Mod The Sims - How to make Walls, Floors, and Ground Cover (Beginning Creators Start Here!)

Mod The Sims (https://modthesims.info/index.php)

- Tutorials (https://modthesims.info/forumdisplay.php?f=754)

- - How to make Walls, Floors, and Ground Cover (Beginning Creators Start Here!) (https://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=147840)

thanks for this! hugs and kisses on their way to you!

Hey, that's a great tute. thanx a lot. i kinda knew how to do it but i had forgotten how to get my wall back into the Homecrafter - its the little things that stump me - but scanning thru your tute to find out how i read thru some of it. its really good. even i can follow it! and your wall is beautiful.

Problem loading into homecrafter

in my homecrafter when i tried to upload my creations into the program, (around step 5 or 6) I was naming it and giving it a price, but the part to the left where it shows the wallpaper looked blank. Is there a reason for this? i used the same starting pictures as you so i figured it would look the same as yours. i was using photoshop cs3... so idk if that has something to do with it. the same thing also happened when i tried to do my floor so i figured i might have messed something up.

any ideas?

I have a doubt.
What can i do to fix the problem with floors, when i make
a set, floors looks different than walls, and sometimes this
doesnt looks fine...
Any ideas?

Ima -- is your graphic a .bmp type file? Photoshop tends to put things in .psd format unless you specifically tell it otherwise.

Rahela -- As a builder, I find it extremely rare that exactly matching wallpapers and floors look good ... so rare I can't even remember a case.

My first guess is that you are not taking into account the aspect ratio of each. You can not use exactly the same graphic for walls and floors and have them come out looking the same because they have different 'shapes'. Homecrafter will stretch the graphic to fit the shape.

I've never tried to do this, but here is what I would try first, and then adapt depending upon how it looked ....

Start with the wall graphic. Make it 'just right' at 768 x 256. Save as a new file name and crop to 256 x 256 --- it has to be crop, not resize! You want to use only the bottom square of the wall graphic. Save as .bmp for your floor. (And your floor will need to be the 1x1 tile - the multiple ones will require additional figuring.)

Now go back to your wall file and resize to 512 x 256. Here it has to be resizing -- you want all of your wall scrunched into the 512x256 format. Save as .bmp.

Put them thru homecrafter and see how it comes out. Good luck!

It's also worth bearing in mind (beyond bluetexasbonnie's very useful tips) that walls and floors will just simply look slightly different, even if you use the exact same colours for both. There's something about the settings for them or something... you can see it in my examples too: http://www.***/images/t...utorialwn02.jpg

"I was actually a little surprised when I saw these together... the background of the walls seems a lot warmer than the more yellow border and floor, but after looking at it for a minute, I kinda liked it better than if I'd done it the uniform yellowish-beige I'd intended the whole thing to be, and eyeballed in the graphics programs I'd built it in. The background being warmer is a little more interesting."

Best, then, to -not- use identical images to start your floor and walls as they aren't going to match exactly anyway, and just intend them to roughly coordinate.

Just an addition to bluetexasbonnie's tips - if you do crop the bottom of the wall graphic, you need to make sure that what you crop is seamless - if it doesn't tile properly over multiple tiles, you may have to adjust things till it does - either by cropping at a different spot, or working to make it seamless, or choosing a different texture for your floor.

Well thanks both, i think i will have to
work harder in order to creat something
that looks fine.
Here is my example for you to see it

It really looks like Arrgghh!
But in ps looks fine...i think i will have to choose
different textures just to fit them.
Right?

Thank you so much for answers!

Yes, those two look bad together. You might try taking your flower graphic, shrinking it and turning it into tiles. Alternately, select one of the medium colors from the floral trim to make a modereately uniform carpet look.

The main wall coloring could use a little more work to make it truely seamless and more uniform, without being boring. (That is exceedingly hard! A solid color with a light application of a B&W texture pattern in the multiply mode often works nicely.)

Yeah as i told you i will have to work harder XD

Thanks!!

Great guide.I have Paint Shop Pro 7. Will that work?

I've never used Paint Shop, but there are a lot of wall/floor builders who do, and they make gorgeous things. Since the functions I'm talking about are fairly basic graphic functions, I would expect Paint Shop to have them.

hey, is there anyway you could send me the version you have there? i can't seem to do anything i want to with the one i have. it doesn't listen to me.

