How To Build For Dummies

[poisonapple88]

I've been playing the Sims 2 for over five years now and not once have I succeeded in making a nice house. All of my houses are square with ugly roofs that are way too tall. I can furnish nicely but building an attractive house just doesn't work well for me.

For all of you who are creative and good at making aesthetically pleasing houses, how do you do it? Do you draw out a blueprint? Look at a picture? Comment with some tips or pictures so maybe I can give a shot at making something that doesn't resemble Sir Bricks A Lot.

[annoainthere]

Have you checked out the building area forum? There are some great tips and guides over there.
http://modthesims.info/forumdisplay.php?&f=126

Personally I can spend weeks perfecting a house. I suggest you just open a new plot of land and fiddle around with all the various settings. It's the way I do, and generally I get something worthwhile.

The other tip is to get some images and floorplans of houses and build them from scratch yourself. A decent looking house will take a lot of time.

If you don't have a lot of time I suggest importing some of the CC houses on this website and fiddling around with them. It'll also give you a better idea on how to create something similar.

[joandsarah77]

http://www.modthesims.info/wiki.php?title=Tutorials:Building_Great_Realistic_Houses_-_From_the_Ground_Up Will give you a range of tips to building better houses. Scroll down until you come to the links for Exterior and Internal and look at the info in each of the links

There is nothing to stop you from changing one of those square houses but you. :) Here is a thing to try just to get you started. Go to where your front door is; bring the wall out to form a small rectangle. So one or two tiles out and three long with the one tile door in the centre, or 4 tiles wide for a double door.
Then go to one of the rooms that goes to the edge of the house and do the same with that along its length or width except for two tiles. So say a back bedroom runs 5 tiles along the back of the house extend it out by two tiles and run that five tile length wall along it's width. You can still auto roof if you don't want to try out making your own. Now that square or rectangle should look a little more interesting. Once you get the feel for making houses slightly less 'square' you might feel like trying out some more things to make them more interesting.

House plans can be helpful but choose something that isn't too complicated. Some people find drawing it on graph paper helpful, I just go by eye, looking at things such as windows, doors and stoves to judge how many tiles long a room should be. Placing furniture as you go can help with room size. I find most people who have trouble building, build rooms which are far too large. That's okay on a film set or a mansion, but unless you’re a good builder those large rooms are going to look like stadiums and not grand at all.

[whiterider]

Don't use autoroof, if that's what you're doing now. It really does suck ass.

[joandsarah77]

Not always on small houses, plus I don't think she is planning on submitting just building something better than a box for herself. I would mess around with getting something more interesting in shape before tackling roofs, those can be tricky. Seeing she has later ep's she could mess around with the roofs pitch quite easily though.

[gazania]

I do use AutoRoof if I'm lazy (and often am), but will adjust the slope using the roofslopeangle cheat. Plus, if I'm constructing porches, I remember to still make the walls, put the roof on, then delete the walls around the porch area. I am not a fan of awnings.

Like annoainthere, I like to find reputable real-life free online house plans if I need some inspiration. I found that rarely can I EXACTLY replicate layouts, and sometimes, I don't want to for whatever reason, but I can at least find a starting point to try something different. And often, those are the houses I package for later neighborhoods.

By the way, not all square houses look unsightly. If you're going for a bungalow or "cabin in the woods" look, a square house might actually look cute or appropriate for the setting. But I would think that you'd have to add other eye-catching details, such as porches. And indeed, auto-roofing might look a little too boxy in that case.

[Saturnfly]

Start on smaller lots. Sometimes having a small lot to work with is less daunting, and building a small house is less time consuming, yet still challenging trying to fit everything in.

Look at any one of the hundreds of real floor plan websites. In fact I recently discovered this amaaazing website with beautiful simple houses and realistic cozy floor plans: http://www.latitudehomes.co.nz/site/nz80.asp (everyone look at it! LOOK AT IT! eheheheh#$#@$#*drools*)

Try and colour coordinate just by experimenting, use some cheats, and put objects on a diagonal angle just as you'd see in a real house.

Do.Not.Use.Autoroof -- The more you practise placing roof's, the more you'll realise how easy it is.

Google interior pictures; bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms etc.

[zumppe]

Do.Not.Use.Autoroof -- The more you practise placing roof's, the more you'll realise how easy it is.

I usually don't bother making my own roofs, why would I, it's not like I see them, ever. The few seconds I'm in neighborhood view before loading a family, I can live with the autoroofs. I just choose a color that matches the house, and check that it's not totally awful looking, and that's it. I don't see the roof while playing a lot anyway, so why bother?

I always check first, if one of the autoroofs looks good enough. Only when my house is a weird shape, or very big or something, so that all the autoroof styles look absolutely horrible, only then I make my own. Reluctantly. :lol:

[joandsarah77]

Saturnfly, those are some yummy house plans. :D *bookmarks*

[M.M.A.A.]

Did you check out this thread?

http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=441916

[AlexandraSpears]

I find it's easier to plan a house without a foundation (let's put bedroom here, kitchen here). Or just lay a huge foundation, drop your rooms on it, and take out what foundation you don't use. But that's just me.

Try thinking out of the box (pun intended) and doing something asymmetrical. Put in some diagonal walls and use the 45-degree cheat to place furniture at a 45 degree angle (instead of a right angle). Experiment with roofing. Just have fun with it and see what you come up with.

[MattShizzle]

I always place the foundation one room at a time - then add the walls.
ie - place foundation for kitchen. Place kitchen walls. Place foundation for living room. Place living room walls, and so on.

[Peni Griffin]

Most of my useful general comments are on this thread:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=469883
And I don't feel like saying them again. Besides, there's pretty house pictures in that thread.

[poisonapple88]

Thanks for the tips everyone. I'll try putting some things to use and do some stuff out of my comfort zone.

[iCad]

I "cheat" and draw them in CAD first. But I know that's not available to everyone. ;) And not everything translates well into the game, either, because CAD is much more flexible. *mutters about roofs and stairs, as usual*

That said, it's fairly easy to make a box a little more interesting. Like, put a few extensions on. If your house is, say, a 12-tile x 12-tile box, put a little bump-out on the front, maybe five tiles wide, so the house is a little more L-shaped, which is a little more interesting. Then maybe do a similar thing off the back, to make a laying-on-its-side blocked-off-S-shaped house. Both shapes will generally look fine even autoroofed, especially if you adjust pitches a bit. The standard is a 45-degree pitch, which is fine if you're building a symmetrical Cape Cod, but most real houses' main roofs are pitched a little lower than that, usually 35-40 degrees, and accent roofs, like on dormers, are often pitched higher than that, up to maybe 60 degrees, depending on the roof.

But really, a nice house can be made just by putting down some connected boxes of different sizes. Doing this might require non-autoroofed roofs, however. But that's basically what I did for this house here (http://i654.photobucket.com/albums/uu261/icads_sims/parkerhouse.jpg). Just drew a bunch of connected boxes and then farted around until the roof looked somewhat decent.

If your roofs are too tall, you can adjust the pitches of them. With M&G, there's a tool that you can use. Otherwise, you'll need to use cheats and Nightlife and/or Pets...or maybe later EPs that "carried over" the roof angle cheats that came with those EPs.

And another tip: Dormers are your friends, whether you place the "standard" ones in the roof menu or make them yourself. For the house that I linked to above, the tall entryway was made by sitting a "dormer" right over the entryway. (It wasn't one of the game's, but a longer one that I built myself by building walls on the second floor and then roofing it with a long, narrow, low-pitched hip roof.) Doing that broke up the front facade into three different height levels, which adds visual interest. It also broke up the long stretch of sideways roof that the portico blends into. Long stretches of boring roof are...Well, boring. Unless, of course, it's part of the style, like it is with a Classic 1950s-1970s Ranch House With Carport (http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AhOX6SLRDIQ/TkqFWZ2CbhI/AAAAAAAAA00/oXEtun_mTww/s1600/ranch-house-2.jpg), before the split-level "Raised Ranch" style became The Thing in the early 80s-ish.

Fireplace chimneys are also good for breaking up big, boring roof lines, particularly if you stick one in unexpected places, like maybe smack in the middle of the front facade of the house rather than on the back or one of the sides where they are more usually placed. I usually build walls around them because I find that the tapering shape of them isn't always what I want. So, the outside parts of the fireplace is enclosed by little 2x1 "rooms" that go up as tall as the chimney is, usually trimmed with low fencing on top or sometimes a half-wall, if the little ugly chimney topper is still visible. (I hate that thing. It's a silly peeve of mine. :lol: MUST...MAKE...NOT...VISIBLE....)

