Hello Hidehi I am so pleased to see the special lot now up onto the exchange! It looks very great! Your presentation of it on the exchange is so very well done! Great photos that you have taken of it, great descriptive words you have written to accompany the pictures, and great explanation about how simmers who download the lot can enjoy using or visiting it. Thankyou to you and everyone else for all the time, work, care and effort that you have all put into this very special gift to the sims community!
Hello Hidehi, the lot is looking absolutely stunning I've just been looking through ingame and it looks brilliant, thank you so much for doing the build!
Priscapup, thank you for doing such an amazing job on recreating the stalls:D
Hello Zoo, your thread for the build is great! It would be great if you could add EnchantedRose99 name too. Your description and words about the build is very nice and well written.
Thank you for making such a special thread for our gift to the simming community Zoo :thumbup:
Our dear Rose has already mentioned if you could pleased add EnchantedRose99 - thank you Rose!!
I would also like to ask you to include nerdy3000 in the list of participants and mention suepea as well please ... even though she was unable to get her artwork to me on time I used some of her latest uploaded patterns to decorate one of the stall walls.
Thanks, Ladies, for making sure I didn't forget anyone! I have actually already added the three people I left out (they weren't in the Blackcat Builders post, or else I overlooked them), but when I went in to explore this AMAZING BUILD, I saw their stalls and added their names.
This lot is so much more beautiful in game than I had imagined. It took a good long while to strip the artwork, too, there is a TON of it!
I posted a few screenshots to our thread, but each of you should feel free to add more if you want.
I didn't get the photos of the clever clever way that photos of food are used as signage in the restaurants, or the meeting room with the "sales charts"-- PERFECT.
Guys you have all done a fabulous job. The lot looks great and is going to be so helpful for builders in the future. Excellent work, and if you see your artwork in houses to come, don't be surprised because it is all fabulous.
I think that next Zoo U course should definitely have a class project as well, just saying. They're so much fun! Well, for me anyway. Not sure about Hide or Prisca
Hi, Rose! I don't know exactly what the next class is going to be. Some things don't lend themselves to the idea of a class project, BUT I doubt very much that this was our last such project!
The next time we have a class where there is an obvious way to turn it into a class project, then we definitely will!
Just sitting here reading in my hotel room... Fantastic news about the feature!! I can't wait to get home tomorrow evening and download the lot! Already rec'd and faved. I had such a great time with this, and now I shall reap the rewards!
Didn't I tell you Hidehi did a fabulous job? Even pictures don't do it justice!
Just sitting here reading in my hotel room... Fantastic news about the feature!! I can't wait to get home tomorrow evening and download the lot! Already rec'd and faved. I had such a great time with this, and now I shall reap the rewards!
Didn't I tell you Hidehi did a fabulous job? Even pictures don't do it justice!
I totally agree, you have to walk around on that lot to see everything. It is amazing.
That's awesome! Well done everyone, and thank you so much ZooProfessor and Hidehi! Brilliant, just brilliant.
Well, I promised a bit of a default recolor workshop, so, I'm posting a mini tutorial in the next post, along with a link to a lot to help everyone out who wants to do that. It's going to take me a few minutes... Coming very soon.
UPDATE: This technique is largely redundant! I am leaving it up here in case anyone wants to use this technique to make custom backdrops for photographs using the billboards. Maybe this is useful for other things, I don't know. There is a much more direct technique of modifying the photograph image files (and skill paintings, too!) using S3PE and DDS image editing. I have posted a tutorial on that here.
Default recolors are an alternative to using CAP, and may give you a higher resolution photograph, and certainly give you the possibility of working with larger images. They also completely bypass the need for installing and learning CAP, and for installing patterns into your game. I really enjoy doing default recolors as a way of changing the appearance of objects in my game, in a non-permanent and easily changeable way, without adding CC. Recolors may be packaged as part of a CAW world and show up in any users game in that particular world without them adding additional content, but it does not work for sharing lots unless both the creator and the recipient both have the recolors added to their mods/packages folder in package format. So, using ZooProfessor3's technique of photographing the image gives us a way of sharing images as part of lots or inventories without requiring users to add recolor mods or cc.
There are lots of tutorials out there for doing default recolors. This is not such a tutorial! I recommend googling it and when I find my links to the tutorials I learned from, I'll post those here (or you can share the ones you use by commenting). This is simply my method of recoloring, but if you are pretty savvy with computers, are comfortable with at least the basics of S3PE and image processing, you might not need any other tutorial. Here are the steps: (You can skip steps 1 and 2 if you want to recolor base game billboards, and download them here instead) and use the lot here for photographing them.)
