#paint.net

i've gotten about eight billion asks about how i render my art, so here's a full-scale tutorial! (this consolidates a lot of smaller past tutorials, so my apologies if this is old news to you lol...)

Step 1 - sketch! I draw multiple iterations in my real-life sketchpad first until I'm happy with the concept, then I either scan it or reference it for the digital sketch.

Step 2 - Lineart! I use a pixelated brush in Paint Tool SAI, as I find it makes the final result look nicer.

Step 3 - Flat colors! Good ol' paint bucket is all I need for this

Step 4 - Shading! What I'll do is copy the flat color layer and set it to pure white as an overlay. Then I'll shade this new layer with black so the original colors can peek through.

Step 5 - Noise! Switching over to paint.net, I apply a noise effect to add texture to the art.

Step 6 - Blur! A slight blur changes the feel from digital to traditional, or at least like scanned art.

Step 7 - Color correction! I bring out the yellow in the highlights and the blue-purple in the shadows, using paint.net's Curves tool.

The Sims 4 uses transparent greyscale images for its normal maps. The Sims 2 does not. It uses these blueish things.

@simnopke taught @lordcrumps how to turn a Sims 4 normal map into a Sims 2 normal map in GIMP. Crumps showed me how to do it. I didn't want to install GIMP or do all those steps, so I made a Paint.NET plug in that does it in one click.

To install it, unzip the archive file, then run the installer. If you don't want to run the installer, just drop the .dll file into your Program Files\Paint.NET\Effects folder. That's all the installer does.

You'll need to be running Paint.NET v. 5.1.11 or above. Restart Paint.NET if you had it open when you installed the plug-in. Then you'll see it under Effects > Tools.