The Curvilinear Librarium

This is a big one. And I want to say soooo much, but I promise to try and keep it short and sweet.

This is a modular bookcase set, with what I hope you agree is a bit more freedom - in both design options and accessibility.



I've been working on these off and on since February (most of that time was spent on wild goose chases caused by my own typographical mistakes). I had plans for a few more bells and whistles when I first started, but limitations in the game and in my modding skills conspired to produce this more realistic version. (Rather than go on and on here about all the things I had planned, let's try to stay focused on the features that actually made it into the set.)




First thing I wanted was a bookshelf that could be accessed from both sides. I knew this was possible, because I have NixNivis' TSM Book Stacks in one of my "castley" lots. After a lot of screwups and wrong turns, I finally got them to work:

Originally, I thought I would make a set of bookcases with double and mirrored book meshes, another identical set without book meshes but added deco slots, then mix and match them. Anyway, long story short, without the pioneering efforts and influence of Leefish, no telling how big a mess I would have made of this project.

I was having some trouble with Sims walking through the 45° extensions, even despite a lot of effort spent redrawing the CRES footprints, so the corner deco pieces were made to stop this. They basically melded into the extended mesh and provided an "invisible" block to walking Sims. Eventually I fixed this problem in the Init BHAV, but kept the pieces in because they allowed for some pretty interesting shapes that I didn't initially anticipate being possible. So a word of caution: Be careful when placing the corners and endcaps. They are fully intersectable with other objects, and can actually "disappear" inside your shelf mesh (or even other nearby furniture).

To give an illusion of seamlessness, I kind of "standardized" the support poles into 90° and 45° pairs, where they overlap the poles of the adjoining section instead of trying to draw half-poles that met up with another half-pole and hopefully made a whole with no perceptible gap. The drawback is, there's half a pole hanging past the end of any given section that doesn't join up with another section.

So I added endcaps to cover the ends, or to use as dividers/supports in place of the support poles.

Almost as much as I like Curvy furniture, I like to have LotsaSlots. So, with a few exceptions of smaller sections, each section has 27 deco slots - Eight per shelf (three facing each side, and two in the center) and three centered slots on the top. Corners also have 4 slots, but they can be hard to access sometimes. It's possible to have 2 or 4 (maybe even 6 &8?) corners in the same game tile. Pressing the "M" key can cycle through one corner section, then onto another, but often one or more of the units in the tile gets skipped. You can place some objects in the slots of a unit you don't want to use, then remove them once you have placed the deco on the slot you actually want to use, OR (easier) just move the corner unit you want to decorate a few tiles away from the rest of your shelf sections, place the deco object, then slide the section back into your shelving configuration.

There are seven(7) files attached. You don't need all of them.

What you do need is:
A. one "CurvyBookcase" file (either FULL, PETS-FT, or pre-PETS, according to your Sims 2 game configuration)
and
B. the CurvyBookcase-Deco file.

The sections in the main file variants all use the same GUIDs, so you can only place one version in your downloads folder at a time. The Deco objects are all BG, and will work the same in all game configurations.

Optional: Collections folders, BibliophileBookSet, dARE-RC[MaxLord]-CurvyBookcase-MainLeft




Extras

Books

The books are sections cut out from the book mesh from the Bibliophile bookcase. I did a few changes to the UV mapping to make them look a bit more realistic, but otherwise they are all EAxis. They are slaved to the Bibliophile bookcase in the basegame, so if you want to recolor them you must recolor the EAxis package, not mine. I make no claim on these meshes, so use and abuse them as you wish. These gorgeous Baroque gold ceiling tiles are made by Red Sonja and can be found here . (I think that may be her autobiography on the left shelf near the top...)

Recolors
This recolor package is totally optional. I mostly made them for myself, to match an office suite I've been working on forever. I will warn you that mileage may vary with some of the textures in this package - especially with the transparent ones, which were made for a tabletop from the office suite and don't really work anywhere else except in small doses. The wood textures, however, look great with anything.


Known Issues

*** If you are having any problems making these shelves work in your game, please check the comments page. There are some fixed files available there that should help. If they don't help, leave a message so I can attempt to fix any new problems.***

The 45° parts that extend beyond any particular section's tile are also object-intersectable, although not intersectable with Sims. This means that they can still clip through walls and other nearby objects. Except for the straight pieces, and maybe the 90° edged tiles, I wouldn't recommend setting the Curvilinear Librarium up against a wall.

If you are playing a Basegame, or any other pre-PETS Sims 2 setup, you MUST use the files marked "[pre-PETS]." Files from [PETs-FT] or [FULL] will definitely crash your game.

There are some shading issues where some of the sections join each other. Nothing major, just not perfect . I spent quite a lot of time this week remeshing the worst offenders, with pretty good results. There are still a few irregularities left that occur where the meshes overlap. Since very few of these sections are meshed exactly the same at a given joint, I'm afraid making them truly seamless is just beyond my ken at this time.


Some Technical Info

All textures used in the mesh files are EAxis, except the white and black pole recolors, created in GIMP 2.8 from EAxis gold texture
All textures in the Maxwell Lord recolor package generated by myself with Genetica Viewer and Wood Workshop (both by Spiral Graphics)

Parts in-game price Catalog placement

Shelf sections 386 Hobbies>Knowledge

Corners 98 Hobbies>Knowledge

Endcaps 5 Hobbies>Knowledge

Books 7 Decorative>Sculptures



Tools used: SimPE, Blender 2.77 & 2.78c, GIMP 2.8, Genetica Viewer, Wood Workshop





Polygon Counts:
Section Name Total Faces poles shadows grndshadow bookcase
45to45: 706 64 36 16 590
45 sm: 456 64 36 12 344
BigCurve Left 668 64 36 16 552
BigCurveRt: 668 64 36 16 552
MainLeft: 629 64 36 16 513
MainRt: 629 64 36 16 513
90LG: 630 64 36 16 514
90SM: 630 64 36 16 514
90Left: 554 64 36 16 438
90RT: 554 64 36 16 438
CornerLeft: 79 2 77
CornerRt: 79 2 77
End45: 14 2 12
EndCenter: 14 2 12
EndEdge: 14 2 12
SCurveLeft: 592 64 36 16 476
SCurveRt: 592 64 36 16 476
StraightCntr: 160 64 36 2 58
Straight Edge: 160 64 36 2 58



Bibliophile Book Set:

Subset1: books-50, shadow-2
Subset2: books-12, shadow-2
Subset3a: books-44, shadow-2
Subset3b: books-12, shadow-2
Subset4: books-48, shadow-2
Subset5a: books-22, shadow-4
Subset5b: books-28, shadow-2
Subset6: books-36, shadow-2
Subset7a: books-12, shadow-2
Subset7b: books-22, shadow-2


Additional Credits:

Delphy - for providing a vibrant community and knowledge base here at MTS
Quaxi and team - for the SimPE program
Numenor, RGiles- the CEP package
FifthAce2007, NixNivis, Leefish - unknowingly guiding me in building this set