HOW TO: Natural Ponds, Pools & Waterfalls | Tutorial | Sims 4 | Simsational Builds

[Music] [Music] [Music] hello simmers welcome to my channel sensational builds my name is deb and today we're going to be doing a tutorial on how to build natural pools and waterfalls within the sims my aim for this video is to help you build these pools to look as natural as possible so they look like they will always been there obviously you can alter these to suit your own style and make them look more refined for more modern builds or you know whatever your heart desires but in this particular tutorial i do want to show you how to make them look as natural as possible so first up what you want to do is use your pool or your fountain tool now i do prefer using the pool uh pull tool in this one here instead of the fountain one but again to each your own desires um so what you want is to grab the custom pull tool now again when you're building a really natural looking pool you don't want to have hard lines square shapes anything like that so you're gonna make this look one to look as random as possible so don't be afraid to do obviously some square sections go in a bit we're going to be hiding all of this as well all of the edges that we've made so it doesn't matter what shape your pool is at the end so you end up with something like this just a really strange jaggedy shape to suit whatever build you're doing let's start off with that to make it really simple what i first like to do is just lower it just by one click so that it's very slightly into the ground using your wallpaper tool and going down the level you can actually inside the pool itself and a lot of people don't know that you can actually change the wallpaper within the pool so you can actually do you know whatever you'd like on the inside you can make entirely blue whatever sometimes it looks really nice having stone on the inside if you want it to make it look like a just like a pond kind of pool this one here works really well what's it called it's clean room comes in a bunch of different colors the dark one actually works really well as well and same thing with the floor you can do any sort of flooring you like again so in where is it in i think it's in miscellaneous yet you've got bottom of the basement comes in the same color swatches as the walls and if i just get rid of the grid lines you can see there that it just looks like a dirt hole on the ground if we change the edges of the pool the trim sorry you can just stick with that one there make it brown if you like or if you do have this um the get together expansion pack the rocky pool trim is also quite good as well with that rock edges now without adding rocks all around the sides which is one way to make it look natural if you don't have the time or the patience for that uh one way to sort of make it look more natural is by using your terrain paint oh sorry in here into the dirt ones any one of the dirt ones will do i like using the smarter starter soil the plain trim might have actually worked a little bit better so if i just make that brown there we go so without doing anything more it's already starting to look a little bit better a little bit more natural now if you do have either jungle adventure or the get-together packs uh these waters are better for making it look like a natural pond because they're not quite as sparkly even that one there's okay if you want it to look like nice and clean then the standard one that you get the this one here is probably one of my favorite ones because it still looks sort of plain but it doesn't look quite as dirty as say the get together ones they look a little bit more murky basically i want to swim in that a little bit more than i'd want to swim in this one but it depends what look you're going for as well so there's a like the most basic way you can do it um but there are sorry i'm just going to move that out a little bit more but there are other ways that you can make it look more natural as well so again without using rocks you can use some plants and the good thing about the pool tool is that the plants oh sorry you will need to turn on your cheat bb dot move objects on for this one here so it automatically snaps to the edges which works really well for what we're doing here so just getting some random you know bushes and things like that around the edge can really make all the difference and even if they go into the pool a little bit that's fine i mean i know it's not that realistic but it makes it look a lot better these reeds are a really good one as well and i'm kind of doing really random things right now and you could probably do a lot better than what i am doing at the moment but i just sort of wanted to give you an idea that just by adding the plants you don't need to add them all the way around you can just add them to a section and rocks is the biggest and easiest way to make it look natural because they snap to the edge and they hide the entire edge of the pool and you can also size them up using your square bracket or size them down and just by putting a few of them around and rotating them a bit automatically you have something that looks a lot better there another way to do it without the plants is to just use rocks all the way around i like to do that quite a lot and then accent it with plants afterwards now this is a pretty time consuming thing i just use these standard ones there are a lot of debug ones around that you can use as well again depends on what look you want this just tends to be the fastest because i don't need to scroll through it and i can click