Building over water

[DeLouche]

Hi all,

Has anyone built over water on a beach or fishing lot? I've not managed to do this at all, so any tips, from sunken footbridges, to full scale piers, would be very helpful.

Specifically, I'd like to create a pier - I've seen some great ones, perched on top of columns, and I'd like to try something similar. I'm currently working in CAW, so the water is already there, so if I can build over already-present water, so much the better...

[RunAmokSims]

Lucky Palms came with pier pieces in buydebug and I'm trying to figure out how to use them. Anyone successful ? I end up with a small strip of green terrain around the pier piece. I can't figure out how to do the walls.

[Swirl-Girl]

I suppose that if you use cheats you could enter Move Objects On an put columns in the pond or ocean, with a little fiddling you could probably manage to get the columns to the same height, that is when CFE is useful. With both cheats activated, you have your pond and your location of your pier in mind. place a column where it is your desired height, then place columns at your desired location, place flooring directly on top of all of the columns, the use the level terrain tool from the column that is the correct height, to one of the columns in the correct place and level the rest of the columns, remove the guide column, and add flooring, fencing, etc. From what I know it might work better if you use a column that can be multiple heights, but if you don't like any of them, just use normal collumns and hope for the best. Tell me if you need any clarifications.

[DeLouche]

Thanks Swirl-Girl I'll give that a go!

[Joria]

My all time favorite build was Pier Fun Oh Won in Union Cove.  It is built right into the bay floor.  I did not use cfe at all, since I didn't know how.  Just put down foundation and went from there.  The first version was fully landscaped underneath with statues and plants that sort of looked like water weeds and fog emitter stuff.  Once the pier was totally built it was so horribly graphics intensive, (and still is), I had to remove almost all the underwater sea scaping.  As long as you are working in CAW you can do it.  I've tried doing it on lakes in different areas with much less luck. 

[RunAmokSims]

Joria, I had never used cfe either but after Lucky Palms I found it was extremely easy to use with the new pier sections (found in buydebug/misc).

I chose a large lot, placed the large U shaped pier section and butted the open end up next to the front edge of the lot. Then I filled in the area with flooring. Next I started the cfe false cheat and started digging the lake around it. The only thing I had to be careful with was digging the lake right next to the pier. I used the smallest square brush because if I got too close the flooring it started to sink and I'd have puddles around the inner edges of the pier. All it took was a little practice and my pier looked just like the ones in LP. I've been having fun playing with that.

[DeLouche]

Thanks for everyone's helpful advice and tips!

Joria, your pier in UC is utterly gorgeous, and actually what inspired me to want to try it, so thank you very much - I also have no experience of cfe, and was prepared to try and learn, but am glad that I don't have to add yet another learning curve to the CAW mix

RunAmokSims, glad you managed to get your pier to work I don't have Lucky Palms, but I do want to try more waterside building, so I might look into this at some point in the future...

It's good to know that there are so many ways of doing piers/building on water, this is really helpful!

[PolarBair]

I don't have Lucky Palms so I don't have these pier pieces but here's a quick and dirty pier I just through together on the light house island in the version of Sunset Valley I'm working on.



I found (using CFE off) I had to elevate the terrain underwater to one columns height beneath the pier level because CFE does not stretch the columns to the new floor height unfortunately. It would look better if it did.

bummer, I put a few fish spawners at the end of the pier but for somereason my sim can't fish off the pier. I tried moving things out of the way and even removing the railing at the end but she still won't fish off the pier.

[DeLouche]

Hmmm, that's odd.... you pier looks nice though... I started to build one last night and it crashed CAW :/ Had been acting slow and odd for a while though. I'll try again in-game...

[Frey]

This is really cool! I always thought it was imposible to build over water that was already there.

I still don't understand why EA hasn't created a trick to stretch columns though, like pressing shift to place stairs through foundation or something like that. It would make everything a lot easier and more beautiful!

[Chuckles_82]

There is a slider for some of the colums to make them 1,2, and 3 stories tall. I'm not sure if it goes up to 4. But not all the columns have that option.

[Frey]

Yeah, but I mean making them smaller. Like 0,5 stories tall or something like that. I love building over water but sometimes  1-story-columns underneath look too tall and rather weird.

[Chuckles_82]

If you use the square column, and place it before editing the terrain, then place another one underneath it, it overlaps without looking too bad.

[Swirl-Girl]

Maybe you could make columns using walls in little one square rooms?

[Frey]

If you use the square column, and place it before editing the terrain, then place another one underneath it, it overlaps without looking too bad.

What do you mean with square column? I have the spanish version of the game so maybe it's just called differently, but I didn't find any column with that name and I have several of them that are rather square so I didn't know which one to use. But it would be so cool if this worked!