#sims 3 how to

[kwimii999]

Tutorial : How to make roads with car parking space

When I first started using the create a world tool, I immediatly wanted to make roads with car parking space. The only world where I had seen these types of roads were in Boroughsburg by potato-ballad-sims. So, I searched up the internet as one would do when you don't know how to do something and nothing until I found this post by krrank on their forum. I already knew how to make roads at that time. In fact, it was only when I saw her showcase of dirt roads, that I saw how there was a way to make roads larger to then add cars parked on the side. Now, because I haven't found a proper tutorial on how to actually do that, I decided to make my own tutorial and share how I managed to do it. It's not as perfect as Boroughsburg in term of sidewalk intersections (because I'm not the best at texture editing) but enough to have the look of parked cars, which can make a town look so much more lively.

What I'm assuming before this tutorial :

You're familiar with the CAW tool

you know how to place roads

you know how to create roads using textures provided by EA or CC road textures

You know how to add custom content for CAW (only applicable if you don't own the university EP)

The downside

The only downside with these roads is that sims will walk/run through the cars when going somewhere because we're basically using the sidewalk as parking space. To balance that out, I suggest using hybrid roads in your world : normal roads with normal sidewalks and roads with parking space.

On the left we have a road with car parking space

On the right a normal road with sidewalks

Step 1 : Choosing your road textures

Example of what it should look like :

Possible question #1

" Okay but there's no sidewalk now, what do I do ? " : Simple ! Place independent sidewalks on the side. A bit like this (ignore the fact that this is not completly aligned to the grid) :

Step 2 : Placing cars on the road

I highly suggest using cars that are meant for decoration and aren't high poly. If you're using super CAW do not use the drivable cars that can be bought in game. In my case, I used the debug cars from the university EP meant for decoration and lowered them until it hid the parking curb. If you don't have the university EP, the world CC from Boroughsburg includes deco cars used for the purpose of parked deco cars !

Do not put too many cars on the roads (I only do it because I do not care since I'm making my own personal world, but if you intend to share the world you're making, limit the cars that you put on the streets)

How to hide the parking curb (for university cars) :

Lower your car's position (Y axis, green line) to : 15,4 - (Good enough height to hide the concrete curb and only hides a tiny bit of the car's wheels)

Don't forget to rotate (Y axis) the cars to the right direction. In fact, to be 100% accurate in the rotation placement of your cars, you can write the exact degree in the board that appears when you select an object. So, basically : 90 / -90 OR 180 / -180

Possible question #2

"In what direction should I rotate the cars ?" : Here's a reminder of traffic directions in game :

And that's about it. Hope this will be useful to anyone who was wondering how to make larger roads and add cars parked directly on the street :)

[bellakenobi]

Tutorial - Extracting the assets from Shining Nikki for conversion for Sims games (or anything, really)

Finally! In advance I'm sorry for any errors since english isn't my first language (and even writing in my actual language is difficult for me so)

And first, a shoutout to The VG Resource forums, where I found initially info about this topic 😊 I'm just compilating all the knowledge I found there + the stuff I figured out in a single text, because boy I really wanted to find a guide like that when I first thought about converting SN stuff lol (and because there's a lot of creators more seasoned than me that could do a really good job with these assets 👀)

What this tutorial will teach you:

How to find and extract meshes and textures (when there's any) for later use, and some tips about how stuff are mapped etc on Shining Nikki.

What this tutorial will not teach you:

How to fully convert these assets for something usable for any sims game (because honestly neither I know how to do that stuff properly lol). It is assumed that you already know how to do that. If you don't know but has interest in learning about CC making (specially for TS3), I'd suggest you take a look at the TS3 Tutorial Hub, the MTS tutorials and This Post by Plumdrops if you're interested in hair conversion. Also take a look on my TS3 tutorials tag, that's where I reblog tutorials that I think might be useful :)

What you'll need:

An Android emulator (I recomend Nox)

A HEX editor (I recomend HxD)

Python and This Script for mass editing

AssetStudio

A 3D Modeling Software for later use. I use Blender 2.93 for major editing, and (begrudingly) Milkshape for hair (mostly because of the extra data tool).

