#tutorial time

METHOD ONE: ADAPT A FLOORPLAN

This method is particularly helpful if you’re building more than just a room. All you need to do is find an image of a floor plan you like, plop it down in Blender, and use it as a guide for your floors and walls.

If you’re a really good artist, you can draw a floor plan yourself. But if you’re me, then, uh, yeah, Google Image Search is your friend. 

As you can see, the final result is a little different because I tweaked it to suit my story. Don’t be afraid to change things! A floor plan is great to get you started, but the final look is up to you.

Also, keep in mind that in Blender, you have to build EVERYTHING, so don’t drive yourself crazy constructing spaces that your characters will never use. You’re not building for reality, you’re building for story. 

A good trick is to just hint at other rooms and spaces so that you can fill them in later if need be.

The main thing to keep in mind, though, is scaling. You don’t want to scale your floor plan for reality; you want to scale it to the Sims 4 game assets you’re going to use. The easiest way is to export an object from the game and use it to resize the reference image of your floor plan. I’ll be covering how to do that in the next part of this tutorial series. 

METHOD TWO: USE AN IN-GAME BUILD AS A MODEL

This is the same basic principle as using a floor plan. I suggest taking at least one top-down screenshot in-game and then a few around the lot so you can see the details and decor.

You’ll still need to scale the screenshot to use as a reference, but the benefit is that you’ll already know how everything fits. If you’re not a great builder (hi, it’s me), this is an especially good method. It's how I made the River Styx Subway Station.

The lot was originally built by drugst0rec0wgirl on the Sims 4 Gallery. I made a few changes to suit my needs.

Keep in mind, though, that things in-game won’t always translate 1:1 in Blender.

for example, not all build-mode objects export nicely. Debug buildings sometimes look wonky as hell!

Lights don’t actually illuminate anything; you’ve got to create that effect manually (I'll go over this step-by-step later in the series).

Stairs are another big issue. When you export them from Sims 4 Studio, you get a single stair, which is great for scaling, but not much help if you want a grand staircase or the second floor of a house.

I won't lie, stairs are hard, but damn if they aren't cool once you figure them out. If anyone ever wants to torture themselves like I have, you can check out this tutorial by CG Essentials. He has another one for railings that is equally great. Just remember, you’ll need to make sure the rise of the stairs matches the height they use in-game, or else you’ll have a hard time with poses. 

METHOD THREE: GET INSPIRATION FROM A REFERENCE IMAGE

This is the hardest to do from scratch and usually best once you’ve done a little more building. The reference image I used as inspiration for the City of the Dead in my story is by an artist named Thalia Bruckner. You should check out her ArtStation page; it’s weird, whimsical, and amazing! 

Reference images are awesome for helping you understand scene composition.

What do I mean by that?

Well, when you’re trying to create an exterior scene like a bustling city or an enchanted forest or whatever, it's best to approach it in layers. Your goal is for it to look lively and full based on your camera view, not real life. That means more detail at the front, less detail at the back. 

In my build, the “front” of the City of the Dead has actual street lamps and decor, but the back is just some bookshelves I sized up because they look like high-rises from far away, and a big-ass window for texture. 

I used the reference image to get a feel for the size and shape of buildings I needed, and then I just worked section by section, using debug buildings from the game to fill in my city.

Blender has a bunch of popular city generators you can buy as add-ons. I’ve tried a few, but found them to be kind of clunky.

I’ve also tried generating my own city with geometry nodes, but it didn't give me flexibility I needed. That doesn’t mean these methods are bad, just that I personally haven't found them useful for what I'm working on.

There are some paid add-ons that I think are really great and that I use regularly for things like skies, fog, and special effects. I'll definitely do a separate post about them in the future.

METHOD FOUR: START WITH THE STRUCTURE

This is probably the method I used the most. Basically, you're lookin for some structural element that you find interesting or exciting, and then you base the rest of your build around it.

This is essentially what I did for the Isle of the Blessed. I was reading about the Netherworld in Greek Mythology (which I completely bastardize in my story 💀 ), and I really liked the idea of a peaceful island that the dead could float over to…or, in Alice’s case, drop onto while screaming bloody murder.

I started with the idea of a floating island as my inspiration and used this tutorial to create it.

