BluebellFlora

I turn up at my first clients’ house, ready to renovate one of their rooms. They apparently don’t care which. I do want something to go off, so I ask for an idea of one of my client’s likes and dislikes. She tells me she hates woodworking. Her father runs out of the house to inform me he also hates pianos. I approach her mother, begging her to tell me something they do like.

“Well,” she tells me, “What I really love… is pipe organs.”

I turn a spare bedroom into a pipe organ room. Every house needs one. I realise I forgot to take Before photos, so I snap some of the entirely unchanged landing. I invite my clients back and lead them up the stairs to it. (They insist on covering their eyes with their hands to climb the stairs, despite the door to their new Pipe Organ Room being closed.) The client who asked for the pipe organ wanders off to use a computer, rather than look at the new room, but finally they tell me they want to talk about it.

“I think I’ve seen enough. Let’s go over my thoughts.” “I’m ready to talk about the renovation.”

These are among the most ominous statements I’ve ever heard, and I’m certain they’re about to ask, “Excuse me, but why did you replace our bed with a pipe organ?” but they assure me they love it. To prove it, they shake an empty piece of air instead of my hand.

I return home, where a NAP inspector turns up to fine me for not having recycled any of the furniture in the apartment I moved into yesterday yet.

Luckily, I don’t have to worry about the increase in bills too much, as another Sim responds to my roommate advertisment. We go into her room and talk. She seems nice, so I invite her to be my roommate. She accepts, then yells at me, walks into my room to poke at my chest of drawers because she likes that decor style, and leaves  a note on my floor. As she starts using the mirror in my room, I read the note:

“Please follow the golden rule. I don’t come into your room and touch your stuff, do I? No, I don’t.”

I ask her to leave my room and stop touching my stuff.

Luckily, she soon settles down into living with me, making a white confetti cake for us as a peace offering. After we have each eaten a slice, she starts making a white confetti cake She leaves it in the oven, presumably having remembered she already has a white confetti cake. The next day, she clears it out of the oven, and makes a white confetti cake.

Meanwhile, my work continues. I get a request from the Greenburg family to renovate their walk in closet. I know the name, but can’t quite place the family, until I arrive at their house to discover it’s made up of a crane and a large shipping crate. There is no walk in closet to be seen. There is no room for a walk in closet to be seen.

I try my best, demolishing their kitchen area to fill it with closet space. I throw out their easel, because they told me they hate painting. They also hate rockclimbing, so I sadly dismiss my plans of installing a climbing wall in their closet. Knox and Blossom tell me they like the finished product, even though it wasn’t what they wanted. I am entirely unsure what they wanted. Blossom decides to flirt with me, as her wife, Mary, watches. Mary tells me she hates the renovation. This could be because I flirted with her wife but could also be, to be fair, because I demolished her kitchen and replaced it with a closet.

Getting home from my terrible day’s work, I discover my roommate has left a second note, this time in her room. Wondering what she needs to tell me, I go in to look at it. It tells me not to come into her room and touch her stuff. I have to admit, she got me with that one. Nonetheless, she makes a white confetti cake.

The next day is Talk Like A Pirate Day. After redesgning a living room to have nothing pink, blue, basic, mid-century, or to do with bowling, I try to compliment one of my clients, another elderly lady. I get my pirate speech confused, and accidentally flirt with her. Perhaps my purpose in life is to flirt with old women, the way my roommate’s purpose is to make white confetti cakes.

Moving up in the world, I get a gig to renovate the kitchen at the biggest penthouse in San Myshuno. I am unable to enter the building, or knock on any of their doors, so I have no choice but to teleport myself in. I ask a client what she’s looking for in her kitchen renovation. She tells me she hates cooking. Anything to do with cooking–ovens, fridges, microwaves, cupcake factories–she can’t stand the things. She doesn’t want them in her kitchen.

Despite being the kind of people who can afford to live in a penthouse, have a suit of armour costing $8k on display and, apparently, either order takeaway or go out to eat for every meal, they give me only a couple of thousand simoleons to work with. Luckily, I can get more by selling their hated oven, replacing it with popcorn and ice cream makers. I add a guitar. They love guitars.

