Tutorials / View Tutorial
By Cyclonesue on Oct 23, 2009 • Sims 3 Pattern Making Tutorial
Slide 1 / 23
Slides in this Tutorial
- 1
- 2 I’m going to convert an existing texture using a basic select tool to split a brick pattern across three channels (and an alpha) to make the English Victorian brick pattern shown on the right. You can use any pattern (including my brick pattern).
- 5 To make a custom pattern in your art program, you need to create a new image.
- 8 Instead of using layers we’re going to use CHANNELS (because that is what patterns use in Create-A-Style). Art programs differ in how they allow you to work in channels; Photoshop has its own Channels window as shown above.
- 9 For our pattern, the channels will layer on top of each other, with red at the bottom, followed by green, then blue (and topped by alpha if you want a fourth colour). Anything in a higher channel can overlap (and obscure) an image in a lower channel…
- 11 The picture on the left shows how channels in Photoshop link to the colour pickers in The Sims’ Create-A-Style tool. Every channel in your pattern relates to a colour picker in the Create-A-Style screen!
- 12 Before you do ANYTHING with your pattern, you must ensure that, when the pattern is repeated vertically or horizontally, no join lines are visible (known as ‘seamless tiling’):
- 14 You might be making a single pattern as a motif for a tee-shirt, but someone who downloads your pattern might want to use your pattern as wallpaper or the covering of a sofa! It is for this reason that some Sims websites will reject your pattern unless you provide screenshots proving that your pattern does tile seamlessly.
- 15 If you are converting an existing image into a pattern, you need to:
- 16 To cut out the bricks, I used Photoshop’s Quick Selection tool. This tool makes good guesses at outlines when selecting each brick shape, leaving me with only to trim a few bits of mortar that had been included with some bricks. Other select tools including the Magic Wand are good for this too.
- 17 Some selection tools have tolerance settings: the lower the tolerance number, the less ‘similar colours’ are selected with each click. The image above shows the selection results obtained with the Magic Wand tool when tolerance levels are set at 0, 10 and 30 respectively.
- 18 I have pasted my first selection of bricks into the GREEN channel of my prepared pattern image.
- 19 After pasting the bricks successfully into a channel, I returned to my original texture where my brick selection was still active. I erased those bricks by pressing the DELETE key so that I know those bricks have been transferred.
- 20 When you have transferred your texture to all channels, the next stage is to check brightness.
- 21 When a channel is semi-transparent (most of the graphic is shades of grey), anything beneath (on a lower channel) will show through. However, if there is no pattern beneath any see-through areas, then the pattern’s Background fill (set in the Sims 3 Workshop pattern tool) will show through instead.
- 22 Here you can see each channel individually
- 23 With all channels combined, the final RGB image in Photoshop looks a bit of a mess here. However, it should look fine once it’s loaded into the TSR Workshop.
- 24 You can save your pattern as a PNG or DDS file (sometimes shown as D3D/DDS) if your art program supports DDS. If you choose DDS, ensure the Alpha Channels box is ticked!
- 25 When saving in DDS format, you will see another window of settings. Ensure that “8. 8. 8. 8. ARGB” is selected, then click the SAVE button.
- 26 Click the ‘browse’ button under “RGB Mask Image” to find your new pattern. Once loaded, tick every channel your graphic uses (for my bricks I have
- 28 If there are any see-through areas of your finished graphic (shades of grey and black) and you tick the Blending boxes of your palette colours, the background fill will show through, blending with your graphic. If you don’t tick the Blending box, the background will only show through 100% black areas of your graphic.
- 29 All patterns actually use a greyscale base but they all start out with pre-selected colours.
- 30 Click the export button in the Workshop to save a copy of your pattern to your computer. This will create a self-installing Sims3Pack file that you can double-click to add your pattern to Sims 3 custom content and install it for you so it’s ready to play.
These settings that are important are:
· Size (your image must be 256 pixels wide by 256 pixels high)
· Image format (it must be an RGB image – 8 bits per channel)
None of the other settings shown above are important and can be ignored.
Any graphic you place in your red channel will be controlled by the first colour picker in the Create-A-Style tool. The graphic you place in your green channel will be controlled by the second colour picker, and so on.
If your pattern doesn’t use some of the channels, its corresponding colour picker in the Create-A-Style tool won’t be clickable. The majority of patterns don’t use all four colour channels; many use one colour only.
· Any lines or pattern must join unnoticeably
· There should be no gaps between each repeated image
The green squares on the left are each made up of a pattern tiled 4 times (that is: each green square is 2 patterns wide, by 2 patterns high). In fact, it’s rather obvious how many times the pattern is repeated in the left-most square because you can see the joins clearly because the pattern does not line up. The rightmost green square does tile correctly with no visible join and so IS seamless.
(a) ensure it tiles seamlessly
(b) decide how many recolourable parts it needs
(c) divide the image into those recolourable parts
(d) paste each recolourable part into a separate channel
Work in the order of red, green, blue then alpha. That is: if you only have one colour, place it in the lowest (i.e. red) channel; if you have two colours, use the red and green channel, and so on.
When dividing your pattern into multiple channels (because you want to give the pattern more than one colour to change in the game), it is usual to place either the main background of your image or bulk of the pattern colour on the first (red) channel and work upwards, with the least detail going onto the highest channels.
Once I’ve repeated this for the remaining bricks, I should be left with the mortar only – which I’ll be able to place in the bottom (red) channel without any further work!
Use brightness/contrast adjustors to increase the overall whiteness of each channel individually. This will need some experimentation until you’re familiar with pattern-making. Too bright, and your final pattern will look washed out with no texture to it; too dark, and it will be semi-transparent.
You will see these results when we come to preparing our graphic as a pattern in the Sims 3 Workshop tool later.
The Workshop is discussed at the end of this tutorial.
If your art program does not support the DDS format, any image on the alpha channel will be lost. You can only make 1, 2 or 3-colour patterns with a PNG file.
used all: red, green, blue and alpha). This should give you a greyscale representation of your pattern.
The background fill can be any colour you like, but black usually works best unless you want to use the background fill as a fixed colour (as in the above-mentioned tiling example where the background fill would have been a fixed shade of beige, grey or white).
Click on the colour square for each channel to select a colour for it (or you can enter the HEX colour number in the ‘#’ boxes if you already know what colours you want).
Add a title, description and select a suitable pattern category.
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