Wall poster adjustments -- which is easier?

[lucy kemnitzer]

So I want a wall poster with all the trimmings like pixelhate/Numenor's full tile and 2 tile ones, but shiftable like aikea-guinea's half-height one.

In particular I'm wanting to make a shiftable wall poster which is nothing but a bump map (with a simply transparent texture, or, depending on what I find when I try it, a mere ghost of a texture) -- this is to put bas-reliefs on any wall. I've been experimenting with doing it with a very transparent image but it looks more drawn on, especially with certain colors of wall underneath it. I want to be able to place the decorations over or under windows, so I want them shiftable.

So is it easier to make the full-tile posters shiftable or to add a bump map to aikea-guinea's half-height poster? (it's for my own use for now, but I believe her TOU is pretty easy about this kind of alteration and if it turns out well enough for a public life I would ask before sharing)I'm guessing the latter, but I'm having a bit of trouble finding the tutorial I saw about adding bump maps to an object.

And another question about aikea-guinea's poster: it keeps leaving a tiny black line on my walls. Is that a misalignment of the main texture, or something wrong with the shadow texture? Or should I just remove it and see what happens?

[mustluvcatz]

Instead of adding a bump map, try playing around with a texture or shape in your graphics program. You can use bevel and/or emboss and add drop shadows to it, then adjust the opacity to be barely seen. I've done something like that, which got lost in the crash. I'll be back in a bit with an example. :)

[lucy kemnitzer]

I'm doing that tonight, because when I opened up pixelhate's poster to try playing with the bumpmap, I didn't find it. So I'll see how your suggestion plays out after the game loads!

Thank you!

[mustluvcatz]

You're welcome. In the attachment above, all I did was add a new layer and deleted the background (so I'd get the clear layer only), drew a paw (using Custom Shapes), rasterized it (so I could play with it properly)..added bevel/chisel hard and a drop shadow. Then adjusted the FILL opacity to 0%. The opacity wasn't changed at all..I wanted the layer effects to be obvious. If you know how to do all this, just ignore all that. ;) It should work out alright, it did for me when I did it.

I don't know anything about aikea-guinea's poster since I've never used it, but there are shiftable wall stickers that can be recolored this way. In SimPE be sure to use DXT3. The TXMT should already be set to blend.

[lucy kemnitzer]

Well, I tried playing more with the transparency, and using the ingame "Butterfly Crawler Decal," but the results were underwhelming: they still look drawn on. And yes, I'm using DXT3 and TXMT=blend. It looks exactly like the first version, really. In SImPe, it looked like the transparency of the image was maintained: but in game it does not. I did lock the transparency of the image layer.

I'm using Paintshop 9, so some of the procedures are a bit different, but layers is exactly how I go about it. I've taken photographs of the bas-reliefs I want to recreate, traced them on another layefr, and played with the properties of the layer and the blur and sharpness and etc. Sometimes I do the drawing as vectors and then rasterize them, sometimes as regular pixel-by-pixel painting, like you describe. I haven't run effects like those yet, though.

Really, I wish I could figure out how to play with a bump map, though. I really think a bump map with a nearly-null texture image would do the trick. Just a bit of shading for the deepest and highlighting for the highest parts, and maybe a bit of soot!

[lucy kemnitzer]

This is just a crappy ingame snapshot, but it shows the problem. This version is back to the pixelhate-numenor 1-tile poster, placed with silent lucidity's omsp to be right on top of the window. This image was saved as a .png file with 36% opacity, and imported as DXT3, blend mode set to blend. I also attempted to add a bump map, but the last two steps were not possible because the tabs I was supposed to go into to add resources to simply didn't exist, so I don't think the bump map is actually being read by the game.

However, until I can get the transparency to hold, the bump map is not even a live issue. This looks horrible!

I have another idea I'm going to mess with later -- I think there's a function buried somewhere in the "effects" menu in paintshop to turn an image into a screen -- I thought that's what happened with the opacity property of the layer, but maybe not.

http://i28.tinypic.com/2wf4lqv.jpg

edit, here's the image I imported, I hope the transparency shows up right:
http://i26.tinypic.com/ngznzc.png

Well, no, it doesn't, so I guess that's the problem.

Third edit, a while later:
well, now, when I went back into Paintshop and looked at the image, it still looked like iot had 36% opacity, but the layer properties tab said it had 100% opacity. I'm flummoxed. How can it look like that and yet -- never mind, I'm back to the drawing board. Obviously, layer properties is not doing the trick, and I have to explore the special effects menus.

[mustluvcatz]

Lucy, do you have another pic of the image you want to use? One that's just the outlines?

[lucy kemnitzer]

I created it as the reliefs, not as outlines. By the way, this is the latest iteration of the image, placed on a grey background so you can see it (and not bothering to put it into an inage the right size for the poster, yet):
http://i25.tinypic.com/jl6us6.png

I have run it through "emboss" (which improved the looks of the image a lot, thank you for the suggestion) and "halftone" (it's too coarse, even at the finest setting). Then I blurred the halftone because it was ugly, and got this, which I think is really nice. I am trying to turn it into a screeny thing -- dots on a transparent background (that is, inside the image, not just transparent around the image): but using the "set pallette transparecy" function is not working.

