My current project is a hood called Grønnholmen (Green Island in English). It's a rather small community, but with the help of all the lovely neighborhood deco out there I have been able to make a shopping district, an airport, a farm area and a cruise harbor + a regular suburban area. My favorite part of the island is the large shopping mall (blue and orange building), which is actually the only visitable lot in the town centre. The neighborhood is far from finished, and still missing lots of regular housing, a hotel, tourist area ++

@malfoya Looks great- do you have any update pictures? :lovestruc

Thank you @simsample ! I will try to take some new pictures soon ^^ There's been a few updates. I just need to figure out my settings so that the photos don't look so small I've also added a small vacation island for my inhabitants to travel to.. Love the colorful, but industrial look on your hood too!

EDIT: I took some new and bigger pictures.

Town center and Grønnholmen mall which has about anything...


Since Grønnholmen is an island a ferry is necessary for the inhabitants. The green house belongs to Beate and Sigvart Blomkvist, a lovely elder couple with a dog and no children. I am planning for them to adopt a child when their house is finished.
http://s235.photobucket.com/user/ma...lmen_2.jpg.html


The island also have a pretty decent airport and bus connections. I absolutely love these neighborhood deco sets that are available here on MTS. They are making it much more fun to decorate hoods!


Farmland, camping and coastal area.


Grønnholmen has its own vacation hood called Simbiza. It's only missing a market/shopping area, then it's done.


I haven't really built much on my own yet. I am more into the small details then just making random families and homes :P

@malfoya, love the update on your neighborhood. Great layout too.


Another new neighborhood (Grove Valley). Much smaller and not as many households.

How have a not noticed this thread?
A few I had of Coral Bay.

Well, I've spammed this thing all over my Tumblr since I started building it, might as well spam it here, too, now that it's pretty much done. I confess that I'm very proud of it. It's definitely the most labor-intensive neighborhood I've ever built, and I'm just thrilled to bits that it turned out to match the picture of it that I had in my head going into it. It's set as a subneighborhood of one of my neighborhoods, built for the specific purpose of playing a castaway scenario in it, originally a Midnight Sun Challenge sort of thing, but it became something totally not that. It'll be the setting for a story I'll be writing (and which I will hopefully stick with!), which will be located here. (Nothing really to see there yet, though.) It's a tropical volcanic island, and looks like this on approach:



This is (most of) the playable area, from above:

(Never mind its working name, which is in Welsh, as most of my working names are. It means "Island of the Lost." You are welcome to try to pronounce it. )
There are three occupied residential lots (1 for the hapless castaways and one each for two tribes of "natives"), two empty residential lots to be used in the future, and one community beach lot for fishing purposes. On each, the roads are either removed (where possible) or concealed under rocks and trees so that, when playing the various lots, you don't see them unless you're really looking for them, so you get a better feeling of isolation. In neighborhood view like this, of course, you can simply turn the roads off and use a mod so that there aren't cars zipping around.

A more ground-level view of part of the playable area:

This terrain (Original here, made by @mctammer ) was originally flat in the buildable area but I, alas, modified the crap out of it in-game using the modifyneighborhoodterrain cheat to, for instance, make higher and lower ground, to dig river beds, and to raise bits hidden under volcanoes so that I could use cloud boxes to make the volcanoes (There are five of them) appear to steam. It was a large undertaking (and I'm still tweaking it here and there) and, of course, it makes placing future lots mostly impossible because much of the road system is now destroyed. But that's why I placed lots first, before I did any destruction in the buildable area. And there are still a few "undisturbed" areas for future "emergency" lots, if they're needed.

This is the castaway pair's residential beach lot, where they start their "journey", pulled back for a wider view that includes the big volcano:


And, for laughs, what the playable area looks like with the roads turned on:

Very realistic iCad. Now I know why you were fiddling with castaway hood deco (thanks for those by the way ) Toss up a link on MTS so we can follow along, yes?

My 'hood is coming along so nicely, I'm so happy! I do have another 75% of the map to fill, though... but at least I've got this part down!

