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Wallpaper and Floor Recoloring

Posted on by leosims

Hi again with a new tutorial. This time we will see how to make our own wall papers and floors. This will also be an easy one so dont worry.
Wallpapers and floors are the most important parts if you like decorating houses.They can make a really good decorated house look beautiful or ugly. But i think for most of us, options which are offered by EA are the not enough. At least for me. I am always in need for more 🙂 So lets start with what you will need for this;

  • Sims 4 Studio
  • 2 d Editor Program ( Gimp ,Photoshop, Paint or etc.. you can work with the program you want )

We will start with wallpapers, and later you will see for doing floors we do same procedures only with a few differences.

1- Open sims 4 Studio and write your creator name

2- Under the build menu, select wall and hit on build

3 – Select the wall  you want to recolor ( better select it according to the type, i mean choose a plain wall if you will do a plain wall paper with out trims ) and hit next

4 – A box will be opened, write your new wall paper package name and save

5- When it is opened, you will see the catalog menu. Here you can change the name, description and the price of your wall as you want

6- Now go on texture menu, just near the catalog tab

7- You will see three sizes short, medium and tall. These are the wall heights of EA. We will export all these 3 textures. You can do it by one by with the export button or can use , ” export all ” button. Dont forget to name them as short, medium and tall when saving, so you will know which one is what when recoloring.

8 – Now open your 2 d photo editor program. And do your recoloring for each wall sizes. Here are are sizes for all walls ;

  • Tall Walls  – 256 x 1024
  • Medium Walls   – 256 x 512
  • Short Walls – 256 x 512

If you dont work with right sizes, you will see question mark instead of your texture in the game and they wont show up.

9- When you finish your recolorings, save each file as .png

10- Go back to sims 4 studio, and import all new recolors according to the sizes.

11- Arrange your swatch tumbnail colors as we learned at previous tutorial of recoloring.

12- Just near the texture tab, click on the  tags menu. Here you can change existing tags according to your new walls such as color and wall paper type

13- Save your file and put it in the Documents > Electronic Arts > The Sims 4 > Mods folder and you can test your new walls in your game

Floors

Everything you do with wall papers is also in use with floors. Just choose floor under the build menu if you want to recolor a floor and hit the build button.

Only the difference is the size for floors is 512 x 512. And you will see three textures here  diffuse, normal and specular. You will export all these 3 images and do your recolor. Everything else is same with above

I hope this tutorial will be helpful for those who wants to create own walls and floors. If you need help or have any questions, please dont hesitate to ask. I will do my best to help.

Recoloring Tutorial

Posted on by leosims

Hi everyone. Today wanted to write out something that may take your attention for creating your own custom content objects. I promiss it will be really easy and fun to work with. You dont need to be a mesh creator for this or maybe you will be in the future, who knows. But i think this will be a good start.

In this tutorial, we will see how to do a basic recoloring with sims 4 studio. Also you need a 2d photo editor program to do your recolor. You can use paint, photoshop or another program you want, it does not matter. I recommed you to start with a painting or a rug, if it is your first try. Because since other furnitures such as chairs, tables or other clutter items need multipliers  to have shadows and look more realistic in game ( we will also learn how to get multiplier of an item in the next articles ) , you will also need blender program to get it. So, i will write everything step by step, lets start;

What You Need
Sims 4 Studio – you will find the latest version at sims4studio.com
2d editor ( Paint, Photoshop, Gimp etc… )

1- Open Sims 4 Studio, under the object menu; select standalone recolor

2- Write your name at Creator Name and click on object menu

3- Choose the item you want to recolor from the menu ( If you want to recolor a custom content mesh, you first need to put the mesh file in sims 4 Studio Mods folder ) and hit next. A box will be opened, write your item’s name there and save your package file. Its better if you make a special folder on your desktop for this and save all files there to find it easily when you finish.

4- When it is opened, under catalog on the right side, you will see name, description and price tabs. You can change these as you want.

5- Click on the texture menu, next to the catalog. You will see the export button near the texture. Hit that to export your texture.

6 – Open that texture in your 2 d photo editor program and do your recolor.

7 – When you finish, save the new file as .dds or . png

8- Now go back to sims 4 studio, under the export button you will see import. This time hit import button, choose the new recolor you made. You will see the mesh is changed with your recolor.

