Whether you are a first time decorator or a seasoned pro hopefully this post will have something for you. This will be ever evolving as new...or old things are brought to light by decorators. I'd like to start by giving a big thank you to all those creative designers that have offered up decorating tips to the community and to all those who will in the future! Sites decorators will want to visit...again and again and again: Eq2 Furniture Database Websites [Updated August '08] Britannic Lore Housing Information Index: How To's The Basics - "How the heck do I move furniture around anyway?" Taking, and posting, screenshots ~Donilla The Decorator Guide: Paneling Putting books on bookshelves - "Those bookshelves just don't behave" Placing wall items backwards How to do it yourself Kitchen Guide (Image Heavy) ~Nefaria Decorating in layers ~Sapphirius Scaffolding - "I'm not tall enough to see up there" Float an Item up high and get "Cannot place the object here" message - yes, there are workarounds! Add Light to a Light that has no Light - That has to make sense to someone. HOW TO: Use the load /save layout files.. by Mistal Books, Item Count, and YOU! ~Xanzibar Decorators' Guide to LoN ~Amphibia General Tips and Warnings Helpful Advice Clever Ideas and Techniques Furniture Info Rug Information - "Does it have a see through bottom? Can i stand on it if I float it?" The Backs of Paintings - "What's the back of it look like? Can I walk through it?" General Tips and Warnings Get a scrolling mouse ~LadyVader if you've accidently clicked on the move option for a piece of furniture you didn't mean to move, just hit the ESC button. It's much easier to just move a piece aside for later use than accidently hitting the pick up button and messing up your whole design. ~LadyVader if you want to superimpose another furniture piece one on top of the other and the "bottom" piece is being stubborn, try raising the top piece a few inches off the ground and looking at it from the side. Camera angle often seems to have a lot to do with whether or not an item will move into place - so move around and look from different angles if something is being finicky. ~Ninibi I occasionly run into a situation where an object disappears visually, or stays visually in place but is unclickable in any way, as if it weren't there. In both cases, the item or items will almost always correct themselves when I reload the house by leaving and then re-entering, or simply camping to the same character. ~Tock In another thread, Donilla mentioned "keep a bookcase, a table, and a shelf in my inventory at all times when decorating." I suggest taking this one step further - Make sure they are unique items. The reason behind this is you use these items to help place things, but sometimes you'll need to place something in a manner that won't let you access the item you used to place it. For example, my fishtank here, I used a vampire mirror to finish off. To achieve this, I had to use a bookshelf to provide a face to attach it to, but once it was placed, I could not select the bookshelf to pick it back up. Because the bookshelf I used was a unique item (there was only the one in my entire house of that type), I was able to then activate the /house window to "collect an item" and retrieve it without worry that I was picking up the wrong one. ~ Cerilynn Regarding Fish Tanks: If you do end up using a bookshelf or item that isn't unique though and you aren't making a teeny tiny fish tank you can actually select the item you are using as a glass wall such as a vampiric mirror, move so you're inside the tank and then hit esc so it goes back. Then from inside the tank you can pick up the bookshelf or whatever item you were using for the flat surface. I found that was a little less scary on my part if you don't have an item offhand that wouldn't blend into the list when typing /home. I also found this is a nice trick when you decide after making the fish tank that you wanna mess around with some of the stuff inside without messing up the front panels positioning. Again this pertains to only fish tanks or spaces you can actually fit your character in, lol. ~SecretNinja Helpful Advice I like looking at decorating magazines, myself. If I see something that looks comfortable and welcoming to me, it often gives me ideas for the in-game houses. My own personal "style" is to create an atmosphere that feels welcoming and comfortable and to just flat out decorate and work with the space (for my own homes). Would I like to actually live there? that sort of thing. Sometimes having a theme in mind helps - someone wants a froglok space, etc. Sometimes getting an idea of something you wish you saw in game, such as the toy train, pipe organ, fish tanks and previously, fireplaces and stoves! I look around outside of game for ideas that'll be fun to make in game. All my advice, otherwise, will center around gardens and decorating structure. I think there was a good post here somewhere on decorating in "layers." With gardens, try to keep it diverse and interesting to the eye - building up is a great trick - creating features as you would in real life. Something that catches the eye like a tiered planter or a walkway. Tall plants in the center or back to build "walls" of greenery. Water, pathways, eye level plants - texture - those are great things to consider when making a garden now that we have so many more plants available to play with (ee!). ~Ninibi The more I decorate, the more I've found that what really really helps me, is to picture what it would take, right here in my living room, to get the effect I want in-game. It's a sort of 3-D thinking. The one thing I consider most important in decorating (for me, anyway), is: how would I feel, sitting in the room I just decorated, and just chat-roleplaying with someone? If I can't park a character in there for two hours and just roleplay/chat... then I know my design is flawed and needs re-working. Usually... it means I've got "too much flair", and it's time to get rid of some of the many doo-dads. Sometimes I sketch, although I'm not much of an artist at all. Then I look at the furniture options available in-game, and I visit these forums, and look for ideas and inspiration. And then - this is the one thing that saves a lot of headache and grief at the end... if you're doing a big project, check and keep checking that you can walk through the areas that you want to be able to walk through, and that you can climb your stairs, even as you keep building them. I can't tell you how