A small texture default for these basegame shorts, removing all the zippers and pockets, and making them usable for my historic save. Black specular removes the shine. I left the buttons and made them recolorable. Please put the file in your overrides and enjoy.
Now THANK GOD this was reconverted years ago, as when I looked at its original hair and this version, it was SO MUCH BETTER lmao, but anyways, this to me would be a great use for those in an alternative route or just a casual bedhead :D
i’ve updated these tailored shorts with fixed visual bugs, improved textures, and a proper thumbnail.
sorry for the earlier version — i’m still learning and improving with every release, so thank you for your patience!
converted from ts4’s sweet allure set, these shorts bring a clean, classy vibe to your sims. perfect for warm days when your boys still wanna look sharp.
I decided to upload V2.0 officially now, as otherwise I never will. If you tried out the testing version, I recommend you redownload the latest one as there are some changes since then :)
Quick summary of update:
Better menu
Different types of arrangements + reactions
Ability to scent arrangements for special effects
More interesting skill journal, stats + challenges
So I’ve finally decided to make time to learn some script modding! 🥳
I managed to rustle up a couple of small mods with help from some great modders over at the Creators Cave Discord!
Completely inspired by Savanita’s Expanded Household mod, I made two other mods that I think compliment it very well!
Community Lot Mailbox
Now that we have ways of making sims live on community lots, (With NRaas ‘Add Sim..’ and the Expanded Household mod by Savanita), they should get their mail and bills there, right? Now they can!
New and existing community lots can have a fully functional mailbox added to them. Also, functional outdoor trashcans can be added too!
Requires MonoPatcher!
Credits: Lazy Duchess, Savanita (The Sweet Simmer), Phoebejaysims, Zoe22, Gamefreak130
It’s so frustrating when your sim can only carry the small items in their pocket i.e their personal inventory when they’re out and about, going to lots that they don’t own!
Is your sim’s house too small to hold their lifetime’s worth of junk or collectable items such as their art collection, cars, antiques, gems etc that need extra storage?
Is your sim opening up a shop and wants to add some large items such as furniture to sell?
Is your sim having a party on a community lot and wants to bring their own furniture and decorations to the lot? (Great idea from Phoebejaysim! 👍🏾)
With this mod, your active sim can now transfer large items to and from their family inventory on any lot whether it’s owned, unowned, a residential or community lot!
Add some items to your sims family inventory, pan to another lot, shift+click the ground of the lot to 'Buy On This Lot’ - you should see the family inventory and its contents!
If you want to 'Add a Sim’ using NRaas Master Controller to live on a community lot, move their furniture first before adding them so they don’t lose their stuff.
Requires MonoPatcher!
Compatability:
Awesomemod already has a similar feature but this mod won’t conflict with it if you still want to use it.
Made on Game patch 1.67
Credits: Lazy Duchess, Savanita (The Sweet Simmer), Phoebejaysims, Zoe22
Random immensively helpful cc making tip that got drammed into me when I started making cc:
Inspect things
Weirdly & gorgeously detailed EAXIS acrobat outfit that’s somehow still only 5k? Open that birch up in tsrw and export the mesh to blender and inspect how it’s made, compare the multiplier and the normal map etc.
How did EA make a skirt with a high slit that doesn’t go grazy in animation?
You guessed it, open it up, get it in blender, inspect its topology and bones.
Wait, how do you get those sheer 3d sleeves? EA has few/no meshes with 3d sheer parts so….Lemme inspect that cc with the pretty sheer sleeves!
Wait, how does that mask seemingly have 5 channels?
Inspect it
What’s a normal map supposed to look like?
INSPECT IT!!!!
(Note; the normal maps you see in tsrw of some BG items are weird and funky, I recommend cloning a later ep item instead)
Look at how others things that have something special or are very nicely made are made. I specifically recommend looking at later ep & sp & store eaxis items first and foremost, because while most cc out there is perfectly functional, it sometimes isn’t EA maxis match standard and can have some peculiarities. There are some ea items that are really well made and inspecting their topology, textures and so on can give you a lot of insight.
For the same reason, when I first started making cc, I first tried some 4to3 conversions, using mildly outdated tutorials. This wasn’t going anywhere as options the tutorials said I had to use weren’t working, it didn’t look pretty etc etc. Then @simlicious recommended me to start with an EAXIS frankenmesh, and I made my “sleeveless vest” and “sleeveless vest with ruffle blouse”. While I would do those two slightly different now (but can’t be bothered, cus they’re old news now.) With her assistance I learned SO MUCH when making them.