9 – Just above, there is a menu called ” swatch tumbnail colors ”. It helps you to find the desired recolor easily in the game. You can choose up to 3 colors here to define your swatch. When you right click with your mouse, the eyedropper tool will be activated. And you can choose your colors with this , just by clicking on the color you want on your new recolor. Repeat this for all the swatches you made. And of course dont forget to import the new recolor for each swatch if there is more than one.

10 – When you finish, you will see ” save ” at right bottom. Hit save and you can close sims 4 studio.

11- Take the new package from where you saved and put it in Documents > Electronic Arts > The Sims 4 > Mods folder. And you can test in in your game with the name you gave it.

Never forget EA doesnt support custom contents, so use them on your own risk.
I hope this tutorial will be helpful to those, who wants to get start with custom content creating. I will always be glad to help, so if you need help or have any questions, please dont hesitate to ask. I will do my best to help.

Blender Short Cuts

Posted on by leosims

It seems to be a very complicated program at first. I also remember i thought i would never learn this program when i first downloaded it. Deleted and downloaded it back again so many times. But if you are working with custom content for sims, even only recoloring, you need some basic information and knowledge about blender.You know we need Uv maps and multipliers etc… And belive me it is not that hard. In the event, you dont have to know everything or be a blender pro. You will find some short cuts that can be useful while using it, in this article. Before starting you need blender 2.70 version to be compatible with sims 4 studio since the latest version is not compatible yet. So, lets start;

Shift + F5 – allows you to see your mesh in 3d view
Ctrl + Right click on your mouse – makes you go to the next screen
Ctrl + Left click on your mouse – makes you go to the previous screen
Space – opens the tool box
Tab – you can go in and out from edit mode with this short cut. Another way for this is ALT + E combination
F1 – opens file browser window, allowing you choose the file you want to open
F2 – opens file browser window, allowing you to save your active blend file
Ctrl + Q – brings the menu that asks if you want to quit blender or not
Ctrl + Z – undo last operation
Ctrl + Y – redo last operation
Shift + D – allows you to copy the selected mesh or mesh parts. After copying the mesh, ” G ”, grab mode will be activated, allowing you to choose a new location for the copied mesh.
G – move tool – After selecting the mesh, hit ” G ” and you can move the object. Here you can use x,y,z axis just after hitting ” g ” , to limit the movement on the desired route
R – rotate tool. After selecting your mesh, with hitting ” R ” on your keyboard, you can rotate it. Here you can use x,y,z axis just after hitting ” r ” to limit the rotation on the desired route.
S – size tool. After selecting your mesh , with ” S ” button on your keyboard and moving your mouse, you can resize your object. Again if you want to limit the sizing on a certain route, you can use x,y,z axis.
A – selects or unselects all
Ctrl + B – opens bake menu ( it is very important for us since we need the multiplier for recoloring our meshes )
Alt + G – clears mesh location
Ctrl + J – joins selected mesh parts into one mesh
V – allows you to go in out from vertex paint mode ( we will see how to use it for lights, to light properly in game later)
X – opens the menu that asks if you want to delete the selected mesh or mesh parts
Z – opens solid mode
Alt + Z – opens or closes textured mode
H – Hides selected mesh or mesh parts
Ctrl + H – Brings back hided mesh or mesh parts
Shift – H – Hides unselected mesh or mesh parts
Ctrl + Tab – allows you to switch between vertex , face and edge select modes.
Ctrl + N – calculate normals outside
Shift + Ctrl + N – calculate normals inside
Shift + Ctrl + F3 – allows you to save the whole blender window as an image
Ctrl + O – brings the menu that shows the latest saved blend files to choose and open one
Num + – zoom in
Num – zoom out
Num 7 – allows to see your mesh from top view
Ctrl + A – Its makes the changes permanent that you made in object mode such as rotations and sizing..
Shift + A – brings the menu to add a new mesh

I hope this basic information will be helpful to those who want to get start with dealing blender. I know my english in not perfect and there may be some translate problems. Sorry for this. I find some tutorials very hard to understand, maybe because of my english or maybe the manner it is written so I will be working on more articles and tutorials to show basic prodecures in a simple manner.