Tutorials:Taking Totally Bitchin Pics/Garden Set

Garden Set

A properly-created outdoor set can create a beautiful natural feel to pictures, and is appropriate for many types of sims. It can be one of the more challenging sets to work with, as plants often have high poly counts, and crowding them together and pointing the camera at them can make for very slow frame rates, but it can also be one of the prettiest ways to take pics.

Start by placing two walls - you can use a stone fence, or a wall with a stone texture applied. As with the basic set above, remember that the light is coming from a certain direction, so you want to make a well-lit corner.

Use the terrain paint tool to paint the ground an interesting texture in wide strokes using the largest brush size. Then add some accents of another terrain paint in the smallest brush size for interest. Don't overdo it - you want it to look random and natural. You can always undo or paint over it if you don't like how it looks.

If you would like to add a pond, outline the pond first in a different texture appropriate to it - a dark wet-looking brown mud or small gravel is a good choice. Make sure you do this first, as you won't be able to change the texture once the water is in place.

Then put in the water, leaving a little edge of gravel here and there. Use the smallest brush size for adding the water, and do it a single click a time. Try to give it a natural blobby sort of shape with a bit of variance in the depth of the water in places.

Now add some trees. You want it to look lush, but not too crowded, with room left for other plants and, of course, your sim. Remember to add a couple trees on the other side of the fence if you are using a low one and the trees may show over the top in your pictures.

Try to use odd-numbered clusters of trees and other plants when you are adding them.

You will want to make sure you have the following cheats enabled:

• boolProp snapObjectsToGrid false - Plants only grow along perfect straight lines in well-tended formal gardens. Unless that's the look you're going for, make sure you place your plants in a scattered, natural way.

• boolProp allow45DegreeAngleOfRotation true - This will allow you to have more rotation angles for your plants. You could just use the 4 right-angle rotations by default, but the more randomly your plants seem placed, the more natural it will look, so make sure to rotate each plant a few times if you're placing several of the same plants near one another.

• moveObjects on - This will allow you to place more than one plant in a single grid tile, and intersecting one another. The branches of trees often tangle together when they are closely spaced, and placing a few trees close together and a few further apart will look random and natural.

Now add some shrubbery and lower plants and flowers. As with the trees, stick to odd-numbered groups, scatter them around off the gridlines, rotate frequently, and overlap a little. Try to stick with one or two coordinating colours in the flowers.

Pictures taken in nice natural sets like this can be very pretty. Make sure you can't see the road or sidewalk in any pics like this, and you generally want the background to look natural as well - either sky or mountain, not a roof or something behind. The high wall or fence you placed first should obscure most ugly constructions, and your trees should do the rest.