And then, there are always the floor plan sites that you can look at for inspiration. You might not necessarily want to try to replicate them exactly (because sometimes you won't be able to do so without so-called "advanced building techniques"...or sometimes not at all, no matter what you do), but they can give you good ideas for overall shapes and logical room layouts.

[Saturnfly]

I usually don't bother making my own roofs, why would I, it's not like I see them, ever. The few seconds I'm in neighborhood view before loading a family, I can live with the autoroofs. I just choose a color that matches the house, and check that it's not totally awful looking, and that's it. I don't see the roof while playing a lot anyway, so why bother?

I always check first, if one of the autoroofs looks good enough. Only when my house is a weird shape, or very big or something, so that all the autoroof styles look absolutely horrible, only then I make my own. Reluctantly. :lol:

Usually when I'm building basic houses, I use auto roof, only since it is so basic and the roof style is the only sensible option, + when I put a roof on a simple rectangular house, it's the same as what auto-roof will generate.

But I couldn't imagine an auto-roof on more complex houses, especially if I'm building from a real plan which the roof is completely different to what auto-roof can muster.

Roof's can really make or break a good house, even though you don't see it whilst playing, it is still part of the complete house, many people play to build just as much as they play in live mode. It's not a bad idea to get used to placing roof's manually, especially if you want to get into uploading them or decide one day you want to make a sims story.
Can someone shut me up now? I swear I could talk all day about roof's.

[Allimae]

Roofs are a pain. Especially the shed roofs. I would like to use them for smaller houses but I can never get them to go in the right direction. Even when I manage to start them out the right way they will change direction on me just before I reach the end of the house.

[AlexandraSpears]

One thing I like to do is run a Google image search on floor plans, if nothing else for ideas.

[M.M.A.A.]

Roofs are a pain. Especially the shed roofs. I would like to use them for smaller houses but I can never get them to go in the right direction. Even when I manage to start them out the right way they will change direction on me just before I reach the end of the house.

Try using the long and wide roof type for each shape, or are you talking about the one sided roof?

[Allimae]

I am talking about the one sided roof. It comes in both gable and hip. It is really the gable shed roof that I am interested in.

[simsample]

Roofs are a pain. Especially the shed roofs. I would like to use them for smaller houses but I can never get them to go in the right direction. Even when I manage to start them out the right way they will change direction on me just before I reach the end of the house.
The way I get around that is to use two narrower roofs next to each other. So, if you want to place a shed roof on a 4X4 space, you can't control which direction the roof slopes. But if you make two 4X2 roofs next to each other you can control the direction, and it looks the same in the end.

[iCad]

The way I get around that is to use two narrower roofs next to each other. So, if you want to place a shed roof on a 4X4 space, you can't control which direction the roof slopes. But if you make two 4X2 roofs next to each other you can control the direction, and it looks the same in the end.

^ This is what I do, too. In fact, it's the ONLY way to do it, so far as I've found, when you want narrow but deep shed roofs. For some reason, the game seems to think that shed roofs have to be wider than they are deep, and that just ain't necessarily so. :p For non-shed roofs you have options either way, but not for shed roofs. For those, they leave it to you to figure out. :lol:

[roxmaniac]

Is there anything I can do to prevent this

http://i518.photobucket.com/albums/u349/roxmaniac/sims/windows.jpg

I made the wall taller because I wanted the music organ to fit under the roof.

http://i518.photobucket.com/albums/u349/roxmaniac/sims/windows2.jpg

I know I could make a normal wall and a small one over it but then you cant see the roof from inside. Just the blue sky if you look up. I wanted to avoid that.

[Mootilda]

You could try using Numenor's un-levelled walls. Here's a link:
http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=59793

[mirjamsim2love]

Or if possible use the doors and windows for multiple storeys?

[roxmaniac]

You could try using Numenor's un-levelled walls. Here's a link:
http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=59793

Hmm looks interesting.
Will have a go at it tomorrow when I got some time.

Thanx