Tutorial: How to make simple landscaping in Sims 3

Hi everyone.

This is my first building tutorial. It's about making your Sims homes, or well, their yards, look nicer.

Here is a house I built just for this tutorial. You can see it looks a little dull in the middle of all that boring green grass.

I added some low fencing to mark my decorative flowerbeds, and painted some lighter dirt in there. I also painted the whole under of the house with light dirt, made it so that a tiny line of dirt shows outside the house. (This was an idea I "stole" from #create in MTS. I think it was HystericalParoxysm who mentioned it there originally)

Next I put a fence around the whole lot, painted a walkway, planted 2 trees and made a little pond.

Trees need some life under them, I like to think that there lives a squrrel in my trees, who drops all kinds of bits and pieces of tree under it, and of course there are dead leaves and stuff like that, so I paint some light and dark treechunk under the trees. (I have no idea what they are in english, they are in the misc. terrainpaints I think)

Then I take the biggest round painting tool, set it to softest (all the way to the right) and take 'autumn grass' (1st grass). I do some clicks around the tree so that the dark stuff blends in the grass.

Then I start to work on with the flowerbed. First I open cheatbox (Shift+Ctrl+C) and type in 'moveobjects on'. Then I go to flowers and select the blue flower. (Not using any names cause I don't know them in english). You may have noticed that there are many sizes of one type off flower. I re-select the blue flower until I get the smaller one. Then I place some of those in the marked area. I hold ALT to place them where I want, not to the grid, and I also rotate them with holding ALT so that they are not all the same way.

Then I did the same with pink flowers. This time I didn't care for the size, I just place some to the spots that looked right to me.

And same with the yellow flowers.

Next I filled the big empty spots with darker green bushes.

But oh-oh... There are still holes in the flowerbeds. I planted some tiny blue flowers there.

Cause I like to have some variety in colors I planted some white ones too.

To the rest of the empty spots I put some leaves.

That's all I did to the flowerbed. 

Next I started on working with the pond. I painted it all with the pond paint, found in the misc. paints.

Then I took the middle sized round painting tool, put it to softest and put on some darker sand around the pond.

Next I started on planting plants. First I put in some of these. (Still using ALT when placing)

Then I added some pink flowers.

And some yellow ones...

Aaaand some blue ones...

Few dark green bushes...

Little blue and white flowers...

Then finally, some leaves to fill the gaps. I put them the the waterline too.

Then I added those water plants. 

Then I went back to painting tools, painted the unders of bushes and flowers with lighter dirt, and blended the sandy parts with 'autumn grass' ( middle sized brush, set to softest)

All done, and I now have a pretty house I can delete cause this tutorial is now over. Hope you found it useful :)

P.s. Sorry that I was lazy and didn't hide the grid lines in every picture.....