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I’ll eventually write a tutorial or at the very least some loose notes to get this result:

Quick and dirty trick to reduce contrast on textures for Sims 3 Why reduce contrast? Because DDS compression (DXT1 – DXT3 – DXT5) absolutely sucks when compressing pixels that go from near black / white to neutral gray: It might look like no big deal on a 3D editor but once in the game these artifacts and other DDS-attributed defects (like ringing) can be easy to detect. So besides modifying the lighting, material, UV size and baking settings inside Blender you can easily just use an image editor that allows modifying levels using curves (in my case PaintNet). Just be careful because, as you can see below, reducing contrast also washes away detail, a small adjustment is enough:

Now, where did I put the antivenom?

Sooooo, my break was cut short for obvious reasons and making/uploading stuff is a good opportunity for me to relax a little (which is somewhat ironic because in the past making mods was a big source of stress). Thankfully I found that using ‘Blender 2.8 beta’ along with an old version of Meshtoolkit was the culprit behind some problems with meshes above 10k polygons (like getting holes on the seams). With that out of the way you’re going to see bigger meshes although I don’t intend to get anywhere close to the 30k limit for shoes (the example below, which will be shared this wednesday, is shy of 15k); for garments I will remain in the 3-6k ballpark to avoid headaches with clipping. Stay safe.

Some simple and not-so-simple accessories to close 2019 (yes, I’m aware that’s not how laces work ).

I updated MedBod 1.9 to remove some lines around the boobs, if you don’t go beyond the default size probably you haven’t noticed it yet, in that case you can skip this update. Before: After:

Where to learn how to use Blender? Well, everybody and their grandmas have already uploaded hundreds of videos on youtube, but I believe CG Boost have some good tutorials that teach the basics and then some. From there you can go to Grant Abbitt, Blender Guru and Jayanam and the rest is just practice.

Dear admin, I see new porn ads. I get it, they keep the site going. But... please, please, PLEASE... no Brazzzers with sloppy people who over-act, as if they were first in class (or maybe failed) at William Shatner school of Over-Acting!!! PS, I like Shatner, but do have limits!

Though not active on LL, I keep tabs. I find it necessary to make note of a thread by Nonsequitur. Cannot ignore it! I know that he has logged into LL many times since I left... I guess to be certain the coast was clear, as cowards do. He begins is little whine, fully referencing me, knowing I am not there to respond, and continues to do so in several of his comments. He whines about being called out for theft. His last was minor, but was the final straw. In the past, I simply never bothered to share my work after he would make a sloppy version and upload a couple of days after stealing my idea. Last was one I posted a few pics and said that "this is a WIP..." And a few days later... there would be his version. I could not believe that he claimed to have mentored me!!! JoshQ was, and always will be my mentor. I opened a thread asking how to make open bottomed garments, and JoshQ replied. That thread continued for quite a while, with my questions and JoshQ's answers. That would be mentoring. Some I got, some no... some were face slap 1 year later. Nonsequitur joined that thread. Perhaps suggesting things, but none that I used, as the results were... not so good. During time on that thread, is when the stealing began. I posted a Blender image of a male kit I was working on, to show Josh. A few days later, Nonsequitur uploaded a kilt. I never bothered to upload mine, as it felt like people would think I was stealing his ideas. So, my next project was an outfit to upgrade my Harley Quinn (LOVE HER!) I made the mistake of showing Josh what my plans were. This time, Nonsequitur actually announced that he was going to make a Harley outfit also... and chose the same that I was working on. I felt competetive, and thought to show off the multiplier I was working on. Nonsequitur copied the image, used it for his project, uploaded it, and PM'd him about stealing it, actually BITCHED that he had to resize it so he could use it! Believe it or not, he was not the main reason I left LL, but certainly a contributing factor. Now he whines about drama queens and trolls (he was listed as one of MY followers, so he could basically stalk me on the threads, I guess), and how he is not motivated to create, because I called him out. I saw that both @Kendo 2 and @ritualclarity had posted on that thread. Both, referencing aspects of "trolls" and how they operate... some, to make a seemingly vague post, but obvious to one being talked about (in this case, believing it to be behind her back), as I was the only person I know of to remove all of her content from LL in the passed week, which Nonsequitur referenced. That is my RANT!!! I will go breathe now, and enjoy some chilled vodka!

