#and some of the shading is reused but i had to redo that myself

[joshuamj]

A continuation of my last post cuz I just had to draw the red life version, its also just so good.

[sewandbind]

Adventures in... lingerie making?

Yeah so at some point I thought, you know what I'm going to do instead of studying for my finals? Bra sewing. So I took a deep dive into bra patterns, underwires, lace and elastic.

There are a few patterns so many people rave about online, the Harriet bra, the Black Beauty bra, the Marlborough bra etc. There are so many small pattern companies specialised in lingerie patterns and it was a little intimidating when choosing one. They're also not cheap. A bra pattern is easily 15-20$ and I get why, but I'm a little cheap when it comes to patterns. This is however not a project I wanted to draft my own cups for. The Maya bra is a free pattern, but it's not a style of bra I wear often.

I don't have big boobs (I wear a 65D/30D) and like, a lot of the home-sewing bra patterns offer a lot of coverage and support. Which is great! But it's not what I wanted. So when I saw this nice plunging/push-up bra pattern, and people online were like "it's not a beginner friendly, buy when you have some bra-making experience" I went like "that sounds like a perfect pattern for me, a beginner". Of course I bought the paper pattern of the Merckwaerdigh PBH30. And the Cambia bra pattern because it intrigued me.

Then it was time to get lost in all the kinds of elastics and fabrics I would need. I caved and just bought a bra kit; shipping prices can variable and I didn't like the kits the Dutch sites offered. I did however like this black lace set by smallbobbins.be.

And then I started on a test bra, made out of some cotton voile and purple lace and lycra I had in my fabric stash. I had such a hard time with the instructions; even though they're available in mine and Merckweardigh's native language, this pattern is very... ehm brief in the instructions. Thank the gods for the wayback machine and clothing engineer's tutorial on how to insert the removable padding pocket. After that things made way more sense, but I still wrote my own instructions + illustrations (message me if you're interested). I decided halfway through my mock up, that I felt confident enough and that I would make a 'mock up' out of the bra set. I used a different piece of bra tule that was included (it was a shade lighter). The cup pieces were so small that I suspected I could make at least 2 bra's out of it if I threw some strap elastic, rings and sliders in that I already had in my stash. I ripped the hook and eye closure of a too small bra and reused it.

I made the B70, like the measurements table told me to do. I allowed myself some experimenting with a one-piece lace cup fabric (not my fave look). It went pretty well! Until I used a zigzag stitch to topstitch the power mesh to the picot elastic and the black thread on the beige power mesh showed all the missed stitches of my machine. It's not pretty at all. I hate ripping out seams that are positioned well, but I do want to redo this after I do some much needed maintenance and timing management on my machine, before I start zigzagging my 'official' version of the bra.

The wires, even though they're push up wires, are a little too big, but I've ordered shorter ones.

To mine and everybody's surprise, (no really, I was really surprised), the cups are... too small? Yeah not sure how that happened. I might be on my period, but even those measurements fall neatly in the "84-86 cm" measurement for the B70 cup. I'm not totally spilling over, but it's noticeable enough that some of my breast tissue is not in the cup before I did the swoop. Adding the little padding 'cookies' for some volume is making the problem a little worse. So I guess that means I'm making a C70 for my 'official' bra.

[vintagesimstress]

VI c. UV_1

(Previous: Changing the texture displayed in Blender)

As mentioned before, the uv_1 map plays a very different role than uv_0: it tells the game where certain parts of your mesh are located, so that the whole thing could move with sliders. It seems many people struggle with it a lot – and to be honest, I have no idea why, as in my experience uv_1 has always been totally unproblematic. Hopefully you'll share my feelings on this!

Let's click once again the little triangle on the right ('Data') and choose 'uv_1' this time.

As you can see, the texture on the model turned very weird – and it'll stay this way, as that map is not meant for texturing. You can as well change to solid shading, if you find that craziness spooky or annoying.

If you switch to edit mode, you'll see that the map looks just as crazy:

UV_1 uses a completely different type of template. It differs very slightly depending on age and gender of your sim; the adult female one looks like this:

You can download all the versions from S4S forum, in HERE (I highly suggest you make some kind of 'Basics' folder for all those things which you'll keep reusing!)

