Alright, I am tyring to recolor a custom mesh. I dont understand what to do because nothing is the same after step one. Like when i click next it says something about its complete or somerthing, no pics or anything comes up its really frustrating me!

Shniveshnive, you have to click on "plugin view"...look at the bottom of your screen....then you'll see..!!!

Rosemary :0)

Rainncandy,

Say, a 512 x 512 texture gets blurry in game, then you may try with 1024 x 1024, 2048 x 2048 ones. The file size may be big then, but you may try the build-in compression to see if that helps reduce the size desirably to your want.
http://www.modthesims2.com/member/s...847&postcount=5

Only UVmapper PRO gives a preview of the mapping; but you can preview the final result in SimPe, anyway.

I have two suggestions:

1) in Photoshop, shrink the image horizontally by 68% (I've calculated this ratio looking at your screenshots, it should be accurate, more or less).
2) when importing the texture into SimPE using the "Build DXT" function, use the "Sharpen" selector to set SharpenSoft, SharpenMedium or SharpenMore.

That's what I have - UV Mapper Pro. I'm able to preview my bed and rug that I'm recoloring. I finally got them to look totally clear in the game. UP Mapper helped me out big time.

I think I know what to do about my paintings now. Thanks for your suggestions, Numenor. I will be sure to try them.

shniveshnive: to make a recolor for a custom mesh you DON'T click on the "Start" button.
You must click on the "Open" button, search where is the custom file, select it to open and than choose the option recolour.

Niol: my apologies, hope you are joking...... make a 2048x2048 texture?????
Again, sorry, but this is "absurd"
A common mistake its to think that a big texture means hight quality: this is not true.
We don't need a big texture to get a hight quality one!
To get a good texture first of all we need a good mapping of our mesh: if some face are to stretched or to compressed we can't have an accurate texture also with a big size.
Second we need to make an accurate texture with our 2d editor in the real size we want: if we make a big texture and then we reduce it with the graphic editor often we lose more details about it and also the right saturation and contrast.
Finally we have to build it with the DDSutilities in the right format with the right effects to preserve its quality.
If the mesh is not ours, there are really a bit things we can make to get a better texture. We can only try to re-draw the design to make it more slight or more wide , increase the contrast and the saturation so when it will be draft on the mesh it would be look less stretched or compressed.

Rainncandy, if the mesh is yours, the first thing to do is to make a better mapping of the canopy and of the painting : they are too stretched and the texture will be deformed.Then try to build the texture with the DXT3format and a SharpenSoft effect.
For the painting you can make a 218x512 texture............ is more than enough.
For the bed and the canopy I'd make a 512x512 one.
If you have UVmap PRO, make a new mapping and save the template with the right size (the size you want) and use them as base for your texture.

If you change the size of the "original" texture, and build it with the DDSutilities, don't worry: the size will be automatically edit in yours.

Niol: sorry again, but it's so frustrating to see big texture, that the only real effect is to increase the size of the file, when it's not needed .........

That tells you how much I know about mapping ...

Jokes apart :D, I only knew the texture was magnified from the first pic. I didn't know if she was doing recolouring on her own meshes or others', nor the scale she wants. So, I just suggested to double the texture size to hopefully get it closer. Then, the pics after my previous post obviously shows the ratio issue even the size might have been increased. Since that's stated already, I knew there's nothing more for me to say.

After all, thank you for the mapping lesson before my trial and errors ...

I had made an animated floor tile for my only featured lot. But, I used 1024x1024 for that tile :D, so I compressed it down to about 300kb.
What's more?
The tile scale is 32 x 32, namely 1/4 of a lot page .
Note: unmodded typical HCP tile are 1x1, 2x2, 5x5 while certain in-game tiles are 3x3, 4x4 as well.
I've planed to make all-in-one floor tile for a whole lot . 2048x2048 may be necessary? What do you think?

I've downloaded and installed CPE, DDS Utilities and SimPE but when I get to the Extra --> Preferences stage, I can't locate DDS Utilities. Furthermore, below the NVidia DDS Tool Folder Bar in the "Preferences" menu, it says (before I even try to browse for DDS Utilities) "Nvidia DDS Utilities were not found. Download them here." I've tried redownloading DDS but nothing has happened. Could you help me figure out what is going on? Thank you.

i have this same problem, and i did exactly what you did, lol, and you know what ?
I can recolor, and clone...just the same....seems that for me it dosen't change anything...

