Special Entry 2: Making Transitions between Water Systems
Introduction:
I hope you'll forgive me, but I'll include answers to your last comments in my next regular CJ entry, to keep things easier.
In today's special entry, I shall demonstrate my personal way to make transitions between different water systems and between ploppable and in-game water.
First of all, I need to mention that I sometimes struggle myself with this one: No one ever made a comprehensive water system including MMP's, lots, and water mod. This situation will always result in some trouble, such as strong color difference, or straight lines at transitions. I've found some ways of living with it, but none of them is perfect, and I really believe no one will ever care that much if you people reading this won't be able to make a perfect transition, either. I'll try my best, however, and so I whipped up a few images made in a sandbox region.
Chapter 1: Knowing what's going on
With that, I simply mean you should try to get a feeling for the colors of your plugins in your Plugins folder that deal with ploppable water and your water mod. The simplest way of trying this out is plopping a few samples just somewhere in a sandbox region and then comparing the colors. I already mentioned something like this in my last special entry, but I'll illustrate this again with some pictures. I'm having quite a few water systems in my Plugins folder and I think the following combinations go very well (from top to bottom):
- Pegasus' Tahoe water and Neko's brooks
- RFR Plopwater system (the 2nd orthogonal piece) and Pegasus' Stream/Pond Kit
- RFR Plopwater system (the 2nd orthogonal piece) and diggis' water
Of course, it's not perfect: The 1st combination has to deal with a visible altitude difference between the MMP's and the brook. With the 2nd combination, the MMP is much larger than the prop on the lot. And with the 3rd combination, the textures are a bit different, despite the same colors. Don't worry, we will solve this now.
Chapter 2: Troubleshooting
We've already seen some of the trouble that attempts to connect different water systems can cause - despite having similar colors. Fortunately, with a certain amount of MMP work and patience, several problems can somewhat be resolved:
Suggestion 1: You can hide some parts under rocks. This is already a big help, although especially the 1st combination is really troublesome (make sure to check all 4 rotations with this one!).
Suggestion 2: Just hide some nasty transition line (especially with the 1st and 3rd combination) behind something big, such as a tree. Sounds like a cheat - and it is one. But if you can pull it off cleverly, no one will complain.
Suggestion 3: If there's a road or street somewhere, you can just use lots that fake a bridge to do the job for you. This picture illustrates all 6 possible combinations between Pegasus' CSK, Pegasus' Stream Kit, Neko's brooks, and diggis' water system. May look a bit odd, but this is a combination especially useful for urban settings, and maybe some big development can hide the fact that the railings of the bridge look different (or distract from it).
Suggestion 4: If a larger river needs to meet a lake, make a delta, to reduce the size of the river arms. This series of 4 pictures illustrates it. Extra notes:
- Usually I'm placing the water first, but since I'm resorting to very big rocks in these pictures, I needed to place the rocks first.
- I'm making it especially difficult by offsetting parts of the lake by 1 tile. Even this can be solved.
Suggestion 5: The RFR small turbulence piece and my own waterfall lots fit anywhere. Really. Looks sometimes boring if you do that 100 times, but it is possible and actually even more realistic than one would think since in real life, if there are two bodies of water with different color somehow connected, this frequently happens at elevation differences, or locations such as river estuaries. Again, two pairs of pictures to illustrate it. On the second picture, I'm again using a tree to hide a sharp transition, on the fourth, I'm dragging a thin line of small rocks at the bottom of the water fall to make the transition between the turbulence piece and the dark water look a bit more realistic.
Chapter 3: Transitions to in-game water
Now comes the ultimate horror (really, I also don't like this part): Making a transition to in-game water. Yet despite all the trouble this caused me over the years, a coincidental discovery helped me with that. The main two issues with this challenge are:
There is barely a case where an MMP or a system of ploppable lots really fits a water mod. And this is especially troublesome if a large river needs to meet the sea. Sometimes, you can resolve that by zooming out, but usually, this is a nightmare. So, in most cases, I'm just resorting to the usual strategy of using turbulence pieces and making a delta. Which is still somewhat realistic. The only thing else that might help you is a bit of planning: Is it really necessary to make 20 transitions to in-game water, or can you "redirect" a river to flow into another river to keep the amount of transitions low? Do you want to simulate a river with in-game water or will a river made by MMP's or lots do? Usually, I'm trying to keep the number of large rivers flowing into the sea as low as possible, and I only leave the sea as in-game water - everything else is MMP or lot-based.
As for the second issue: A picture may tell more than a thousand words. Even in this case, we see that something is off, and no matter what we do, it will never look right:
The reason is something that may surprise you: The fact that one can see the beach through the water surface too easily makes it very difficult to make a visually pleasing transition into in-game water, even if it is realistic.
Don't worry, this can be resolved by modifying some settings in your terrain mod. If you have some basic knowledge with Reader, you might want to make some changes there to reduce the transparency of the water to help with that. If you are new to modding the game, please note: This is one of the few instances where making a change in Reader will immediately be reflected in-game without the need to bulldoze something, but do not try to do this with lots!
Step 1: Find out the files of your terrain mod, make a backup first, and look for the exemplar file with the TGI 6534284a-88cd66e9-00000001.
Step 2: Change the property WaterDepthForMaxAlpha to a lower value. I believe Maxis default is 24 (in m below sea level), I usually like to keep this at 2. This means that at this many m below sea level, water becomes opaque, and by lowering this value, water will lose its transparency at a much less depth. Save, exit, and start the game.
Result:
I personally prefer this over anything else, this setting still allows me to place underwater flora, although it requires me to terraform the seabed to make it really shallow. So you might want to experiment with this setting in order to find out the best value for you, depending on whether you are more frequently working with underwater flora or difficult transitions into in-game water.
Chapter 4: Some download links
These links contain some downloads you might be interested. Unfortunately, diggis' water system and Pegasus' content come with many links, and I can't find Neko's brooks anymore, so this list is rather short for now. I'll try to expand it if possible; I suggest that you make a Power Search for the author diggis over at the LEX. You might also want to click on the link "Find their other files" with Pegasus and Paeng, to help you find their other uploads and download more interesting stuff.
RFR Plopwater System: https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/27199-rfr-plopwater-pack-1/
My own waterfall lots: https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/32036-small-ploppable-waterfalls/
Paeng's turbulences and transitions: https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/26557-paengs-turbulences-and-transitions-volume-01-and-volume-2/
Pegasus' Pond Kit: https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/12329-peg-pond-kit-ii-deluxe-edition-v206/
Pegasus' Stream Kit: https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/12426-peg-stream-kit-deluxe-edition/
Pegasus' PPond Kit (comes with the dark blue Tahoe water): https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/21661-peg-ppond-kit/
Edit: Neko's Brooks: http://hide-inoki.com/bbs/archives/sc4_0858.html
Edit 2: diggis complete ponds and streams: https://www.sc4evermore.com/index.php/downloads/download/14-park/108-sc4d-LEX-legacy-bsc-diggis-complete-ponds-and-streams
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