Once you have downloaded it, click 'Image' and then 'Open image'. It works exactly the same as in case of uv_0. Now it should look like this:

You can see that your vertices are twice wider than the template. I'm not sure why the template has been made in this way instead of getting adjusted to the TS4 requirements, but that's what we have to work with. Select all the vertices (a), press s, then x, then type 0.5 and press enter. Do not move your mouse! Your uv map should be twice narrower now:

We still have to move it, so that it'd align with the template. Select all again, this time press g, x and type 512. That's exactly the number of pixels you need to move your mesh to the right. Now it should finally look correct.

Just like in case of uv_0, the top part is completely done, so the only thing we have to do is unwrap the skirt. This time the only valid methods for doing it are no. 1 and 2 (see: VI a), namely moving the lines manually or using cylinder projection. As at this point making manual adjustments would be too cumbersome, we're going to use option no. 2.

Select the lowest line of vertices to select your whole skirt, go to front view this time (num 1) and choose cylinder projection.

Move the newly unwrapped faces up or down (g, y), to the black area, so that you could properly see them.

You can see that my dress got unwrapped a bit unevenly – there are small 'steps' on the sides. I highlighted all the faces which should form the left edge. Now I'll move the highlighted parts on the right to the left, and the non-highlighted parts on the left to the right, and then it should all look and work fine.

Tip: you can also move them precisely into the right place by typing g, x, 1024 (to move to the right) or g, x, -1024 (to move to the left)!

The weird part at the bottom is the closing circle; you can select the central vertex (which is here doubled on the sides), weld it and move it down, to more or less align it with the lowest row. Or simply wait with closing your dress until you're done with uv_1 ;). The bigger problem is that step my dress still has at the top. I'll select all the vertices below it and just very gently move them along the x axis to the left. Now, that looks better:

And now, just as we did before, we have to connect the skirt with the top. It's a bit trickier than in case of uv_0, because you can't do it in one piece: your mesh has to be split along the back and both sides. Take a look at the top mesh. Let's start from the left: click the rightmost face and then, in 3D view, the faces right underneath it. This will tell you where your skirt should be split.

I'll deselect the face of the top, select the whole part of the skirt left from the selection and then move it to the left (g, x), separating it from the central part.

That weird line at the bottom is the closing circle again – I'll delete it and redo it afterwards, it'll really be easier.

Repeat the same steps for the part on the right.

The edges of those three parts should be, if possible, straight. Mine aren't. To be able to adjust them, I'll select the edges and temporarily split them (ctrl + e, in 3D view). Select a vertex or two above as well, or the uppermost one won't get split!

(If you're having problems with selecting edges, it might be smart to select the whole skirt (not the top!) and change it back from tris to quads (alt + j). Then you can easily select edges by clicking them while holding alt).

Split also the top row of vertices, to separate the skirt from the top. Just for a second.

Now select a whole edge, press w and choose 'Align X'

Repeat for the remaining edges. If you want to and feel that it's needed, you can also straighten other lines in your mesh.

Now it's finally the time to put it in the right place. Select the skirt and move it up (g, y).

One can immediately see that it's way too tall. Scale it along the y axis until it looks more reasonable. It should start at the lowest line of the top and end a bit above the feet. Nothing big will happen if it covers them, but it has to fit inside the picture!

And now just scale and move each of the 3 parts individually, along the x axis, to match them with the top.

The only thing left to do is to weld the vertices. It's unlucky that we separated the skirt from the top; now we have to select all, remove doubles and then once again split the side edges to be able to weld everything properly. Just like with uv_0: select a vertex, press w and choose 'weld' from the drop-down menu. Repeat for aaaaaall the vertices connecting the skirt with the top.

Sometimes the vertices can be quite far away from each other. Is it still safe to weld them? I'd say risk it. If you see some weird stuff happening in game when changing your sim's body type, you'll know you have to fine tune it: straighten some lines, make them more regular etc. However, chances are quite high that it won't matter at all.

Select all and remove doubles. Yes, again (I keep doing it all the time, that's probably why I love the edge split modifier so much).