1. In S3PE, open the "fullbuild.package" within the appropriate game, for example, Program Files/ElectronicArts/Sims3/Gamedata/Shared/packages/FullBuild2.package if you are looking for an image from the basegame, or Files/ElectronicArts/TheSims3Generations/GameData/Shared/packates/FullBuild_p08.package if you are looking for an item from Generations, for example
If you are concerned you might accidentally mess up this file (which would probably necessitate reinstalling) I recommend working from a copy of this file instead of from the original.
I sort the files by tag and name. You are looking for _img files, and they usually have descriptive names that can help you locate what you are looking for. In this case, I searched for base game billboards ("signBillboard_signage"). Skill paintings can also be found for editing.
Export whatever images you are interested in recoloring to a file, meaning, a folder you have named "images for recoloring" or whatever. Close S3P3.
2. I would strongly recommend making a folder dedicated to backups of your recolor images. You may be referring back to them frequently. I would not recommend overriding these original images. Create a new folder for exporting your new images to once they are editing.
3. Open the image you want to edit in an image processing program that supports DDS images. I use Gimp. It is free and you can download a DDS plugin that works well for it. It will ask you to load mip maps, and you can load them or not, it doesn't matter.
4. Edit the image however you want. You can copy/past an image from elsewhere, just remember before you finish to merge all your layers down into one single, flattened layer. If this process does not yield the result you want in game, I sometimes find it useful to take the original image and copy it, and open a new image based on the clipboard image, and then generate my new image in that separate file. When I'm finished, I just copy and paste it into the original, and it is at the correct size, which means I don't have much editing to do in the original image file. Export (don't save) as a DDS file, and DO NOT change the name of the image, as this is what allows the game to match the image to the correct object. A DDS options window will pop up. There may be a few different compression formats that work, but I have success with DTX5. Remember to check "generate mipmaps". The window looks like this for me:
5. To get the recolor to show up in game: Open S3PE, and create a new file. Import your recolor images, and save it as "billboardrecolors.package" or whatever you want to call it. Place this file in your mods/packages folder. (If you are importing recolors into a world in CAW or into installed worlds, open the .world file in the CAW/UserToolData/Worlds folder or in TheSims3/Installed Worlds. The recolors will then be a part of that world file)
6. Delete your game caches and restart your game. Some items that are CAStable, such as buy mode paintings, you may have to open them in CASt and change a texture to get the recolor to show up. To remove the recolor, simply remove it from your mods/packages folder after exiting the game.
That is pretty much it!
Specifically for the photography techniques introduced in ZooU, I made this lot with all five base-game billboards in it, ready to be recolored, and ready for your sims to photograph in an indoor residential lot so you can control the lighting. (It is pretty tricky to get billboards on a lot: I used Shimrod's mod to do so, so you won't have to). You can download it on the exchange or from dropbox here. And you can download the five base game billboard images here, and thus skip the whole process of finding the images in the fullbuild.package.
As Zoo's colored grid was really helpful in CAP, I thought it might help here as well, so there is a billboard default replacement grid included in the extracted images folder. It looks like this:
and photographs of each size, in roughly the middle of the billboard, looking directly at it and slightly zoomed out look approximately like this:
Which should help you decide how to size your images. The further out you zoom, the more you are able to get a higher resolution image.
Skill paintings also work really well for photography, but there are over 1000 skill paintings! You'd have to know specifically which painting you had in your game and find the corresponding image, so it doesn't really make sense for me to share those images just for that. At some point, when I get my default recolor set of the skill paintings done, I may upload those images. In the meantime, you could check out this tutorial.
Good luck!
THANK YOU for the mini-tutorial! I have been so swamped this week that I haven't gotten to look at it in detail but it looks really cool.
I upload pretty much everything I build, so I likely won't get to use it often since (if I read that right) the only people who will be able to see your recolors are people who have their own game modified as well. I hate that because this looks really interesting and gives more variety, too. BUT I can always photography them, as you pointed out, and it might make for some way better panoramic photos than you generally get going the CAP route.
Wow Ami I was just over in your studio and stumble across this Billboard Photography Workshop, it is amazing. I did'nt know you could do the billboards also.. Wow & Wow.. I rec'd for you also and adding to fav's to DL later..
Oh, that is awesome, Bree! Thank you so much. I know it is a bit of an odd thing I'd love to hear how it works for you
Zoo, thank YOU! As you say, the recolor thing doesn't work for sharing except with worlds, which is why your trick with the photographs is just the coolest thing ever! Seriously, I haven't seen it done anywhere outside of ZooU.
Oh, that is awesome, Bree! Thank you so much. I know it is a bit of an odd thing I'd love to hear how it works for you
Zoo, thank YOU! As you say, the recolor thing doesn't work for sharing except with worlds, which is why your trick with the photographs is just the coolest thing ever! Seriously, I haven't seen it done anywhere outside of ZooU.
