Offerings of Tiny-ness

[crabofdoom]

 

Years ago, I used to have a buyable floor made from the image of the plywood that- by default, anyway- shows up when you use the brick foundation. It was set to $0, and was amazingly useful for when you need the floor in place to arrange furniture, but didn't want to waste money on temporary flooring or by forgetting to sell said flooring back before replacing it with a better option. There are always those stubborn bits that won't sell back from under lights, doors and furniture, as well. In one of my many purges, this floor apparently went out the window.

This isn't as big a deal as it could've been, as the buyable texture was really stretched and pixelated beyond its intended resolution. I've long intended to either search for it again (which never happened) or make my own, which has taken me until last night to get around to doing.



This is my new building buddy, on the left. As you can see by comparing the brighter stain and nail heads, it's smaller than the default texture, but HomeCrafter only allows tiling in 1x1, 2x2 and 5x5 patterns. 3x3 would probably be almost perfect, but it isn't an option. So, for best results, it's best to cover the entire floor and not just the holes left behind from digging a basement or selling back the inner foundation. (me? cheap?! ... yes.)

This plywood floor comes in two versions: free, as the original buyable I found was, or cheap ($1 per tile,) since most of the time, I really, really don't want to use money cheats, and out of $4 for a foundation block, $1 seems fair value for the wood. Both versions can be used at the same time if, like me, you sometimes vacillate between "haha, no cheats for you!" and "F*#K I forgot the ceiling!". The textures are identical.

While snooping around for the plywood lifo texture, I also found a floor texture that I swear I've never seen in-game:



Glass blocks! Yes, Maxis included a photo-realistic texture, and yes, it was marked as a floor. This is slightly edited from the image as it comes out of the game files; Maxis' image has two blocks, cloned to make four, but right on top of each other, which would've resulted in very obvious tiling stripes. I reversed the bottom two to make it seem a little more varied. It's a 1x1 pattern, and best used in small areas. It will probably also make a better illusion if you have the OFB room divider fences, but in a small enclosed room, it should be fine. The pattern, incidentally, is not diagonal (see grid outside.) That's just the way the Calientes' foyer makes it look. More expensive than plywood at $6 per tile, and found in Tiles.

I haven't seen anyone else use this image before (or I'd have it, since I'm something of a sucker for glass blocks,) but if someone did, they probably didn't offset the pattern like I did, so there. All three files are in the zip below and are clearly labeled. All textures by Maxis, so do anything and everything you please with them, except charge for them or take my initials off of the files. But I gave them custom catalog descriptions, so unless you change that, too, everyone would see what you did there, anyway.


>>DOWNLOAD

Comments

[curiousb]

Ooh, that plywood floor is useful - great idea!

And I'm a bit of a sucker for glass blocks too. I'm wondering, do you think there'd be anyway to make a glass block wall covering out of the texture?

[crabofdoom]

Hmm. I'd only have to compare the size of the floor texture to a wall swatch to get the scale right. I don't know why I didn't think to try it while I was making these XD

[silivrin.livejournal.com]

Plywood floor! Yay!
I wanted one for ages, but was never able to find one! So you deserve a huge thank you!
THANK YOU!

[currantpotpie]

Glassblock floors! Yes!

Thank you...They will be abused heavily.

[aquilegia]

Just yesterday I gabbed Evan's build defaults and was thinking to myself I'd still like to have the plywood floor as an option -- and here we go. :D

And I just realized that the glass blocks remind me of some of the sidewalk inlays in one of my favorite cities, so I have excellent use for them both. Thank you!

[psychosim]

This is useful, thanks! I think one could even make the glass blocks a bit transparent with DXT5 and some changes in the TXMT.

[leefish]

These are very cool - did you ever get round to the walls?

[crabofdoom]

Thanks! I haven't yet, actually. I've been kind of lax about getting any sims projects finished in the past few weeks.

[lovelyxwow]

I hate to be another one to ask, but have you had a chance to work on the walls? :) I would like to try and recolor the floor, and the walls may make a nice addition. If not, is it okay for me to fiddle around and see if I can do a proper wall?

[crabofdoom]

Sorry I took so long to reply, but yes, you may certainly use the textures to experiment with, if you wish! I haven't had the inclination yet to open HomeCrafter again, so there's no worry over overlap.

[lovelyxwow]

Okay, thank you! :)