I can haz CAW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11

Please pardon my nerdy glee! :D

So this is clearly just mostly Riverview Lite at the moment, but I have begun making some edits to slowly transform this bad boy into Lakeside Heights. On the left side of the river will be Lake City, and on the right side will be a mish-mashed version of Lakeside Heights and Bluewater neighborhoods. The brown areas at the bottom shorelines are where I've extended the land so far. On the bottom left will be the Stoneview Court neighborhood, and the bottom right will be the Lakeside Heights Lakeshore area.

And from another angle (pardon my crappy graphics):

This is pretty much all I've done so far, lol! Here is where the Bluewater River opens up out into my fictional Lake Michigan. The near terrain in this picture is Stoneview Court, which will be expensive houses and a cliff-side park - I added that road to extend all the way to the coastline. And the far terrain will eventually be the LH lakeshore and marina.

One without the fog overlay:

You can see a little clearer in this one how the lots in Stoneview Court extend over the cliff! I'll be building these houses myself - but I wanted them that way so that I could build right up to the cliff's edge.

I plan on widening the river a bit, especially down near the lake opening (I'll probably be moving where that lighthouse is). And in staying true to my idea of the area, the only way to get to Lakeside Heights from Lake City is through Hazel Park, so that bottom bridge will have to be eliminated.

The middle island will be added to the left side Lake City landmass, and that will be where I build LCU! The whole left side will be flattened and de-grassed and urbanized. Then those two bridges through the center will hop over to Hazel Park, and down to the LH shoreline, or up to the further reaches of Bluewater Township.

I do plan on staying mostly true to the official LH area map, here:

There are really only going to be a couple small changes. The north and south ends of Lake City will be swapped, because I wanted Stoneview Court near the shoreline). And also, because of where the farm terrain painting is on this map, that'll have to be where the farming parts of my Bluewater Township are. Everything south of the farm will be Lakeside Heights, and north of the farm will be Bluewater Township with its own little Main Street just like in the TS2 version.

I spent hours yesterday trying to wrangle the damn distant terrain pieces, before finally cursing them to hell and giving up. I really don't think I'd be able to use them anyway since I need coastline on half of the terrain, though I would have liked to have some distant terrain on the other half. I suppose I'll just use hills and forest to cover up the back half instead.

Unless anyone's seen custom distant terrains??? Ideally smaller ones? It'd be cool to find one I could place along just one or two sides of the map.

So that's my first day with CAW! I'm really enjoying using it now - after it took me a good 12 hours to figure out how to even use the camera controls on this laptop. I think I'll definitely be plugging in a real mouse before I do any more work with this. I'm also very glad I changed my mind and decided to start from the Riverview base, rather than completely from scratch like I'd initially tried. That saved me a ton of time in sculpting and terrain painting!

And a word of first-timer advice? If you're just beginning, don't start with the distant terrain objects, lol! Oh man, that almost killed the whole project for me! :o

A couple very useful tutorials that I got started with:
- Creating Sims 3 Worlds in the SimsWiki
- CAW 101 - Connecting Roads over at Creating Charleston