Download everything you don't have and install it before starting this tutorial.

Now, before we continue, a little advice:

I wrote this tutorial assuming that people who would benefit from it will not put the finished work derivative from these assets behind a paywall or in any sort of monetization. These assets belong to Paper Games. So please don't be an ass and put your Shining Nikki conversions/edits/whatever behind a paywall.

The tutorial starts after the cut (and it's a long one).

Step 1:

Launch Nox, then open Play Store and log in with a Google account (if you don't have one, create it). Now download Shining Nikki from there.

After downloading the game, launch it. It will download a part of the game files. After that, log in on the game, or create a new account in any server (the server is only important if you want to actually play the game. For extracting it doesn't really matter since the game already has the assets for the upcoming events and chapters. It also doesn't matter if you actually own an item in game, you can extract the meshes and textures even if you don't have it in game). If you're creating a new account, the game will lead you through the presentation of it etc (unfortunately there's no way to skip it).

After that, click on that little arrow button on the main screen. There, you can download the actual clothing assets. Wait for the download to finish (at the date I'm writing this tutorial, it is around 13GB). When finished, close the game (not the emulator).

Step 2:

Now we're going to copy the assets to our computer. Click on Tools, then on Amaze File Manager. Navigate to Android > data > com.papergames.nn4.en > files > DownloadedBundle > art > character. This is the folder where (I believe) most of the assets are stored.

Now, where the stuff is located respectively:

Meshes are on the meshes > splitmeshs folder

Textures are on the textures > cloth folder

Tip: Want to really data dump everything? Just select the folders you want and copy to your PC! 😉

Click on the three dots on the side of the wished folder, then in copy. Then click on the three lines on the left upper corner to open the menu, and then click on Download. Now just pull the header of the app to show the Paste option and click on it. It might take a while to copy completely (the cloth folder might take longer since it's bigger, so be patient).

If you're confused, just follow the guide below:

The copied folder will be located at C:\Users\{your username}\Nox_share\Download

Step 3:

Now that we got the files, we need to make them readable by AssetStudio.

For this, we need to open the desired .asset file on a hex editor, and then delete the first 8 bytes of the file, and then save.

You can see it is a pain to do that manually to a lot of files right? This is why I asked my boyfriend to create a script to mass edit them. (I only manually edit when I'm grabbing the textures I want, because afaik the script won't work with .tga and the .png files, more about that forward this tutorial)

How to use the script:

Make sure Python is already installed, grab the nikki-fix-headers.py file and place it on the folder where you copied the folder from the game (mine is still the Nox_Share Download folder).

It should look like this, the meshs folder and the script.

Let's open the Command Prompt. Hit Windows + R to open the Run dialog box, then type in cmd and hit Enter.

Now follow the instructions pictured below:

The folder with the edited files will be at the same location:

Now, we finally can open it all on AssetStudio and see whats inside 👀

Step 4:

Open AssetStudio. Now click on File > Load Folder and select the folder where your edited meshes are (mine is "splitmeshs-fixed"). Wait the program load everything. Click on Filter Type > Mesh, and the on the Asset List tab, click twice on the Name to sort everything by the right order, and now we can see the meshes!

To extract any asset, just select and right-click the desired groups, click in Export selected assets and select a folder where you wish to save it.

Stuff you need to know about the meshes:

Step 4-A: Everything is separated by groups.

Of course you'll have to export everything to have a complete piece. Only a few pieces has a single group. When exporting, you have to select every group with the same name (read below), and the result will be .obj files of each group that you have to put together in a 3D application.

Step 4-B: The names are weird.

They're a code that indicates the set, the piece, the group.

