What's the suggested storey height?

[cogeo]

I know this has been asked hundreds of times, but I have the impression that there are... hundreds of answers too!

Some say 3.5m, some 4.0, some others even 4.5 or more! And there's that "suggestion" of "stretching" the model vertically by 20-30%! To my opinion this is not only vague, it's too much as well. If you make your storeys 4.5m tall and stretch them by 20%, you end-up at about 5.5m, which would make them way too tall, I'm afraid.

I'm rather leaning towards adopting some 6.0m for the lobby, and some 4.0m (or even 3.5m) for the storeys, with NO further "stretching", ie these should be the "final" dimensions.

More particularly, if you have made W2W BATs, please tell me what are the dimensions you have chosen, and how do you feel they fare ingame (eg have you instead wished making them a little taller or shorter?).

I would listen to your opinions or suggestions with great interest.

[metarvo]

Personally, I'm under the impression that 4.0m should be used for most story heights, with 5.0 or higher used for select commercial or industrial buildings with high ceilings (big box stores, warehouses, etc.).  So far, the BATs that I've succesfully completed are power line related and therefore the story height is not applicable to them.  However, I have gotten generally good results by modeling them to their approximate RL heights and scaling them up by 33%.  This helps to avoid the "BAT squash."  It might not work for every building, but it's a general rule that I follow.  The thing is, SC4 in pure Maxis vanilla form doesn't keep scale with itself, so it can be rather difficult to try to compromise between RL scale and SC4 scale.

[jmyers2043]

My rule of thumb for a commercial building? Each floor is 5 meters. That is from the second floor up. I make my ground floors 7.5 to 10 meters depending on the building style.  The ground floors of European buildings tend to be shorter so a 5 or 6 meter ground floor would be more appropriate. 

<edit>
I remember doing some 1 story CS$$ sandwich shops. Deadwoods commented in the BSC threads that they looked nice but a bit squashed. I knew they weren't squashed based on actual floor height in meters. But he apparantly thought so. I continued to use them in my game. After 4 weeks it dawned on me that the answer was to make the buildings more narrow. So I scaled them from 15.95 meters wide to 13 meters and that made all the difference and the buildings looked taller.
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<Edit Two>
Just did a check. Bobs Greae Pit is 9 meters, The Taco stand is 6 meters tall, that blue CS$$$ Euro Luxury store is 8 metes tall. Dempesys Diner is 10 meters tall but that is because of the art deco facade at the front entrance.
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I've only done a few multi story buildings and did some comparison before I got too far along. My 10 story building was as tall as a Maxis 9 story building and also as tall as another Maxis 11 story building. So there is some wiggle room.

BTW – 5 meters is a great round number when you want to array the floors upwards.

I recently did some R$ homes. The typical floor is 4.5 meters. That compared favorably with Maxis homes, those done by Cycledog, and most R$ that SimGoober made. But a 4.5 commercial building will look squashed next to other commercials. Obviously, my opinion only. 

The ingame Sim is just a smidgen under 4 meters. So keep that in mind when you can't make comparisons of your bat to other game assets. 

I do a lot of farm buildings. A barn (like an industrial) can be many heights. What I try to do in those cases is to keep the door height where I think is acceptable. A barn door will be 6 meters high. A front door of a factory where the office staff and public enters would be 5 meters. But a rear door where a worker might take a smoke break will be 4.5 meters. This is where knowledge of a Sim comes in handy. Place a Sim who is standing near a rear door and the 4.5 meter door height makes sense. 

I usually have to scale the building a bit after I'm done. Most often so that my building will fall within lotting parameters – such as to shorten it from 17 to 16 meters so it fits on a 16 meter wide lot. I generally think the less one has to scale a building the better off you are.

About the best word I can give is this. . .  I wanted to build a couple of industrial buildings to compete the Maxis MPR Metals. I used the Reader (Xtool wasn't around back then) to determine the dimensions of the MPR building. That gave me a starting point. Before I did my R$ homes I used the tool to find the LOD heights of Maxis, SimGoober, and Cycledog homes that I wanted to provide in game alternatives to.