shift and um and duplicate them as well basically what you just want to do is just randomly pick them and rotate them like so you can size them up or down to add more randomness so i'm just going to fast forward the video now so there is the final pull with all the rocks laid around it and i think this is probably the easiest way to make it look natural you can even like say size the rocks up a bit more in certain sections i think that looks really good as well so say if i wanted to make this entire side of it and even if you've got the same rock side by side if you just rotate it a bit it works really well i don't worry about them clipping over each other when it's all done and dusted it does actually look really natural so that already started to look really good now let's add some plants to it but again you just have to sort of play around with it there's no right real right or wrong way to make it look good like so i don't mind it clipping into the water a lot of the time it looks looks pretty good you can also if you want your pulls your seams to actually swim in it just delete a couple of sections and add in oh yeah the a ladder this rock ladder here from get together is really good because it blends in beautifully with the rocks as well around it it has that nice sort of rustic rusty finish you might need to play test that to make sure that the rocks aren't too close but now your sims can get in and out of there as well without breaking up the look of the pool you can also within the pool itself don't be afraid to add some say bushes or something like that to the bottom of it to give it that look of um not necessarily seaweed but the water plants this one here is a pretty good one from jungle adventures mix them up a bit because when you when you go up you will actually be able to see it through the water itself and again depending if what water you decide to use if you do use the more nat clear one you'll be able to see it through the water and again it just adds to that natural look that we're going for the sims can still swim in there and everything like that again you can make this as big or as small as you like you can make a creek with it you can do a river um you can build a bridge over the top of it although that's a tutorial for another day and we can add a waterfall to a side if you'd like so if we add a waterfall over here let me just delete these plants that we've got or maybe i'll just move them so what we need to do is we need to create the levels for the water to actually fall down on so there's a couple of different ways you can do that you can do it with creating a say another pool or a fountain and raising it up to the right level they can't actually be touching that's the biggest thing that we have to make sure that we oh that we do so we have to raise it up so as you can see we've got that raised up there and that will give us enough space for the water to fall down now we have to hide it because it looks a little bit weird again we use the same sort of wall and the same floor but once again using your rocks in particular they're probably the easiest way to make it look natural is you're gonna have to go around it and hide what you've done now sometimes these rocks do float when you have it up here so see that one there it's sort of floating in midair you just sort of have to make it maybe make it a bit bigger and lower it and then if there's still a gap underneath it just shove rocks everywhere honestly they will hide it and even though it might when you're doing it it might look a little bit weird when it's all done and dusted the pile of rocks actually can look quite realistic [Music] all right so when you've done that you're ending up with something like this now you'll find that adding rocks on this side is going to be very difficult because it's very steep if you needed to add rocks there to keep the sort of look what i recommend to do is go down a level in here you'll be able to raise them up till they're the right height you can see there it actually blends in really nicely so you can if you need to fill up more rocks there what i would probably do is add in the water fountain first to give it that waterfall look and then continue adding rocks to make it look more natural so to actually create the waterfall itself you're going to need to go into your fountain tool this one here nope sorry this one here the water emitter now the size of it will depend on the height and distance of your fountain i don't like to go too far or too high because then it starts to ruin the illusion it makes it a bit harder if you want it to be a bit higher i would recommend adding multiple levels so doing exactly what i did here but before adding all the rocks just add all your pools make them the right heights and then put place all your rocks all the way around it as suits so what you want is the spraying one not the leaping one and instead of going up here what you'll notice if you go here is that the water lands in the middle of nowhere and you don't want that in fact i think this one might be a little bit small what you want is see this area from the very top of it to where it goes down this part here has to be at this top level not this part because if you add this to the top the water's flying through the air now if you think about water and how it behaves that's not what actually works in a natural looking uh waterfall again i'm not trying to make this look like a fountain i'm trying to make it look like a natural free-flowing waterfall so i don't want the water to fall to go there i want this part here to be flowing