Placing existing houses & buildings into CAW lots w/o altering terrain...

[PoisonFrog]

First place a lot in CAW that is large enough for the housed lot you will place there. X-tra large lots help with tricky placements.
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/32616_111214182849Terrain-01.jpg

Now, go into EIG(Edit In Game>Edit Town) and place the housed lot you want and save. Before you exit EIG, enter the cheat 'constrainfloorelevation false' with testing cheats enabled, then exit EIG.

Back in CAW, your lot will look something like this...
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/32617_111214183359Terrain-02.jpg

http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/32618_111214183459Terrain-03.jpg
You can see how badly mismatched the lot terrain is to the world terrain and the mountains are perfectly vertical and not very fixable with normal techniques. Now we fix it...

Select the lot.
Now go into the property browser in CAW and change the last digit of either Position X or Position Z and press enter on your keyboard...now your lot should look like this..
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/32619_111214185330Terrain-05.jpg

There will be water on your lot if you did it right, and the terrain will be back to its original form. There will be objects that jumped into the air and possibly some that are submerged below ground. A general cleanup of objects(chairs, stairs and outdoor stuff on the ground) before doing this isn't a bad idea.

To get rid of the water on your lot, use the conform edges tool on it.

Now the hard part...cleaning up the lot. I usually go back in to edit town with the constrainfloorelevation cheat and touch up the terrain where needed. Then I go through and move any objects that are at the wrong elevation. Finally I remove any ground tiles like sidewalks that don't fit in..
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/32621_111214190840Terrain-09.jpg

http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/32622_111214190915Terrain-11.jpg

Obviously, this isn't for every situation, just tricky elevations where you want to preserve the land formation, or where other methods don't work ;)

[armiel]

That's quite interesting and also new info, to me at least. Thank you.

Have you playtested lots that you have altered this way? "Cheaty" methods may cause routing issues and make some objects unusable unless replaced fully.

In CAW I usually just build new lots, I don't recycle lots so to say :P But I wish there was a way like this for in-game lot placing.

[PoisonFrog]

Only a little, so there could be issues. I've only done 4 lots like this, but it would be nice if we didn't have to build 80-100 houses or ask others to do so many. I think most of the Maxis houses could be reworked to our tastes without being generic. Of course you'll always want to build some houses from scratch for diversity and flavor. I'll put a new release of my world on my Journal sometime tommorow if anyone wants to examine this more closely.
:)

[PoisonFrog]

Ok, I finally found a few hours to examine this in game and understand it(at least on an intuitive level). There are a number of interesting things going on here...

1. Cheats can be entered in CAW, I use K1ll3RM1CK's Cheat Utility(available on MTS) to enter cheats directly into CAW.

2. When you use the technique I laid out in the first post, you are dealing with 3 planes-The world plane, the lot(or structure) plane, and the lot water plane..(actually there are 3 water plane components of varying function, but they behave uniformly for my purposes).

3. When using the conform edges tool as described in my first post it conforms the lot's water plane to the world plane imported with the 'constrainfloorelevation false' cheat, but it doesn't conform the lot plane to this imported world plane. That's because the building structures need the original lot plane or they would become disassociated from the lot. This in turn causes routing problems in game and also makes the terrain tools in build mode behave freakishly...because they are associated to the old lot plane, not the new imported plane.

4. To make this cheat function properly in game, you need to conform the imported world plane to the lot plane. Here's how I did that...

After placing a lot in CAW and entering EIG I used the 'SetImportedTerrainOffset' cheat described here:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=4269322
to set my structure height before I place the housed lot and use my cheat. The higher you set this, the less of your lot will be clipped flat when conforming the two terrain planes...a bit of clipping may help with mounting horses and object placement though. If you set the structure too high, you will end up with floating objects and misaligned structure, later on.

Then follow the steps outlined in my first post and do the following after removing the water from the lot with the 'Conform Edges' tool:

Go back into EIG, enter the lot in build mode('constrainfloorelevation false' cheat enabled) and get a few ground units in conformity with the structural elevation, then place a single unit of foundation there. This has to be correct, as it will be your reference for bringing the two terrain plains into conformity with each other..I used the existing stairs as my ground level guide. If your first floor elevation is correct in relation to existing stairs, you can use your existing flooring as a reference.
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/32843_111219205541Screenshot-268.jpg

Now place another foundation in one of the corners of your lot and use the Level Terrain tool to make it the same height as your reference foundation..
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/32845_111219214821Screenshot-272.jpg

Then place another foundation in the opposite corner of your lot and use the first corner to level it, also leveling the entire lot's 1st floor elevation(except the very outer edge). If done correctly, all housing structure will now be at correct elevations.
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/32846_111219215554Screenshot-274.jpg

Now all planes are in conformity and the terrain tools will function normally and routing should too...let sims and horses walk a few sim minutes before mounting, though. Add a few touch-ups and you have a good starter home costing about 18,000 unfurnished, I believe...
http://www.modyourpanties.com/hosting/32847_111220011815Screenshot-280.jpg

Sorry, I had to use a different lot for update pics... :turtle: