ROOFING A Beginner Level Tutorial It's annoying when you build a great house, click on the autoroof button, and something horrible appears atop your new construction. This tutorial aims to guide you through creating a nicer roofline manually. First, the basic Sims 2 game only has two roof types. It might seem like there are a lot more, but they are all just variations on the same theme. If you have the Open for Business (OfB) expansion pack, you gain a few more roof types. Second, you can create a whole variety of visually appealing rooflines with the minimum of effort, and there's not all that much to know! Roof Types. Hipped: This is the basic type of roof which slopes inwards in all four directions to the centre of the building. Page - 1 -
Roof Types Cont. Gabled: This roof slopes inwards at the North and South ends, but is flat on the East and West. Although there are two buttons for adding a gabled roof, the only difference is the axis on which the flat walls are placed. This roof will create new walls on your building! Shed Hipped: Exactly the same as the hipped roof except that one edge is flat. This roof will also create new walls! Page - 2 -
Roof Types Cont. Shed Gabled: Again, same as the gabled roof, only it is flat on one side, so it's kind of like a big slope. This will actually create new walls on three sides of your building. Doubling Up Have a look at the above images and try to imagine the second two roof types (the shed ones) as the first ones cut in half. OfB Roof Types Open for Business has given us some more roof types, although at first these appear to be quite limited. Cone Roof: Comes in the short or large variety. Can only be placed in square sizes such as 2x2 or 4x4. Page - 3 -
OfB Roof Types Cont. Domed Roof: Exactly what it sounds like. Again, can only be placed in square sizes such as 2x2 or 4x4. Octagonal Roof: This is similar to the cone roof except it has eight sides instead of being circular. As with the other OfB roofs, this must be placed in a square size such as 2x2 or 4x4. Page - 4 -
Alright, so we have a basic L-shaped house with no roof (see picture below). Imagine it's nicely decorated and ready to live in. Your Sims don't really care if there's a roof or not, but they're only Sims. A good roof will look great for you, the player, and if you don't put a roof on, the house will look really weird in the neighborhood view, and people won't want to download your house. Page - 5 -
Combining Roof Pieces We can only add a roof in a square fashion determined by the grid. Unlike walls, the roof cannot be built on a diagonal and even if we use the boolprop snapobjectstogrid false code, the roof tool won t go off the grid. Click on the roof tool and choose the manual roof section. We'll add a hipped roof first of all. It should be selected by default. We'll add the roof by dragging two sections (see pictures below). Something to bear in mind is that the two roof pieces actually overlap but become merged together to form one. This will play an important part later on. The completed roof looks neat and is functional, but is really simple and can be achieved with the autoroof tool anyway. But what if you wanted to have one end of the 'L' hipped and the other gabled? Read on! Page - 6 -
Hipped/Gable Joint Have a look at the screenshot below. Here we've just laid a hipped roof together with a gabled roof. The gabled roof has extended out towards the base of the 'L' and the hipped roof overhangs under the gable. This might be acceptable for you and you might just decide to keep it like this, but you can do something about it. Let's go back and lay our first hipped roof section, like in the previous example. Now lay the gable only on the exposed area of the roof. Don't let it overlap with the hipped part at all. You should have a roof like this: Page - 7 -
Cleanup If you find that the gable is facing the wrong way, choose the other type of gabled roof. Now, take out the hipped roof again. Drag from the base of the 'L' up and across towards the gable section. If you find it hard to see what you're doing with the roof in the way, just press the END key after you begin dragging and the roof will disappear. Press HOME when you're finished and it will come back. Don't drag it all the way to the end of the gable section, or you'll get an overhang again. The green section in the image below shows the drag area you should be using. What you should end up with is shown below. One end of the L is a gabled end and the other a hipped end, yet the joint between them is seamless. Even though three pieces of roof have been used, they all join to form one. Page - 8 -
Cleanup Cont. When we created the gabled roof piece, the Sims 2 automatically made 2 special end walls. Since we have now added more roof pieces, one of these walls is totally inside the roof and we don t need it any more, so let s delete it. You can delete these special end walls just like regular walls. I ve painted it red in the screenshot below. These walls don t actually cost anything, so if you leave them in place your lot won t cost more. Page - 9 -
Gabled/Gabled Joint If you try to put two gabled roof pieces perpendicular to one another, they both extend to the edge of the house (see picture below). This might be the effect you're after, but if it's not, you can still get around this problem. Page - 10
