Smoke floating over bare roofs: bringing the chimneys back

Walking around the village, I noticed most houses had smoke rising from their roofs with no chimney. I had to either add chimneys or remove the smoke. Back in 137 I'd cleaned up the house interiors by deleting all the furniture and indoor lights, and I wanted to keep that cleanup.

What I built

This is how it looked before the fix. Smoke was just floating above the roof with no chimney.

I restored the chimneys as in the pack's original design, so now the smoke comes out of the top of a chimney. The interior cleanup now keeps the flues and chimney tops and deletes the furniture and indoor fireplaces. Indoor lights and sound zones still get deleted as before.

There are 15 chimney tops and 15 smoke effects, so they pair up. The 4 houses without chimneys never had smoke in the first place. In all 15 spots the smoke sits within 0.1 m of the chimney top, and there are 0 leftover furniture pieces or house lights, so the 137 state is preserved too.

Things I thought about

• Brought back the chimneys instead of removing the smoke. In the original pack, the smoke sits almost exactly at the chimney top (on one house the chimney top is at 10.12 and the smoke at 10.11). They were made as a pair, so putting the chimneys back seemed like the right call.

Rabbit hole: the chimneys were inside the interior group

In SUNTAIL houses, the chimney isn't part of the roof model. It's inside the second-floor interior group. Two or three flue segments stack on top of the indoor fireplace, and the chimney top at the very end pokes out through the roof. When I deleted the whole interior group in 137, the chimneys went with it.

After changing the deletion rule, I reverted the 40 interior deletion settings across 19 houses in the current scene and deleted again with the new rule (1,343 objects deleted).