So the very basic textures I’m baking on blender (mostly for garments) have three components: The ‘color’ which has all elements (straps, borders, laces, etc) delineated with low contrast lines The ‘roughness’ in which you control how reflective each element is: black is like a mirror and white is the opposite And the last one is the ‘normal’ that allows you to fake depth, black elements wont “protrude” while white and grays will. This image is connected to the height of a ‘bump’ node and both ‘strength’ and ‘distance’ are below .2 NOTE: Both roughness and normal can be controlled further with a ‘color ramp’ node Combine these components with some lamps and/or an hdri image and you get some basic volume, shadows and highlights baked into the texture (plus a normalmap). As I said before most of it will be lost when converted to a 1024x1024 DDS image but what remains looks better than my several attempts of adding detail by hand.

To be totally honest with you most of the detail showed here disappears when you bake it into a 1024x1024 texture but even then what’s left is good enough

Many moons ago I mentioned ‘Bforartists’ a fork of Blender that centers in ease of use. When I found it Blender 2.79 was the latest version which I barely was able to use so Bforartist looked like a good alternative, but then I looked into the developer notes and goals for Blender 2.8 (which I believe was in early alpha back then) and decided to wait for it instead. Recently I checked it once more and now the project has up to date builds based in Blender’s latest (2.91 alpha) and a more robust faq/guide section. If you hate memorizing keyboard shortcuts you might feel at home with Bfoarists because every function has a colorful icon and/or entry on the menu and you can still configure the workspace, install addons, etc. I’m already accustomed to Blender’s new interface and shortcuts but if you’re the complete opposite maybe give Bforartists a try.

From this: To this: “Simple Lingerie” accessories (and maybe stockings) are going to become a little less simple... and that's a good thing!

I was looking into making some procedural textures using nodes, but every tutorial ends in a monstrosity like this one (and the image just shows half of it): Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing because of the power of making something completely modifiable to the smallest detail. But then I remembered “Blender can also use DIY patterns” and then made this in less than 5 minutes: Obviously is doesn’t generate as much detail as a procedural texture, but for the stuff I make you’ll hardly notice any difference. TL;DR: sometimes being lazy does pay

Friendly reminders: Every single piece of CC made under my name is free, forever. Avoid scams I only “exist” in two places: Loverslab and NSFWmods. No twitter, no facebook, no discord, no tumblr, etc No rules, no tou, no nonsense. Like my stuff? Download it. Want to modify it or even port it to other engine? Don’t even ask me, do whatever you want

This is the node setup for Viper, nothing spectacular although it worked pretty well for making several textures from a single 512x512 tile. Some notes: The ‘RGB Curves’ node allows two things: changing the image to “neutral gray” using the ‘color’ slot and then modifying the contrast using the curve, more or less like photoshop does The ‘ColorRamp’ node, when connected to the ‘roughness’ was used to determine which sections of the texture where shiny or opaque, also I used it for the mask (not showed here) because you can add your own colors in this case I use it to change the dark scales to red and the bright to yellow: This is the node setup for the environment texture (aka hdri): I used the ‘Hue Saturation’ node to make the hdri “gray” by moving the saturation to 0, this is because an hdri not only provides light information but also color and for this game your textures must be grayish And finally I also reduced the ‘factor’* because initially the resulting texture was a little bright, ‘dds dxt1/dxt3‘ compression introduces artifacts when dealing with high contrast and small details *what needs to be reduced is the ‘strength’ on the ‘background’ node

Simple masks can be done a lot quicker (and precise) using Blender too. Blender_mask.mp4 You can do the same for the alpha (white over black canvas) and save it separately, then you can use DXTBmp, GIMP, Photoshop, etc. to join them and create a 4 channel mask.

