Attached you will find a tutorial that explains the cloning of a painting and how to change the paintings texture. This will not replace ingame paintings.

The tutorial is a PDF and comes with lots of images. You will need a PDF-reader to be able to view it. Use Adobe Acrobat Reader or Foxit Reader or any other reader of your choice.

If you have questions about the process please ask them here.

Please remember: Modding Sims 3 is highly experimental atm, so the way how to do this may change as the tools evolve.

Please remember: Extensive cloning may lead to a Clone War. You have been warned!

Have fun

Edit: New version online -> Typos and a highly superfluous german paragraph removed.

Edit: Tutorial - The Next Generation

This tutorial is now available in the SimsWiki

Great tutorial! I will be using it later.

One thing, though, on the next-to-last page there's a paragraph in German language, you may want to change that.

Very nicely done tutorial, and thank you for saving me the trouble

The same method can be used for making recolors of almost any object with some non-CASTable regions... with a few exceptions for now, but keep checking back as the Cloner continues to evolve if you try to recolor something that doesn't currently work. The Sims 3 Object Cloner (s3oc) is still being updated almost daily. I'm assured that the steps involved in picture cloning won't be affected by updates, so the tut should remain valid, but the Cloner is getting a lot more capabilities, so I'd advise anybody using it to check for updates before each project.

The only comment I'd make on the tutorial itself is that you don't actually need to keep ALL the resources in the cloned painting in your package. Which means that after cloning and before "fixing", you can delete most of the other resources in the package; your new object will draw any resources you omit from the original, so omitting unchanged resources can keep your package size down. You need to retain the OBJD and OBJK resource and any IMG resources you modified, and you might want to retain the STBL resources so that you can edit them later instead of composing them from scratch... but that's it. Everything else can be deleted from the package in S3PE.

Xanathon, would be great if you wanted to make this into a Wiki page :D

Srikandi... The S3OC says we need the OBJK file too. Do we not?

Anyway, I was just wondering what kind of results people are getting now with their file sizes, because I know they were being discussed in the other thread. I've been playing around with different processes and have been getting very different results.

Currently I am doing this... S3OC - Clone S3PE - Delete extraneous files, replace DDS with my edit. S3OC - Fix (changing thumbnail & catalog data). Resultant package file: 472KB

And then this...

Go back to S3PE with the fixed file, select all, export to an empty folder, start new & import all with "Compress" ticked. Package size is then reduced to 113KB.

I tested both packages in the game (deleting all caches in between) and both worked fine -thumbs, recolours, quality etc. So can I assume this is a good thing to do?

Yes indeed, thanks, editing my post. And good tip on compression.

BTW, I've always done the image edit after making the object unique, instead of before... I don't think it makes any difference which step you do that at. So I do Clone (OC) -- Remove extra resources (PE) -- Fix (OC) -- Edit .dds.

Also, if you don't have the DDS viewer, it's not really a big deal to just dump all the DDSes into your editor and pick out the one you need there. Only whichever one you modify needs to be reimported.

I wanted to keep this simple to not overwhelm beginners. I thought about adding how to compress but left that out, I also left out how to change the STBLs to create catalog-strings for other languages.

There is always place for expansion.

As for the wiki: I'll think about it, but Mediawikis image handling is awful uncomfortable. While I like Mediawiki for it's flexibility I usually avoid to use it for image-heavy articles.

Well, I've just made a batch of 12 and all my compressed packages came out around 100KB, so I figure that is pretty good. I wish I'd waited a day before I started fooling around with S3OC though, because I spent hours working it all out just before this got posted. Lol. But I was doing the 3 thumbnails manually before the tutorial, so it helped anyway. Thanks Xanathon.

I'm glad that I learned how to do this all the hard way before the tools were ready, but boy do I love how easy it is now! In fact, the only tedious thing left is the way the lighting effects some pictures and having to check it in game and then go and re-edit the darn DDS by guess to compensate!

