Waddesdon Manor - Chateau Roofing

From my last post you know that I'm trying to recreate the big English estate called Waddesdon Manor. If you know of the place you probably are wondering whether or not I'm insane, but I assure you my craziness only extends as far as the Sims. To continue my WIP presentation, I would like to show a few quasi-tutorials on how to create the roof designs used with the lot so for this post I'll go over the chateau-type roof.

One of the more common elements of many French chateaus and buildings in the chateauesqe style is the mansard roof named after its creator Francios Mansart , a 17th century architect. The mansard roof is a type of hipped roof that slopes steeply from the bottom and then transitions to a shallow slope above. The image below shows you what I'm talking about. The term "hipped" refers to roofing that slopes downward on all sides in comparison to a gabled roof design which has at least one vertical edge. A big reason this type of roof construction became popular was that it allowed for much more living space on the top floor of a building where natural lighting was provided by multiple dormers.

If you look at the two images below you can see in game examples of mansard roofing used in my Waddesdon build. Ok, so you might be a bit confused by the images and what I'm saying. I admit that the main roof section in the center isn't exactly a textbook mansard roof. As you can see the roof slope starts off shallow then gets steep and there is no roofing on the very top only flooring seen in the second image. This is a variation on the mansard design that is used in the real version of the house. However, just to the right you can see a good example of typical mansard roof design. I'll give a short explanation of how I created the chateau variation of the mansard roof.

If you weren't aware, the game even has a roof tool called mansard so making that type of roof should be easy right?  BUT as you can see from the first image below the slope is way too shallow compared to the traditional mansard seen on many older buildings like Waddesdon. You can get around this, but it takes a bit more work on your part. Take a look at the next image below to see an example of how I go about it. What I did is create another floor that's moved 1 tile inward from the outer edge of the floors below. Then I used the tool called "half-hipped roofing" and created roofing all around this room. Simply raise the pitch of the roof until the top edge of the roof meets the top of the room. As you can see in the 3rd and 4th images, you have the option of placing floor tile or if you're a traditionalist go with hipped roofing with a shallower pitch.

So that's a typical mansard roof. I did promise to show how to make that chateau style, although since the initial steps are basically the same I started with a simple mansard. To create the chateau design seen in the 2nd image I posted above, I made a room 2 tiles inward from the edge of the lower floors and 2 stories tall compared to only one. I again used the half-hipped roofing tool to surround the room and raised the pitch to meet the top of the room. You can see how the slope is much more steep.

I'll save how to add that shallow bottom portion of the roof for my next post that will go over a useful trick: roof stacking.