So, 4 years ago, I was all over the place looking for a quite specific world style, or at least a good heightmap to make one of my own. 4 years of life happened, and I've finally found a good heightmap I was easily able to edit in CAW to get pretty much exactly what I want!

So, here I've got the heightmap and an overlay of my plan so far:



The green area to the lower-right will be hills and forests with a bunch of scattered lots and maybe a couple small communities. The brown in the top area and the neon-yellow in the middle are completely flat now. The neon-yellow will be the main town which I want to have a style similar to a mix of these two:



The brown area will be full of farm fields in a grid.

Mile Grid anyone?




This is my quick concept of a Mile Grid. Each plot of land is 120 tiles from the inner edges of the roads (slightly larger because the roads don't have sidewalks). They are big enough for fields surrounded by trees and fences, and some houses. This house is sitting on a 64x64 lot.

The forests will hopefully feel a lot like this little area:


The house to the left of the image looks like this from the street:


The house to the right:


I want to recreate my worn roads for this, but I have already recreated my lines, plus some.


The purpose of this thread is to, for one: see if there's still much activity around here for Sims 3 worlds, and two: to get feedback and advice as I progress.

If anyone has any builds they think would be a good fit for this style and would like to see them here, feel free to share!

Looking back at these images, I feel like the mile grid might be a bit too small, especially compared to that house. The easiest solution here would be to make them 252 tiles across (that is the area on the inner edge of the outer roads here). This would allow me to either keep this area as it is and just have it be a more developed area of the grid, or I could easily remove the gravel road that crosses the highway right next to the house and push the outer gravel roads parallel with the highway further out.

Coming up with a different size entirely would take more work, but it's possible.

Here is the current heightmap exported from CAW, with the big northern are being flat:

How does this look for terrain painting? I really do not like painting terrain as it is just boring and tedious. I want to make the terrain in the hills as autonomous as I can, placing the trees, bushes, and rocks will be annoying enough.



Also, I have downloaded the 2K textures from this 4K texture mod for use in my game. If I paint with the game textures in CAW and load it in the actual game, will they automatically use the modded textures? It didn't seem to when I was using Edit In Game. If so, does anyone know how I can get the textures from the expansions into CAW? I remember being able to do this, but I can't remember how.

And how to I make it so CAW can render things further away at higher detail like the game does? Things look awful right now even from just a couple dozen meters away. In the image below, each center line is 3 meters long and the gap between it and the next line is 9 for a total of 12. By the 3rd line (36 meters) things are already blurry. In my images from yesterday, up to 7 lines were visible at high-detail (84 meters).