Hi Community,

Daniel, creator of the Sims 3 New York Project (http://sims3newyork.blogspot.de/) has given me the advise to open a thread here and I am happy to get the chance to recieve feedback and ideas for the creation process of my own New York Project.

If you want to inform about my project to get an idea of what I am planning in detail, you can use my blog as source of information:

http://sims3bigapple.blogspot.de/


You could as well help me by just contributing your ideas right from the spot.
I would appreciate any kind of advise, hint, ideas for the creation.

This is what the map layout looks like:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--dvpFg4Ve...reenshot-32.jpg

As you can see, it's more or less a complete map of the city of New York with Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx, only lacking Staten Island.
There is also a part of New Jersey on the map.
The world will be really large in Sims 3 dimensions (largest map possible) and I have to work very efficently in order to keep it running smoothly.

I want to ensure performance stability by not plastering the world with lots, but using deco-buildings instead. They are simple hollow cubes/low poly objects with nice textures on them to get a realistic look. Thus, the world will not look typicall "simlish style" but more photorealistic.

Buildings are made with google-sketchup and then converted as package files.
I have yet done about 60 different buildings and I would be thankful for any idea which building to do next.

So if you feel like there is a famous landmark missing, a special shops you want to see in the city or anything else you would like to contribute, I would be happy to read your suggestions.

Thanks,
Horus

I love this. Have you worked on the wallstreet/broadway section yet? Specifically the place with the charging bull. My dad has worked in a building next to it for almost 30 years, so it's pretty near and dear to me.

I haven't worked on Wallstreet yet, but I will consider your suggestions

Please link/post the pictures of your work here, in this thread.

Hi,

today I could finally upload the First Beta.

Download

The Island of Manhattan is now 70% finished and I have made some good progress over the last few weeks.

Here is what the city looks like at the moment:



It would be great if you'd try out the beta version and give me some feedback on what to improve :D

Well, since this is a modding site, I would like to know the technique you used for converting Sketchup files to package files. The problem I always have had with sketchup is that many buildings may have 60 or more different texture files. It seems that Sketchup makes buildings in little bits and pieces. You have part of a building, then a texture that goes with it. Putting these buildings together into one piece appears to be a major hassle. In fact, it generally seems easier just to start from scratch.

Also, many sketchup models have really bad and blurry textures. But I suspect there is not much that can be done about that.

Also, I am eagerly awaiting your tutorial on lighting up buildings. I know Monsoon has done it, but I have not really looked at her lighted buildings yet. But I would like to see a tutorial on this.

I, too, have made a lot of deco buildings, most of which have not been uploaded. This includes a few New York buildings, which can be seen in Manustyle/Daniel's New York, NY world. I certainly would be interested in updating these buildings with lighted windows. But I never played around with it all that much.

Hi,
so far, everything you said is true. The only way to get sketchup buildings into the Sims 3 is to put all necessary textures together into one and then assign this new texture to the model. This means a lot of work and can be really painful, but in most cases, it is really worth it. To my mind the buildings from sketchup have far better quality than those converted from x-plane or microsoft flight sim.

I promiss to write a tutorial about how to add nightlights to buildings when I find the time. I know two ways so far, the one from Monsoon, which means putting a "nightlight" texture to the building, and my own, which focuses on making windows that light up at night. It is up to you, which one you prefer, but in my opinion it is more realisitic if only the windows light up and not the whole building itself. I will upload the tutorial on my blog once it is finished and let you know.

Well, it's not from me, BloomsBase told me about it.

The advantage of the X-Plane or MFS buildings is speed. I can pop out a conversion in 15 minutes. If you need a lot of buildings fast, it's the way to go. I have looked at hundreds of Sketchup buildings and the quality is pretty uneven. Many have absolutely horrible textures. Others are very well done. However, it seems that the best models are not available for download.

Building from scratch can be pretty time consuming. I have come to the conclusion that the best way of doing this is by creating panels. A panel, for me, is typically a 3 square by 3 square plane, although I have used different sizes, like 1 square by 3 squares. The panels can be joined together to form a single story. Stories can then be copied and pasted one above the other. Many panels will share the same texture, which allows for a much high detailed building. However, I would note that in the Sims, high detail only really matters for the bottom floors. After about the third story the detail is lost as the game shifts to lower levels of detail. Typically, I will make a texture sheet containing the textures for all of the panels I am planning on using and then each panel gets assigned to its own part of the texture sheet.

Absolutely true. It is easy and fast do convert a building from X-plane or MFS. The advantage of sketchup is its big database. I could find a model for every NCY landmark I was looking for. Of course it was really a lot of work and I am glad that I am done with most of the big landmark buildings.


This is exactly what I have done to do all the townhouse and appartment deco buildings. It took some time until I found out the right scale for the stories, but now it is easy and fast to make a good looking deco building. I am trying to take only high quality textures (1024x1024) to get the best visuals in game. The only disadvantage is the file size, but at the moment all my buildings take up to 400mb and I can't really see any performance impact. Hopefully, this will last, as there are still many buildings to come

I don't know what your conclusion was, but I finally decided that a Sims style story is three square high (a square in Milkshape is the same as a square in the Sims.) Of course, if you are making your own buildings, you are free to make a story whatever you want. Also, the Microsoft buildings are pretty much the same scale as the Sims buildings. The Sims scale is not to definite, but if I do the calculations, it is close enough.

One of the side effects of this is the conversions are huge. Some people chose to reduce the scale of the buildings, which sort of throws the whole scale thing off.

A lot of people don't appreciate just how simple these buildings can be. They can be as simple as a cube with a texture applied, or they can become quite complex.

I have found the easiest way to maintain a high resolution texture is to have different panels which are reused over and over again. I have also found that the high resolution becomes less important after the first couple of floors. Starting at about the third floor, the Sims 3 pops into low resolution (LOD 3) mode.

In some cases, I have reduced a 1040 x 1040 texture to 520 x 529, or less, with no noticeable difference.

By the way, FWIW, Drzewiecki Designs has done a New York, NY scenery for flight simulator. It might be worth a look.

By the way, I really did not intend to hijack your world thread, but I find the building creation to be far more interesting than the world creation. Since you obviously have made some great strides in this area, I am curious about what you have done.

Hey so according to mediafire the Second Beta has been taken down as of this year. Does anyone have a different link that I can use so I can download. It was always one of my favorite so I'm sad I can't play it.

Not sure if the OP will see this one day but I still play this world and the Empire State Building was so creative, but I can no longer find the base or the illuminated top.