And now a very important, final step that I usually forget about: you have to revert the moving and scaling changes you made at the very beginning. Select all and press g, x, -512 to move it back into position, and then s, x, 2, to make it twice wider again. Otherwise TS4 will get quite perplexed with your mesh (and so will you, seeing everything being weirdly deformed and moving with all the wrong sliders)!

As you see, it's not very difficult and once you get a grip of it, you can do it in no time. To be honest, 90% of the time I don't even do the whole scaling and moving thing; I just open the picture, to know where the feet are, and adjust the rest to the top. UV_1 is really not that bad, at least as long as you don't have to deal with the upper body half.

Here are just a couple of general, closing remarks which I'd like to share:

If you move any vertices of the top, immediately move them on the uv_1 map as well. I try to avoid it at all costs, but sometimes I can't resist making just one teeny tiny adjustment... Arms are usually not a problem, neck can get problematic, and breast area is an absolute nightmare. I already mentioned it once, but honestly, better dissolve vertices and cut new edges with the knife tool than move anything in there.

If you're frankenmeshing, remember to weld any vertices you merged in 3D view! If your mesh is getting split in game when you move any sliders, that probably means you didn't connect those parts on the uv_1 map (or that it's vertex paint... but that's another story).

Of course, if you added any other parts to your mesh than just a skirt – or if you frankenmeshed a thing, but changed its location, e.g. took a hair ribbon and put it on the skirt – you have to put it in the right place as well! In case of frankenmeshing you just have to change its location on the map; if you made it yourself, you'll have to experiment with different types of unwrapping first (pssst, projecting from view usually isn't a bad idea).

There are also certain cases - rarely, but still - when it might be a better idea not to properly unwrap a part of the mesh, but weld it all together to a little dot and put it in the right place on the uv_1. The first example which comes to my mind are 3D buttons. I always weld each button to a single dot, so that it’d be changing its size evenly, without deformations. However, this comes at a prize of an increased risk of clipping.

And finally: if you're having big problems with uv_1 and my method doesn't work for you – or if you made your mesh completely from scratch, so you don't have an unwrapped top – you can always make a data transfer, copying uv_1 data from another mesh. I won't elaborate on this one, because Teanmoon already explained it all in her amazing tutorial, which you can find HERE. Scroll down a bit until you see 'UV-1 Transfers'. I think I used it myself once or twice in the past and I was quite pleased with the results :).

***

Once again, I'm sorry both for how long you had to wait for this tutorial and for its final length. I swear I intended it to be a simple, concise explanation ^^. I hope that at least it's all clear and will help you avoid any problems with uvs. Please tell me if you have any questions or if something doesn't work for you – really, I mean it! Half of my inspiration for this tutorial comes from me watching other simmers struggle with making their first pieces of CC, as it helps me notice what hasn't been explained yet.

From now on we'll be moving into the dangerous territory of clones, cuts, regions, bones and weights, and I need some time to figure out how to divide this whole topic into sensible parts. It's not even that hard, but very interconnected, and that makes it difficult to tackle – as covering it all in one part is absolutely out of the question. Please have some patience with me and stay tuned!

[ultears]

Could you tell how you make those wonderful gif edits, and what effects and apps you usually use? I just love them!!! If possible can u make a tutorial please? Thanks in advance ❤❤

First of all, thank you so much!! That means a lot because I put lots of effort into making them. :) Second of all, you didn’t actually precise what gifset you’ve seen and therefore what effects you want me to explain, but I’m going to guess it’s this one because it has like, 500 different things going on :’) (if not, feel free to send me another ask specifying which gifset, although basically, any effect I’ve ever used is in this one, so it’ll be explained) 

I only use Photoshop CS6 for all of my gifsets (I don’t use anything to make the caps/frames because I feel like it’s easier to just make them in CS6) and I use a Macbook Pro if that does anything? Idk, just for the screenshots I guess haha

For these tutorials, I’m going to assume you have basic GIF-making knowledge but if you need a tutorial for that too, just send me an ask and I’ll teach you how I do it (because everyone does it slightly differently)

Disclaimer: I’m in no way an expert, most of the things I know about GIFs are thanks to the tutorials of people before me and lots of trial and error. Also, I suck at explaining things. 

