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Post by jebeansprout on Apr 9, 2021 7:41:59 GMT -5
ello! I've been experimenting with making a night-light shaped like a bunny hereand I've used the base game robot lamp to do this. I deleted the bulb layer in blender, deleted the robot vertices and joined my mesh to the original robot layer. when I import it to S4S though, the bulb is still visible like this even though I've deleted it. does anyone know why this is? are there things I could be doing better? here's a link to the blend files n such
(haven't messed w/ the bump map and shadows yet) thanks for any help! |
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Post by network on Apr 9, 2021 12:33:01 GMT -5
You deleted s4studio_mesh_1, therefore when importing your mesh s4s isn't doing anything to the bulb. Instead (for a quick fix) you should delete most of s4studio_mesh_1 (leave a couple of vertices) and then scale it all the way down and hide it in the main mesh.
Also in the future it would make more sense to clone an item without a bulb, because now you'll have to mess around with the light resource a fair bit.
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Post by jebeansprout on Apr 9, 2021 18:20:54 GMT -5
You deleted s4studio_mesh_1, therefore when importing your mesh s4s isn't doing anything to the bulb. Instead (for a quick fix) you should delete most of s4studio_mesh_1 (leave a couple of vertices) and then scale it all the way down and hide it in the main mesh. Also in the future it would make more sense to clone an item without a bulb, because now you'll have to mess around with the light resource a fair bit. ooh I see! I'll have to try that purely out of curiosity to figure it out thanks very much for the tips, I've given up on the robot for now and decided to try the jellyfish lamp instead which was a bit easier without the bulb nonsense  main issues are that there's a-lot of noticeable seams especially when the light's switched off here: 1 2 3 4when it's switched on, the seams are less noticeable but it's really bright like this and it'd be nice to have a default brightness like this instead. (Although a bit of the seam issue pops up again)I just added an edge split modifier and made the bump maps black in hopes to get rid of the shininess but also cus I don't know what I'm doing lmaoany ideas how to improve this? here's the link to the file if anyone wants to have a gander |
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Post by network on Apr 9, 2021 19:23:10 GMT -5
You deleted s4studio_mesh_1, therefore when importing your mesh s4s isn't doing anything to the bulb. Instead (for a quick fix) you should delete most of s4studio_mesh_1 (leave a couple of vertices) and then scale it all the way down and hide it in the main mesh. Also in the future it would make more sense to clone an item without a bulb, because now you'll have to mess around with the light resource a fair bit. use these for the maps instead: sims4studio.com/thread/1079/get-eas-bump-specular-maps |
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Post by jebeansprout on Apr 10, 2021 12:41:24 GMT -5
yeees, it's aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive
thank you those maps helped, still a bit shiny so I'll have to look up how to make things more matte there's also these faint mesh lines. I tried to duplicate the mesh on itself in edit mode to see if that fixed it but unfortunately not. :( Edit: Managed to fix the white lines by downloading NVidia profile inspector, selecting Sims 4 and turning anti-aliasing fix on since I use an NVidia video card. Happy days! 
For anyone who's been struggling like me, I'll leave some info on how I got to this result: Blocky Pixelated Model:This was fixed by going into object mode and setting the shading to smooth (button can be found on the left-hand side). If you're unable to find the button, you can also press spacebar, type in smooth, and it should pop up. Brightness:This was a mix of fixing the vertex paint, and editing 'light' in the S4S warehouse tab. For the vertex paint, I just made the vertex paint a darker shade of grey. For the S4S light editing, when scrolling down to light in the warehouse tab and clicking "edit items", try lowering the number in the middle of 'At'. For example, if the number is 0.15, 5,0.2, I might change the middle number to 0.15, 3,0.2 and see how that affects the brightness. Hope this has helped anyone! |
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Post by network on Apr 10, 2021 16:16:02 GMT -5
Awesome, I'm glad it worked out for you!  |
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Post by jebeansprout on Apr 11, 2021 8:02:46 GMT -5
Awesome, I'm glad it worked out for you! Ah... I think I spoke too soon
the light looks good when it's on, but when turned off, the seams are really noticeable and have a weird sheen on them
i've been experimenting for hours trying to adjust the specular and bump maps with no success :( image1 image 2
hang on folks, I've cracked it!   so... my issue was tweaking the spec map in GIMP, and the main mesh didn't have its doubles removed (doubles have to be removed on all LOD meshes and shadow meshes) here's a little guide for anyone who needs to know how to do spec maps with GIMP! first I opened the blank spec template created by orangemittens in gimp which can be found here
make sure you're on the channels tab and not the layers tab  Now, I noticed Photoshop tutorials will just have an RGB layer already there, but GIMP doesn't so I just created one by right clicking anywhere in the channels area, selecting 'New Channel' and naming it 'RGB'. Don't worry that it's not with all the other channels, it'll still work fine. To achieve a matte look, I had to make the red, blue and green layers as dark as possible. You can do this by selecting the layer (you'll know it's selected when it appears a dark black like this)  Once selected, go to the top and click Colors > Brightness/Contrast and drag the brightness. For matte, drag it darker, for shine, drag it lighter. Now you're onto the Alpha layer. When you click the alpha layer and only have that visible in your channels tab, it's gonna look black in the main window, but you can see its' actual brightness in the channels tab.  To alter this, while the alpha layer is selected, go to the top again and click Layer > Mask > Add Layer Mask > Channel > RGB. This'll connect your alpha to your RGB. Brightness/Contrast didn't seem to work for me on the alpha, so I just got the paint bucket tool and made it black since I wanted everything matte. Once the alpha's done, go to your RGB layer and make sure it's paint bucketed black (again you'll see it change to black in the channel tab). Now you can export! Go to file > export as. Then at the bottom of the export window where it says "Select File Type (By Extension)" click and scroll to 'DDS image', then click 'export'. Another smaller window will open. In the compression section, you wanna select 'BC3/DXT5'. On the mipmaps section select "Generate mipmaps" I checked the compression button cus I saw that on someone else's guide. Also clicked advanced options and checked Filter > Triangle cus I was getting annoying triangles and didn't know whether it would help  bare with me here though cus I kind of accidentally figured this out and am trying to remember the steps I took so this could be wrong- I'll have to double check but I thhink this was it Also here's the nightlight bunny army .... WOOOOHOHOHOHOHOOO   |
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