down this uh the angle there that i've got so what i probably need is a larger one probably the medium one because that length looks more like what i have here so again how do i get it there because when i try and put it here everything's sitting on top you're gonna have to go down and in fact i probably should have done that a pool instead of a fountain because i need to be a little bit lower so what i'm quickly going to do and i really hope that this doesn't destroy everything that i've built here again i've got move objects on so shouldn't i'm going to change this into a pool if you're going to have to use a pool for your second level i would change the foundation into so i would use this one here probably in a darker color to make it blend in a little bit more so if i just stick with that one there see the edges nice and thin that'll be the easiest to hide i'm gonna see if i can adjust the terrain [Music] okay sorry everyone so i've had to modify it slightly i would recommend if you're going to be doing a waterfall to be to actually place the pools first before you place all the rocks um just because i was trying to show you the pool first isn't one option and then show you to do the waterfall it obviously didn't work that way when i would usually do it the other way but i have filled with a little bit so i've gotten us back to pretty much where we were before a little bit of the pool edges showing but that should be fine we should be able to hide it with the water and if not we can always place some rocks underneath to hide it as well and end up with a much more natural look so as you can see that looks a lot better already and i might even just leave that one there but you can play around the thing about these pools is that they are really time consuming i wouldn't recommend it if you're trying to do something really quick but if you do want to spend some time on a on a place that you know really deserves the extra attention um or a mansion or something like that it can be really effective so where i was at before my little error with the fountain slash pool is that we need to use a large enough um water emitter that has this section here the falling section to cover the space from the top here because that's where you want to just go over to actually the bottom of it to actually hit the pool itself or at least very very close to if it's too high up it isn't going to look natural so grabbing hold of the water meter and again going down to our basement level what we want is to raise it up now i generally place a whole bunch of these now you're gonna need to use a lot that's the other trick to make this look as natural as possible so using the shift key i place down a whole bunch of them oops try and keep them all in the same direction just to make life a bit easier for me so i can just click and pull another step to make it look as natural as possible is to using the closed bracket or so the open square bracket to size the emitter down as small as possible it's not necessary and oftentimes it is hidden um but it does help once we've got our emitter and we've got it placed in the right direction using your nine key you want to raise it up until you're at the right height now keeping in mind that the edge of this pool is not there so i'm just going to size this up because i'm going to need to grab it again you're going to need to get it at the right height now this is probably a touch too high i want it to just go over the edge of that the lip of that pool itself so as you can see it's going a little bit too high i want it to just sort of just go over the top of the lip of the pool so using zero i'm just gonna lower it once again it's hard to judge but once you get the first one the rest of them are easier and using your alts key you can free place it as well off the grid here it's falling a little bit too far i would actually want to move it back a little bit like so the first few are hard and then the rest of them you just match up so it's a bit easier so i might leave that one for now because it's falling down here or right and i might need to use some rocks to fill up that space a little bit more if you type in your cheat code bb dot show hidden objects and bb.show live edit objects and then you can either search for debug in here or you just press the little search key and you scroll down all the rocks are in all together so it makes it a bit easier to find unfortunately we can't search here we are so these are all the rocks that we get with all your different packs depending on what packs you have will be what rocks you get but these cliff rocks here i find are one of the best ones to use for this sort of thing you have to size it down and then obviously raise it up as you can see there just by placing one that fills up a lot of space without me having to muck around too long with placing you know 100 million rocks and then you can just use your normal small ones to just sort of fill in the gaps a little bit where you might need them like say i find that when you start adding the angles and whatnot it ends up being a little bit harder to so when it's on an angle like that it's a little bit harder to actually fill in those gaps and you don't want it to go too high up you want that lip to be free of any rocks here because obviously you don't want the water to be lower than the rocks themselves so if i just place that one here oops go where i want you to go here when you have a waterfall the water doesn't leap over rocks it just falls gradually down obviously i have the problem of the water being slightly lower but i try and