I tried and it didn't work..probably my fault. I couldn't get the dds plugin for Paintshop Pro 10 to work at all so installed Gimp and I am really not familiar with Gimp at all. But I managed to finally get my poster image done. I saved the dds file and followed all the steps but when I tried it in the game, I had all this weird text...UI: blah blah at loadup and also in the game. My poster wasn't in the game and the Goth Poster was red/blue with a question mark.

When I removed the package file for my poster, it was fine again. Oh, and I did remember to delete the cache files and let the movie run so that wasn't the issue. I must have done something wrong in the naming somewhere, but not sure what.

I've been using GIMP and this is what I do...

1. Open the DDS file and measure painting dimensions.
2. Open/create the image I want in my preferred graphics program (Fireworks) and resize/edit/whatever then export as jpg.
3. Copy jpg. Go back to GIMP & paste. (It pastes in as a floating layer.)
4. Move it into position over the original image then "Anchor floating layer". DON'T "Flatten". (You can do this via a right-click->layers or there is a little button in the Layers toolbox.
5.Click Save AS. "Save" won't bring up the DDS dialog. Overwrite existing file to retain correct filename.
6. Select DXT1 from the DDS popup and tick generate mipmaps.

And that is it.

I am not an experienced GIMP user, but that is what works for me. And all my frames are recolourable with pictures displaying correctly. (Hopefully, that simplifies the GIMP learning curve for someone.)

But it sounds like something got messed up in the fixing for you because I know I had that same blue/red thing happen to me a couple of times when I was doing it all manually but I'm not sure how it could happen with the Cloner. Somehow, your package must still be using the original DDS filename, I think. Is it possible that you edited the file from the original clone and imported it (with the same name) to the package AFTER you "Fixed" it, instead of before?

I am pretty sure I didn't edit the file from the original clone since I copied and saved to a separate folder and the changed name was the one in my game files (Mod). So not sure what happened.

Thanks for the GIMP info. I tried getting the PSP program to work again but no luck. It is a downloaded (Paid for) copy of PSP X and it appears it may be installing the trial version and not giving me the opportunity to put in my key. I called Corel but they have no idea what to do with me. I guess its an older version of the software.

Okay, I think I found the problem. When I import the new dds file, it appears to replace the old one...at least the old one has a line through it. However, after I save and then go back and check on it, the old dds file is back in there. So basically, its not saving the new dds file when I click on save in S3pe.

When you have imported the new one, try using "save as" for the updated package, not save, and giving it a new name.

Okay, will try that. Thanks.

I figured it out I think. When I was importing the file, it was not replacing the duplicate but instead leaving two identically named files. I manually deleted the old file and am going to see if they show up in the game okay.

It worked! Yay! It looks great in the game too. Thanks to all of you for your great tutorials and help.

Hey thanks a lot for this tutorial, I've been wanting to make my own paintings since I first got the game. You might want to mention in your tutorial about the ViewDDS app. It took me a while to figure out I needed something else besides what was listed in the tutorial since I'm a total noob at modding

One question I do have though is how to get the nice thumbnails like the Sims default. I've seen other custom paintings that have it as well and those show the painting within the default frame whereas mine is just this flat image. I know you say in your tutorial we can choose which one we'd like but how?

Thanks again for writing such a clear, easy to follow tutorial that even I managed to make a painting!

You're welcome.

ViewDDS is mentioned in the list of software you need in the first chapter.

You should transform your images to perspective view in your graphics editing software if you want the isometric look in the thumbnail.

Ah so it is! I just read down the list at every bullet and didn't read to end of the sentence

Yes I'm aware of perspective view but I was referring to the thumbnails that show the painting inside the sims frame. Some custom paintings I downloaded from simsartgallery all show thumbs exactly like the sims defaults and I thought maybe there was a way to do this other than the workaround in the graphics editor and applying a frame around it.