Aww! Thanks, Sweetie! I'm sure that other people do it, too. The only thing that I've never seen is the grid thing, which helps me a lot.
I just made a Plumbot and I wanted the D.N.A. logo on her (so she could help Julianna with her work building for me) and I used the grid trick to put the logo where I wanted it. I will upload a photo so that you can see my efforts.
Comments
http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/817478/hello-come-and-introduce-yourself
http://tinyurl.com/OneRoomOneWeek
http://tinyurl.com/rosemow
My Showcase thread https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/948861/rosemow-s-rooms-showcase
Priscapup, thank you for doing such an amazing job on recreating the stalls:D
I've rec'd and faved too
My Blog
Share Your Newest Sims 4 Creation Thread
My Gallery
My TS4 Thread
My Sims 3 Studio
This turned out more beautiful than I even thought it would be! Everyone did a great job and I could not be more proud of each of you!
Everyone gets an A!
http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/718843.page#11426964
Hidehi, it would be GREAT if you would post some photos on this thread of your wonderful build!
Zoo
My Blog
Share Your Newest Sims 4 Creation Thread
My Gallery
My TS4 Thread
My Sims 3 Studio
http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/817478/hello-come-and-introduce-yourself
http://tinyurl.com/OneRoomOneWeek
http://tinyurl.com/rosemow
My Showcase thread https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/948861/rosemow-s-rooms-showcase
Our dear Rose has already mentioned if you could pleased add EnchantedRose99 - thank you Rose!!
I would also like to ask you to include nerdy3000 in the list of participants and mention suepea as well please ... even though she was unable to get her artwork to me on time I used some of her latest uploaded patterns to decorate one of the stall walls.
Thank you sooo much everyone!!!
This lot is so much more beautiful in game than I had imagined. It took a good long while to strip the artwork, too, there is a TON of it!
I posted a few screenshots to our thread, but each of you should feel free to add more if you want.
I didn't get the photos of the clever clever way that photos of food are used as signage in the restaurants, or the meeting room with the "sales charts"-- PERFECT.
This build is DRF for sure!
Zoo
I think that next Zoo U course should definitely have a class project as well, just saying. They're so much fun! Well, for me anyway. Not sure about Hide or Prisca
The next time we have a class where there is an obvious way to turn it into a class project, then we definitely will!
http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/718860.page#11427257
Didn't I tell you Hidehi did a fabulous job? Even pictures don't do it justice!
I totally agree, you have to walk around on that lot to see everything. It is amazing.
Great job for you, too, Pup!
That's awesome! Well done everyone, and thank you so much ZooProfessor and Hidehi! Brilliant, just brilliant.
Well, I promised a bit of a default recolor workshop, so, I'm posting a mini tutorial in the next post, along with a link to a lot to help everyone out who wants to do that. It's going to take me a few minutes... Coming very soon.
detailed in my blog here: http://aminovas.wordpress.com/custom-photograph-workshop/
But everything you need to know is in this post!
UPDATE: This technique is largely redundant! I am leaving it up here in case anyone wants to use this technique to make custom backdrops for photographs using the billboards. Maybe this is useful for other things, I don't know. There is a much more direct technique of modifying the photograph image files (and skill paintings, too!) using S3PE and DDS image editing. I have posted a tutorial on that here.
Resources:
S3PE
5 extracted Base Game Billboard images to recolor
Lot on the Exchange with 5 base game billboards and photography platform
Default recolors are an alternative to using CAP, and may give you a higher resolution photograph, and certainly give you the possibility of working with larger images. They also completely bypass the need for installing and learning CAP, and for installing patterns into your game. I really enjoy doing default recolors as a way of changing the appearance of objects in my game, in a non-permanent and easily changeable way, without adding CC. Recolors may be packaged as part of a CAW world and show up in any users game in that particular world without them adding additional content, but it does not work for sharing lots unless both the creator and the recipient both have the recolors added to their mods/packages folder in package format. So, using ZooProfessor3's technique of photographing the image gives us a way of sharing images as part of lots or inventories without requiring users to add recolor mods or cc.
There are lots of tutorials out there for doing default recolors. This is not such a tutorial! I recommend googling it and when I find my links to the tutorials I learned from, I'll post those here (or you can share the ones you use by commenting). This is simply my method of recoloring, but if you are pretty savvy with computers, are comfortable with at least the basics of S3PE and image processing, you might not need any other tutorial. Here are the steps: (You can skip steps 1 and 2 if you want to recolor base game billboards, and download them here instead) and use the lot here for photographing them.)
1. In S3PE, open the "fullbuild.package" within the appropriate game, for example, Program Files/ElectronicArts/Sims3/Gamedata/Shared/packages/FullBuild2.package if you are looking for an image from the basegame, or Files/ElectronicArts/TheSims3Generations/GameData/Shared/packates/FullBuild_p08.package if you are looking for an item from Generations, for example
If you are concerned you might accidentally mess up this file (which would probably necessitate reinstalling) I recommend working from a copy of this file instead of from the original.