I’m gonna put this under a cut or else it’s gonna take so much space oml

GRADIENTED GIFS

So these gifs are probably the easiest to make out of all of the ones in this set. I’ll be using the hand for the example because it was slightly harder to get there (you’ll see why shortly)

So you start by making your basic gif: (I edit all my gifs at 540px but these are saved at 268px for Tumblr dimensions)

Because this is a colour-matching gifset and not a vibrancy, I skip my step of basic colouring (which usually includes lots of curves, vibrancy, and selective colour, and you can see that the most in my lyrical fairy tail gifsets) Instead, I’m going straight for the gradient layers. I start off with a full black and white to get the colour contrasts, and then I put the gradient of the colours I want:

Now for this gifset, I had a basic self-made psd (if you will) that I copied on every gif to get the same colour, so I’ll do that now (it’s made up of curves, vibrancy, brightness/contrast and exposure layers)

Now, I didn’t think there was enough of a contrast between Yuuri’s hand and the background, so I added a curves, brightness/contrast and levels layer BEFORE the gradient ones so that it would affect the entire colour schemes to get this:

And there you go, that’s the gif! The one with the skates didn’t use that last step because I liked the contrast between the skates and the background already without additional layers, so that’s why it was easier. I also added snow on it like I did with all other gifs in the set, so I’ll do a separate tutorial in here for that.

TYPOGRAPHY

To be honest, I wouldn’t really be able to explain these very well considering it was my first time using them, so here are the links to the tutorials I followed. It was lots of trial and error until I got the method down, but I was happy with the end result, so I’d recommend them.

Typing the name: [x] (I actually did this one without a tutorial but this one resembles what I did, I was just too lazy to put the cursor bar lol) 

Writing “love”: [x]

So, if you followed the tutorial the same way I did, you’re going to get something like this:

Similarly to the hand, I copied the gradient I wanted (I didn’t need to put the black and white one since those are already the base colours): 

However, because I wanted the opposite colours, I clicked the little “reverse” button in the properties > gradient map to get this:

From there, I added the same PSD as earlier to reach the colour scheme:

And there you go, that’s it for the text ones! Just missing the snow. I know this makes it look simple but that’s because I didn’t make the tutorial myself for the hardest part, lol. (The handwriting one took me about an hour, so don’t despair if it takes lots of time because it’s definitely a hard effect to get a handle of)

AI / GLASSES

Alrighty! Well, these two are the object ones, and probably would’ve been considered the easiest ones if I didn’t have to deal with finding the exact image I was mentally picturing for the glasses, whoops. 

So the “Love” character comes from episode 5 when Yuuri presents his theme. I tried taking the frames where the sign doesn’t move. So, we start off with that basic gif:

Over these frames, I placed a ‘colour fill’ layer that matches the colour of the board on which Yuuri wrote, which actually gives us a completely opaque colour over everything. 

After that, I added a layer mask so we could see only the writing of the character through the fill layer, hiding everything else in the frame: 

This doesn’t look like a gif because I covered up everything that moves, but it is one! You’ll only see movement later when I add the snow, which is the only thing that moves in both this gif and the glasses one. Now, like the other gifs, I added the gradient (also reversed like the writing to get the proper colours) and the psd to make it darker like the others as well, and you get to this:

And there you go! That’s how I made the Ai gif. You can also do it like I’m about to do the glasses, with a singular screencap, turned into multiple frames.

So for the glasses, I searched online for an image that I thought resembled Yuuri’s glasses and found these, which I was satisfied with: [x]

To get to the shape I wanted, I messed around with the image size and the canvas size until I got them approximatively the size I wanted them in my usual 540x304 canvas size, like this:

Now that I had my image, I converted it to a frame timeline like with most of my gifs, and copied the image into multiple frames so I had this:

Now, for all intents and purposes, although nothing is moving (yet), this is a gif because it has the multiple frames going on a loop. Like with all of the other gifs I’ve made, I put the gradient layers (this one had a black and white one because there’s blue in this one as well) and the PSD:

And that’s it! Again, just missing the snow to make it look like a moving gif. I’m guessing that you can see my pattern at this point, haha! Now I’m going to screw it over with the final two gifs, that are a little different. Whoops. 

