#oh and if you'd like to know how LONG a single deco sim takes me

[madebycoffee]

you make such wonderful deco sims (and thanks for taking requests right now!) I was wondering what your process is on making them? Idea down to actual deco sims in game being made.

༼ つ✿ ◕_◕ ༽つ This is so sweet!!! ;__;

As far as process goes, I did learn how to make them by reading thru this tutorial. It did take me a couple of times reading through and following along with a sim to make one! (After I did successfully make one I went through again and wrote out the important steps on a piece of paper. Just to solidify it, and to have a cheat sheet for later in case I forgot) Under the cut because lmao I am chatty today.

As far as idea -> actual decosim being in game. Most of the sets I've made stem from needs I have. Prom sims, High schoolers, audience sims etc. All of these sets I made b/c I needed to fill out scenes in my legacy @madebysimblr lmao. AND as I've gone along making sets, and all the sims I made last year for the 11DoD I've gotten pretty efficient!

I start in CAS first, make a single sim that will be turned into a deco sim. I save them to my library, and then to make 'swatches' I add that same sim to the household. There are other ways to make swatches, but I find this easiest.

Here's a household of clones I made 🤸‍♀️ I change their skin tone, hair, clothes swatches. Add/take away tattoos, and change up skin details. I find this process fun tbh, though it can be a little time consuming. Sometimes I make all the sims I have an idea to make in CAS before moving on to make the decosims themselves, other times I do them in smaller chunks. Really just depends!

OH and the clones/households are the reason I name all my deco sims. I work on them and remember them by name lol. (Above is Plasma! She'll be shared with the vampires i've made :) )

Once I've got sims ready to be exported tho, I then start working in my folders. After the 11DoD last year I really figured out a good system that works for me. I like things organized, and this also serves as a very loose step by step for me. -I export DAEs first, naming them 'Plasma1, Plasma2, etc' I usually do 4 swatches per sim. And yes I export each DAE, but I think that's less time consuming than recoloring after the fact lol. -Then turn 1 of the DAEs into a poseable rig. Save that rig. -Then I make a pose for said sim. It's faster for me to simply make all the poses for the decosims as I go, vs using poses I've already made. -Export OBJ -'asucc' is the base game succulent the above tutorial lists. It's my base for every deco sim I make. So next is save out all LODs. and then I take the sim into s4s.

-At which point I do a lot of things in S4S. I made sure to rename it, I include the name of the sim, my username, and the set of deco sims this is. A little fun blurb in the description, and change the price to 1.

-I change the decorative tags to be 'clutter, decoration (misc), and sculpture, and make sure to uncheck plant. I uncheck everything in the 'Function' tag EXCEPT for 'never receives snow' so you can use the deco sims outside in the snow.

-I add in swatch thumbnails, I eyedrop colors from the sim and the swatch thumbnails are 'hair color, skin color, and shirt color' usually.

-The only extra thing I do is then go into the Warehouse tab and change the slotting behavior to 0 unless I think the deco sim would be useful having a bigger slotting behavior. 0 makes it so they will not snap to any surface (and it's what most of my decos now have)

-Once I've done all of that I can take the sim in game. I check to make sure that all the swatches look right, that all the LODs are imported etc. If everything looks good I can then export the thumbnail to make a custom one for in game!

And once I've done that, I'm done. Usually what I do is work on multiple sims at once. So I'm posing a bunch of sims at once, then exporting all their OBJ etc.

It's a long process, and that's partly b/c I want these sims to be as good as possible to share out. BUT I really love making deco sims. And I've found that you really can never have too many, and they can be used in such a variety of ways. SO I'm happy to spend a bunch of time making them :D if you read all that ily thank u