Rosemary :0)

First of all thank you for this tutorial. It has taught me a little more about how recoloring works and demystified those .package files. I have one question though, if the Subset selection doesn't come up when one tries to recolor an object with just one texture, how do you recolor an object with just one texture. I've tried to recolor the Ambulance, but in the Resource Tree only a black cube icon with a question mark that says "AllRes (0)" next to it shows. Any suggestions?

BlueBerry11,

Have you installed the DDS tools yet?

I installed DDS Utilities. Is there a difference? Are there extras that I need?

Never mind. I've got it working. Thank you.

BlueBerry11,

Congratulations

When you compress a file, does it make the object less quality ingame?

Hi Rainncandy,

1. The TS2 compression shouldn't degrade the textural quality like any other "lossless" compression formats like "zip", "rar" or alike. So, the texutre may just get compressed down to generally about 70-80% of its original size. Monotonous textures get more compressed and invisible textures gets compressed down to less than 1kb. Dependent on the types of the object, invisible recolours can be tricky that the texture file (txtr) and/or the txmt file may be necessary as in the driveway recolouring.
But for repository objects, reserving the txtr file or at least the txmt file should be a safer approach not to accidentally create a blue flashing recolour for related objects.
BTW, a procedure for it:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=132612

2. /as for if one has to compress files in a package file:

In my opinion based on my experiences about second compression on the pacakage files, those packages with in-game compression will result in file sizes larger than those packages without in-game compression will.
Note: the first compression is about the in-game compression on the files in the TS2 package files for game-play while the second compression is the compression of the package files for storage, sharing, etc.

So, it can depend on whether one wanna save the space for game-play or storage.
Yet in the case of invisible driveway-recolouring, the empty/"invisible" texture can be compressed down to <1kb from >1Mb while the resultant compressed package can still be well compressed by the second compression like zip , rar or else. I'd say the in-game compression worths it.
On the another hand, a hard-to-well-compressed texture won't save the package a considerable space (~100kb in my personal expectation) with the in-game compression. Why would one waste the effort or even make the second compression suffers from a much worse compressibility due to that?

The above is just my present personal comment on the need to use in-game compression on files in a package.

So, Imade everything you said, and the recolor is pixelated in the game! How should I kill that pixelation?
Here's the pic if you want. http://i126.photobucket.com/albums/...89/98brownb.png
(I'm talking about the poster )

This tutorial is to show how recolouring can be done. It doesn't guarantee undesirable results probably due to stretchy mapping as Marylou discussed a few posts up.

evanesco,
If you feel like to fix stretchy mapping when that's the case, repair centre may provide more relevant helps.
BTW, have you tried the fileter as none, blur, sharpened, etc?

Hopefully, someone more experienced in texturing will give you better suggestions.

Having Problems!
 

Well, when I tried to start a recolor, and I hit the Start button, it totally crashed! Anyone know why? Please PLEASE PM me! I really want to start to recolor things, but I can't! Please!!!

Rippleclaw,

Any more infos like:
1. Which Maxis object you're trying to recolour (probably including a link to freely download, sorry a pay object can be inaccessible to those who may help here. ) ?
2. Are you using the latest simpe but with EP6 BV which is still NOT supported by simpe yet??
3. Have you scanned for broken custom contents by some scanning tools?
4. Is your game copy corrupted in the first place?
etc...

Could someone please point me at a tutorial that explains how to make a non-recolorable custom object, recolorable? Thanks.

AmberDiceless,

The tutorials are just right below the stickies of this sub-forum. is it that you're unfamiliar with the terms?

A Guide for quick creation of Colour-Enabled Objects
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=52499

Tutorial: Adding a subset to an object (and making it recolorable)
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=103379

Thanks for the tutorial. I had a go at my first recolour today of a custom object (Inge Jone's small versions of Merola's painting). It worked, kind of. I couldn't get the DDS thing to work so I used the 'import' button in SimPE (I'm a simPE novice btw) and the need-fulfilling paintings do show up, but when I zoom out, and as a thumbnail in the buy catalogue, they still show the original textures.





Could someone help? Preferably using idiot speak...

I have Seasons
I'm using corel PsP 10 and SimPE 0.62.1

Scratch that. Just realised I hadn't resized for the smaller views. Now have to suss out how to do that!

I have a bit of a problem cause when i got to the part where to right click on the image and click build DXT it was in gray and couldnt click it. And i installed the program for it but how to i make it clickable? (sorry im a total and complete idiot :P)

Mine is like that, I just used the import button and it worked well enough. Managed the resizing thing too and now have my first recolours in the game!