#modding tutorials

Hello, I promise at some point I will put together a full tutorial with lots of screenshots and my own tutorial file (primarily for the folder structure but it won't be required) and such. For now, I just wanna talk about custom pathing skin textures and especially UV/VTK overlays.

Glossary

custom pathing: renaming a file or adding it to a different folder in your project to prevent any other game files (vanilla or modded) from overwriting your project and vice versa. I prefer custom folder structures because it helps me find files more easily.

.mi file: material instance. You can read more about these on the wiki. All you need to know is that it is a type of texture file.

.xbm file: from the wiki: .dds files in a format REDEngine can use. Essentially, just images. When you export them, they usually get exported as PNGs for you to edit. The majority of modded skin textures are going to be .xbm files and what you want to pay particular attention to when custom pathing.

localMaterialBuffer: this tells the game what texture files to look for and use when loading an entity.

DepotPath: the file path to an asset (e.g. the xbm or mi file)

relative path: this is the path to an asset contained in the project.

(Let me know if more should be added here!)

Pro tip: how to easily add a modded file to your project

The easiest way to quickly find and add the texture you need to your project is to search for the texture name in the asset browser. Then, you can right click on the file and hover over "Add selected from archive." You should then see a list of mods that contain that file. Pay attention to the file size and if there are other files with the same name in the list of results in the asset browser.

Click on the mod and the file from that specific mod will be added to your project!

Custom Pathing the Textures

For this, we're going to be looking at t0_000_pma_base__full.mesh from the NPV of my dear boy Vincent Guerra. I also use the UV framework for him, so we're using the mesh included in the UV framework.

If you're using a tutorial file, make sure you overwrite the vanilla body mesh with the modded one for the framework you're using. Each framework's body will include additional file paths in their respective textures for the various overlays.

*Written Hogwarts Legacy Modding Tutorials *

╚═════════════════════════════. .★.╝

╰►⠀꒰ In collab with @ahriadnetv ꒱ ₊ ˚

♡ ┊꒱ It's beginner friendly

૮Ꮚ ┊ ꒱ All of the steps are broken down.

୨୧ ┊ ꒱ Images are included with the steps.

౨ৎ ┊ ꒱ Button locations within the kit are either shown or written in detail along with the order that they need to be clicked in.

☾ ┊ ꒱ Credit & links are given to the sites & people that we based it on for you to look into if needed. ♡

✩ ┊ ꒱ We can & will update it as new methods are tried in the kit & found to be successful on our end. ♡

☁️┊ ꒱ All of my tutorials have been moved here for easy access & I'll be adding more to it as I experiment between the creator kit & Blender. ♡

🄲 ┊ ꒱ If any of the links stop working, let us know ASAP so we can fix them! ♡

ᕬ⑅ᕬ ┊ ꒱ If you love our written tutorials, please like & share this post & if you can, support both of us on Ko-fi as well. Those are included. ♥

୨♡୧‿︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵‿୨♡୧

Thought I'd make a little post to plop all my existing (and future) modding tutorials. A lot of these have been around a while mostly in Discord servers and not everyone joins these.

Some tutorials might be outdated, have better methods, or even be somewhat obsolete. I don't update them often and most of the time I just write them down to help people with specific inquiries.

A lot of these things were taught to me first before I sat down and wrote a how to. Thank you to everyone who was/is part of my modding journey and for sharing your knowledge with me!

My tools are mostly Wolvenkit, Blender and Noesis. These tutorials focus on the use of these tools and aim to aid beginners.

How to replace a vanilla tattoo

Adding decal meshes (for pictures) to clothes (Outdated)

Shirt decal replacing framework

How to make custom microblends

Changing NPCs clothes

Importing custom poses into the same container

Adding pride makeup to NPCs

How to change an entities' locomotion

How I refit clothes in Blender

Fixing sticky/falling feet in custom poses

Adding submeshes to garments without needing a new source

Complete Decal Workflow

NPC+/NPV to Nibbles Replacer

Poses Retargeting

Hello! Thank you :P

Those mod ideas sound great! I actually have a WIP painting requires paint mod that's still up on the Sims 3 Creators Discord. If you're a part of it, feel free to download that mod and open up the code to see how I did it. The mod actually works fine but I didn't officially release it for other reasons.

As for tutorials, I recommend you look at the MTS tutorials for object modding: Mod The Sims - Tutorial:Sims_3_Object_Modding

And there are other tutorials here, depending on what you want to know, you can look at any of the threads: Mod The Sims - Tutorials

If you don't have ILSpy, I recommend downloading it so you can look at EA's code or the code of other mods. I suggest you find a game feature that does something similar to what you want and then pattern your mod after it. You can also look at the code for my pet food mod and model yours after that if you want.

Hello! Don't worry, your English is wonderful! :) The above suggestions may help you!

As for the resources I used when I started: I looked heavily at EA code and other modders' code to see how they did things. It taught me how code should be formatted and let me see directly how others got things to work.

For example: for my Sim Post mod, I looked at Arsil's Custom Generic Role Desk to see how sims were sent to "work" at the custom desk.

If you're stuck with something, search through MTS or Stack Overflow or you can ask on the Sims 3 Creators Cave for help.

If you struggle with understanding the basics of C#, there are a lot of beginner tutorials around the web that you can find.

Heads and bodies - all included in one blend save file. Just throw it to your blend save folder and open it in Blender 2.49b.

The file should be used for adjusting the hair meshes to the different head types. You can’t use it for porting armours - there are no weights!