the packaged version which lets me plop down as many of the lot as I want.
Question is, would it be easier to just remove everything from the foundation on up, and just gridadjust the foundation? Then build the house again on the newly adjusted foundation?
And just what is this CFE cheat? Is that short for the constrain floor elevation?