much time I lost building something that looked great - only to find I couldn't get up the stairs, or squeeze through the doorway... ~Eladia I think the best designs come from visualizing the entire space and thinking about how you want to live in it. My personal thing is to never decorate just against the walls. Always consider the space in the middle of the room as usable area. Sofas don't have to be against the wall, neither do fireplaces, bookselves or counters. Consider how a display space could also be a divider, and not necessarily a solid one at that. I tend to break a room into smaller spaces and make my groupings within those spaces. Also be sure to vary the heights of things. Everything at one level doesn't give the eye any where to focus. From a pratical standpoint, never pickup any thing, always move it first. If you end up moving the wrong thing, the ESC will undo it. You can always pick it up after you've moved it. Also the '/house' command can be used from anywhere. Stand where you can see the item you want to work with. Access the 'Collect Item List' and move the item you want to adjust/pickup etc. The list will remember where you left off, so if you want to remove just one bookcase out of 20, you will eventually hit upon the one you want and you can then pick it up. For bookself placement, line of sight is an issue so keep something solid handy that you can jump on to get yourself higher up if needed. Also scrolling as far out as you can and then playing around with the camera angle can help when placing a touchy tricky item. With the correct angle it is sometimes possible to slide something under something else, etc. ~Donilla Clever Ideas and Techniques When doing my gardens or spas and baths and using the mystic mirrors for waterfalls, although now we have the tapestry, i didnt like the fact that the walls were seen throu the mirror, so if you put a teak mirror behind it, now that they can be big, water reflects back and all you see is the water effect. Not very well seen in the pics much better ingame, but you can get an idea here: http://i303.photobucket.com/albums/...tubndthebed.jpg This house is gone, Ive moved to SQ but you get the idea. ~Bruji
Excellent resource. Very well put together! Here's my tips! Feel free to file them away wherever they go. ^_^ My apologies if someone's already shared them! Fine adjustment Often, if you're a perfectionist like me, you'll want to get objects aligned ever-so-perfectly, but no matter how hard you try, they just don't seem to line up. There's that pesky little edge poking out a sliver too far. Here's what I do to fix that. I play EQ2 with the left and right mouse buttons reversed as far as what turns my character and what just rotates my view. Since the left button always places the house item regardless, they need to be reversed for this to work properly, as far as I can figure. When I'm trying to align something perfectly, I hit Alt+O to open up the mouse options (hitting Alt+O will open/close the game options to the last section of the options you had open that session), and adjust the slider for mouse speed down to it's lowest setting. Then, I go to place the item. The item moves much more slowly now, but often even this isn't enough for me. I hold down my right mouse button to ever so slightly adjust the angle of my view. This glides the item along the plane of the surface you're placing it on ever so slowly, and makes perfect alignmentment a snap. When I'm done, I just hit Alt+O again, slide the slider up to max, and then move around as normal. Fiddling with viewing things from various angles to get it to do exactly what you want can be time consuming, but the results are completely satisfying for the OCD home builder who simply must make everything perfect! Surface glitching Sometimes, I want to place two identical house items so that they appear to be one continuous item, like sections of counter or large rugs. The problem is that frequently the top surfaces of these objects are too even and flat (as opposed to rough and uneven, like oggokian rock tables), and the textures for both items will glitch and get all scrambly (that's a technical term, by the way) when placed into each other. This is an especially irksome problem when you're trying to lay out wall-to-wall carpeting. What I do is to resize every other item in the arrangement by the smallest increment possible (hold down Alt while resizing). With a series of ironwood counters, for example, the second, fourth, and sixth counters would be shrunk by the tiniest bit. The intersecting sections of the countertops are no longer perfectly level with each other, removing the glitchy pattern. The difference in height is much smaller than you could achieve by raising sections of the counter, slight enough that it's much less noticeable than large sections of the counter going all scrambly. Prior to item resizing, the best you could hope to do would be to place something on the glitching patch to cover it up. When dealing with wall to wall carpeting, you slightly shrink every other rug in a chessboard pattern. You'll still have glitchy spots where the corners of the regular sized carpets intersect, but placing items over them is usually no sweat, and even if they're left showing, they're way more inconspicuous than the edges of every section of carpet going scrambly and making all the eyebrows of the OCD decorators amongst your guests twitch uncontrollably. Happy decorating and building!
My tips.. When decorating I use my veteran's reward billy doll to shrink myself when I need to be close to the ground or fit up close to the ceiling to get that "just right" angle for placing something when building. Also gnome boots help so you can bounce around and up onto perches for that purpose. I find the most versatile and useful things for placement are my teak and ash bookcases. They are perfectly smooth, can sink into one another's edges to form a long smooth wall when creating and placing things (think building a wall from paintings) Plus they also sink into walls and items.
My only tips... 1 - Never be afraid to try anything new or unusual. Just how do you think a lot of these neat decorating ideas started? 2 - Always be sure to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Often, you do some accidentally that winds up looking really good, but if you're too focused on an area, you won't notice it. It also helps to tie things in together, and focusing on one little section at a time can often make things look disjointed and spastic.