Items that doesn't belong to a set won't have the "S...something", instead they'll have another letter with numbers, but the part/piece type and group logic is the same.

As for the parts, here are the ones I figured out so far:

D = Dress

H = Hair

AEA = Earrings

ANE = Necklace

BS = Shoes

ABA = Handheld accessory

AHE and AHC = Headpieces/hats/hairpins

AFA = Face accessory (as glasses, eyepatches, masks)

(maybe I'll update here in the future with the ones I remember)

Step 4-C: The "missing pearls" issue.

Often you'll find a group that seems empty, and it has a weird name like this:

I figured out that it's referent to pearls that a piece might contain (as in a pearl necklace, or a little pearl in a earring, pearls decorating a dress, etc). The group seems empty, but when you import it to Blender, you can see that it actually has some vertices, and they're located where the aforementioned pearls would be. I think that Unity (SN engine) uses this to generate/place the pearls from a master mesh, but I honestly have no idea of how the game does that. So you'll probably have to model a sphere to place where the pearls were located, I don't know 🤷‍♀️ (And if you know how to turn the vertices into spheres (???) please let me know!)

Step 5:

Now that you already extracted a mesh, we're gonna extract the textures (when any). Copy the textures > cloth folder to your PC like you did with the splitmeshs folder.

Open it, and in the search box, type the name of the desired item like this. If the item has textures, it will show in the results.

Grab all the files and open them in HxD (I usually just open HxD and drag the files I want to edit there), and edit them like I teached above. Then you can open them (or load the cloth folder) on AssetStudio, and export them like you did with the meshes.

Stuff you need to know about the textures, UV map, etc:

Step 5-A: The UV mapping is a hot mess (at least for us used to how things works in sims games).

See this half edited hoodie and the UV map for a idea:

So for any Sims game, you'll have to remap everything 🙃 Also, stencil-like textures all have their own separated file.

As for hair, they all use the same texture and mapping! BUT sometimes they are arranged like this...

Here's the example of a very messed one (it even has some WTF poly). Most of them aren't that messy, but be prepared to find stuff like this.

Shining Nikki just repeat the texture so it end up covering everything, for Sims you'll need to remap, and the easiest way is by selecting "blocks" of hair strands, ticking the magnet button to make your seletion snap to what is already placed (if you have familiarity with blender, you know what I'm saying). Oh, some clothes are also mapped with the same logic.

Regarding the hair texture, I couldn't locate where they are, but here is a pack with all of them ripped and ready to use. You can also grab the textures from any SN hair I already converted :)

The only items with a fine UV map are the accessories, at least for TS3 that the accessory has a UV map independent from the body.

"But I typed the ID for the set and piece and couldn't find anything!"

A good thing to do is to search with only the set ID and edit all the files with it, because some items (especially accessories) share the same texture file. But if even then you can't find anything, it means that there's no texture for this particular item/group because Shining Nikki use material shaders* to render different materials like metal, crystal, some fancy fabrics, etc. So you'll have to bake or paint a texture for it.

*I believe that those shaders are located on the other cloth folder in the game files. This one is way bigger than the other one and once I copied it to see what it was, AssetStudio took ages to load everything, almost used all my 16GB of RAM, and then there was only code that the illiterate me didn't know what it was 🤷‍♀️

So that was it! I hope I explained everything, although it is a little confusing.

If you have any questions, you can comment on this post or send me a PM!