Quote: Originally posted by timbit2006

hey, is there anyway you could send me the version you have there? i can't seem to do anything i want to with the one i have. it doesn't listen to me.

nvm i got the experimental version. it's screwed up

Thank you very much! You are the best tutorial person ever! Now i am making my own custom textues so far i have 2 walls. i didn't download any of the textures or anything. I hate it how when you're making walls in paint.net it loooks crappy so you keep fixing it but when you look at in in homecrafter it looks so nice :D

Thank you so much for taking the time to put this tutorial in for us. I'm a newbie and I started playing Sims2 about a year ago and I had no idea you could make custom content for it until a week ago and I have been on this site every day since. I decided I wanted to start making my own custom content and share it with everyone when I get better at it but I had no idea where to start. This tutorial is very well laid out and is understandable and you did a wonderful job!

Augustsim

Quote: Originally posted by HystericalParoxysm

Testing Your Creations In-Game

Go ahead and load the game and go into your neighborhood of choice. Create yourself an empty lot to use for testing. I think I used a 2x2, but it doesn't really matter what size you use.

Enter the lot and put down some walls. Again, doesn't really matter where... Just make sure you're looking at the light side of the wall. The light on the lot comes from a certain direction, and if you're not looking at the correct side, the wall will look much darker and you won't be able to see your texture as well. Put down two or three sides of a box, like you're making a square room, and wallpaper the walls with your new wallpaper. It may not be the first thing in the catalog now, even if you have no other custom walls in your game. Cover the area of ground between the walls you made with your carpeting. Now take a look at your handiwork!

I was actually a little surprised when I saw these together... the background of the walls seems a lot warmer than the more yellow border and floor, but after looking at it for a minute, I kinda liked it better than if I'd done it the uniform yellowish-beige I'd intended the whole thing to be, and eyeballed in the graphics programs I'd built it in. The background being warmer is a little more interesting.

Somewhere on another part of the lot (you can get rid of the walls and floor if you need more space), use the raise terrain tool on the smallest setting and just... click randomly around a small area to make some craggy, uneven terrain. Then go in to the groundcovers and, still on the smallest setting, just lightly dust the tops of the rises in the terrain you just made with your new groundcover. Rotate around and tweak it to taste. The screenshot below is just some quick craggy terrain I threw together, the groundcover just assembled, a couple clicks with the water tool, and a couple trees. The larger areas of green are just the default green grass that I left here and there in the low spots.

If you don't like the result in-game...

You can go back and make changes! Remember, for anything with layers, you should've saved a layer-separated version... a .PSD if you're using Photoshop, or a .PDN if you're using Paint.NET. You can go back, open the file, and edit it to your liking. Save a new copy of the .bmp version, move it into the right Homecrafter folder, and make a new version of it.

Where are my creations located?

If you'd like to share your new creations (or if you'd like to delete an older version if you've made changes), you'll find the files you made residing in My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/Downloads. Unfortunately, Homecrafter doesn't make the file names very descriptive, beyond wall_, floor_, and terrainPaint_, ending with a string of characters, but since we only made three at once, it's pretty obvious which file is which. If you're doing more than a few at once, write down the order you made them in, and then sort the newly created files by Date Created... You can then rename the files in the same order as the order you created them in, and it should all match up. You can also open the files in SimPE and look at the Text List inside it to see which is which as long as their names or descriptions you gave them are different, but that's for more advanced users (i.e. anyone who knows what I'm talking about with that one sentence of instructions).

Rename your files to something much more descriptive. For example, I would name a floor I created:

F_Carpet-ImperialEggshell_HystericalParoxysm-DemusedSims.package

You don't necessarily have to get that specific, but it is VERY helpful, both as a creator and a downloader, to be able to tell what a file is and how to track down the creator at a glance.

Sharing Your Creations

If you've created a particularly nice set of walls, floors, or groundcovers that you would like to share with the community, that's great!

