Download: A pre-final version of recolours of Psychosims Neighbourhood Sky
In that faraway land
where my spirit flies
To my island girl
under these ancient skies
( + information and download link + )
Last year, psychosim made this wonderful globe object to place in a neighbourhood; instant sky!
The effect was amazing and I wanted more options, so I set to work on recolours. Unfortunately, due to my perfectionism, slow pace, and some unforeseen circumstances (such as a computer crash) they still aren’t finished, even though I posted about them before with great enthusiasm. Because I won’t be able to work on these recolours until August and several people have expressed their interest in them, I decided to share my latest version.
I had just made a batch of recolours with different textures, which is what you will get. They all have horizons, too. The project is still ‘in development’ as it were, so nothing is perfect - but it’s better than nothing!
The sky textures were not made by me (except for one); I just slapped them on, really. But in an effort to simulate more realism, I added a little grassy “horizon” bit at the bottom. As I’m still developing this I’d love to hear your thoughts about it. I’m not happy with the terrible pixelation happening there, but due to the gigantic nature of this object, some stretching is to be expected if you don’t want to end up with gigantic filesizes!
*** Things to try out ***
- The objects show up in the "landmark" directory in the decoration catalogue in the neighbourhood view.
- You do not need Psychosims object to use this - unlike regular objects, recolours of neighbourhood decorations are made by cloning the original. This also means they all show up in the catalogue separately.
- You place the object by placing a little grabbable square on one of the corners of your terrain and rotating the globe with > and < to wrap it around the terrain square. See also Psychosims post.
- The level of the horizon is adjustable! As it depends on the height of the terrain where you placed the grabbable square, you can edit that if you have AL or MG installed. By enabling the modifyneighborhoodterrain cheat, you can select the terrain square that the grabbable object is on, and move it up and down with [ and ]. I think you get the best effect if the square is about water level, or lower.
*** Things to watch out for ***
- These files are not compressorized, and because of the large textures that adds up to 1,40 MB per recolour. Please feed them to the compressorizer yourself if this is your preference - I don’t have access to it right now.
- They are not visible from a lot, as the object is too gigantic! Use the original lot atmosphere inside a lot. (I'll get round to putting these recolours on the lot object some day, or keep an eye out for bagfran who might do just that.)
- In fact, it's so huge that parts of it may disappear if the "free"camera is positioned too far from the centre, so watch out when taking pictures.
- All of them have a grass horizon all around the globe. I do plan on making a sea version as well for island ‘hoods, but that’s for a later time, sorry. (Pretty coastlines or detailed textures such as Criquette had would be really cool, but I’m afraid they are quite impossible without a gigantic texture!)
- One of the recolours (#0, Cumulus Clouds, see swatch) has a horizon that’s higher than the rest; this is adjustable with the terrain cheat, but be careful you won't behead any tall hills!
*** Things to be thankful for ***
- Psychosim, for creating the neighbourhood object which I cloned
- Chris997, for creating the original lot atmosphere (which Psychosim enlarged) and for some of the textures I used
- Danicast, for creating recolours of the lot atmosphere of which I used one texture
- Blender Architecture, for providing wonderful textures
- Nepheris, for reviving the project, for testing these recolours, and for the beautiful pictures in this post! (see more here)
*** Things to look forward to ***
- Please tell me what you like and don't like about these recolours! I'm still in the trying-everything-out-to-see-what-looks-best phase. Especially the height of the horizon. Should it be higher or lower than it is now? Is it practical to use?
- There are also many things I would like to add/edit, including:
* starry night skies
* completely overcast or stormy clouds
* white winter skies for when it snows
* romantic sunsets
* apocalyptic skies (any preferences?)
* a better horizon (any suggestions?)
* alpha-edits
Although the success of all this will be determined by what pictures I can find and my limited texturing skills, feel free to leave suggestions!
[[ DOWNLOAD ]]
Please enjoy this! And if you do, please post pretty neighbourhood pictures! :D
I’ll be off now to ace my exams. See you in June!
And with the wave of her hand
and her sparkling eye
My island girl
bid me goodbye
For another dream
in another time
For another life
under another sky
♪