[simkoos]

i'm a huge fan of simple yet stylish furniture and ikea does it for me every time! this collection is based on a few items i've added to my cart (and never purchased) over the years lmao i hope you like it! 💛

all items are base game compatible (unless stated otherwise!)

this collection includes 51 decor and functional buy items!

uppland armchair - 19 swatches

uppland loveseat - 19 swatches

uppland sofa - 19 swatches

poang armchair - 19 swatches

jules dining chair (wooden) - 11 wood swatches

jules dining chair (plastic) - 19 swatches

nordli bedframe - 11 wood swatches + black & white

vikagrevsta dining table (1x1) - 19 swatches

vikagrevsta dining table (2x1) - 19 swatches

vikagrevsta dining table (3x1) - 19 swatches

malm dressing table - 11 wood swatches + black & white

malm dressing table (with mirror) - requires sp09 vintage glamour, 11 wood swatches + black & white

malm dresser - 11 wood swatches + black & white

lack side table - 11 wood swatches + black & white

lack tv stand - 11 wood swatches + black & white

lack coffee table - 11 wood swatches + black & white

lack wall shelf - 11 wood swatches + black & white

olivblad plant stand - 11 wood swatches + black & white

jattesta shelf - 11 wood swatches + black & white

ekenabben shelf - 22 wood swatches + black & white

lappland tv shelf & storage - 11 wood swatches + black & white

aurdal closet unit - 11 wood swatches + black & white

ikornnes floor mirror - 11 wood swatches + black & white

enhet cabinet (with mirror) - 11 wood swatches + black & white

lindbyn mirror - 11 wood swatches + black & white

bondskaret coat stand - 10 swatches

brogrund corner wall shelf - 1 swatch

tridsno floor lamp - 13 swatches

ledsjo wall light - 5 metallic swatches

bettorp led mobile lamp - 19 swatches

blasverk table lamp - 21 swatches

tvarhand table lamp - 19 swatches

flottilj desk lamp - 20 swatches

klunka laundry bag - requires sp13 laundry day, 1 swatch

bollbuske plant pot - 19 swatches

artbuske watering can - 1 swatch

kopparbjork vase - 20 swatches

vasen vase with lillies - 6 swatches

famnig hjarta cushion - 20 swatches

lindrande home scuplture - 8 metallic swatches

dundergubbe moving box (large) - 1 swatch, 4 variations

dundergubbe moving box (medium) - 1 swatch, 4 variations

frakta carrier bag - 1 swatch

kalas collection (plate, bowl, mug, cutlery) - 25 swatches

xl rug collection - 36 swatches

rug collection - 20 swatches

knoppang photo frame - 7 swatches

underhalla wooden blocks (toddler toy) - 6 swatches

s/o to @nucrests for not only testing everything but also encouraging me to continue when i wanted to give up and scrap this entire project. 😭💜

download on patreon!

[potato-lord-but-not]

put all the podcast guys in a room together for group therapy

[stellarfalls]

Save me indie films & muted color palette…….

[johziii]

COMFY HOLIDAYS SET - christmas 2023

here's a gift for you <3 merry christmas and happy holidays to you all!

pls lmk if there’s any problems & feel free to tag me if you use them in your gameplay and post to tumblr! <3​

TOU ♥ CC PAGE ♥ MY KO-FI ♥

sfs | google drive

[sunshinepixels]

Move in day 🚚🏠📦

ft. another florida house from yours truly

[neishroom]

cleo's post-grad apt in san seqouia

[mystery-pixels]

the classroom before the kids arrive and mess everything up

[gothoffspring]

Hesperia

[saewokhrisz]

131

[thebarrows]

put them in a room together and no one will come out alive (●'◡'●)

[elitisim]

Ebonix- Deji Locs

All credits goes to@ebonixsims! Original here!

Hair for For Teen ➜ Elder Males

27.5K Poly

2048x texture

Under Hats, 1 channel

Fully recolorable rubber bands at the top and end of each loc

Texture: Ebonix

Custom Thumbnail

includes all LODS and is disabled for random

The rubber bands on the end of the hair cast weird shadows on the face in CAS but they're fine in game.

Larger Pics and color channel breakdown under the cut

tagging: @pis3update, @sssvitlanz, @kpccfinds

[DOWNLOAD]

[warmsol]

i've missed you so ♫

[aashwarr]

yume’s kitchen, in four parts. 🕊️ 

[cerubean]

somewhere deep in the forest...