New Dining Table And Chairs Bought myself a copy of Milkshape because the 30 free trial had expired and my promise to myslef, last Easter , was to master meshing. I don't expect to be a genius, but it would be nice (a) to be able to make some simple items and (b) to prove that it's not all that difficult. The Mirelly Gant Dining Table It felt kinda wrong taking this next shot (shouldn't've chosen the Seasons Scotty to load up for the demo shots) I installed lights under the table to show off the fine knees ... I mean table construction. The skin (texture) went a bit wonky mainly cos I didn't really understand what I was doing with the UV mapper ... but having done it once, it won't so tough next time ... I'll even get the grain running properly on the frame rails. So, I hear you ask,... Why? Well I have been pretty darn scathing in my criticism of custom content makers who charge for downloads and get all possessive about their manky meshes as if it actually takes real effort to do this sort of thing. If I can do it, anyone can. I ceased taking art classes after year 7 and I never got past stick figures. I have all the hand to eye coordination of a lush. But I have opinions by the truck-load. I also never got beyond ultra elementary maths. Venn diagrams are alien territory to me and differential calculus might as well be Klingon. But ... meshing is easy peasy and I just had to prove it. I downloaded and printed off J. Woods' excellent 100 page tutorial: The Sims 2 Start to Finish Object Creation Tutorial from MTS2 and read it last night before turning out the light. (It's 100 pages each have short instructions and a large easy to see screenshot.) If you have a reading ago of 12 you can follow this tutorial. Being me ... I took a scenic diversion and abandoned the making of the ugly plank with 4x4s for legs (as per the tutorial's instructions) and spent an happy 30 or 50 minutes exploring Milkshape (previously I had played with Milkshape with no idea of what I was doing and ... well getting nowhere and learning absolutely nothing ... I didn't even know there were view captions available to help me see what I wa supposed to be looking at ) OK the joints are slightly on the wonk, but I have furniture like that for real - the wonkyness is underneath where it doesn't show ... mostly. Time taken in total. 2 hours. Including registering unique GUIDs and throwing the texture mad together. I'll be going back to it as soon as I have time to refine it with a better UV map (which I have learned is the instruction that tells the game which areas of the texture map to put on which bits of the mesh.)
24 Hours Later OK. 2 hours for the first lesson was pretty cool. The first table was rough, but it worked. Tables 2, 3, 4 and 5 all had faults, Bad ones On the plus side #5 only took 27 mins from clicking on the start up SimPE icon to opening the buy catalog at the Blossomhill farm of Mr. McGreggor (I still haven't looked to seek waht his name is ... and he still hasn't got more than one spoonful of cornflakes) I made a substantial number of changes to #5, to the mesh, completely remade the UVmap, as well as refining the texture map and rewriting a better catalog description more in keeping with Maxoid ones. I hate it that so much custom content bears the original catalog description of the item it was cloned from. Even more so I hate the stupid ones with 10+ environment ratings but only cost a few simoleons. I want expensive stuff. How can you have a wealth sim if you don't have plenty of $5000 paintings? Anyway ... here's a free new table. Note how the table's legs are arranged so that 6 sims can sit around it without excessive clipping. Note also that it actually looks like a table. The wood grain runs the correct way and the table top has been chamfered off to avoid that ghastly block effect. It weighs in at: faces = 276: vertices = 432, which not especially high - much lower than most Maxis tables.
OK, I really like this one and I'm going for it. I've downloaded it. Are you looking for suggestions? The legs on the table in post #1 looked sturdier. It's not that I think sim meals are particularly heavy (although some of my sims gain weight too easily, it's because they drive a car to get to the shopping center right across the street,) it's just that I imagine wood tables with thick, sturdy wooden legs. Of course, Americans always think bigger is better.
LOL - but good taste is discrete and fine timber, loving prepared by a master furniture maker is a slender thing of beauty. I ain't making Thrift Store merchandise here. Forget Walmart, IKEA and JC Penney, in fact forget the US entirely ... believe me, most of the rest of the world tries This stuff comes hot from the Tottenham Court Road workshops of Sphinxy Bill's estranged cousins, Chip and Dale Joyner. Admire the graceful lines of their latest product: The Monastic Luxury Dining Chair. Recolors for the table and chairs will be available over the weekend. All my files are named for easy location.
Cool stuff, Mirelly. It almost inspires me to try it myself. (I'm still having fun with recoloring objects, so the "almost" is important.)
Thank you for downloading and testing these items. I looked at recolors today and got sidetracked by the chair. I will need to upgrade the mesh into separate parts so that the wood colour can be chosen separately from the seat colour. When I get the chance to tackle this (I'm not quite sure yet about combining two meshes in one (still looking at Maxis meshes to see how it works) but when I do the replacement chairs (and recolours will have the same names so anyone who has the originals (and wants the recolours) can just replace the original file with the new one. Meantime I am very pleased with the overall result, though I will take the opportunity to tweak the UVmaps for both items at some stage. (I'm trying to be innovative by sticking a postage stamp sized thumbnail of the UVmap in one corner of the texture map so anyone wanting to do a recolour can just blow up the little thumnail to see where all the various components are ....
i am wanting to learn to make my own objects but i think that i should learn how to re-colour first does anyone know a good tutorial for that.
Head over to MTS2's Create section (seems to have gained a funky new look but you shouldn't have any trouble finding tutorials to suit the image editing software you have ... or can afford ). I wish you success. The most important thing is to have fun. Making custom stuff is not difficult. I guess making attractive stuff is tricky if you have no eye for artistic detail or patience (both are fairly important). The hard part is mastering the various programs (software packs) that you will need for the job. This is why recoloring is the place to start. You have to be able to colour a texture map if you're going to mesh so that'll be one thing you don't need to learn when you come to teach yourself meshing. Hope this helps. And remember, the longest journey starts with a single step.
