MonkeySimmy

This is more of a trick. I thought I’d share because I used it on every mesh I created and I haven’t seen anyone mentioned it before. 

I assume you understand the basics of the Blender interface and weight transfer. If not, read this tutorial: Weight transfer in Blender first.

The key steps of weight transfer are in “Weight Paint” mode performing “Transfer Weights” with the method of “Nearest vertex”. Your new mesh and the mesh you want to transfer weights from might be similar, but not identical. Sometimes the result may end up like this:

And it causes some glitch in game. It might look worse when your sim moves.

This is because the nearest vertices around this area don’t have correct weights as they’re still ‘too far’.

The trick to fix this is simply to create more vertices on the original mesh, which you transfer weights from. Select the orignal mesh, go into Edit Mode, select all and do several times of Subdivide. You can do as many times as your computer can take. 

Transfer weights with ‘Nearest vertex’ again.

Now it’s nice and smooth.

In game the glitches are gone as well.

The shadow map draws shadow on the underneath meshes (which could be either a sim body mesh or another CAS item) covered by your item. It adds depth and makes your item a little more realistic. 

Instead of hand-painting it, this tutorial will show you how to use the blender baking to create a ‘correct’ shadow map with just a few steps. 

Please read my tutorial of How to bake shadow for clothing to make sure you understand the basics of baking. This tutorial will not cover some similar steps again.

NOTE: 

This method only works on the mesh where it’s able to tell the sim body from the clothes or accessory you’re making.

It does NOT work if your item is painted on the sim body mesh.

Pt. 1 Your mesh includes part of the sim body mesh, e.g. tops, pants, dresses.

1. Open your mesh with blender, go into Edit Mode and select the faces which belong to the sim body. 

2. Press P key to separate the selected faces into a new mesh. 

Step 1&2 isn’t a must. But it makes the baked result easier to edit later.

3. Select the sim body mesh you just separated.

4. Open the World panel with a globe icon.

5. Check Ambient Occlusion and Environment Lighting.

6. Increase Environment Lighting to 2.5. This will make the shadow darker and shading of the mesh itself (which we don’t need) lighter.

7. Set Samples.

8. Add a new image in 1024x2048 in the UV/Image Editor and Bake in Ambient Occlusion Mode.

9. You should get something like this.

10. Save the baked image.

Pt. 2 Your mesh does NOT include the sim body mesh, e.g. necklaces, acc clothing.

11. Open your mesh in blender, expand the rig tree and select the sim body mesh where the shadow should appear. Note you need to highlight the Eye, the Arrow and the Camera icon to be able to select and bake an invisible sim body mesh.

12. Bake the selected sim body mesh the same way above. And save the baked image.

13. Open the baked image in Photoshop. Add a new layer under the baked image and fill in with pure white.

14. On the baked image layer, use the Eraser tool or Select tool to get rid of the shadow that is not from the item you’re making, e.g. between the fingers and legs.

15. Reduce the Opacity of the shadow layer. You might need to test in game for a few times to get a best result. Please never use a pure black shadow map.

16. In the Channel panel, add an alpha channel. Fill with pure white on the area where your shadow is. The range doesn’t need to be accurate.

17. Save your shadow map into a .dds file and import into your .package file with sims4studio. Test it in game.

Tutorial: How to bake shadow for clothing

Wool Trench Coats

Tumblr dashboard doesn’t do these images justice so please click on each image for greater detail.

Some of you may know that I looove fall/winter clothing, and absolutely LOVE wool coats :) I’m so proud of these and this is probably my favorite thing I’ve made to date :)

And I plan to do a two or three more versions with more layering options like this and this.

Comes in 12 different swatches and found in the Suit Jackets category.

Custom thumbnail.

Hope you guys like it as much as I do!

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