Wow, everyone has such wonderfully detailed neighbourhoods.

This is the one I have been working on for the past 2 years, starting off as a prosperity challenge. I'm trying to make it look more detailed as I slowly build it up.

New neighborhood that I'm working on, Astoria Falls.

Here is my main hood called Hallawalk (it uses the Belladonna Cove template):






Here is my first downtown hood. It's called Dunnle Downtown (I have two downtown hoods attached to my main hood):










Here is my other downtown hood called Dunnle Harbour. It's the coastline of the city, and it's inhabited by lower wealth sims:







Here is a look at the Dunnle boardwork/beach





Hope you like. :D

@Benjoz I love your hoods! You have a realism to them that I really like. I have never been good at making industrial city hoods myself. Without hood deco I am screwed! Your downtown area has a really good skyline view as well!

@malfoya I'm glad that you like it ! These hoods took a while to build (especially the Dunnle city hoods). But I do like how they've come out. A lot of the lots are built by me, but some are downloaded from other creators!

This thread is awesome, I can't wait to see more custom hoods! :D

@ Benjoz, awesome hood, I love it. I use that same default road replacement, it really adds to the urban factor. Excellent work!

Thank you @MOOKIEBLAYLOCK . I'm telling you, since I downloaded that road replacement, I can't play without it! I love the realistic look of the texture.
It's a must have for me since I like my game to look more realistic than cartoony.

^ I hear ya on the realism, I'm the same way

@MOOKIEBLAYLOCK Your hood looks awesome! Infact they gave me a lot of inspiration to build my city hoods. I may build another hood just for fun, lol.

Oh, great. I get to follow MOOKIEBLAYLOCK and Zarathustra. And all the wonderful, wonderful efforts here as well. (Looks at floor.)

But after yakkin' about this for two months, I thought I'd show the final result of my custom vacation hood. This is not quite going to elicit the oohs and ahhs of MOOKIEBLAYLOCK's and Zarathustra's efforts ... indeed of the efforts here so far ... but I thought it acceptable for an advanced-beginner-level effort. It is a Mountain hood.

For details, it's spoiler time. Lots of details. Lots of words. Lots of thanks and attributions because it would be rude of me not to do this. I also put things my Sims could do on almost every lot, using some great CC mods, so I'll go into specifics about that. Beware, please. A possible teal deer here for some who don't like wordy stuff.



A snapshot of the map is below. I'll post a few building shots from the main vacation hood once I play them. So far, I've tested on a test hood and a main hood. All non-rabbithole lots work, anyway! (Well, once I fixed the problems with one of the hotels and the crashing hotel beach lot. The beach lot is a few tiles away from what you see in the picture. I have NO idea why moving over a few tiles would fix this, but I'm not complaining. At least I can still use the hotel.)

Added a lot picture. This is Abby Farrell's Tavern, the restaurant in the historic district. It's based off an actual Early Georgian-style building. Snapped quickly in-game, no fancy stuff to enhance anything. No special live-mode camera mod, unfortunately. What you see is what's there, warts and all. And there are warts. I'm still learning. But at least it does bear a decent resemblance to the original, and the routing is OK. I did not add much landscaping because there is a large pond in back, I use the shimmering pond trick on my lots, and I try to be aware of lag.

If I add more pictures, I'll put them under the SPOILER tag. I promise, mods!

@gazania , thanks so much for the (overly!) kind words, I really appreciate it! I love your hood and all the detail, planning and thought that you've put into it. Excellent work! Got a question... what is all that green stuff in your hood? Have your sims somehow managed to make grass, trees and plants grow? The only green my urban sims ever get to see is when they get mold on their walls. I'm going to have to keep them from seeing your pictures or they're all going to want to move there. Looking forward to more pics of your hood and it's wonderful that you take the time to explain your thought process and city planning. Awesome!

gazania you have a nice pretty green hood, nothing wrong with that. MOOKIEBLAYLOCK's hood is very impressive, but I'm not sure I can see a single sims house!

