#ts4tips

Hey there! I just want to share with you some things I’ve discovered about texturing in my phase of experimenting and playing with it. The results presented here can be achieved faster in Substance Painter but this Photoshop pipeline was created before Substance even existed, and it is still relevant until these days (in some cases it provides more control, if you’re more familiar with Photoshop). I learnt this with some wonderful tutorials about texturing for Dota 2, all the technical details can be found HERE and HERE , in case you’re interested. I did not followed the steps thoroughly since I’ve adapted it to work with only Blender and Photoshop.

Now to the good stuff, It’s widely known that using a High Poly mesh provides a way to mantain and “bake” details into your Low Poly mesh as a way of optimization for making content for game assets. (As I mention in the other post). What a lot of people miss about this process is the HUGE potential it actually has into making your new texture from scratch.  First of all, it allows you to bake a Normal Map, this will make a great impact in how your items look in game and Sims 4 Games DO USE THEM, you shouldn’t miss the oportunity to take advantage of this handy maps.

Secondly, you can bake an Ambient Occlusion map, this is very useful to give detail to yout texture and it’s a widely known starting point in a texture. You can reach this results by multiplying this texture on top of a solid color:

Now, it is still looking quite...mhh.. FLAT, right? So what else can I bake to improve this? The answers are in the links I dropped above. Other maps you should definitely consider as a starting point are:

Gradient Maps

Cavity Maps (both high detail and smooth)

Light Maps

Bent Normals map, World Space Normals or Object Normals, all of them should give you a good fake lighting effect.

With the help of this maps and some texture overlaying (fabric texture and noise), you can get this results:

As you can see, making this maps helps you get a LOT of depth in there, making the volumes to show up better and stand out increasing the quality of the item a lot, without even manually painting anything.

From there you can keep experimenting and painting on top to reach your desired results, but definitely take this into account as a starting point ;). This will improve your work without the need for highpoly counts, that are definitely not needed and harmful for games (cannot stress that enough).

IT WAS THE FUCKING EA APP

I spent all evening yesterday trying to figure out why my Sims 4 game doesn't launch. Like at all. Steam starts, then EA shows the "Preparing the game", then nothing at all, like I never clicked the icon. Well, after uninstalling Reshade, removing all mods, repairing the game and sacrificing a newborn I thought it would be a good idea to start the EA app separately. Whaddayaknow, it crashes, tries to repair itself and crashes again. Uninstalled the bitch, reinstalled again, aaaaand there it is, my lovely game, launching again. Brand fucking new because I took out EVERYTHING. GG, now I have to deal with my saves that are in the 2400's count currently because I fucked around with importing other people's saves and found out that once you set your save filename to 002226, next one will be 002227 which translates as something like "fucking kilotons of saves later, here's your millionth one". Absolutely fucking moronic naming system, ugh.

Anyways, rant over, now you know where to check if your game doesn't launch. Can they do ANYTHING right?