I've been wanting to create an inventor modeled after a particular anime character for some time now. But I've been having difficulty trying to figure out how to recreate some of the visuals from the house, because they just didn't translate over well into the sims. But after some thought and a bit of work, I finally did it.
This is one of the only pictures I had to work with:
This is the home of Winry and Pinako Rockbell, also known as Rockbell Automail, from the animated series: "Full Metal Alchemist." It takes place in a country very similar to early 1900's Europe in a world governed by Alchemy as a physical science, as opposed to physics in ours. Automail is a mechanical prosthetic limb replacement that is grafted into a person's remaining nerves, allowing the user to regain full usage of their body after an amputation (except they have no sense of touch with it).
The first thing I noticed is that the second floor isn't exactly a floor at all. It's more of an attic, and since there were actually bedrooms up there, an attic space would be rather difficult to work with. Likewise, there were some serious size continuity errors between the outside and the inside. The characters in question were seen in their bedrooms, eating at the dinner table, and working in a somewhat spacious workshop...but with such a small house, I couldn't imagine that there would be enough room inside of it for all those amenities (this is not to even mention bathrooms, and asside from an outdoor shower faucet, you never actually saw one). Likewise, you never see enough of the interior (as the characters living in the house are not the main characters) to get any sort of an idea of the layout.
So, it required some rethinking and artistic license with the floor plan to put it into form in the Sims 3:
Since you never actually see with any real certainty what's inside the brick add-on section of the house, I assume it's supposed to be the workshop area. Since there wasn't enough room for what I wanted to do with it, I took some more artistic license:
I'm likewise going to stick with a washer/clothes line set up to try and maintain as much of the low tech feel as possible. And the stairs lead to the actual workshop:
I used several Fast Lane Stuff items to give it the "gear head" feel that the Rockbell workshop had, plus I added a couple of extras:
A simbot recharging station (an idea stolen completely and shamelessly from Ausette...thanks again by the way lol)...
And an emergency shower stall for quick posterior extinguishing after an inventing explosion.
The living part of the house still needs some work. I've got to find some reference materials for wall and floor coverings. I also need to fiddle with the color of the siding a bit to get a lighter yellow.
