Hi. The process of adapting accessories differs based on their location, so to explain how to adapt something correctly, we need to see an object first.
You can find many non-ts4 specific tutorials on modelling in general or specific items, so try that fist and come back later with this object
For now, i can give you a simple example:
How to make simple earrings for The Sims 4:
Meshes:
- make sure the path in S4S settings leads to blender.exe in Blender 4.1;
- in S4S main menu choose Create CAS standalone and click on CAS. Filter the catalog by Earrings, select hoops. Click Next, save somewhere;
- switch to Mesh tab, click on Export. Open this blend file in Blender 4.1;
- in the outliner double-click on s4studio_mesh_1 to rename to Reference, then hide it ( eye icon);
- switch to the side view ( Ctrl NUM3 ), select Cursor tool, click where an ear is usually pierced;
- Add - Mesh - Torus. Expand Add torus pop up. Reduce Major radius to 0.2 and Minor to 0.0015. Change Align to 3d cursor. Holding Shift, click on the value next to Location Z and drag until the top of the ring aligns with the cursor. Reduce Major and Minor segments just before the mesh starts to look jagged;
- Object - Shade smooth;
- change pivot to 3d cursor;
- you can activate transform tools with buttons next to Cursor, shortcuts ( G to move, R to rotate, S to scale ) or by adding their gizmos. Use arrows to move, circles to rotate and squares to scale;
- if you want to change the thickness of this object, switch to Edit mode and use Shrink/Fatten ( click on the yellow thing and drag );
- once happy with the shape and the location, Mesh - Snap - Cursor to world origin. Mesh - Duplicate, click Enter. Mesh - Mirror - X global. Mesh - Normals - Flip;
- since the reference and your hoops cover the same area of the ear, you can transfer all data responsible for moving and morphing from the reference. When making body accessories, you'd need to transfer weights and uvs from the body directly. Switch back to Object mode. With your hoops selected, in Modifiers tab add Data transfer. Unhide your reference and choose it as Source. Enable Vertex data and Vertex groups, then choose Nearest face interpolated. Enable Face corner data, then Colors, holding Shift, UVs as well. In drop downs choose Nearest face interpolated and uv_1. Click on Generate data layers and apply;
- in 3d view
select everything with A. In UV editor rename UVmap to uv_0. In the drop down choose Diffuse map (
or you can use a template ). After doing this, the uvs would stretch vertically. Normally, you'd bring them to their original size before proceeding with S Y 0.5. In this case, you need to shrink them further anyway, so you can skip this and just press S to scale and G to move until the uvs fit the image horizontally, then press S Y to shrink them vertically. Notice that in the image below there are a few pixels between the borders of the uv space and this uv island;
- select the reference and check its cut number. Since there was only one meshgroup, the cut is 0000. Give the same to your hoops and delete the reference. Save, import in S4S, check how it behaves in-game.
- if happy, make lods. In this case you can select everything and Edges - Un-subdivide, but in most other cases you'd need to use Decimate and reduce roatio, stopping just before the mesh starts to change shape dramatically. After that, File - Save as under a different name, import in the second LOD in S4S. In this case you can import this blend in the last LOD as well.
Textures:
To make a realistic looking texture, you need to set up lights and materials right. How to do that depends on the goal and tutorials on this topic can be found on youtube. I'll show a simple example:
- open the first LOD and save the blend under a different name( baking.blend, you're not going to import it in s4s);
- create the floor (Add - Plane, scale until big ), always do that to get more complex looking textures;
- right now both earring are uv unwrapped in the same place, which does not work with baking ( blender does not know from which one to bake shading), so you either need to move one uv island outside of the uv space or just delete one earring;
- switch shading to Material preview;
- expand the timeline and change it to Shader editor. Create a new material, change Base color to yellow, Metallic to 1, Roughness to 0.25;
- Add - Texture - Image texture, click on New, change Height, click on Color, set Alpha to O, Click on New image. Select this node;
- in Render tab choose Cycles, GPU compute ( if available ), change Samples under Render to 20;
- expand Bake, choose Combined, change Margins to 6, hit Bake.
- after making a test bake, you'll find that the reflection of the skin was baked onto the texture, which makes sense but is not what you want. Expand the rig, disable camera icons for everything under the rig, then increase samples to at least 500, bake again. Once happy, in UV editor Image - Save as. Import this image in S4S instead of Diffuse;
- you can save this blend or delete it, just do not import it in S4S;
- earrings dont have shadow or normal maps, but they have a specular, so you can make one
like this from your diffuse.