Gabled/Gabled Joint Cont. Start by creating two gabled roof pieces that stop short of the base of the 'L'. Remember that if your gable is facing the wrong way, just choose the other gabled roof tool. Now, take the hipped roof tool and drag two hipped roof pieces from the base of the 'L'; one towards each gable piece. Have a look at the green area in the picture below to see where you're dragging the first piece, then just drag the second piece towards the other end of the L. Remember to press the END key while you re dragging the roof if you re having trouble seeing where to drag to, and HOME to display the roof after you ve finished dragging. Page - 11
Gabled/Gabled Joint Cont. As if by magic, your roof pieces will merge to form one neat-looking gable joint! Page - 12
Roof Spaces When you drag a large square roof piece, you might notice that in places, the area inside the roof would be large enough to add rooms, adding an extra level to your building. It s easy to use that space. The key thing to remember is that using the default roof slope angle (more on slope angles later), a roof rises one level for every 3 tiles. Let s start off with another basic building shape: At the moment, it s just a ground level and a roof but there is plenty of room for an upper level inside that roof. Add some walls, staying three tiles away from the walls on the ground floor where the roof slopes: Page - 13
Roof Spaces Cont. The area closes itself off and darkens because you ve just made a new room. Now you can add stairs to connect it to the ground floor and you can divide, furnish and decorate this space just like you would any other. You can even add windows to the end walls, like below! You should be aware that those end walls are still part of the roof even if you add windows to them, so if you decide to delete the roof, the end walls and windows disappear (you get the cost of the windows back) and the room is open to the outside again. Page - 14
Dormeriffic Although it s quick and easy to use the dormers included with the game, it s almost as quick and easy to make your own. They just consist of a roof and some walls, like everything else. Let s add a manual dormer to our existing design. First, lay out the walls. In my example I ve made a 2-tile wide dormer but yours can be any width you like. Also, I ve made mine stop 1 tile short of the walls below, but yours could extend all the way to these walls if you wanted. Go up one level, add a roof (remember to drag it inside the other roof so that they overlap neatly) and a window. It s worth nothing that if your dormer wall stops 1 tile short of the walls on the ground floor like mine does, you limit the types of windows you can use. Windows that extend very low on the wall will look wrong because the main roof is covering part of the dormer s wall. Page - 15
Open for Business Roofing The new roof types in Open for Business take a bit of getting used to but they are quite useful after a little practice. If you do not have this expansion, just skip to the next section. The octagonal roofs are the easiest to use because we can make octagonal room shapes using the build tools. Note that we can t make octagons themselves (an eight-sided shape whose sides are all of equal length) because a diagonal wall is longer than a regular wall. The octagonal roof pieces are designed to fit nicely onto rooms made as in the picture below. Clockwise from the top-left, these are 1, 2, 3 and 4 tile octagon roofs. To add the roof, drag across diagonally to make a square that fits inside the octagonal walls. The 2x2 octagonal drag area is shown in green below. Page - 16
Open for Business Roofing Cont. The next picture shows what the octagonal roofs of various sizes look like. In my opinion, the domes and cone roofs are less useful because it s not possible to build circular walls so they look odd when placed on top of rectangular or octagonal rooms. One interesting use for a dome roof is directly on top of a flat roof: Page - 17
Open for Business Roofing Cont. Of course, the OfB roofs can easily be combined with the existing roof types. In the example below, an octagonal roof is combined with a gabled roof. Roof Slopes Angles (Nightlife) If you have the Nightlife expansion, you can make use of the RoofSlopeAngle [15-75] code. This can change the angle of the roof from the default 45 degrees to a new angle. Open the console (cheat box) by holding CTRL and SHIFT on the keyboard and pressing the C key. Type RoofSlopeAngle followed by a space and the desired angle between 15 and 75. There have been a few debates about whether the capital letters in the commands are necessary. I use the capital letters because at least there can be no doubt about whether this is responsible for my codes not working. Page - 18
Roof Slopes Angles (Nightlife) Cont. The roof slope angles will change immediately on all the non-ofb roofs on the lot. The octagonal, conical and dome roofs are not affected by the change of slope angle. Note that this is a per-lot setting, so there is just one angle for all the roofs on the current lot. Through a glitch in the undo tool, it is possible to create two pieces of roof with different slope angles on the same lot, but this does not persist when the lot is saved and re-entered so it isn t useful and the process isn t described here. Roofs Inside Rooms. Sometimes you might appear to have encountered a problem when the roof seems to be inside a room. This is no real problem. All you need to do is add a roof on top of the room you re having problems with and the roof inside the room will vanish. Creative Roofing. A roof can really make or break a lot. Anyone can press the autoroof button but it takes a little more effort to plan out the steps you ll need to create a great roof. It s definitely well worth the effort when you get the right look though. Page - 19