Hey everyone,

On building up my Sims 3 house I have overlooked a serious problem.

I first built up the rooms and THEN realized that putting fireplaces on the ground floor would WREAK HAVOC on the rooms on the upper floor.

I know that I can remove the chimney parts to get rid of the problem.

My question is:

WOULD IT BE UNREALISTIC IF I REMOVED PART OF THE CHIMNEY TO PRESERVE ONLY THE FIREPLACE AND EXHAUST THING?

I am trying to build a house that can actually be imagined to be real.

To put some edge to the issue, I'm going to show here some images of a large house in the US called "The Breakers".

Here is the Ground Floor's Music Room. Notice the fireplace at the wall opposite the piano (right side in this picture):



Now see this Floor Plan of the Ground Floor. Look to the right to see the Music Room. To the wall left of the Curved Wall (where the piano is) is an outline of what probably is the fireplace:



Below are the Second (bottom) and Third (top) Storey plans. Notice the SECOND Storey.



As you can see, the entrance to "Mrs. V's Bedroom" (which is by the "Gallery") seems to be DIRECTLY ABOVE the fireplace in the Ground Floor's Music room. Yet the plan does NOT show any obstructing chimney part blocking this entrance. It would be RIDICULOUS to have a chimney part BLOCK THE ENTRANCE to a matriarch's bedroom.

What can you make out of this?

Thank you very much for reading and I hope for your valuable help.

Regards,
Lounieus

Its possible that the fireplace wasn't vented to begin with or that the venting ran up the wall then between the floors to an exterior wall. You can't tell with that illustration of the home because its not a true blueprint with the electrical/plumbing/services all marked. So really its up to your discretion. I personally don't think removing the chimney will hurt the realism, but other opinions may differ.

Thank you very much for your comments!

So I am correct in saying that there isn't a Chimney Stack right above the fireplace on the Music Room?

Would also it be correct, then, to say that not all fireplaces have Chimney Stacks on the floor directly above them, yet still end in an exhaust pipe on the roof above them?

Because Sims 3 fireplaces ALWAYS come with a Chimney Stack directly above them.

I also want to know this:

In this Sims 3, fireplaces have a huge brick wall behind them. This means that if I put a fireplace in a certain room, there will be a protruding brick wall in the next room. Is this true for real homes?

Thank you once more.



Could I ask what you mean by "filtering it horizontally until it hits a wall"? Maybe if you have an image describing this?



So it's okay to remove the Chimney Stack, but still preserve the Chimney exhaust on the roof?

Do you have an illustration describing this?

I apologize if I seem to ask for too much, I just want to make my house design look realistic.

Regards,
Lounieus

If you want to leave the chimney stack on the roof I would shift it so that its over the wall next to the entrance to the bedroom. Where you have the gallery circled in the last picture, I would place the chimney stack directly overtop one of the walls to the right or left of that circle...... Like Nitromon said chimneys didn't always run straight up. Or you could leave it off all together...Does the building you are recreating have a stack on the roof in real life?

https://www.google.com/maps/uv?hl=en&pb=!1s0x89e5a5f9c641cbb1:0x82d9f631f5fc133f!2m19!2m2!1i80!2i80!3m1!2i20!16m13!1b1!2m2!1m1!1e1!2m2!1m1!1e3!2m2!1m1!1e5!2m2!1m1!1e4!3m1!7e115!4shttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Breakers!5sthe+breakers+newport+-+Google+Search&imagekey=!1e1!2shttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d9/The_Breakers_Newport.jpg/1200px-The_Breakers_Newport.jpg&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=0ahUKEwi1rNez6N_UAhVpxlQKHbTfAOwQoioIiwEwCg

The Breakers has lots of chimneys. Wonderful house. Visited there years ago.
This is Sims and you can do whatever is wanted, but chimneys and fireplaces that are in wrong places bugs me in Sim builds, dollhouses, anywhere. Too much of the frustrated architect in me. My guess is that in the Breakers as the walls are so thick they managed to pipe/vent up through some of the walls for a few twists and turns?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Breakers

I live in a house that at one time had a fireplace and a furnace which both had chimneys. The fireplace was boarded over, and the furnace was given a better vent, but the architecture of the house was otherwise unchanged.

The chimneys simply look like thicker spaces in the wall. They act as shields for the closets in the bedrooms upstairs, and the one coming up from the basement runs through the kitchen to provide a small division between the cooking area in the kitchen and the space where a kitchen table would go, as well as acting as a shield for the back door.

Considering that in the Sims it is not practical to make a hallway that is only one tile wide, a bathroom where the door opens onto the square right in front of the toilet, a walk-in closet, or a house with a nursery that is not on the ground floor, but any wall has enough electric outlets to plug in anything you want to use and all rooms automatically are able to have the light turned on as soon as you walk in without having to cross a dark room to find the switch, there is a certain sacrifice of realism that you need to make anyway.