CHARACTER CUT-OUT GIFS

Welcome, friends, to the most time-consuming form of gif I have ever made. Luckily, only the cutting out of the character takes time, the rest is pretty straightforward from what I’ve done in the past gifs, and you can reuse the cut-out characters for any future gifsets as well (I used these cutouts from a previous gifset I made, this one here) 

I learned how to do these cutout gifs (well I had a general idea on how to do it but her explanations make it so much clearer) thanks to bae’s @katsuukis ‘s tutorial here, so you should probably just follow her tutorial ‘cause mine’s a mess. :’) 

You start off with your basic gif. (the fewer the frames, the less you’ll want to jump off a bridge while doing it: this example is 11 frames, but the other gif is 58 frames, and let me tell you, it was unpleasant) I try keeping it the original size of the frames (in my case, 1280x720px) so it’s easier to edit the masks to remove the backgrounds. (but I will be saving them at 268px later on) 

I chose the frames for this one so that it looks like an eternal loop, but you can do whatever you want! 

Alright, now for the masking. You’re going to select both the frame in the timeline and its equivalent layer. Using the ‘quick selection tool’, you’re going to select around Yuuri until you have the whole background, like this:

And you’re going to click ‘refine edge’ (in the top bar) so it looks like this. I use the same settings as Alice recommends in her tutorial, and it seems to do the trick. And then you click ‘OK’:

Then, you’re going to right click, choose ‘select inverse’, and you’re going to click the little rectangle with a circle in the middle of it at the bottom right under the layers (if you hover over it, it says ‘Add layer mask’) 

And it should give you something like this:

Because this is a tutorial, I did this a little sloppily, but the more detailed you get with the mask, the better, so take as much as you need to get it how you want. And, you’re going to redo this for every frame. (this is why it’s better to have 11 frames than 58, lol) Now that all the masking is done, I resize the gif to its usual 540px width. In the end, it should give you something like this: 

The edges for this gif seem a little rough but imo they look better when you have a background, which is what we’re going to do next. 

In the layers section, under all the images of Yuuri, you’re going to place a colour fill layer, like this:

This colour matches the purple end of the gradient I’ve been using. The shades are completely the same. (#9c9fb7) And from there, you’re pretty much set. You don’t need to put a gradient on this one, but you do have to put the PSD, so:

Note: the psd I’ve been using for all of these gifs was based from these gifs, meaning I adjusted all the colours to get what I wanted from the gifs containing Yuuri’s face in them. So logically, these are the first gifs I made for the set. But yeah, that’s it! Just missing the snow, once again. 

SNOW

So, on all of the gifs, you can see there’s a light snowfall going on. Probably to no one’s surprise, I also learned this trick from @katsuukis tutorial here, and really it’s pretty simple, although I changed it a little because I hate using smart filters, lmao. 

We’ll use the glasses for the example because it’s the only gif in here that started out not as some frames from the show or an animated text, but literally just an image copied into multiple frames (you’ll see why having the multiple frames was necessary now as opposed to just keeping the one frame) 

So you start off with this:

You’re going to open your chosen file for snow in Photoshop. I found that the one Alice uses is a little too thin in snow (considering I’m incorporating the snow into the gradient instead of leaving it white on top) so I found a very similar gif that just has more snowflakes (or maybe I’m crazy) (I’m not 100% sure if it’s this one because I didn’t save its origins but here:)  [x] :

So you open the gif up in Photoshop, select as many frames of it as you need (I made the glasses gif to be 24 frames, so that’s how many frames I’m taking from the snow) and copy them:

Go over to your main gif (the glasses in this case), select all the frames and click ‘paste frames…’:  

And make sure that you select ‘Paste over selection’ then click ‘OK’:

It should look something like this, which is completely normal:

In the Layers section, create a new group, and place all of the snow layers in there. (Rename the group ‘snow’ if you want) Move the newly created group between the black/white gradient and the gradient of your choice (mine is the purple/off-white one):

Finally, when selecting all of the frames in the timeline and the group that contains the snow, change its mode from ‘Pass through’ to ‘Screen’

And there you go! That’s how you add the snow (here it is in 540px so you can properly see the effect). 

And that’s actually all the effects I used to make that gifset. It was way more than I thought it was, but explaining them all made me realise how much I learned, haha! If I didn’t go into enough detail for some of these, just shoot me another ask and I’ll try to explain more than I did here.