arkadiansims

[arkadiansims]

I've been having fun with glass rooftops in TS4 recently, designing houses that are all or mostly enclosed in glass - so they're protected from the weather in all seasons.

The three white blocks are private quarters with beds, en suite bathrooms, an office area and a lounge area with small TV - and then the large central glass atrium is the open-plan communal dining and recreation area. The patio with alfresco dining area is under cover as well, and there's a greenhouse for all-seasons growing. In the background of the pictures you can see a couple of the enclosed houses I've built - with the house and garden all completely enclosed in a glass house.

I've also created a biodome, with the plan that I'll create six Sims to live in it and I'll lock the door to keep them inside.

Both these builds are up on the Gallery - EA ID ArkadyRose. I've also uploaded several starter houses recently as well, plus the Botanical Gardens Cafe:

And the last one is what I'm working on at present - a Tudor mansion and estate, with wedding area in the sunken garden, alfresco dining area, swimming pond with island for diving, an observatory and a self-contained 1-bed gatehouse.

It'll be up on the Gallery too in the next day or so.

[arkadiansims]

Anders’ Quarters, Skyhold

Anders’ quarters, Skyhold, as featured in the Dragon Age fanfic series “Reflections”.

[arkadiansims]

I can never leave a build alone. :-) This one was a load of fun though - about 7 hours in total. There’s something quite relaxing about working on a Sims 4 build.

So of coure, me being me, I couldn’t resist tweaking the Hanging gardens of Babylon build. Now there’s a Residential 64x64 version with 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms and all mod cons. Both versions are up in the Gallery (EA ID:ArkadyRose).

Link to Hanging Gardens (64x64) on The Sims 4 Gallery

[arkadiansims]

So of coure, me being me, I couldn’t resist tweaking the Hanging gardens of Babylon build. Now there’s a Residential 64x64 version with 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms and all mod cons. Both versions are up in the Gallery (EA ID:ArkadyRose).

Link to Hanging Gardens (64x64) on The Sims 4 Gallery

[arkadiansims]

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were one of the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World. According to legend, King Nebuchadnezzar II built the Hanging Gardens for his wife Queen Amytis because she missed the green hills and valleys of her homeland.

[arkadiansims]

Sims 4 build - a waterfall

I decided to have a go at building a waterfall in TS4. I started with the upper river - a wavy swimming pool with murky green water from the Outdoors Retreat pack. Then I built the lower pool area - an irregularly-shaped basement with pool - before removing the basement ceiling, thus leaving this lowered area open to the sky. The waterfall area uses large water jets from the fountains section of house building and rocks resized with the enlargement building cheat. They’re stacked using the Moveobjects cheat.

I decided to change the water in the lower pool to sparkling water.

Picnic area finished.

Close-up view of the picnic area. A couple of the bushes are actually trees shrunk down 2-3 sizes.

View across the pool from the other side.

Close-up view of the waterfall itself.

Overall view of the river, falls and lower pool with picnic area.

View from the other side.

View of the picnic area in the finished park.

One of my sims taking a swim in the pool.

View of the completed park.

[arkadiansims]

A little desert build.

[arkadiansims]

I did record and edit a longer, 41-minute video today featuring a glass-sided indoor pool, but we’ve been having broadband issues all day and I wasn’t confident it would stay up long enough to upload it - so instead I made and managed to upload a quick little video tutorial to show how to build an above-ground glass-sided swimming pool.

Anders was quite appreciative of it too!

You can also find this video in the Videos area of my Twitch channel.

[arkadiansims]

I gave myself a time limit of 20 minutes and a Simoleons limit of 20K to build a 1-bed starter home. I came in at 15 minutes for the build and under 15K Simoleons, which isn't bad! No captioning or voiceover - just uninterrupted building done fast and freestyle without any preplanning.

Click here for the Twitch uploaded version!

[arkadiansims]

Experiments in livestreaming on Twitch haven’t worked out, so instead I recorded and uploaded this video of a build I made in Sims 4 using only the base game and “Cats & Dogs” expansion. I didn’t plan it out in advance; just made it up as I went along, which to be honest is how I do most of my builds!