Thanks for your reply, much appreciated.

Do a screenshot of the painting in the frame, edit it and import it into the package..?

The way to get the game to autogenerate thumbnails is to remove the defaults from the package. I.E. use S3PE to remove all THUM resources. Voila -- new thumbnails by magic. That's something else that could be added to the tut.

Of course, if you want something different for your thumbs, you can edit the .png instead.

If you're making your painting or other recolor for upload here, you would probably want to follow the procedure I described above and delete extraneous resources to keep size down. Bearing in mind that MTS only accepts original or sims-related art in paintings.

Also, there's a new patch-compatible version of the Cloner up today, which also includes new compression code to make your object smaller. You definitely want to update.

I have an odd question. Is there any rules about using artwork found on the web in Sims paintings? I have found so much good stuff but not sure if I can share any paintings I make with this artwork. Thanks.

That's a complicated question Unless the artwork is explicitly declared to be copyright-free, somebody does hold the copyright, and that person could contact you and ask you to remove anything you make with their art.

An attorney friend tells me that in the case of a photograph on the web of a painting produced non-digitally, the copyright holder for the digital image is not the artist, it's the photographer -- unless the artist paid the photographer or otherwise explicitly retained copyright.

If you're seriously concerned, you can contact the website owner and try to obtain copyright information and/or permissions for the images you want to use. I contacted a couple of artists for permission for images I wanted to use in patterns, and was turned down *shrug*, so I didn't use em, and focused on material I was sure was open source.

Not everybody does this, though... obviously

As I said above, however, on THIS site, we only accept painting mods that are original art, sims-related, or modified in some significant fashion to fit the game. That's not because of copyright, but because otherwise we'd have a million uploads of everybody's favorite picture; and really, with the cloner, it takes about five minutes to do a painting mod.

Thanks, Srikandi. I was not thinking of posting them anywhere for download but they might be in houses I upload..if I were to upload a house which is probably not likely since I haven't done that yet.

I have found a lot of open source stuff so that works too.

Thanks Srikandi, that did the trick! I was considering doing what xanathon said above but for some reason I didn't think that's how others got those thumbnails - it was too much of a workaround.

Will the new version of Cloner work if I haven't patched my game yet? I'm holding off until some of my favourite mods are also updated.

As for copyright, I don't think that would be an issue rian90 with all the adidas and nike t shirts available already but it's always nice to ask the artist and get permission.

Rian, the easiest way to make sure you aren't breaching anyone's copyright without all the hassle of trying to find contact details to ask for permission is to look for Creative Commons licenses.

At Flickr, you can search by specific CC licenses and you can use any of them for S3 stuff except the ones that specify "No Derivatives" provided you meet the other criteria specified. An "Attribution" license, for example, just means you need to provide a link to the original creator which, really, any polite human being would do anyway.

This is the page which links to the various Flickr CC license-specific searches... http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/. And it isn't all photos. If you are looking for paintings, just add that as a search term.

A lot of DeviantART artists use CC licenses too, but I don't think they have license-specific searching. (I could be wrong?)

Also, if you use Google image search, the advanced options have a "usage rights" box, so you can filter for images available for "reuse with modification". It isn't indexing a huge amount of stuff yet but it is getting there. Yahoo advanced image search has a licensing filter too, but it currently only does Flickr content. Basically, the search engines are all working toward doing the hard part for you. Lol.

Edited to add: I'm working on some Simlish adaptations of movie posters at the moment, which are obviously copyrighted material, but there are exceptions to copyright protection under "Fair Use" laws. ("Fair Dealing" here in Australia.)

Edited again and I can't believe I forgot to mention... Wikimedia Commons. Nearly everything there is either Public Domain (no copyright at all) or CC and all images have very clear descriptions of the copyright status. The database is huge, and if you are looking for older works like famous paintings etc, you will find and endless supply.

Hooray for Copyleft!