The top of the island was really bumpy, and trying to place sims on it for posing was a nightmare, so I used some mesh cubes to make platforms and gave them a nice stone wall so they looked like they belonged there.

I used a free add-on called Wall Factory. Here’s a tutorial, complete with a great tip about adding PBR textures. 

You can get a ton of free PBR textures here on Polyhaven. I like to use them whenever I want something to really look like it has roughness or depth to it.

Another structural element I wanted was a statue. I was already learning to make deco sims from this fab little tutorial and these tips from @madebycoffee (literal queen, these tips were so great).

The Alice statue is just a deco sim, scaled up, with a marble texture instead of her skin (which makes her look butt-naked, lol, sorry to her for the disrespect).

The halo is just a curve converted to a mesh with an emission shader on it. I got the idea from the tail-end of this video (he talks about how to make the halo in the last part).

I created the glowing doors based on this YouTube short. Yes, I know it's about making credit cards glow for commercials, lol, but I swear it works. 

For the Apparitional Baths/Tartarus. Water was the key structural element I wanted to work with, so I started by making a giant lake. The build is a combination of debug items from the game and platforms (same trick I used on the islands).

I’m not going to dive in (I’m sorry) to making water now, but I used this tutorial.

Truthfully, my water-making still needs work, lol. It's barely animated, and I don’t have the crashing waves I imagined or anything truly dramatic. I know that it's possible to do those things, but I’m just not there yet.  

For the Fields of Mourning, I really wanted something that gave off "cottage-core meets macabre," so the grassy field itself was the inspiration. I’m not going to get into it now, but here’s the tutorial, and I’m happy to talk through how I made it work with game assets in another post if people are interested. 

METHOD FIVE: USE A SIMS 4 DEBUG BUILDING AS A MODEL

Spoiler alert: This is the method we’re going to use for the rest of the tutorial. Basically, you just export one of the (working) debug buildings from the game.

Then you use it as a guide for your floors, walls, windows, and doors. The nice thing about this is that the exterior is done, and you’re really just designing the interior. Here’s a shot from further along in the tutorial where I’ve already started framing things out and placing furniture. 

Besides the fact that these buildings are already scaled to match the game assets, you can also easily place them in other scenes to get your exterior shots. Like so:

SETTING UP YOUR FOLDERS

This is the least sexy part of this tutorial, but I am trying to save you heartache! This video tutorial does a pretty good job of explaining why you should organize your Blender project and how to do it, but the TL:DR of it is this: you want to be able to find things, you want to be able to reuse assets, and the bigger and more complicated your project becomes, the more your ability to do those two things matters. 

First, give your project a name. Mine is “Monster Date Night Part 2,” but you can call it whatever you want. Like the video says, we’ll start with three main folders inside the project:

The LIBRARY folder is basically storage for stuff like screenshots, reference images, test renders, building notes, etc. Think of it as a place to keep anything you may need to come back to or reference as you’re working on your project.

The PRODUCTION folder is your working files. I’m building a massive world with way too many characters and scenes, so I’ve got a lot more folders than what you’ll need for this project. The main folders you need to create in here are SETS, EDIT, TOOLS, and SCENES. You can add additional folders later as you need them.

The SETS folder is where we’re going to keep all the objects that we’ll use to decorate the set we’re building. We’re building a lodging cabin, so just make a folder inside of SETS called LODGING CABINS.

The EDIT folder is where we’ll actually construct our build, so just make a folder inside of EDIT called LODGING CABIN BUILD. 

The TOOLS folder is where we keep things that we’re going to reuse for building our sets, like camera rigs (trust me, you only want to build that thing once) or VFX. For now, just add a folder called SCALE. It’s where you’ll keep objects that you can use to properly resize a floor plan.

Don’t worry about the SCENES folder for now. We’ll deal with that towards the end of the project when we start thinking about staging some sims in our build and take a few renders. 

Okay, apologies for this non-sexy diversion, but I swear it was necessary. Time to grab some objects!

EXTRACTING OBJECTS FROM SIMS 4 STUDIO

Just like in-game, if you’re going to build a Sims 4 set in Blender, you’ll need decorative objects. You don’t have to pay for 3D assets; you can literally use what’s in the game or your favorite cc.

Unfortunately, you can’t just install a package file or scroll through build/buy in Blender. You’ll need to extract these items from Sims 4 Studio and prep them so they don’t look crazy or clutter up your project file. But don’t worry, I’m going to show you how! 

