Tutorial; building rowhouses and lots
Muupi had a question about fake rowhouses, and I decided to expand my reply a little and write a tutorial about it. There is a tutorial on ModtheSims, and no doubt in other places as well, but when I first started building rowhouses I found them difficult to follow; the pace was too quick. So I slow down in my own tutorial and I hope things will be clear. If you get stuck, don't hesistate to ask!
For this tutorial I want to build three 1x1 houses, who are going to be attached to each other. We build these on a 2x2 lot. So first, plop down an empty 2x2 lot and call it something recognisable. Usually I write SHRINK at the beginning, so it's easy to find in the LotAdjuster and then I add if this lot will be on the left end of the row, the right end, or the middle.
A suggestion Threadandsandpaper made is that you can also add '0' in front of your lot, so your lot name will be at the top of the list in the LotAdjuster. ;)
So, a 2x2 lot consists of 20 by 20 tiles. We want to shrink this to 10x10 tiles. Why can't we grab the Sunnysides mini lots from Modthesims, which are already 1x1 empty lots and can be plunked down in the neighbourhood, without interference of the LotAdjuster?
Because of this. The game will complain as soon as you want to build closer than the edge than two tiles. Out of bounds. Because of that we would never be able to attach the rowhouses to each other, as the walls will never touch each other like this. That's why we are going to use the LotAdjuster instead and shrink our current lot.
First I like to mark with tiles where I cannot build. (Turn the move objects cheat on, so you can place tiles on the edges of the lot.) Because this is going to be a 1x1 lot - or 10x10 - we have to remove 10 tiles from the back.
Then, we do the same at the sides. Five tiles from the left side, and five tiles from the right. This too equals ten. This is how small your lot is going to be.
Then, inside, I add a blue stroke. You will now have an empty square left from 8x8 tiles. This stroke is there because you cannot build walls on that stroke. The LotAdjuster will complain that the lot isn't empty and will refuse to shrink.
Build your house! Don't bother with decorating yet. Just build the walls, doors, windows, stairs... (and the inner walls, too. It's recommended to do those before you shrink the lot.)
For those who are a bit familiar with the LotAdjuster already. Another thing you can do is to build on a very large lot, duplicate this lot a few times and then delete everything but the building you want. (For example, you build on a 6x3 lot, and builld four lots next to each other with the boundaries in mind, duplicate it three times and then delete everything but one building (until you have each building on one lot.) You can plan complicated lot buildings, as Threadandsandpaper stated. You can also just build a generic middle house, duplicate that a few times and adjust it for the left and right sides of the rowhouse, so you don't have to build each house separatedly.
The walls in green are fake walls; these are the walls which are going to attach the houses to each other and these are the walls that make it look seamless in neighbourhood view. Notice that they are built on the blue stroke. Also notice they are horizontal on the blue stroke, not vertical.
Now place your roof. Do not put a roof over your fake walls - the ones in green - yet. We make a separate roof for this. The roof will consist of more parts, while it looks like it's just one roof. Why can't we just drag the roof all the way over the fake walls?
The roof leaves a wall. And if you look closely, the wall of the separate roof we just added is at the edge of the blue stroke, which is not allowed.
So we delete that wall. This way the lotadjuster will allow us to shrink the lot, and the roof wouldn't look all funky because it doesn't have a wall.
In the left house, we have only made fake walls on the right side, because that's where the other houses will attach to the left one. It means that you won't have to do anything about the other side at all, as long as you haven't built on the blue stroke. In the middle house, as you can see here, we place fake walls at both sides. Check if your fake walls are at the same line. It would look odd if your left house is 5 tiles long and your middle house only 4.
Here again the importance of roofs. Here I've done it the other way round; I placed the roofs for the fake walls first. This so you can easier see what I've done. The order of placing roofs doesn't matter at all.
Then I delete the outer wall, leaving the other wall from the main roof intact.
And the right house. Here you put your fake walls on the left side of the building. I've put a balcony on the other side, for fun .:D
And again a picture with fake walls and a roof wall that needs to be deleted. You don't have to delete the tiles.
Go back to your neighbourhood. Isn't it pretty? Yep, not really. So we quit the game and load up the LotAdjuster. Please do install the latest version. I do have 3.5, and the current latest version is 3.6. All 3.6 has added to the previous version is a couple more options, which we don't need to use anyway.
(Have happy dog.)
Press start! Then look for the neighbourhood you built your lots in.
Find the lots. This is why I put 'shrink' in front of the name. If you're building in a neighbourhood full of houses, it's not always easy to find the one you want to shrink.
Click on Next, and then Advanced. Tick the Enable Shrinking box. Maybe you're wondering why the Old Size says '20x30', when it's evident that I've been building on a 20x20 lot. However, the LotAdjuster also counts the road, which is also 10x10 tiles.
Now we shrink the lot. We want to go from 20x20 to 10x10, so we need to delete ten tiles from both directions. Do NOT touch the front yard. The option should be greyed out by default, but don't shrink from the front yard. You will be shrinking part of the road and it will screw up your lot. Instead, fill in -10 for the backyard. We also shrink five tiles from left and right.
You can - of course, you can - shrink three tiles from right and seven from the left, or the other way round, as long as it adds up to ten. But five and five is easier.
If you want to build bigger rowhouses, of course that's also possible. If you want to end up with a 1x2 rowhouse, then simply add +10 tiles at each direction. So with a 1x2 / 10x20 rowhouse you'll start on a 2x3 / 20x30 lot.
Click on Finish. The lot has changed, hurray! Do the same for the other two lots. If you don't get this message, it'll protest and tell you that the area you're trying to shrink isn't empty. Maybe you have forgotten to delete the wall from the roofs, or something else that prevens the LotAdjuster from shrinking your lot.
Go back into the game.
At first sight, not a whole lot has changed. Load a lot.
Look at that! Shrunk and well. The LotAdjuster advises you to change something and save it, then go back to the neighbourhood to make your lot display correctly in neighbourhood view. I usually move the garbage can, or add a tree, or whatever. Make a change, any change.
Sometimes this will happen. Don't panic! Simply turn the windows around with moveobjects on and the < > keys.
And as you can see, it doesn't matter if a lot is residential or community.
When you loaded all the lots you've shrunk, changed something and changed it, go back into the neighbourhood view.
Now you can place your lots together.
Perfect fit!
This is the middle house. As you can see, the fake walls line up perfectly with the other two houses. The tiles at the very edge of the lot are inside these fake walls and therefore dead space. This is okay, though, because that makes the lot a lot more playable, and you could put your mods in it, such as ACR, the batbox and more.
Now, these houses I've shown you aren't particularly special. So I have another example.
These are rowhouses I've built with attaching balconies. Fences are okay to build on the very edge of the lot!
And because of that, you can also use fences to make flat roofs. The LotAdjuster will accept those. The cornices CuriousB converted from Awesims also work!
To see those in all their rowhouse glory, please go to S655's blog. They also have a video in which they explain how they build a rowhouse, so if you want some more information on how to do them, go watch this as well!
If you have any difficulties or have questions, please do ask. :)