hide that as as best as possible with the fountain itself you can also use a terrain paint tool again depending on how steep this angle is and make it a more rocky one and that will also just help hide a few little bits and pieces that you weren't able to get with you with the rocks so i think we've got a pretty natural looking rock face there for our water to fall down so let's get on to the actual building the actual fountain again now this is the problem that you get when you start mucking around i can't actually move this water fountain now because it's hidden behind walls and rocks and whatnot so i'm just going to leave it there it's not too far out of place if you had to find it you could start moving the walls back and moving the rocks aside and things like that but i'm not going to do that today i don't have time okay so there we go so i'm just going to start placing them where i think it works so as you can see it's only just going over the top of the rocks there and going down into it and as you can see that second one that i placed looks a whole lot more natural than the first one just falling down the rocks and don't be afraid of the rocks sort of hide a few bits of the water because again when we've got a natural waterfall the water doesn't all go down in one direction you can we can also start changing the direction that the water's falling in here especially because i've got a bit of an angle on this side but see here so the easiest way to do it is i find to line it up like that and then i can get to the same height or at least similar height little differences in height are fine because again water is a natural thing and all fall down how it needs to but ah see that one's a little bit too fast the other water sort of just like falling over the top of it i might leave it and put the other ones a little bit closer just how this is a particular this particular bit of water going a little bit further so i'm going to speed it up now so because this again is a hugely time consuming thing to do especially if you want to make it look as natural as possible and just place a few more around where i think will look good now as i'm doing this again the biggest tip or trick that i've got for you is that place heaps of them when you think you've got enough place more because that's the biggest thing to making it look natural is so they're not sparse the water should be look like it's sort of free-flowing and that there's heaps of it when they're too sparse it will look it just will lose that effect of looking as natural as possible so just fast forward now and you'll be able to see the final product soon all right so we can see where i'm at as you can see is this one here now you could add a lot more water to that if you wanted to this one here because it's not too big of an area i'm just going to keep it sort of basic for now so yeah lucky like you would have seen not all of them have to be the same height they can be very slightly different heights change the angle around as well water doesn't naturally always fall in one angle especially because it's going around a curve and going over rocks water will fall in different directions so change that around as well again it is obviously going up a little bit but i can't change that because i can't make the water level at the same level as the edge of the pool itself um you can add some more rocks there to hide that a little bit more also i might add one on this edge here because that looks a little bit funny but there we have it i'm gonna add some trees and bushes around it now and the last thing we want is to also add in some lily pads maybe even some algae again this depends on what packs you've got as to what you can have available to you to use with the algae i tend to prefer to put it in little corners again depending on the packs that you've got which will be available to you most of these are in the get together pack but they have these steamers or bubbles cracks and those ones there again picking color that will sort of blend in the most really give it the sort of ambiance and you'll see what i mean when i put it onto live mode the steamer things at the bottom are those bubbles and add this sort of mist to the top of your natural pond you can add less you can just put one of them if you wanted to so there you have it guys there's your natural pool that your sims can swim around in swim underneath that little waterfall that you've got as well i hope you guys have enjoyed this tutorial i hope you guys find it helpful i look forward to seeing all of your beautiful natural pools and waterfalls in future if you do one after seeing this tutorial please tag me i would love to see it it makes me really happy actually um let me know in the comments below if you do have any questions or anything that i forgot to mention and if you did like this video i would love if you'd give it a like and subscribe and i'll see you all again next time thanks so much bye for now

Channel: Simsational_Builds

Views: 106,728

Keywords: base game build ideas, sims 4, sims 4 base game, sims 4 base game tutorial, sims 4 build, sims 4 build tutorial, sims 4 building ideas, sims 4 no cc, sims 4 pools, sims 4 tutorial, sims tutorial, the sims, the sims 4, the sims 4 building tutorial, the sims 4 tutorial, tutorial, pool tutorial, sims pool tutorial, waterfall tutorial, sims waterfall tutorial, sims pond tutorial, natural pool tutorial, sims natural pool, the sims 4 waterfall tutorial, simsational builds

Id: 64VvQJl4-H8

Length: 25min 56sec (1556 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 21 2020