Grand, Fancy Panel Walls

Due to a manic phase of playing/listening to, of all things, Strauss waltzes, I got it into my head to build bits and pieces of a grand palace as set pieces for picture-taking purposes. I wanted a fancy entry foyer, a ballroom, a library, a music room, etc. For this little project, I needed some fancy walls. And, as it happens, there's a Maxis molded, gilded wall in the game. I don't know what, if any, EP/SP it came with, but it only comes in a useless-for-my-purposes slate(ish)-blue.

So, I went and layered up the original wall's texture image. I gave it a bit more dimension, "re-gilded" the gilded bits so they were a bit more gildy gold and a bit less pee yellow, and then I dumped colors and graining onto the thing. I really only needed a few of my darker wood colors plus white for my own project, but I went and made the wall in all 20 of my wood colors, plus white, in case I found myself needing other colors at some future time.

And then, since I didn't want all of the walls in the set pieces to be quite so fancy, I made a couple of plainer matching pieces, too, There's one with all the trim except the center coffers and no gilded bits except for the strip across the top so that it breaks up the fancier wall but still tiles nicely with it. (Plus, you can stick things like wall sconces and maybe mirrors and artwork and stuff on it without it looking stupid.) And then there's a wall with just the crown molding and baseboard, which is pretty much meant only for wall tiles that will have windows and curtains on them because otherwise tall windows cut into the trim and look stupid.

So, here's a pic with all three of the walls in white...which is actually a very, very light gray, not pure white, because pure white tends to look unnatural. (In fact, the color code I use, for hah-hahs, for "white" has the hex code EAEAEA. ):

The two instances of the plain version of these walls are on the outsides of the pic above, one with just a window in it, and one with a window and a curtain. The plain walls work best if you use curtains that cover up both sides of the wall tile all the way out to the edges, to ease any transition between a trimless wall tile and a trimmed one next to it...but I don't have any extra CC in the user account that I use for creating, in order to save game-loading time, so...yeah. Just imagine that that Maxis curtain goes all the way out to the edge of the wall tile. Also, forgive the lack of ceiling in the pic. I discovered that with the ceiling turned on, the crown molding gets chopped off, and I wanted it to be seen.

(There's a similar pic of the Cayenne color attached, too, just to show all of the pieces of one of the "woody" colors together, too.

Anyway, here are the 20 wood colors for each of the three kinds of wall. Here's a piece of the gilded version in each non-white color:

And here's the tops of the "Trimmed" version:

And here are the tops of the "Plain" version:


The individual images to make each of the above pics were culled from in-game pics taken indoors, but in bright light from, specifically, four ceiling lights, one for each tile.

All that said, I'm not sure how generally useful these will be, but I thought I'd share for the benefit of other folks who maybe build actual, functional palaces or for people like me who just want some fancy set pieces. If only I could make a version where the center coffer insets on the gilded walls were mirrored as well, I'd be all set, but...Oh well.

I Compressorized all of these, even though it only takes a couple KB off of each file, and I'm offering each kind of wall separately, so that means that you have the possibility for up to 63 new walls here, all located in the "Paneling" section. The "plain" walls aren't, IMO, all that useful without at least one of the other two, but the "trimmed" and the "gilded" ones can stand alone. All are clearly named so that you can easily get rid of the files you don't need/want.

Now go build yourself a grand, chandeliered ballroom or something.