Step Two: Setting up CAW & Laying Out Roadwork

After drawing up a design concept, I'm ready to work in CAW. I consulted two very helpful blogs before beginning: Sims in Testing and How to Create a World. I advise new CAW users to read the CAW tutorials on these blogs carefully and thoroughly. I can't stress this enough because I only gave them a brief read-through and came to regret it. I learned some lessons the hard way.

LESSON 1:  Never build your world using the default roads. The default road is the only one that cannot be customized. If you use the default road and later decide that you want to change the road design, you have to delete the roads and replace them with a new one.

After deciding on the direction of the sun, and doing all the preliminary set-up work in CAW (as outlined in the linked blogs), make a new custom road. In retrospect, it's a good idea to download custom road textures before starting the whole CAW process. ModTheSims has many uploaded terrains, roads, and objects that can be found in the CAW resources section.

After downloading your custom content and installing them properly, you can create a custom road.

Click on the 'Create Custom Road' button. 'Custom Road Settings' box will pop up, allowing you to upload each element of a custom road.

 Browse to the SourceTextures folder where you installed your custom textures and find each of the textures required.

 All sections must be filled except for the Opacity Map, which can be left blank. Name your custom road. Remember that you can change these textures at any time after you lay the road down, so long as you create your roads using a custom road.

Once the road is created, right click on its name in the Road Tool window and choose 'Set Road as Active' from the scroll down menu.

 The road is active when its name is in bold. Now you can lay down your roads. You will have to set the road as active every time you click out of the road too.

 

If you want to change how your custom road looks after you've drawn the roads in, you right click on the name of the road and choose 'Edit' from the scroll down menu. This will pop up the 'Custom Road Settings' box where you can edit all the road elements, including the name. 

 All of the roads made from this custom road will automatically change.

LAYING OUT ROADWORK: 

Using three different types of roads, I lay out my city. The hills and the farmlands are still a work in progress because I have not set down the lots and I'm not exactly sure how those will change once I start terrain sculpting. The city proper area will remain the same as most of the lots are already placed. I tried to be generous about the space between the roads. This is a world I don't necessarily intend to upload and so I'm not too terribly worried that other people will think the lot sizes are strange. However, I want to leave myself leeway to make changes for later expansions and what-not.

Some preliminary sketches:

I didn't want to arbitrarily place roads. Nor did I want to simply create a gridiron street system. In cities like Paris, streets branch out around important buildings or monuments. I did think about that a lot when planning my city.

The result:

I used a road to outline where I wanted to the river to meet the land, after terrain-sculpting the road will be removed. I plan to put in sidewalks for waterfront walking trails.

A few more words on roads: I'm sorry to say that I can't offer a step-by-step guide to making roads, even though, when I first began CAW I desperately needed one. I, too, was frustrated by the lack of information other designers had given about roads in CAW. Everyone kept saying "you really just need to play with it yourself to get a hang of it". In actuality, this is the truth. If you are familiar with the pen tool from Photoshop or Illustrator, then you already know a lot about roads. When you lay out a road, it comes with green colored nodes that you can drag to change the shape of the road. The blue nodes will allow you to change the length of the road segment. When a road is no longer straight, the nodes change in color from green to cyan.

LESSON 2: The grid is your best friend. The grid will allow you to easily align roads and create angled lots. You simply change the number in the 'rotation (degrees)' box to the angle of your choice. Then any roads or lots drawn will snap to the angle. In my opinion, this is much easier than making lots and roads at 0 degrees and then using the rotation tool to align them.

Note on the size of the world: the large map is 2048 x 2048. This is the number of grid squares in the world. A tiny world is 256 x 256. If you select 'Show Chunk Boundaries' under the View tab of CAW, you will see additional white lines. They outline one Chunk, which is equivalent to 256 x 256 grid squares or one tiny world. Each Chunk holds 16 64 x 64 lots. These are the largest lot you can have in game. I think that this information is helpful in deciding where your road are placed. I've found, when working in a large world that it's easy to lose track of how sprawling you're making your world. Keep in mind your sim's commute time. One thing that frustrated me about Bridgeport is that it felt like it took forever for sims to get to work if they lived in one of the mansions across the bridge.

Next Steps: Terrain-sculpting!