What exactly made you clone it...from a light? Why not somethin with a high decorative score, or something? Its obvious alight is going to make light...

It worked! Thanks MissPuff and bigheadpirate, I tried both of your suggestions - I didn't realize that the light controller would conceal anything on the ceiling, not just lights. I decided to go with the airplane sculpture base because it had color options available (and I think it's harder to re-color in the future if the base object only has one option). The plane base also had a smaller file size.

I figured out how to turn off the shading effects on the individual tiles - in "Material Definitions," I set stdMatMinLightRangeHint to 0, and stdMatLightingEnabled to 0 - I'm not sure which one of those was necessary (maybe both were), but it had the effect of taking out the shadows on individual tiles - now you just get a flat look, which can be good or bad depending on how you want your ceiling to look (see picture attached below).

I'll clean up the package and post it here, and then Inge maybe you could make it so that two items could be placed on a single tile? Also, since it's based on the airplane sculpture, the "View" function is still enabled - maybe you could disable it? Finally, the object appears in the "Decorative-Statue" category, so would it be possible to re-categorize it to appear somewhere else? I don't know if that would make things unstable; if so, then I guess I'd leave it.

Thanks for everyone's help and suggestions! I'll post the object in a bit for modification.

This is such a great idea!! I love it and thanks to all who are trying so hard to get this to work..I am in awe of all of you.

Is the site still up? If so yes I look forward to the new file

YES! i cant wait for the new updated file!

That looks beautiful, jgwhiteus, I'm so glad my suggestion helped! It's going to be so much easier to take nice pictures in the game with this. :yippee:

I have to go to bed now, but I'll check for the file first thing in the morning and get to work on it.

Hi everyone,

Sorry it took so long to respond - the site was down for a bit, I had other work, wanted to test it, etc.

Anyway, here is the new file based off of the airplane sculpture. It works pretty much the same as the other file, except it doesn't function as a light anymore - though there's still a "view" function from the sculpture.

If you're recoloring and want the ceiling to match the walls, you should go with a darker shade so it doesn't appear too bright (as lighting/shadow ranges have been taken out). The default texture is a slightly darker shade of "Beachy Keen."

Some more things I discovered during testing:
- You don't always need to turn the ceiling "on" or "off" in order to see your rooms, if you're close enough, the tiles will naturally fade away just as ceiling lights and the hanging sculpture will. This saves you a lot of hassle. The only time it's probably necessary to have the option to turn the ceiling off is when you're in top-down view in build or buy mode.

- Making textures for re-colors is pretty straightforward - you just put the image directly on the square mesh, and it appears that way in the game. The test image I used appeared a little pixelated though (see screenshot of ceiling with hearts).

- The tiles might be off by 1 pixel in a certain direction, so you might notice a small gap. Just rotate the tile and the gap will disappear (this might be a problem with custom textures meant to connect together to form an image, but I'll deal with that later).

This file is mainly for Inge to modify (so she can make two objects on the same tile possible, re-categorize it, and perhaps disable its view function); you might want to wait until later to download it. This version is fully functional though.

Thanks,

J.

P.S. This has a separate GUID from the ceiling light; so you can use the two together - one as a ceiling the other as a recessed light. I'll make some fixes to the light later.

EDIT: I replaced the package below when I figured out how to add the re-coloring option (I somehow missed the very last step of Numenor's tutorial). So now you can add color options with SimPE's object workshop; the only problem I've run into so far is that the textures don't show up in a thumbnail (though they do in the game). So if you downloaded an earlier package, use this instead - although you still might want to wait for Inge

EDIT 2: Removed the file; the beta version 2 (completely transparent from above and the sides; possible to delete all tiles in a room or on the lot due to Inge Jones' improvements, etc.) is available on page 3. .I will post the "official" v.2 on the first page after Inge is done looking at it and we've had the chance to make further improvements.

I had made a dumb post(Edited out)....All I can say now is WOW. Ceilings.....I don't care if we can't hang anything on them.... till the update these are GREAT.

Um...here's a silly question ... can't you place two objects in the same tile using "moveobjects on" cheat?


EDIT: Naturally it works but i realized I haven't read thouroughly your first post where you mention moveobjects on cheat...
Nevertheless I learned something usefull I didn't know and just in case there are others like me out there: You can place more than one ceiling tiles easily by pressing "shift" at the same time.

Re-coloring is now available; see above.

Absolutely sensational work!

OMG, I have soooo been waiting for this! jgwhiteus I am glad you are giving this a try! Maybe this methode would work for rugs too!! *idea* Woohoo.. well... i am definately downloading this! Thank you!!

do you have to change the "obj file" to a package file i don't want to change it:

Oh, sorry, the .obj file on the first page is just the mesh for this object in case you wanted to re-create it on your own. There used to be a ceiling light file there, but I took it down when I realized I made some mistakes. I'll put that one back up soon.

