#modding tutorials

All of my hair color perms boil down to "Hey credit is nice but whatever." Feel free to also use any of my hair profiles as a base for your own edits!

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.

Hi,

you can search on my blog. There is an option for tutorials. I can’t sent you a link because I’m not at home. If you can’t find them you have to wait a few days till I’m back at home.

Okay, I'm back at home:

Here you will find everything you need:

Hope this helps :)

The worst part is imo the Blender one.. the rest is pretty easy: the hair texture and some minor file edits :)

People are actually still interested in modding SFV. Since Modderbase is down, here's some SFV modding links from archive.org. If you don't see images or spoiler boxes in the thread, click on the Way Back Machine search bar where you see the link url address and hit 'Enter' again. FYI this may load quite slowly. Also, If you need to download a tool from these archived links, copy the url of the tool and paste it on the browser's address bar, erase the archive.org parts and then hit enter on the actual link address. Example, copy the address from the hyperlink (https://web.archive.org/web/20240316160336/https://fluffyquack.com/tools/REtool.zip), delete the web.archive stuff, and then it should be ( https://fluffyquack.com/tools/REtool.zip ) and then hit Enter on the address bar.

Anyway, here are the tutorial links:

Unreal Engine Version : Unreal Engine 4.7.6

AES Key : _aS4mfZK8M5s5KWC2Lz2VsFnGKI7azgl

---SFV Modding Tutorial for Beginners---

https://web.archive.org/web/20230227205009/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=445

https://web.archive.org/web/20170920143910/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=97

---Tools List---

https://web.archive.org/web/20230619234458/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=18

---SFV Character Codes---

https://web.archive.org/web/20201028055311/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=60

https://web.archive.org/web/20240324163507/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?pid=20364&tid=1000#pid20364

---Character Resource Pack---

https://web.archive.org/web/20201029015331/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=20

---Texture Guide---

https://web.archive.org/web/20230306152351/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=274

https://web.archive.org/web/20230117144443/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=1878

---Injecting Texture into UASSET file---

https://web.archive.org/web/20231013070905/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=57

https://web.archive.org/web/20220906234610/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=1448

---Color Editing---

https://web.archive.org/web/20170920143734/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=39

---Sound Modding---

https://web.archive.org/web/20210321104439/http://www.modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=77

---Camera and Posing via Cheat Engine---

https://web.archive.org/web/20240316171311/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?pid=23177&tid=89#pid23177

https://web.archive.org/web/20240316172307/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=89

---Hiding Some Costume Parts & Easter Eggs ---

https://web.archive.org/web/20200130095243/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=269

https://web.archive.org/web/20240324163506/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?pid=25521&tid=1732#pid25521

---Swap A character to another Character Slot---

https://web.archive.org/web/20240303200429/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=53

https://web.archive.org/web/20220623143544/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=1000

https://web.archive.org/web/20240316164750/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=811

https://web.archive.org/web/20200926055244/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=576

---Swapping Movesets---

https://web.archive.org/web/20201030162142/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=1099&pid=22087#pid22087

---How to Pack a Mod into a Pak file---

https://web.archive.org/web/20230619231455/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=122

---Creating Physics Assets in UE4---

https://web.archive.org/web/20200130095618/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=37

---Custom Animations---

https://web.archive.org/web/20201224123539/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=873

---VFX Modding and Tips---

https://web.archive.org/web/20210825014646/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=1470

---Packing mod Powershell way if you have Windows 10---

https://web.archive.org/web/20230619231456/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=122&pid=3943#pid3943

---Hex Editing Files to be Larger---

https://web.archive.org/web/20240324163507/http://modderbase.com/showthread.php?tid=1900

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.

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