First, navigate to Sims 4 Studio. Crack (click) that baby open. Make sure standalone recolor is selected under object, and then press the Object button. If you’ve done a recolor before, this will look familiar to you.

This will bring you to a catalog of all the objects in the game. Depending on your computer, it may take a while for things to load, so be patient. There are a few different ways to search: you can select the category and scroll through just like you’re in build/buy, or you can type in a keyword and search. 

The thing we want to grab is a sink because we’ll use it later in our cabin build. Select the sink you want to use. I’m going with the Laundry Day sink, but if you don’t have that pack, choose something else. 

Click next and then give your package file a name. I want to say that names don’t matter, because I get lazy about this, but I regret it every time. Your best bet is to choose a consistent naming convention and stick with it. 

I like “Creator Name_Pack_Object Name,” so I’m calling it EA_Laundry Day_DIY Sink. Then you’ll need to save it somewhere. If you followed the first part of this tutorial, you have a place! Put it in that lovely LODGING CABIN folder we made earlier. 

All this does is create a package file that we can come back to again later if we need it (for the most part, you won’t need it, but there is one good reason to keep it handy that I’ll cover in a second).

Next, we want to export the mesh of this object, which means we have to pick a swatch. There is no cycling through your color options in Blender. If you decide you like a different swatch later down the line, you’ll have to come back to this item and export a different swatch. This is the main reason I keep the package file handy, but once I’m done with a build in Blender, I usually delete it.

Okay, so select the MESHES tab and click EXPORT MESH. You can call it the same thing as the package file and save it in the same place (that LODGING CABIN folder).

Okay, you can save and close because we’re done with Sims 4 Studio for now.

Next, we’ll want to navigate to our LODGING CABINS folder and open the sink in Blender so we can clean it up. 

Blender is basically a giant work window that can be divided into areas. When you first open it, some of those areas are already defined. Here’s a breakdown that explains it if you’re interested. 

The area we’re actually concerned with now is the box on the upper right-hand side of the screen. It’s called the OUTLINER. 

It’s basically where all the crap you put in your Blender scene is represented as a—you guessed it—outline. Or I guess a tree. Whatever. The point is, there is a bunch of stuff in here that we are going to delete because you don’t need it when you’re working in Blender. See all those lamps and that camera? Delete them. They generate every time you open something in Blender, and we don’t need them. 

After you delete the camera and all the lamps. We can start deleting the parts of the mesh that we don’t need. See that stuff that looks like white papers? I think (don’t quote me) that in-game, these register as shadows, but in Blender, light sources work completely different so you don’t need these. Just select and delete them.

Gorgeous! Now you should have one mesh left (in our case, mesh 3). This won’t be the same every time. Sometimes, an object has a lot of meshes, and you’ll be left with more than one when you’re done. You can JOIN meshes so they are easier to work with, but I’ll cover that in a later part because it’s a bit complicated depending on what you want to do with your scene.  

The last thing we want to do is make sure the rig and mesh are inside the collection folder, so select everything and drag and drop it into the collection folder.

Then we’ll rename the collection so we know exactly what’s inside. I’m going to call it “EA DIY SINK,” but you can call it whatever you want as long as it makes sense to you. 

The whole reason for doing this is to get in the habit of keeping your blend files organized and to make it easier to link to an object or use it as an asset later. It seems silly now because we only have this one object. But when you’ve got a giant scene with a ton of objects, you’ll be glad that everything is nice little labeled Collections. 

CONGRATS! YOU DID IT!

Now, if all you wanted to do was pose a sim with this sink, you’re done. But if you want to build a full set, you’ll need to repeat this process for all the objects you want to use. To keep myself sane, I like to prep a bunch of objects for whatever area I know I’m going to work on in the build, and that way I don’t burn out. I know it’s tedious, but trust me, it’s way more annoying to do this while you’re actually setting up your scene. 

Plus, there’s a very good reason we want to keep our stuff organized in this way: it makes it easier to use LIBRARY OVERRIDES. I’ll talk about that more in a later part, but suffice it to say, library overrides will save you a ton of space in your project files and allow you to reuse assets across multiple files. 

But enough yapping, let’s scale a floor plan!