The video is 46 minutes long; total time for the build was just under an hour - the video skips out the bit where I placed most of the furniture. I suppose technically this counts as a speed-build? Might do another video next showing me building a house for under 20K Simoleons.

For the curious, you can find my videos on Twitch here.

[arkadiansims]

I’d given my “Usual Suspects” group (Anders, Fenris, Zevran and Sim!Me) some pets - a husky named Petra, Pounce the ginger tabby for Anders, and Sims versions of my own two RL cats, Satin and Arya. That brought the household to the maximum of 8 Sims, which unfortunately is rather more than I can actually keep track of. I’d installed them all in my Manderley build, which has 2 gates to the grounds and the house. I remembered to lock the front gates to pets - but forgot the back gate, and Arya ran away. :-( SO I’ve split the group up - this is the new build for Anders, Fenris and Zevran, together with Petra the husky and Pounce the cat.

I’ve moved Sim!Me into the Witch’s Cottage* that’s had a few edits - and OMG, the “Cats & Dogs” expansion comes with new roofs - octagonal, hexagonal, pentagonal - and conical!! So now the bedroom turret of the Witch’s Cottage has a proper conical roof at last. I’ve been wanting octagonal and proper conical roofs right from when I first started playing Sims 4; octagonal roofs come as standard in Sims 3 so I just couldn’t fathom why they weren’t a thing in Sims 4. I’m going to be editing several of my older builds over the coming days, you can be sure!

I’m also experimenting with streaming my Sims 4 builds etc on Twitch; I’ve been having some technical difficulties with XSplit so I may simply record videos and upload them to Twitch and possibly YouTube. Stay tuned for further developments!

* My Witch’s Cottage build is viewable in the Gallery in-game if you search for ArkadyRose and tick the “custom content” option under Advanced; there are no actual mods used in the build, but because I use CC in my game it flags all my builds as modded now whether they include CC or not - I’m looking into uploading them to TSR, and I’ll post links here if I can manage that.

[arkadiansims]

For Christmas I got the Sims 4 expansion “Cats & Dogs”. I’ve set up a household with myself as a Sim and Anders as housemates, and gave them Pounce - a ginger tabby cat - and Petra the husky. So of course Anders decided to take Petra for a long walk at night in his underpants, arriving back home barely in time for the shift at the hospital....

[arkadiansims]

New build I’m working on - the Anderson Manse.

[arkadiansims]

Yay, 13,200 downloads of my Sims 4 custom content on The Sims Resource in only two weeks! I must be doing something right! :-)

[arkadiansims]

Argh, meant to post this over here instead of on my main Tumblr! *sigh*

It’s always slightly annoyed me that, excellent though Eclipse’s Anders mod is, the skin texture is facepaint and the eye shading comes as separate eyeshadow and eyeliner layers. So, I decided to solve the issue by making my own skin.

I also gave the skin muscle definition, body hair and freckles - and yep, he even has the two little moles on his right hand if you look carefully!

I also gave him faded and healed scars on his back from his time in the Circle and the Wardens.

You can download my Anders skin here.

I also made him a silly little pair of lace cat panties, because why not?

You can download the panties from here.

[arkadiansims]

Amell Estate in Sims 4

Just for fun and fancy I decided to create the Amell Estate from Dragon Age 2 in the Sims 4.

It’s quite a large build - it pretty much fills the whole of a 30x40 plot.

I’ve tried to keep it as faithful as possible to how it appears in game; once you get past the foyer, there’s the large main hall with the staircase leading up to the mezzanine floor.

There’s a combined lounge and library beyond the main hall.

Hawke’s bedroom, Leandra’s room next door.

The basement.

Passage from the basement leading to Darktown....

Turn the corner, go up the stairs....

... and there you find Anders’ clinic.

There is always a lamp lit even when Anders is sleeping.

And even when Anders is sleeping in the mansion, Hawke makes sure there’s a candle burning beside the bed.

When he’s in the clinic, he has to cook over a small fire.

But Hawke lets him take a shower in the mansion.

The Amell Estate is available for download in the Gallery - ID ArkadyRose. For some reason it’s uploaded as modded but there are no mods or cheats used in the build - I just use CC for Sims themselves, but for some reason that means my builds show up as modded when I upload them unless I turn mods off.