#making cc

Hey fellow simmers! I've tried looking into this on my own but I couldn't find any tutorials so I'm turning to the community! I am a makeup artist in the real world and I want to bring that passion to this game!

If anyone knows of any resources on how to make custom makeup please either message me or reblog this post with your links!

I just wanted to see if I can even attempt to make a skin. It's just a test I'm not perfect in the slightest

I was watching this video

which the comment lead me to this which I found a bit easier to do when getting things to match with the mesh head.

WIP - Tomarang School Uniform

It’s been driving me BANANAS how some people get their textures so creamy, with the details so crisp, when my textures, which are just frankentextures of EA ones, turn out soo pixely.

So for the past week or two I’ve been googling daily trying to figure this out, and I’d find bits and pieces here and there, though frustratingly nothing comprehensive. Hopefully one day i’ll master this and make a proper tutorial for it, but I figured I have enough bits and bobs of advice i’ve gleaned that I can still share some of what i’ve found already.

I’m a NEWB though, so take that into consideration. If anyone else has any extra advice (or corrections?) PLS lmk and I will update this!

The #1 effective thing I’ve found, which I just downloaded last night and makes me so happy: Use Topaz Clean & Topaz Denoise. (30 day free trial, then you can yo-ho-ho it up with your amazing powers of google-fu).* *lol/not to be confused with the hoe it up mod 😅 More people seem to use Topaz Clean than denoise, but plenty of people do use both. I downloaded both yesterday but denoise doesn’t seem to help anything I’m currently working on, though it might be my settings, too idk. Speaking of, it seems that everyone has their own settings they like. I’m currently using @smubuh​‘s Topaz Clean Settings #1 and omg you guys  🤩 

I think I ran topaz clean once our twice, and at least on the second round i ran it on a duplicate layer, which i then I tried both feather-lowered-opacity erased parts around the lines I didn’t want to blur out, like the pockets and seams + using the lasso tool to make a selection of just the bits i did want to smooth out.

You can also use Surface Blur for this if you don’t use Topaz clean!

More advice I’ve found:

Change your mode to 16 bit

Export textures from S4S as PNGs! Yes the game uses .dds BUT dds compresses photos a LOT and loses so much quality, and S4S also deals in PNGs. So, export in PNGs, and when you’re editing, save in PNG or PSD (or equivalent). Then, if you want, when you’re done, you can save a swatch as PNG + dds and see which looks better in s4s for that particular item, as S4S uses a different algorithm to convert PNGs to dds than PS or gimp, etc, do. . Also: NEVER save a .dds twice, you will lose a bunch of quality. If you do want to use .dds, save it at the end, but probably still keep a copy of your base texture as a PNG (if not PSD, which is what it makes most sense to do, imo) in case you need to make any edits later. You can read more about this here.

@peacemaker-ic​ recommends increasing saturation from 0% to 3-5% if you’re getting a lot of pixelization, and you can adjust brightness for dark swatches because dark colors pixelize the most

Make sure you have dithering & anti-aliasing on.

Obviously, don’t shrink your textures!

HOLY SHIT

madddddddddddddd respect to the CC creators who do this daily

I spent like 9 hours making ONE ANIMATION SEQUENCE AND LORD