ADDING FLOOR PLANS AND SCALING THEM

First thing before we start this process: Make sure you have a floor plan ready to go. Honestly, anything you can Google and download should be fine—PNGs and JPEGs both work. Make sure to put your floor plan in your LIBRARY folder and give a name that you’ll recognize so you can come back and reuse it later if you want. 

Open Blender and delete the default cube, lamp, and camera. These generate every time you open Blender, and in most cases, you don’t need them.

Press Shift + A to bring up the ADD menu. Scroll down to Image and select MESH PLANE. There is an option for a reference image, but I’ve found that the mesh plane works better because it snaps flat to the grid, while the reference image option kind of floats in mid-air. 

Locate your floor plan, ignore all the settings on the right-hand side because they don’t really matter for us right now. Just click the IMPORT IMAGES AS PLANES button. 

Now you’ve got a floor plan! Looks great!

JK. It’s tiny as hell. We need to scale it up to the right size.

So, first, before we get too deep, let’s organize the shit in our OUTLINER, shall we? Hover over the outliner and right-click to bring up the OUTLINER menu and then select New Collection. Do this twice because we’ll need two collections.

Double-click on the Collections to rename one of them “Floorplan” and the other “Reference Object.” 

That orange triangle symbol means “mesh” in Blender. That’s our floor plan. Just drag and drop it into the FLOORPLAN collection. 

When you’re done, it should look like this:

The whole reason we’re doing this is that when you’re done building your blender scene, you can delete these collections without worrying that you’ve accidentally deleted an item you need. Moving forward, if you want to add an item to a collection, just make sure it’s selected before you append or link your item, and Blender will place it there.

Okay, back to scaling. 

The next thing we need to do is get ourselves a reference object so we can make sure that we’re scaling the floor plan up to a size that makes sense for our sims. Remember how we just grabbed a sink? Well, go back to Sims 4 Studio and this time, grab yourself a table or a desk. Instead of saving it in the Lodging Cabins folder, though, I want you to save it in the SCALE folder we made earlier. 

I have an object for scale ready, so I’m going to add it to my scene by clicking FILE and then APPEND. Then I’ll locate the folder where I keep my scale items. 

When you click the APPEND button, you’ll get this list of folders because Blender wants to know what you’re trying to add to this scene. If you named your collection as I said in the steps above, then your next move is easy! Just choose COLLECTION and then select the collection you named. 

In my case, it’s “Dining Room Table SCALE” but yours will be whatever name you gave it. Then click APPEND. 

Voila! We’ve got a table! Also, you can now see how small our floor plan truly is, lol. You can delete the boneshape because we don’t need it. And for now, just leave the table where it is.

Select your floorplan in the outliner and hit S on your keyboard to scale it. If you work in Blender a lot, this is probably second nature to you. I had a lot of trouble when I started, so I’ll just say that when you move the little arrow closer to the center of the object, you’re trying to scale it gets smaller. When you move it further away, it gets bigger. Sometimes, if you move it too fast, it’ll flip, so take your time. You just need to release it once you get the size you want.

Now, this is where you get into a fair amount of “messing around” until you get close to the size you want. At some point, you may want to move the table around to test out how it looks in different rooms. Remember to select the rig (the little orange person symbol) and the mesh (the orange triangle symbol), or else you’ll end up just moving the rig without the mesh or vice versa. 

There’s no exact science to this. We’re not looking for perfection; we just want to get close. And remember, you can append multiple scale items. Sometimes, I’ll add extra items like bookcases or counters just to make sure I’m actually leaving enough room for what I want to do. Truly, it’s all very experimental!

And that’s pretty much it. Once you’ve got the approximate size that you want, you can start building.

1. If you’re in SimPe and you’re looking at texture, you should export BOTH base-texture and Alpha Channel somewhere.

2. Now open both in GIMP. Copy the Alpha (black and white) texture by selecting all (ctrl+a) and copy (ctrl+c).

3. Switch to a base image. Right-click on the layer and add a layer mask. A window should appear, accept everything.

4. Now on the layers tab, next to the basic texture you should see a white square. Click on it. If your picture has a black-green frame now, you’re OK.

5. Paste your alpha on the picture by using ctrl+v shortcut and anchor the layer (ctrl+h).

6. If your texture looks like mine, you’re fine. Now click on your base texture square on the layer window (next to the alpha).

