JoshQ

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

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

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!

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: