Adding Water Layers to a world in CAW
The reason : There is no tool to create ponds above sea level in CAW unless you create a lot and do it via EIG.
What this isn't about : You need prior knowledge of CAW, Photo Editors like GIMP, S3PE and preferably a Hex Editor. You can find a more detailed picture tutorial in the References section.
What you'll need :
Go to this post, download and extract the contents of the 707.rar to your working directory - assuming you already have a working directory for the resources for your world.
Download Water Layer_Twinbrook.7z from this post and only extract the file that says "S3_707CA200_00000000_0000000000000000%%+UNKN.bnry" The other file that starts with "S3_90624C1B..." is unique to your world and you'll extract it from your own world.
Hex Editor of your choice. I use HxD, it's free, easy and used in the tutorials that I'll link as references.
An image editor like GIMP, Photoshop etc. This might be optional depending on how you choose to get your coordinates of your water planes.
References : This text tutorial and this picture tutorial. Zaide_Chris' Web tool in the 1st tutorial doesn't work anymore and it can be a little bit difficult to get into at first. I actually had to reread it a few times. The second tutorial is too long and there are few unnecessary steps. So I decided to make a quick, easy and updated tutorial to make it more available and less scattered around. Before we start though, make a BACKUP of your world and keep it in a safe place. I was surprised to see how easy and straight-forward it is to add water planes to a world once I tried it.
-Let's Start-
Start with deciding how many water layers/planes you want in your world. If you want more than one then you need multiple .bnry files that starts with 707... Just copy the one you extracted and paste it in the same directory. Depending on your OS it will either create a copy of the original file adding the word 'copy' somewhere in the file's name or ask whether you want to overwrite or to rename. In either case you need to rename your copied file exactly as follows: “S3_707CA200_00000000_0000000000000001%%+UNKN.bnry” Notice the last digit of the instance (right before %%) is now 1 and not 0. You need to do that for every other extra water plane you want to have. So, starting with 0 it continues as 1,2,3... etc. in hexadecimal counting.
Decide where you want to put your water planes. You'll need two X values, two Z values and one Y value as the height of the water. Obviously you need this lower than your ground level. Open your world in CAW and decide the location and the size of the water plane. Easy way to decide is to get a paint layer with square brush and paint the exact place and size of your water plane. These planes are like square sheets of water so you need a distinctive, square-shaped paint. You can sculpt the area inside this square only. So get a bigger square than the size of your desired pond. After painting is done, you can put objects in opposite diagonal corners of the square to get the coordinates. But I like to get it in GIMP. You may skip to 3rd step if you prefer to do it in CAW. If you choose to do it in GIMP etc, right click on your paint layer that you used and export it to your working directory. This will be a black and white png image showing where you put your paint in your world, white parts being your painted areas. When you open that png file in your photo editor, you can get the coordinates of the square the same way. You only need the X and Z values of two opposing diagonal corners. Like upper left corner would be X1 and Z1 and lower right corner would be X2 and Z2. If you get your mouse over those two corners in GIMP you'll see two numbers in the lower left part of the status bar of GIMP. First number is X, second is Z. Now you have your coordinates! Don't worry about the ugly square paint. You can easily edit the png file and import it back or delete the paint layer if you haven't used it anywhere else in your world.
Open 707Gen.html in your browser. Smaller X number would be X1 and same for the Z1; Altitude is Y. Enter the X, Y, and Z values. For opacity I use 35 or so. Honestly anywhere between 35-55 is fine. It's just preference. "Force 1 Tile" needs to be checked if difference between X2 and X1 is lower than 32 or so. This is all for this tool. Now hit Create Hex. Click ok on popup window and you will see the hex code for your water plane. Copy it to notepad or so. Repeat this for other water planes you want to add - obviously with different coordinates.
Open your hex editor. Open the “S3_707CA200_00000000_0000000000000000%%+UNKN.bnry” file. Replace the hex code with the code you get in the 3rd step. In HxD click anywhere in the code then hit Ctrl+A to select it and Ctrl+B to paste your own code. Obviously your hex code needs to be the last thing you copied to your clipboard. Save. Repeat this with other water planes you want to add by opening other files with different instance numbers you made earlier.
Now you need to extract the "S3_90624C1B..." file from your world and edit in the hex editor to reflect how many water planes you have in your world. Start S3PE and open your world that's in ".../My Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3 Create A World Tool/UserToolData/Worlds/". Easy way to find the file you want is to use the filter below the main screen in S3PE. Make sure the checkboxes near Filter and Resource Type are checked then type exactly 0x90624C1B in the Resource Type box and hit Set. There should be only one file visible, Export > To file as it is. Now you have your own "S3_90624C1B_00000000_0000000000000001%%+UNKN.bnry"
Open that file in your hex editor. Here is a picture of the byte you need to change and a detailed explanation. It's the second row and third column. It should be 00 before change since you don't have any water planes yet. Change it to the number of planes you want to add: 01 if only one; 02 if two etc. Note that the counting is not decimal but hexadecimal so if you have more than 9 planes you need to make sure you're using hexadecimal counting/numbering. The same goes for the instance numbers you change.
With your world still open in S3PE > Resource > Import > From file > and select all the .bnry files you have edited. Make sure the extensions are not .bnry.bak but .bnry since .bak files are just backup files created in case you regret your changes. That's it.
Open CAW and see if your water planes are there.
You can see my results in this post if you like. I originally planned it to be shorter but then felt obliged to add more explanations and... anyways, I hope this would be useful to anyone who needs it.