Starting with an EAXIS ts3 mesh and frankenmeshing it or altering it also gets rid of two intimidating steps I see mistakes in in other’s earliest projects - uv mapping (the item already has an optimized for ts3 uv lay out) and the shape (the item already is made to the ts3 bodyshape, so no struggle with autoboobjob or weird shoulders etc)
Also, there is still miles of untapped potential for sims 3 assets mesh & texture alterations and frankenmeshes, it’s lowkey overwhelming and my head constantly explodes with options (while there are also so many nice ts4 things to convert! AAAAAH) , to the point there are multiple maxis match TS4 creators who commonly use ts3 store & ep/sp mesh parts in their frankenmeshes, if it isn’t a straight up 3to4 conversion!
(This is to say: there are ugly EA items, and EA items with mistakes etc. But lots of it looks very nice if you prefer maxis match to begin with)
Amen! 💜 I’d love to see more original items from TS3 creators!
A few general tips for people who want to get into Sims 3 Custom Content creation, specifically clothing :
Starting your CC journey can feel overwhelming and converting doesn’t seem as intimidating at first, because you do not have to create your own meshes or textures. But for it to look right and work right, it can mean a lot of extra work and knowledge to sort out issues that can arise when converting CC.
It may be less intimidating to learn by starting with simple texture edit with just slight alterations of the mesh without adding new geometry at first. This is how I started many years ago.
As @toadifylackoffantasy already mentioned: it’s a very good idea to inspect different game meshes and textures to see how they work. Most TS3 meshes work pretty well when playing animations, so if you imitate their structure and methods, your meshes will have a good chance of working that way, too.
When you know how EA’s meshes and textures are made, you can spot deviations more easily and it may help you figure out whether this approach works or might be a mistake. CC creators often do not follow EA’s techniques very closely, and knowing when to follow it because it is crucial and when it’s okay to do your own thing is important for how the CC behaves in the end. This skill is honed with experience, but you can start with it right in the beginning.
When I first started my meshing journey in 2010, I familiarized myself with the different texture types and tools first. Back then, Milkshape was mainly used for meshing, but I would definitely recommend Blender now. Blender has come a long way and improved a lot over the last years. It has a steep learning curve, but you do not need a broad knowledge of Blender to start making your own CC edits, you need very basic specific knowledge to get started and learn more along the way.
Don’t be afraid to experiment. My first few clothing edits were made out of frustration with certain CC pieces that I used and generally liked, but had some aspect that bothered me, so I attempted to change those to my liking (ofc I never shared those files with anyone, they were personal edits). I learnt a lot of valuable lessons through this process.
Most basic Blender tutorials show you how to create and edit geometry, some are using techniques which are not game-friendly, like subdivision surface modeling or the use of the multi-resolution modifier. If you hear those terms, be careful—techniques like that should only be used in our workflows when sculpting a high resolution mesh to bake/generate textures from. These methods can result in a very high-poly mesh and these should not be directly used in our Sims 3 games. You can retopologize such a high-poly mesh to create a low-poly version of it that would be acceptable, but that’s pretty advanced stuff since you need to know hoe the topological flow of the Sims 3 meshes are and imitate them to get best results - nothing to concern yourself with at the start of your meshing journey.
Instead, I recommend looking for Blender tutorials specifically for low-poly or game asset creation—these tutorials usually take polygon counts into account and don’t go crazy—though how many polys are acceptable of course varies a lot, sims 3 has a pretty low limit compared to other games.
Before Attempting Clothing Conversions in Blender
Before you dive into clothing conversions, I specifically recommend learning these things:
How the UV map and textures work for The Sims 3 - knowing what texture does what, and in which size and format it should be made in
basic skills in an image editing program which supports the DDS file format (for a free one that is very similar to Photoshop (down to the same shortcuts even), I recommend Photopea, it is free and runs in your browser)
Basic workflow with Sims 3 CC tools (s3pe, TSR Workshop, s3oc, and Mesh Toolkit are the main ones you’ll use)
How the mesh and UV map are structured in the original TS3 meshes
How to fix shading and seam issues on your mesh Know how to align, reset and copy/paste normals, how to merge and split edges
Blender Meshing Basics
Get comfortable with these Blender tools and concepts:
How to use modifiers like the mirror and edge split modifier
How to split meshes into groups and join them
How to use merge by distance to remove split seams
How to mark sharp edges and set shading to smooth
How to activate/deactivate auto smooth
How to align normals
How to copy normals from one mesh to another using the data transfer modifier
How to triangulate and quadrangulate meshes (working with quadrangulated meshes is visibly less confusing and has better tool support, important for things such as edge loop selection with a simple alt+click which saves a lot of time compared to manually selecting each vertex)
Importing/exporting meshes
How to install plugins and which ones to activate/install (like F2 and UV Squares, Blender GEOM tools)
Basics of the Blender GEOM tools plugin
How to decimate geometry (using the decimate modifier). This is not my favorite method to lower polygon counts since it can have unexpected results in some areas—I like to dissolve certain edges, faces or vertices instead to have more manual control over the process instead, but if your mesh is very high poly, then you may consider lowering it with this modifier if you do not want to do a lot of manual work.