The family are delighted with their new cookingless kitchen, so I leave their home to buy myself dinner from a street vendor. My clients are apparently hungry too, as, bereft of an oven, one of them heads into the garden to use the grill.

He sets the grill and himself on fire.

A few minutes later, I teleport back up as the rest of the family come out to approach the Grim Reaper, and the body of their father and husband. One of the children complains that he’s hungry. The man’s widow gives the Reaper a back rub. They go back inside.

I've noticed that you put the poly count of objects in the description and just wanted to know how do I understand if the cc is good for my game or not?

I go on 1200 polys per square as a guide. Maxis is probably around 800 but not sure. 

To calculate is pretty easy. So if an item is a living chair, and has 2000 polys, it would be considered high. That is pretty straight forward.If a decor item is 1/4 of a tile, you would multiply its total by 4 to get the final number. so a 100 poly decor item would be 4x100 to be 400 per tile. If an item is 3 tiles, like a sofa, you would divide it. So a 3000 poly item would be 1000. 

So if your game is running ultra or well above, you can handle higher poly items. If you are running medium you should be selective, if running low you should be really wary of what you put in as both polycount and texture sizes will put unnecessary strain on your GPU. 

**NOTE: This is a tutorial written by my wonderful husband who got tired of hearing me complain about the broken CC windows and figured out how to fix them. Feel free to share this around. I am hoping for a batch fix but in the meanwhile, if you can calculate, you can fix the windows yourself. If you have questions, feel free to send me an ask and we will get back to you.**

The issue:

EA added a “ModelResourceCutout” item for every object that needs to cut out a piece of wall to show up correctly. The actual object is actually there, you can see the door handles in the example picture above. (beautiful doors by @peacemaker-ic​ )

The Sims4Studio developer is working hard to get a batch fix working so the creators don’t have to manually add the correct values for each item, but it’s unsure when this’ll be ready and if it will fix all windows and doors. Some are quite eccentric from a shape perspective, meaning ROUND, CURVED or otherwise not a rectangle.

All that is needed is a bit of math and a bunch of trial and error. Oh, and patience is useful. I’m warning you, doing this 40 times over is tedious, but once you get the hang of it, it’s easy. You just need to do a bit of basic math and to be able to think in 2 dimensional space.

The math

There are three height variants when it comes to walls. Short = 3 units high Medium = 4 units high Tall = 5 units high

Regular walls are 1 unit wide, diagonal walls are Sqrt(2) wide (Pythagorean theorem), which is 1,414. When making these cutouts, 1 decimal place accuracy is generally plenty. The frames of the doors and windows give you a little wiggle room. When you are making more interesting shapes, use 2 or 3 decimal places to give yourself a bit more accuracy.

Let’s apply this magic to a real world example. EA wants you to add an item called “ModelCutoutResource” item to your object, which consists of any given number of lines in a 2D plane. Remember, this is a 2 dimensional cutout, depth is nonexistent, it just cuts out the whole wall, wherever we tell it to by connecting the dots. 

Each line consists of two points, a start and an end. I could tell you how to do it all day long, but doing it and getting it are more important. On to the example. This door with it’s entire frame is 2 units wide and about 2.4 units high. You want your cutout to be IN THE FRAME, however. If you put your cutout at the outside edge, you will have an ugly gap on the sides of the frame an nobody wants that. So guesstimate (or extract from Blender, but I have no 3D modeling knowledge so will not go into that) the correct values, place your objects in game on a blank wall, look at them from the side and put a ruler to your screen if that makes your life easier. 

With our door here we need to make a rectangular cutout. This is easy, just 4 points to define. The points do in fact have a third value (x,y,z) but the z-value is always 0. Perhaps EA has wild plans with this in the future, but for now every single z-value is 0.

Using our gathered knowledge, we can now define 4 clear edges for our door. I always start bottom left, it’s a habit, it doesn’t matter, as long as you make a loop with your lines.

Your lines will now be as follows:

A to B, B to C, C to D and D to A. Let’s put this into Sims 4 Studio.

Editing the package:

Open your package in Sims 4 Studio.