7. Now we’ll do something optional, but it’ll help you with editing. On the top of the window there is a grey area with the kind of lineal thing, click on it and drag on image - a vertical line should appear. Drop it close to the visible texture area.

8. Now open a texture file (I’m using Poppet’s wavy one here). Select all, copy and paste it on your texture image.

9. If you move the texture close to guide, then it should stick to the vertical line automatically.

10. Use scale tool to fit the new texture better to your image (and rotate tool as well if you have vertical areas). Copy the resized texture and paste, then move to the right. Repeat until whole pic is replaced with your new texture.

11. Now save it as .xcf (GIMP’s format), just in case.

12. Now right-click on the layer tab and choose ‘duplicate layer’. Repeat as many times as many colour options you want to have. I’ll make 5 basic naturals.

13. Recolor all layers with chosen colour curves.

14. Once you’re done, let’s use ol’ good ‘export layers’ option. Save them somewhere and open in GIMP as separate images.

Update: I figured that you can export layers as .dds if you use “dds” as file extension, so you can do that and skip point 15 of this tutorial.

15. Now pick one of your textures and choose ‘export as...’ option. Change the whole name to something specific and add ‘.dds’ on the end. Make sure that the bar with file type is set to ‘all export images’ and accept.

16. A ‘save as DDS’ window should appear. Set it as in the picture - or not (start with the ‘format’). I explained more about .dds exporting/settings in this post. Accept. Repeat for other colours.

17. Now go back to SimPe. Right-click on the image and use ‘Import DDS’ option.

18. Find you .dds files now.

19. Don’t forget to commit and save! Repeat for other colours.

If you want to create gradient colours:

1. Follow the tutorial above to point 12.

2. Duplicate layer. Reset the alpha channel of the top layer (you can use one of the drawing tools to fill the alpha with white colour, or select all and cut the whole image, it’s up to you). Hide the bottom layer with the eye icon.

3. Select only parts of the picture that you want to fill with gradient. Pick the gradient tool. Make sure that your tool options are set as in my screenshot. Then, holding ctrl, from top to bottom, drag a straight line, as on my picture.

4. The result should look like that. Now go to ‘Layer’ menu and pick ‘new from visible’.

5. Delete the layer with gradient alpha. Save your new texture as .xcf. You should have two layers - original texture on the bottom and layer called ‘visible’ with gradiented texture on top. Now you can recolor both layers with some curves.

6. Cut the ‘visible’ layer, switch to the bottom one, paste and anchor your gradient. Delete the top layer. The result:

7. Export the texture as .dds. Undo steps (by using ‘edit>undo history’) until you will have volatile-only gradient again and repeat for other colours as many times as you like. Open retexture files in SimPe and export your .dds files. Commit and save.

Result in Bodyshop:

I. How to edit picture with downloaded curve:

1. Open your screenshot (File...>open or ctrl+o). Then go to: colors>curves..., a window should pop up:

2. To import installed curves you need to click a little icon (showed on screenshot) and pick ‘import settings from file...’.

3. Find your chosen curve from the list, click ‘open’ and then accept with ‘OK’.

4. If you’re done, save your pic with 'file>export to [filename]’ (if you want to overwrite already existing pic) or 'file>export as...’ (if you want to rename file or choose different format). 

II. ‘But what if I wanto to create my own curves?’

Then you need to understand how it works:

1. Make sure that you have ticked ‘preview’ (left bottom of curves window) and your setting for curve type is ‘smooth’. Now take a look at ‘Channel’, default setting is ‘value’.

To use the tool you need to click on the black line (or black dots) and drag it to another place (you can do this multiple times!). To explain how it works I made a bad-looking and probably not a really accurate picture:

Some examples:

2. Now let’s check out the red channel:

You’ll get red-orange colouring if you’ll drag the ‘dot’ to left top corner...

...and blue-green if you’ll drag it to the right bottom corner.

3. The green one:

4. And the blue one:

5. There is also an alpha channel. Our screenshot has not transparency, so I needed to pick another example:

Basically, this option is useful when you want to add/get rid of some part of alpha channel:

Now let’s have some fun with this tool and mix all channel settings:

Some examples of hair colours (I based them on volatile):

So, you created some nice curves? Now let’s save them!

You can do that in two ways:

a) Export settings to file...

b) or ‘Add settings to favourites’ (you’ll find them in ‘presets’ later).