Love the tutorial ella. I have meshed a few things for TS2 although I only uploaded one. I seem to be having a problem with some of the textures. I got the three out of S3PE but cannot seem to find the dropshadow image anywhere. I have reread the image sections of the tutorial several times and I must still be missing something.

Brady

**EDIT**

I found the answer while roaming through the meshing FAQs. Maybe at the beginning of the tutorial where you are discussing the Default Resources option, include a note saying that if you need the dropshadows, uncheck the box. That was where I got confused. I left the box checked and could not find the dropshadow image you displayed in the tutorial.

Now that this issue is resolved, I can try again from the beginning.

@primative,
Welcome to the meshing madhouse!
Vehicles are hard to master as they involve animation.

If you've only started gaming on Sims 3 and in particular modding for this game, then I'd suggest to start mastering meshing and texturing simple inanimate objects like tables, decor, etc.
Once you've covered that, you may want to "graduate" to meshes that have states - ie beds, bookshelves, etc, and then tackle animation.

Yes, you can find the vehicle template in the game, same as finding other objects to clone and the cloning process would copy all the resources you need to have the same animation.
You can check the Downloads section for the vehicles we currently have available for downloading - you'll see dragons, alien spaceships, among others - but they all have the same animations as the vehicles they were cloned from.

For boats, or any other vehicle that is not already present in the game, is not possible at this time as the animation resources are not present. And while there have been progress to figure out animation, it is slow going... you might want to follow rothn's progress with his AnimTool.
And if you know animation (Sims 3 uses the .grannyrig format), you are welcome to help chip away at figuring out the puzzle yourself - we have a Modding discussion forum if you need input or help in hashing things out.

As for OSX and Blender:
- check out this thread TS2/TS3 Tools and Utilities: Solutions for OS X users.
- another member, cmomoney, has various tutorials using Blender.

(To search for any member and checkout their profiles listing their Article + Download contributions, just use the Search tool uptop on the Navigation bar.)

Good luck with your projects, and hope to see some of your creations on this site, soon.



Thanks, brady.
The tools are constantly being updated. It is good to note that what images I captured was how the tool function at that point of time, during the writing of this tutorial. I've tried to keep it updated in the wiki as re-creating the PDF document is a hassle. So, any erratas and additions are in the wiki version.

In any case, wasn't all that clearly explained in section D4 (pdf is on page 9)? The blue box in the image did specifically show the box unchecked...
I've added this as a tip in the wiki, anyway. If one person is confused about this, I'm sure there are many others.
Thanks for the heads-up.

Brady you'll only need to get the dropshadow once and that's only so you can apply it to your shadow plane in MS to allow you to see what you're doing as you adjust it to fit your object.

After that you can just apply the same one you used before for making adjustments in MS for any new object. The same exact dropshadow is used for every object I've seen and the mesh adjustment will be all you need to do to have it showing right in-game.

Thanks for the help. I have one now and will keep it in a safe place. Now that I have all the images, I will go through the tutorial once again.

I'm having trouble exporting the Mlod file, saying a bone needs to be assigned. I did what was mentioned in the tip but it still wont export. The mesh is just a simple rotation of a painting to be portrait rather than landscape.

If you're using Milkshape and the object has only one joint all you have to do is 1. go to the Joints tab 2. click the SelUnAssigned button and then 3. click the Assign button. Then export your object to overwrite the MLOD.

I was sure I did that, but apparently not. Thank you

I am in need of some assistance with s30c, I selected the 'normal objects' from the cloning tab but the only objects that are offered are those from expansion packs and not from the base game. I'm not sure if I did something wrong or if I didn't download something entirely but I'd really like to be able to follow your tutorial exactly and unfortunatley the table used is from the base game. Is there anyway for me to fix this?

Uh, go into options and make sure it has the right directory for your base game?

I'm sorry, I'm not seeing an options tab and what is a directory?

There's a menu option where you need to specify the game folders. This is new, well not so new now, but it wasn't available when I wrote this, almost 2 years ago. I have got to find some time to update this wiki.

I'm not at my Windows machine to tell you the exact path, but it's not that hard to locate. Not that many menus to click through, but yes, I believe it is under Options or something. You just need to do this once when you first installed s3oc.