Besides some crashes (don’t forget to save frequently!) I’m liking Blender 2.9 so far although I still need to check add-on compatibility.

Repost(?): some youtube channels with tutorials for Blender Josh Gambrell for hard surface modeling and tips to clean topology Cédric Lepiller for non-destructive modeling (even if he uses a paid addon of his own you can learn the fundamentals from him) CG Matter has a lot of different videos but I find the ones that shows how to use nodes, including a full course, very helpful Jayanam is one of the few that centers in making low-poly game assets which are the best to start learning, also develops free addons Bonus: This tutorial by CG Boost is still one of the best there is for newbies and covers almost all steps from modeling to rendering. Of course there are hundreds if not thousands more, these are the ones that helped me the most. Also friendly reminder: you can use Cmar’s Meshtoolkit to convert an .obj to either .geom or .wso and back, you can also use Milkshape 3D (after installing some plugins) although it can be slow when exporting .objs.

Despite the graininess (thanks to the minuscule area I’ve to work with) the difference between this and my old "textures" is discernible even at normal camera distance, at full zoom you will see some pixelation but by then you’re not playing anymore Will I ‘re-texture’ all my past releases? As I said before meshes require a clean UV map for the baking to give the best results, some models already have it but the majority would require some work. I will choose the “easiest” projects to retexture but of course I also have several other projects on queue (see pic) so yeah… it’s going to be a slow process moving forward. Anyway, barring a worldwide disaster *nocks on wood* I’ll have something to share next week.

Getting close!

Above the red line: a simple uv map where exterior and interior faces share the same space, easy to make and it works with CAS patterns but isn’t suitable for baking in Blender. Below: a more detailed map where every face is represented and, as you can see, takes a lot more space (and time to make). Both are from the same mesh and the latter is how I’m going to unwrap my UVs from now in the pursue of better textures. Another type of CC that benefits from this approach are 3D accessories (necklaces, belts, nails, etc). Now, this is “tricky” because as you might know the game’s engine reduces the texture quality the more accessories you put on your sim, but unlike shoes I can use the whole 1024x1024 area to counter it (more or less). tl;dr: at the very least shoes and accessories are going to get a bump in detail from its textures, and because it takes more than double the time to make I’m back to 1-2 releases per month.

Quick tip to accelerate baking times in Blender 2.83 Go to ‘Tiles’ and change the value to the resolution you’re baking into, in my particular case 2048x2048 (if you want to go higher be sure your GPU has enough VRAM, mine has 2GB). Optional: activate ‘Adaptive sampling’ and change the threshold to ’0.1’ this will generate some faint noise, how visible or desirable this is will depend on your particular case. Using both options my times went from 2-3 minutes per bake to less than 1, it sounds insignificant but because I’m doing several tests at a time any reduction helps, of course better hardware might get quicker results. What about reducing rendering samples? In my tests I noticed a reduction in image quality so I’m leaving the samples alone.

One thing I admit my shoes are lacking is in the texture department, literally I use one shade of gray and even after increasing the polycount the way illumination works in The Sims 3 makes my CC look “flat”, or at least that’s how I perceive it (patterns help but not enough). In the past I avoided generating textures for one main reason: The texture space for shoes is extremely small so details get lost or blurred at best and I don’t want to make 2k/4k textures to compensate nor make them by hand. So I’ve been experimenting trying to find a way to add just the right amount of detail to textures without resulting in a pixelated mess, with some luck you’ll see the results in a month or two.