Sorry! I realize I put the pictures of my lots in the wrong place.

This is for more-advanced LANDSCAPE pictures, not lot pictures! And to be honest, I'm not focusing on the ... errr ... bigger picture, and it shows. I have no special skies, custom terrains (other than paints) or roads. I found the custom sky ones frustrating ... I could never get them the way I wanted, and the ones that allowed you to see them in-lot would show cut-offs between the Maxis and the custom skies. The only sky-related download that hasn't done that for me is the one here that shows the stars at night, and I don't think that's technically an overlay, is it? Perhaps I should try those again. This was years ago. I've learned stuff since then.

Ditto for radiance mods. I tried them. Oh, how I tried, including the well-known ones. But they'd frustrate me. The custom lighting would work better than the default in one setting, but worse than the default in another. I admire people's patience. I think I lack it. Or my graphics aren't up to par. Or both.

So I'll try to sneak off, red-faced, and look at the lovely, lovely landscape pictures here. I did leave my map and the one lot picture up, however. Sorry, folks. I'll hush up in this thread now.

@gazania We want more pictures of your hood! :lovestruc

I love the custom skies:

So much for hushing.

I will probably re-post pictures of my lots soon; just in the appropriate thread (I see a couple of ones I can use here). I know my effort isn't as "WOW!" as many, but I think it's adequate for someone of my skill level. I spent a good deal of time actually researching houses of a certain historical period, and buildings that would fit a certain city setting. It took me quite a while just to find the perfect rural firehouse I wanted to try! I don't think I ever worked this hard on an entire hood. Most of the times, I'll grab a building plan, try to make a lot inspired by it, and plop it somewhere. I never made an entire social/historical story in my head as I made each and every lot. What were the colonists of this hood like? How did they get along with native populations, and how did they use the natural resources of the area? (I imagined some conflicts ... this isn't some light-and-fluffy cartoon! But how were these conflicts resolved? War? Treaties?) Who were the people who originally owned the buildings in the historic district? Who was "Abby Farrell"? How many children did Mrs, Pritchett have? (The original owners of two of the buildings.) What were their circumstances? I do confess that I should never have the image of Howl pop up in my head when I thought of the Warlock (even though Howl is a wizard). Darn you, Mr.Miyasaki and Ms. Wynne-Jones, for a great movie and a quick, but engrossing book that was SUPPOSED to be for my daughter. Oops. I just kind of borrowed it first.

What are the current residents like now? Are there many of them? How do they act toward the tourists? I imagined them as generally-amiable and honest (The Charlatan is banned from all my lots), but hey ... if a quick, legit dollar can be made, why not? They're not altruistic!

What a difference making a playable hood is compared with making just one lot! Playability was a big point with me. I wanted most of my buildings to be accessible. While I did use some rabbitholes because after making 31 new lots (though I did use some pre-made ones by great lot creators and a few of my tried-and-trues) I was getting a little tired of making new lots to fit the stories in my head, I wanted my tourists and residents to be able to have fun ... to visit the sites, shop in the stores, mingle at the beach, have fun at the local karaoke spot. I wanted them to try hands-on activities in almost every building (well maybe not the Welcome Center .. it's a little too small for that ... but they can even grill hot dogs at the firehouse, if they wanted); not just mill around.

I admire each and every previous effort in this thread, and hope my next effort will be up to the standards of the fine hood layouts I see here.

I do confess having a second look at in-lot skies. For now, I'm not doing hood skies because honestly, I don't take usually make entire hoods like this. But I see how things have changed! I tried Poppet's 360-degree skies. That file is indeed large, as the creator indicated, but I do like that I can just not use the skies if the lot lags, or if I just don't feel like it. Just take the item out of the lot! (I do hope these skies won't cause lag, though. They're lovely.)

Before and after pics under the spoiler. Can you tell which one is Maxis, and which one is custom? These pictures were taken very closely together.



Now, soon ... off to post my lot pictures in a LOT picture thread!