Select the Warehouse tab.

Select the Model item (don’t do anything with it, just click it, this way S4S knows the “Instance” value and you don’t have to copy-paste it)

>>> projects which have a separate model for diagonal walls will have TWO model items, you will have to make a cutout resource for both, which their respective instance values.

Click the ADD button bottom left.

Select the type ModelCutoutResource, check that the Instance is the same as your Model and smash the OK button. You will now have a new Resource called “ModelCutoutResource”, all the way at the bottom. So scroll down and click it. ;) You will see “Edges”, which we’ll be adding soon. But first, very important, your cutout will not work if this is not set correctly….. Set “Version” from 00000000 to 00000001.

Now click the “Edit items…” button so we can add the edges with our previously done math.

For objects that are rectangle, just click the add button 4 times, then we can fill them in.

Each “Edge” has a PointA and PointB, which I’ve shown in the image below for A, B, C and D.

We can now fill in the values.

Make sure to destinguish commas and periods. Very important. Periods are used for decimal values, commas are used to separate values. Click Save. Then click Save again.

If you have multiple doors/windows that are the exact same shape, LUCKY YOU, click the export button to export your “ModelCutoutResource” resource and save it as a binary. This way you don’t have to keep entering tedious coordinates into PointA and PointB. On your next door/window you can then select Model, add the ModelCutoutResource, select it and then click the import button to import your previously exported binary. This way you can skip all the other steps and make your life easy.

CHECK AGAIN: - “Instance” value is the same for Model and ModelCutoutResource - “Version” of your ModelCutoutResource is set to 00000001 and NOT 00000000

Test it in-game:

Did you do it correctly? Check it in game. When I fix a set for my wife’s simblr, I usually first place all items in my game, then scribble some calculations on a piece of paper, then edit the packages and then check in game at the end. Then you can do some minor adjustments if necessary and fix those before doing a final inspection.

Once you get the hang of it, it is easy. You get a feeling quite quickly for which numbers make sense and which don’t. Plus, if you do it wrong, it will just show you a weird cutout in the game and you learn from it.

Now on to the more interesting objects, curves and circles:

Windows, doors and arches which have curves are no different, they just have more points and thus more lines/edges you need to connect to make a loop. You can even make two loops if your window or door needs two cutouts.

For these more ‘advanced’ cutouts, it does help if you have at least some knowledge of Trigonometry. It certainly makes your life easier if you’re going to attempt this. I studied in Uni to become a Maths teacher, so that’s clearly an advantage. You at least need to understand how to find out points on a circle to make arches.

Alternatively, you can export the coordinates from Blender, but that’s not my cup of tea.

I’ll make a separate tutorial on round or arched cutouts.

**So again, all thanks to my husband for this tutorial… please pass it forward. You don’t need meshing knowledge, math will get you through it… oh and also, @peacemaker-ic​ if the batch fix doesn’t work out, let us know.**

I do want to point something out that isn’t entirely complete, as it is missing a step. In the model resource, the first four entries are the ‘bounding box’ of the item (that is to say the maximum left, top, bottom, and right values of a mesh, regardless of whether it is a regular or irregular shape). So although through testing the bounding box is adequate enough for rectangular window shapes, you actually need to have the cutout values after the bounding box as well. So for a 4 sided window you will have 8 entries, not just four for the bounding box. You probably don’t need them for the rectangle windows like my testing, but fixing anything irregular and this format wont work correctly as it’s missing that key step. I asked the gurus about this and that is the explanation I got. It is easy enough to duplicate the entries for rectangular windows you have put in, but the order seems different for those sections which seems to be left, right, top then bottom. Whether that order is significant, i am unsure. 

Again, this is why I am not manually updating since i know a batch fix is being worked on. I have seen the progress being made and it is coming along wonderfully, but hopefully this puts it into perspective how much effort it would be to do this manually for all the buildmode items i have. Although i really appreciate people offering to help fix them, the perfectionist in me will want to do it all myself to double, triple, or quadruple check it’s all right, which i will still do when the batch fix is live. It’s just the way I am. Both a blessing and a curse.