For now, you should use the file on this page ("PlaneBase-RecolorEnabled") and put it in your downloads folder. It shows up in your "decorative - sculpture" category (since it's based off the airplane - this will be fixed). Or you can wait a bit more, since Inge is planning on refining this.

Pals, this is a GREAT idea, BUT you´re doing wrong, modding a airplane object or something
similar will cause problems, as I tested you cannot place this ceilings over the door or 45º
walls, because the base object (airplane) , I think there´s a better way to do the ceilings
and this is changin the mesh for the floor, I mean this object (the floor object) only has one
face rendered ( 1 normal ) so you should copy this face and reverse this normal, so you could see
both faces at once and you could place in everywhere you want, that´s my suggestion, I think is the
best way, cause with the airplane model or similar you´ll have a lot of problems. Anyway congratulations
for the idea, I love it.

Oh, I agree there are better ways of rendering a ceiling; this is sort of a make-shift solution until Maxis gets around to putting them in the game. I think I've read about the idea of having the floor show up on both sides of the tile, but wouldn't that create the problem of your ceiling being a reflection of the floor above (e.g. carpeted, or wooden)? I think the advantage of using a ceiling tile approach is that you can customize them to your liking, and can have a plain white ceiling on the first floor and carpet on the reverse side (the floor above).

As for the other problems you mentioned (doors, and diagonal walls), I think those can be worked around with move_objects on (which isn't a perfect solution, but again, this is make-shift). For diagonal walls you could create a triangle mesh that could be rotated (similar to the triangular half-floor tiles) and use move_objects on to overcome the usual object placement restriction?


EDIT: By the way, I updated the original ceiling tile file on p.1 (based off of the ceiling lamp). Now I just think of it as recessed lighting, like you might find in an industrial building. The package has been fixed and re-coloring has been enabled; it uses the old GUID and will replace your older file. I'll put the new and improved file (based off the airplane sculpture) on the first page once Inge is done with it.

I am just grabbing the file now. By the way, were there any further thoughts on making the top skin transparent? I am certain it can be done by someone who understands alpha channels.

That wouldn't be an effect created by an alpha channel. That'd be a setting in the mesh. Basically the creator would have to edit the mesh to invert the normals on the top side of the mesh so that they will not be visible to the camera... turning part of the object inside-out, more or less.

jgwhiteus and Inge, thanks so much for working on this.

RG

Hmm, "inverting normals" sounds very much beyond my expertise - in fact, I was having a hard time slicing the tile in two to make a triangle (to fill in diagonal walls), so more advanced tasks like that are probably far beyond what I will ever be able to do - would someone more comfortable with 3D meshing be willing to do this?

I've noticed that my custom re-colors for the ceiling tiles AND the ceiling lamps have been reverting back to their default colors after I save and return to lots, which indicates I messed up somewhere in Numenor's tutorial. So I'll go back through the steps again when Inge is finished with the file to make sure that everything works - same for the ceiling lamps.

As an aside, I've been working on a small project in response to Isiliel's request for phosphorescent stars - first I tried making a lamp object with alpha channels blacked out, but for some reason the blacked out parts became very visible and pixelated when I zoomed out, though they were fine when I zoomed in closer. They were also visible in camera-man mode. As an alternative, I've gone with a more complicated but successful approach - making a very thin lamp that is placed within a ceiling tile, and changing the alpha channels of the tile so that the lamp can shine through. A screen-shot is below; when the ceiling tile is more stable I'll put this out there as well Thanks for working on this, Inge,

J.

Oh how amazing! The Simmie kids will adore it

i think the view problem could be fixed by making the ceiling drop with walls

Trouble with that is you'd probably never get the ceiling in the views you wanted. Fair enough if walls are completely down, the ceiling would be irrelevant, but what about in cutaway? I wonder how the game would decide which tiles to leave up and which belonged to the walls that were cut away? We could experiment, but the really slick way would be the mesh way as that will always give the precise results you'd want.

but it coulb be a temporary solution

No I've just tried it out and it's not helpful at all. What happens is looked at from below, ie the camera at the same eye level as the sims, the ceiling cuts away as you move towards the back wall. But you didn't need or want it to, as it wasn't in the way.

Then, when you raise the camera so that you're looking down like with The Sims 1, the ceiling stays there in your way! It fades of course as you zoom in, but that's nothing to do with hide-for-cutaway. So it's going to be nicer looking from inside the room if it does not fade out when you move into the room.

Other things I still need to do are make it "keep buying" so you can place as many as you want without holding down control, and it could do with a menu to "remove all" in room - as it takes forever deleting them when you want to rebuild!