Like the title says, I am really struggling with taking screenshots from the ground level. Every time I try, it sets me down at weird angles, or too close to the house. It's especially difficult because the build I'm working on is pretty tall. I know head-on, non-angled shots are required to upload a lot to MTS. I'm not sure if I'm missing something, if it's a glitch or normal behavior for the game, and how other people are able to get such nice shots of their builds from head-on/ground level. Does it require a mod or is the struggle universal? Or am I just doing it wrong? Anyone have any tips or fixes for this?

How tall is "pretty tall?" At the fourth floor and above the camera becomes unruly; do not recommend.

A lot of camera bouncing, however, has to do with the terrain that's "under" and "behind" the camera. If the terrain rises, so does the camera - including terrain that is on the other side of the lot border! Make sure your lot is oriented in the middle of a flat space. Go to the topmost level, tab, and use the - oh, which key is it? X? The key that lowers the camera. Use that key to go as low as you can get from across the street, and angle the camera slightly up.

Yes, it is hard, and you'll probably have to take a lot of shots to get a satisfactory one. That is the lot of photographers since photography began. But eventually, you get reasonably good at it.

With my skyscraper lots I'll frequently have to mess with camera positions for the street-level elevation shots, and oftentimes I'll move the camera to the location I want (location, NOT angle) just using the normal gameplay camera, and only THEN go into cameraman mode to get the angle- it allows for the free-rotation of cameraman mode from a little further away from the building than you'd get from just using cameraman mode the whole time. Just be aware that if you MOVE the camera at all when it's "out-of-bounds" like this, it'll jump back closer to the building again.

The default camera settings are also not the best, so you may want to look into a camera mod that adjusts how much you can move the camera.

Here's a compilation mod that includes several mods in one: https://scibirg.tumblr.com/post/159...mod-compilation (you can read about each one in the links)

And I thought taking pictures of clothes was hard. XD At least the buildings don't stretch and make faces!

One trick I use is to set the focus on a Sim in the house, start off with the camera quite far away, and then move in. If I'm taking a picture of the house, I'll make sure the walls are up, and stop zooming when I can still get the whole house in frame. If I'm trying to take a picture of the Sims I'll zoom in further, but, if possible, I'll still try to keep walls up. I like to feel I'm in the room with my Sims (which is possibly why I feel so close to them!). This way I tend to end up with a child's eye view of my adult and teen Sims, with my eye-level somewhere between their waist and their neck. Of course I can move the camera up a little to get an adult/teen eye view. The Sims I find it hardest to get level with are Sims who are lying or squatting on the floor. I'm always looking down on them from slightly above them. When I would like to get down lower is when two children are playing Mary Mack, as I find that about the cutest thing in the game. I'd like to be able to get down to their eye-level.

Alas, my build is 4 stories of course i had to build tall lol.

The terrain is flat, so I at least have that working for me.

I realized I had forgotten that I could use commands to rotate the camera better lol, so I appreciate it, thank you. I'm pretty happy with how the pictures are coming along, hopefully I can compile them and submit my work today.

I love this idea. I've been trying to take pictures from the Sim's perspective too. I really like the photo album mechanic. I was actually wondering if you can export those photos because I want to preserve them and was thinking of setting up a blog to post some of them to at some point. I know you can always take screenshots, but I really like how the photos the sims take specifically look. It adds a sense of life and realism to them.

I enjoy watching the child sims play games together too, the animations are adorable.

You can export in-game snapshots! All you have to do is copy the relevant files.

Open the neighborhood folder for the neighborhood you want to post about. Inside is a Storytelling folder. This is where everything that goes into making a Sims 2 Album is stored.

When you open the Storytelling folder, you will see a bunch of .jpg and a few .xml files. The .jpgs will have names beginning with "snapshot" or "thumbnail," with snapshots being the full-size pictures and the thumbnails being thumbnail-sized copies of them. (Like so: snapshot_7273cf83_741059a9, with the first element of the name identifying the type of file, the second the household with which it is associated, and the third naming the individual shot. You'll be able to use the household name to connect thumbnails, snapshots, and .xml files together.) The .xml files will have names beginning with "webentry" and contain the formatting and text for the albums. Some of the snapshots will have a single-letter prefix before the "snapshot" element, indicating that they were taken by a sim and which part of the neighborhood (main hood, each vacation hood) they were taken in. If you set the folder to Large or Extra Large Icon view, you'll be able to tell them apart easily. You can copy the snapshots, convert them, and edit them just like any other .jpgs.

They will not be as large and sharp as screenshots, but they are a lot easier to organize and connect to any text you've put into the albums than screenshots. You take your pictures and you make your choices.