So even if they used the paper-thin walls that you generally see rather than using thicker walls that can hide a chimney even better, it is perfectly acceptable to simply assume that the smoke is vented through the walls somehow for a while before going outside. (Which would also help with the heating of the house since the smoke carries a lot of the heat of the fire along with it. It might make cleaning the chimney a bit harder while making it need to be cleaned a bit more often, but that's why the chimney sweeps get paid well.) The chimney simply needs to have enough straightness at the top to draw well.

Edit: Armiel made CASTable chimneys if you want to try them. http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=432817

(I remembered, because at the time I was one of the testers who did not have Ambitions. )

I have another kind of realisme, the pragmatic view. I have also experience in architectural programs such as Revit.

You will never ever be able to simulate such things as variations in wall depth in Sims. It just can't be done. In real life there is several different depths. Sims only has 2 in reality, unless you want to make a room 2 tiles wide.

On the other hand it makes sense giving that fireplace in that location, on that floor, a 1 tile wide backwall. The reason for that is the risk of bugs. The backside of that fireplace cannot be used in most cases. Toilets among other things cannot be used.

It also makes sense in this case to have a wider wall behind the fireplace, because you have a floorplan to consider.

In the end though it will have to be a consideration between space, what use you plan for the backwall and the layout of the house and the floor.

Sadly realisme often have to give way when you try to make a reallife floorplan work with a games requirements for space and functionality.

Thinking about realisme only makes it harder for yourself. In Revit restructuring this floorplan would be much easier, after all I can just draw it on top.

So the venting uses "pipes" that run within walls like a snake towards the roof?

Also I'm not "re-creating" a real life house. I'm just making an original 19th century-like house in the game and I want it to look "realistic", so to speak.

This is offtopic, but I'd just like to make the observation that there are indeed many wonderful, downloadable great "mansions" for Sims 3, based on real life great homes, like maybe Highclere Castle, The Breakers, Biltmore House, or even Malfoy Manor (which was based on Hardwick Hall in England). However notice that these downloads are in fact shrunken down from their real life counterparts, and I'm not sure their creators know this; it seems to me that huge mansions often have walls about 18-24 feet tall. In Sims 3 you could simulate this by making one level using two walls stacked on top of each other, creating one double-height wall approx. 18 ft. high (I estimate that the Sims 3 wall is 9 feet high after taking a picture of a Sim standing right in front of it) and using the "Mega Windows" in Supernatural EP or RegalSims' Versailles windows to fit the huge wall. However most players design their house recreations using only the regular, single 9-foot wall, creating a house that is half the height of its real life counterpart. And since it's half the height, then it ends up half the length, and half the width; a shrunken, dollhouse of a Simhouse; beautifully resembles the original, only shrunken. So you end up making a recreation that has, in fact, only 1/4 of the area of its real life counterpart. Of course, maybe the Simmers explain that they want to make Buckingham Palace fit on a 60x60 lot and still make it look like Buckingham Palace, but it would still always be cooler if it had the total grandeur of the real version (how I wish the floor limit was 30 and you could build on 400x400 lots to build your own Basilica, he-he). My attempt is to make a country house-like house that uses double height walls to make its size closer to the real ones.



Interesting. One of the most beautiful great homes in the world. Never been there yet.

I'm thinking maybe the "chimney stacks" somehow angle/curve within these thick walls or something and end on the roof, though I'm not sure.



Hmm...why would you need to build a "back wall" if you were to remove the other pieces? Is it just to make the style look better? In the floor plan I posted it seemed to be free of these annoying "chimney stacks". Maybe they found a way to have them hidden within the thick walls.

If it is "realistic" enough to accept, I'm thinking I'd just simply delete the Second Floor chimney stacks, pretending that the venting goes through some kind of hidden "duct" system that turns around within walls and ends in a roof chimney. It's too hard for me to change the design of my house just because of this problem, ha-ha.



Thanks for your response. So this chimney doesn't run straight & vertically like in the game? Does it angle/curve within the wall or something? Interesting.


Huh? Why would there be bugs if there was a back wall?

Also, what do you people do with the huge brick behind the fireplace? Do real fireplaces have a huge brick wall protruding behind them?

Regards,
Lounieus

As someone else said, the game still thinks there is a chimney there. It's nothing to do with the wall, it's just the removal of the chimney part we're talking about.

I tend to build like nitromon making my own chimneys, usually 2x1, using MOO on the chimney pieces.

"Also, what do you people do with the huge brick behind the fireplace? Do real fireplaces have a huge brick wall protruding behind them?"
Are you talking about the actual fireplace? Yes, there must be a stone or cement or brick or whatever fireplace. That is the fireplace. The mantle is just a façade decoration. If the building is not to burn you need the actual fireplace to contain the fire in RL. Or maybe, I just don't understand your question?