Femshep hair updated:

outtake:

CAS thumbnails require three things inside a package, besides the actual image: a ‘type’, a ‘group’ and an ‘instance’; you can check all these using s3pe. For the first there’s a list depending on the type of clothe / object you’re doing and thumbnail size, generally speaking, you only need the biggest size (256x256 png) for garments, shoes, accessories and hair, all these use ‘THUM 0x626F60CE’ as the type and use either ‘0x00000000’ or ‘0x00000001’ as the group in the case of stuff made for the base game. The instance must be copied from the CASP, this is unique for every single CC unless it was cloned. So once you have your image just drag it and drop it inside s3pe and modify the attributes. With this you can create your own thumbnail for garments, shoes, accessories and hair in those occasions when it wasn’t included (this isn’t “bad” per se, unless the game generates a wrong thumbnail making the CC undistinguishable from the rest).

outtake:

ImpossibleHeels_NonDestructive_2.mp4 Using non-destructive modeling (or an “envelope” as I call if for the stuff I do) you can create any shape imaginable with a fraction of the vertices, this means changes can be done extremely easy and fast and you have total control over the polycount. I “learned” about it watching Cédric Lepiller’s videos, I said “learned” because Cédric is a industrial design professional that uses a specialized set of add-ons he developed himself. But watching his videos gave me a good idea how to use Blender’s modifiers and even without his add-ons the fundamentals are the same, the rest was just practicing and experimenting.

outtakes:

outtakes:

Meshtoolkit IS the essential utility for modders and I’m grateful to Cmar for making it. My only issue is that, sometimes, severe deformation and clipping appears on the fat morph when using the ‘Auto-create’ function. Of course the blame its on me because I’m trying to make stuff the game was never intended to have, it seems making skimpy clothes for a “meatier body” is a recipe for disaster… (Here you can see face deformation and clipping on a garment after auto-creating the morphs) In the past I took the offending mesh and tried to fix it using Milkshape but that takes a lot of time. Using Meshtoolkit you can convert a .wso and its morphs to .obj and make the corrections in Blender, which is A LOT quicker, and of course you can convert back the .obj to .wso, just be aware TSRW won’t accept the file but if you use it as a reference for ‘Auto-create’ everything will work. ((Same mesh after some quick fixes) I’ve been using this method since the Dark Ages Minidress with good results.

Normally I open a previous project add some new geometry here and there then move, scale and rotate each vertex to hell and back and call it a day, at least that is what I did for ‘Final’ releases. This time I decided to start from scratch using an ‘envelope’ to recreate the shape of Engel Besta; a single envelope was used to create Anemone and since then I’ve been using this non-destructive technique more and more.

Eyebrows are the most important feature in a sims face, is the very first thing I choose before making or editing one. Sadly it seems creators have stopped making them so at first I was testing adapting eyebrows from Sims 4 with the help of this tutorial, the problem is the texture gets scaled and stretched plus, in my humble opinion, it hardly resembles the original thanks to the differences between S4 and S3 meshes/uv map. So I said to myself “fuck it, I’ll do it live” and used Blender to paint directly into the mesh. It took me several tries to get it “correctly” because I don’t have a drawing tablet but thankfully at normal distance you won’t notice the multiple imperfections. Eyebrows will be released tomorrow along Impossible Heels Hedera. Blender_Eyebrow_Painting.mp4

This was the final upload of the year, for real this time. In other news I’m going to take a break from modding until at least late-spring. Friendly reminder, everything I had released so far is free so if you ever give money in exchange someone is scamming you. Loverslab and NSFWmods are the only sites where I upload my CC. Enjoy the holidays, hopefully we will survive 2020.

Most of the problems I had making my own “impossible feet” for Sims 4 came from my workflow: modeling in metasequoia, exporting to blender 2.64 for UV mapping and then to 2.79 for normals fixing; the final step was exporting to milkshape to generate a .ms3d for S4CASTools. Yes it was a mess and generated a lot of problems and defects along the way, worked fine at the beginning but not anymore. An alternative was to stop using several programs in favor of Blender 2.8 beta which has a completely revamped interface that makes it a lot easier to use. So I started familiarizing with the modeling tools, reading and watching tutorials and doing some exercises. Long story short: Blender 2.8 rules and it has become my main tool. I still have some stuff to take care of before returning so hang on a bit more.

Yep,I’m still not happy with the results but I also ran out of time, I won’t be able to do anything related to modding for a couple of months so if you don’t want to wait remember than anyone is free to modify my CC to their liking. See you in spring.

Zaraza!!