A great help to beginning creators is the Creator Feedback Forum here at MTS2. There you can post pictures of your works in progress and get pointers from experienced creators and downloaders on how to improve. It's a great way to get lots of helpful tips and info, and it's strongly suggested that beginners make use of that forum before uploading. Just make sure you read the rules for that forum first.

Once you've decided your creations are ready to be released to the world, check out the Creator Guidelines for info on what you'll need to upload your walls, floors, or ground covers, and RAR or ZIP your .package files. A guide to things you can do to take better screenshots is available here. It is strongly recommended that you take screenshots for your creations by using the Print Screen key on your keyboard to put a copy of your current screen on the clipboard. Then you can paste the image into Photoshop, Paint.NET, or even MS Paint to crop it and save it as a JPEG. This method is greatly preferrable to using the C key to take pictures using the game's camera, which tends to take much smaller pictures with a lot of JPEG compression (crunchiness). If you're not running in windowed mode, it can be hard to switch programs, so if you'd like to set that up, it's very easily done by these instructions.

What to make after walls, floors, and groundcover?

Starting with walls and floors gets you used to texturing on the game's scale and looking for seamlessness in your textures, without having to worry about your texture being stretched or distorted over a mesh. Once you've become very skilled and confident in creating walls and floors, and have done a lot more to make interesting effects than the very simple techniques shown here, you may be ready to move on to something more.

If you're pretty good with computers and don't mind something a little more complicated, you can graduate from walls, floors, and groundcover to doing simple object recolours like paintings and furniture.

Alternately, as it doesn't require the use of SimPE, recolouring clothing in Body Shop is relatively easy, and very well explained starting with the first in a series of great tutorials on the subject.

If you have questions or are having trouble...

First, go back and re-read everything very carefully and look at the screenshots. 90% of problems are usually due to having missed a step, done something incorrectly, or trying to skip ahead. If you're truly an absolute beginner, it's highly suggested that you do the tutorial using the same source images I did, so every step you do will be exactly the same, and so you can compare your work to my screenshots. If you're having trouble with something in the graphics program you're using, try its help file. Most graphics programs also have forums on their official sites full of useful information.

If you're still having trouble, you can ask your question here. Please make sure you include what -exactly- you are stuck on (what step of what part) and what program you're using. Screenshots are also helpful, if applicable to your problem. "I don't get it," is a question that can't be answered, and won't help anyone, especially you. Ask a specific question about a specific problem after going through the whole tutorial carefully.

can we make different colors of that one wall and floor?

Thanks so much for this. I just got the game recently and I've been going through the site and learning so much, just created my first wall/floor.

OHJ - Of course you can. You'd just want to make a new project and replace the .bmp it makes for it with one from your layer separated documents. I wouldn't suggest cloning the existing project and recolouring that, as that will degrade your textures, but recolours are easy.

Quote: Originally posted by HystericalParoxysm

is it just like recoloring objects? how do we package them all together as a set of walls or floors of different textures , because I saw that it's not a zip or rar file it's the package installer type

Hi HP.
I did a wood wall with bottom border, I like how it looks except for the seam where the two tiles meet. How can I fix it?

http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/9144/image1ic3.jpg

Look at it in game before you actually decide whether it needs fixing or not. The view on the left in homecrafter currently has "grid" on. That dark line is not actually part of the file and will not be in the ingame view. Even if you turn it off, you still need to look at it in game. Some can look bad here and look okay ... though more often they look okay here and look disgusting when you fill a room with them.

You really need to judge ingame.

Bonnie is right,turn the grid off and the lines disappear.
To get a seamless wall,in your graphics program go to Effects/Image Effect/Seamless Tiling.
Your walls will be seamless,that applies to floors as well.
it's always good to check in game first.
You package each wall and floor seperate in Homecrafter,then do a folder,give it a name
of your set.
Put them all together in that folder and just .rar or .zip it.
Sorry,turn it into a rar or zip file.

it looks seamless in game, appreciate your help thanks again

Hi- I've tried searching extensively but couldn't find the information I need. I am working in Photoshop CS3, and am having trouble making my moldings uniformly white without losing a lot of detail. All the methods I use take an inordinate amount of time, are not that accurate (dodging, for instance) and very time consuming (using the raster lines to correct line by line.) any suggestions? I just want my moldings a nice even white so they'll be seamless.