I sort the files by tag and name. You are looking for _img files, and they usually have descriptive names that can help you locate what you are looking for. In this case, I searched for base game billboards ("signBillboard_signage"). Skill paintings can also be found for editing.
Export whatever images you are interested in recoloring to a file, meaning, a folder you have named "images for recoloring" or whatever. Close S3P3.
2. I would strongly recommend making a folder dedicated to backups of your recolor images. You may be referring back to them frequently. I would not recommend overriding these original images. Create a new folder for exporting your new images to once they are editing.
3. Open the image you want to edit in an image processing program that supports DDS images. I use Gimp. It is free and you can download a DDS plugin that works well for it. It will ask you to load mip maps, and you can load them or not, it doesn't matter.
4. Edit the image however you want. You can copy/past an image from elsewhere, just remember before you finish to merge all your layers down into one single, flattened layer. If this process does not yield the result you want in game, I sometimes find it useful to take the original image and copy it, and open a new image based on the clipboard image, and then generate my new image in that separate file. When I'm finished, I just copy and paste it into the original, and it is at the correct size, which means I don't have much editing to do in the original image file. Export (don't save) as a DDS file, and DO NOT change the name of the image, as this is what allows the game to match the image to the correct object. A DDS options window will pop up. There may be a few different compression formats that work, but I have success with DTX5. Remember to check "generate mipmaps". The window looks like this for me:
5. To get the recolor to show up in game: Open S3PE, and create a new file. Import your recolor images, and save it as "billboardrecolors.package" or whatever you want to call it. Place this file in your mods/packages folder. (If you are importing recolors into a world in CAW or into installed worlds, open the .world file in the CAW/UserToolData/Worlds folder or in TheSims3/Installed Worlds. The recolors will then be a part of that world file)
6. Delete your game caches and restart your game. Some items that are CAStable, such as buy mode paintings, you may have to open them in CASt and change a texture to get the recolor to show up. To remove the recolor, simply remove it from your mods/packages folder after exiting the game.
That is pretty much it!
Specifically for the photography techniques introduced in ZooU, I made this lot with all five base-game billboards in it, ready to be recolored, and ready for your sims to photograph in an indoor residential lot so you can control the lighting. (It is pretty tricky to get billboards on a lot: I used Shimrod's mod to do so, so you won't have to). You can download it on the exchange or from dropbox here. And you can download the five base game billboard images here, and thus skip the whole process of finding the images in the fullbuild.package.
As Zoo's colored grid was really helpful in CAP, I thought it might help here as well, so there is a billboard default replacement grid included in the extracted images folder. It looks like this:
and photographs of each size, in roughly the middle of the billboard, looking directly at it and slightly zoomed out look approximately like this:
Which should help you decide how to size your images. The further out you zoom, the more you are able to get a higher resolution image.
Skill paintings also work really well for photography, but there are over 1000 skill paintings! You'd have to know specifically which painting you had in your game and find the corresponding image, so it doesn't really make sense for me to share those images just for that. At some point, when I get my default recolor set of the skill paintings done, I may upload those images. In the meantime, you could check out this tutorial.
Good luck!
THANK YOU for the mini-tutorial! I have been so swamped this week that I haven't gotten to look at it in detail but it looks really cool.
I upload pretty much everything I build, so I likely won't get to use it often since (if I read that right) the only people who will be able to see your recolors are people who have their own game modified as well. I hate that because this looks really interesting and gives more variety, too. BUT I can always photography them, as you pointed out, and it might make for some way better panoramic photos than you generally get going the CAP route.
I am very excited to learn how to do it!
Zoo
My Blog
Share Your Newest Sims 4 Creation Thread
My Gallery
My TS4 Thread
My Sims 3 Studio
Zoo, thank YOU! As you say, the recolor thing doesn't work for sharing except with worlds, which is why your trick with the photographs is just the coolest thing ever! Seriously, I haven't seen it done anywhere outside of ZooU.
Aww! Thanks, Sweetie! I'm sure that other people do it, too. The only thing that I've never seen is the grid thing, which helps me a lot.
I just made a Plumbot and I wanted the D.N.A. logo on her (so she could help Julianna with her work building for me) and I used the grid trick to put the logo where I wanted it. I will upload a photo so that you can see my efforts.
http://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/817478/hello-come-and-introduce-yourself
http://tinyurl.com/OneRoomOneWeek
http://tinyurl.com/rosemow
My Showcase thread https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/948861/rosemow-s-rooms-showcase
Thanks, Rose! I love the Plumbots, that whole piece of ITF is great fun.