Here’s a secret bonus tutorial🍀:
📌 Anchoring Mesh Pieces
This is what I personally call a method EA utilized in TS3 clothing meshes to seamlessly connect mesh pieces to each other through connected vertices. It helps to minimize clipping and gaps during animations. The technique involves making sure that the vertices at the seams of different mesh pieces, such as connecting the neck to the collar of a shirt, are connected like two magnets, and will share the same space, so they are basically treated as one when assigning bones and them getting identical bone assignments will prevent gaps forming in the mesh on certain animations, which can happen if you leave edges raw/unconnected. In combination with good bone assignments, This can also reduce clipping/mesh pieces poking through each other.
To utilize the method of anchoring, you can pair up vertices from one edge to one on the opposing edge. You can use strategies such as selecting a vertex, then tapping the g key twice to move it along the edge to better line them up. Pro tip: this vertex slide mode locks the axis to the edge and moves the vertex also on the UV map, which results in a better UV map and less work fixing it for you later on.
Enable snapping with snap to vertex mode to easily snap one vertex from one edge to the other on the other edge. Sometimes, the vertices might not match up and you have too many on one edge or too little on the other. In that case, you need to remove (“dissolve vertices”) or add an additional vertex on the other edge with the knife tool (or by selecting two vertices or an edge between two vertices and using subdivide on it to create a new vertex in the middle—there are often several ways of achieving something in Blender) in case there is a mismatch. Whether to add or remove the vertex depends on the shape and complexity of your mesh. If removing vertices from one edge results in an undesired shape change, adding vertices on the other edge instead is preferable. Ideally, each vertex on your mesh should have a visible purpose, meaning if it is removed, the shape of your mesh will visibly change. If your mesh has so many vertices that you do not notice a difference in how the shape looks by removing the one next to it, the vertex density is probably too high and you can safely dissolve the superfluous ones away, but that is a topic for another time.
Textures
How to add and connect node-based textures so you can check your textures right in Blender right on your mesh (and even edit the textures using texture paint)
Basic UV Editing
How to use the align tools on the UV map
Moving and selecting islands
Using different modes: vertex, edge, face select to your advantage
Enabling/disabling UV sync mode as needed
Different ways to unwrap (mainly the plain unwrap and project from view types)
Using the heatmap view and applying a UV grid texture to check for issues on the UV map (there is a handy addon for that too: Quick UV Checkers)
This is just what I remember (I may have missed something, I’ve been on a meshing hiatus for a while), and it covers only Blender (not other CC tools), but this information should give you a basic direction to go in while learning Blender. Knowing how to do these things gives you a solid base for tackling conversions (and Frankenmeshes/mashups of EA meshes or your very own meshes, too!).
Once you are more confident in your abilities, it’s easier to venture deeper and learn things like how to adjust or make your own morphs, change bone assignments manually, and optimize the UV maps of your meshes.
While learning to make conversions, to take them to the next level, I suggest you get into:
weight painting/manual bone assignments
texture painting
Baking textures/transferring textures from one mesh to another
How to create and edit custom UV’s
How to set and remove seams for UV’s
How different unwrapping methods change the resulting UV
How to use a UV grid addon to get square-looking UV maps
How to use tools to improve UV maps like align and minimize stretch
If anyone wants to add to this post and share more tips and strategies to learn (or add other areas I haven’t covered in detail), feel free do write in the comments or reblog.
If you have read this far, you’re definitely a good candidate to learn how to make clothing CC for TS3! Patience and focus will definitely help you while troubleshooting. And talking about your woes with fellow sufferers, of course (on the Sims 3 Creator’s Cave discord, for example)!
If you’re here looking for the TL;DR:
Learn from actual Blender users, not just from sims tutorials. If you want to specifically know what to learn in Blender in order to make TS3 CAS CC, read the bullet point lists.
It may look like a bunch of stuff to learn, but I think it’s better to know what you need so you can focus on learning the core skills rather than learning lots of stuff you may not actually need in this context.
