New Vacation Destinations

This is another project I've been sitting on for a while and I keep forgetting I have it. I'm working on a custom vacation destination. It's for Strangetown and technically it's an Asian local, but its designed to be an Alien Space Colony. It's called Pollination Station #23 and I've already got a sweet hood deco and layout going on, but I should really work on making better custom lots. I also need to research what vacation activities you are supposed to be able to do at the Takemizu and see how many of them will line up with this new place.

I'm also interested in making a ski resort for a mountain local, where its always winter and it would have lovely ski lodges and lots of christmasy and winter decorations. It would be sweet if I can figure out how to make custom outings for it as well, so they can pay a tour guide to take them skiing and snowboarding since it's not so likely that I'll be able to include those activities any other way. An ice skating rink would be nice to include as well.

The third vacation spot I'd like to create is a wooded lake area. It would have lots of beach lots and activities like fishing and canoeing. Many of the existing mountain tours work well enough for this. I just want to include a lake beach that would be perfect for my Log Cabin Lake House and my Lakeside Cabins.

To round it out I'd need a beach local, and the point of these is to kind of mix up the typical so I can't do a nice warm tropical beach, so the only other option is a colder one, similar to New England beaches. But, no sense in reinventing the wheel, plasticbox has a fantastic neighborhood that I turned into just that. So I will have to think on this some more. I made a bunch of those little houses into single family 'rentals' by placing hotel doors on all the bedroom doors. This helped out when my Stargazer family vacationed there but had trouble making sure that the kids got fed. Renting a house with its own kitchen meant that mom could still cook for the littler ones.

Morph Mesh Curtains

So, I've had this idea for a while and I just never bothered to get started on it and do anything with it because its such a low priority, even though I think its cool. Some objects can have morph meshes, like the swingset and some cushy chairs. They adjust to the shape of a sim's butt visually. What's actually happening is that a second mesh group with exactly the same polys just in different places is taking over when the sim starts to interact with it. I figure this could be applied to curtains, particularly the maxis ones (cuz if it isn't maxis match it tends to have a limited life expectancy in my downloads folder.) The normal mesh would be the default open state of course, but then I could add in the 'closed' version of the curtains. Sims could walk up to the curtains and open and close them, like Atavera did with the BG windows early on. The patterns would straighten out and it would just look very natural - in theory, keep in mind, I've done no poking around yet to see how possible this even is. I think it could work, the painful parts being making straight versions of squished up meshes (likely just have to remesh everything and make custom drapes instead, and then making straight texture versions of all the existing maxis recolors. And then it would break every other recolor as well. Maybe these shouldn't be defaults after all...

Pane-ful Windows

I've picked this project up and put it down so many times I've got at least three or four versions of the list of windows I want to work with. What I've got planned here is to recolor the glass portion of the windows to include things like broken glass, frosted glass, winter frost, stained glass, screens, and no glass. Some of the windows need to have their glass section added and become CEP enabled, and others are silly and need to be remapped and then have the glass as the second subset. Why we need to be able to separately choose wood colors for log windows is beyond me.

This project was going smoothly until mustluvcats came out with her Privacy Screens that basically did exactly what I was planning, but in a one-size-fits-all way. This lead me to have a crisis of faith sorta moment and I put the project down for a year and a half. I've since decided I still want to proceed because my way can give me 'empty' windows, which is something I've been wanting for a long time. Nicely shaped porch window openings without any glass in them. And, I can fix those non-nonsensically two-faced window subsets while I'm at it.

Corner Deco Stairs

I've been putting off doing this post for a while cuz it's dead simple, the project has nothing two it, but yet its a bunch of sucky busy work. Getting the meshes to line up and be low poly is just a nightmare. See the nice inside corner stairs in the center of the picture? Basically I want to do the opposite, make an outside corner. I'd also need to add a bunch of slots, that's not that hard either, it's been done for stairs. The tricky thing I was working on was figuring out a way of making the object a slave to multiple master stairs. A good number of the stairs actually all use the same mesh, not just the cheap brown and green ones, but others share as well. I think there might be a way of doing it because a few times when I've cloned an object but haven't Fixed Integrity or something, it will pick up my new recolors in addition to the original object's colors. There might be something to that. The reason I need to worry about that is because there have been multiple stairs made recolorable, and I want to be able to accommodate that with as little catalog cluttering as possible.

Pleasantview Contest

I've tabled my other projects for now but I'm glad there is so much interest in my College Collection project. Once I have the time I will pick that one back up again. I'm also working on the contest entries for jones' contest. I did the business guy for my first house, and I'm doing the flower lady for my second. It seems to be what everyone else is doing, but I'm trying to put my own takes on them both. Steve went for a really retro look and I chose to loose points by opening up his bedroom. Take a tour!

Rose(mary) Gardner just has to be the younger sister to Marigold Gardner, thus making her a plantsim. Building a plantsim friendly house while still having everything the judges are going to want is proving difficult, but fun. My version will be vastly different from the other Rose's houses. Go check out the rest of the house!

Secret Projects!

I've been avoiding making a post about my current two projects because one is a joint project with Echo for Halloween, and the other is a MTS official project, which you will also know about on the first of November. Basically, don't disappear from MTS right around then, you will want to see what's planned.

Edit: The secret project is out and is posted, if you are interested, it's a costume trunk and available now! The other was the start of MTS Official Creator Competitions.

Joined a new Contest

So, its been quite some time since my last post. I almost have a good reason for it. I'm job hunting. I've also had a few paid gigs and I've got one really freaking early (by my wake-up-at-10:30 standards) tomorrow. Yay! I also have been working on a side scheme to make money by designing and selling dollhouse kits. There might be more about that later if it pans out.

On the sims side of things (cuz this isn't a personal blog, you guys care about sims) I've joined jones' Pleasantview Reno House Contest. Spots are open until Saturday, so if you want to play, get it in soon!

Update: I've uploaded this house! Get it here!