I have the game open, but once I'm out again, I want to open SimPe and look at pixelhate's "ruin and degradation" recolors of the poster and see how they're done. They aren't as dimensional as I want mine to be, but they're better than I've been getting!

[mustluvcatz]

I missed your reply until now. The way that looks is neat- it looks like the wall is carved.

Not having Paintshop is stumping me- I think it's really similar to PhotoShop but I'm not sure. "set palette transparency" stumps me because, well, see the pic I attached. That's how I change opacity.

[lucy kemnitzer]

That's really similar to how paintshop handles layer transparency. Palette transparency is different -- it's supposed to take one color out of the palette and make it transparent for some purposes. I've used it before, but rarely, so I have to learn it all over again every time. It only works with a 256-color palette, which is annoying.

Right now I'm in the laborious process of retracing the design as a vector object with no shading at all so I can play with the drop shadow and bevel. That last image I posted is almost exactly gthe effect that I want. But I want a transparent or nearly transparent object that I can slap onto any wall and get the effect: I don't want to make a series of walls with the effects that I want. Partly because I want to make a few objects that can be layered and combined in different ways to make more unique buildings faces.

edit: nope, none of the variations I'm running on playing with effects n the outlines are any good.

It looks like photoshop is handling bevel and drop shadow very differently from paintshop.

[mustluvcatz]

Can you open .psd's with your version of Paintshop? From what I know, some versions can and some can't. I'd be willing to see what I can do with your image and then you can see what happens with it in Paintshop. I'd need the outlines though- or a really big pic of what you already did. (I tried playing with that small image..ouch, eye strain, lol.)

[lucy kemnitzer]

I just made a version which is 1600X400 (the working one was 810X198: is that really so very small?), and saved it as a .psd. I closed it, and opened it, and paintshop seems perfectly comfortable with it.

I wonder if the file format is my whole problem? I notice that the .psp files I use to work on preserve the layer opacity, and the .psd files preserve the layer opacity, but the .png files that I've been importing into SimPe don't preserve layer opacity. Even though they look like they do!! The image looks just as transparent as the other versions, both in paintshop and in the SimPe texture window when I import it, but the layer information box says that the layer is 100%. I'm now investigating which file types SimPe will accept, and then whether it makes a difference.

edit: SimPe only accepts .gif. .jpeg, .bmp and .png, and of those only .png seems to preserve any transparency. oh well.

Anyway, here's the image (if the attachment worked), if you want to play with it in the meantime.

[Pixelhate]

Just passing here by chance..
Here (www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=316260) is a tutorial to add bump map to an object(part 5).
I don't know how to make the posters shiftable.
I think I remember having played with bump on the poster but the result might not be according to your wishes...
Don't forget to make the mesh bump-enabled before creating a recolour.
Good luck :)

[lucy kemnitzer]

I am so glad you stopped by! I saw that your sig said you were retired from creating so I didn't know whether I could ask you directly. I am having trouble following the directions in the tutorial: when I got to the last bit, where it says:

"Adding the relevant parameters in Material Definition -- TXMT:
In the PROPERTIES TAB, click add parameters four times . . ."

I could not find that tab in the TXMT display window. The tabs didn't exist at all! Of course I am using a later version of SImPe than you used when making the tutorial, but it didn't make any difference in the rest of the process. I went ahead with everything else and the results did not seem to show that the bump map had been enabled (though I am so fluimmoxed on the transparency of the image that I am not sure that the effect of the bump map would be noticeable enough).

Hmm, that's weird. I went to take a screenshot of my missing properties tab, and got an error message "Message: Empty name is not legal. Parameter name: name" So, on a hunch I opened the two-tile poster, and I saw that the tabs do exist, including the property tab. So I think I have corrupted my copy of the one-ti,e poster and that may be my problem. So I'm going to see what happens with a new copy.

I think I don't have to worry about shiftability any more, since I have seen that they shift quite well with the silent lucidity omsps.

Foo, I have to go to work and I won't be back to this till tonight or maybe even later. Thank you for everything!

edit: yes! my copy of the one-tile mesh was corrupted! When I went to replace it with my backup copy I saw that it was only a third of the size of the original! And when I opened it in SimPe the tabs were all there. Still no time to do the actual work over again, but I'm stoked to start over later.

[mustluvcatz]

Is this what you're trying to do?

I forgot to print screen this so what it looks like when it's selected doesn't show. But, it looks embossed (didn't try bevel yet) before you put it on the wall. I didn't play with the effects at all, just added them, because I wanted it to be obvious what I did. I think that softening them might give you the look you want. IF I understand what you're wanting to do. I added emboss>smooth>down and a drop shadow with the default settings that were there..with the exception of changing it to darken. (In fact, looking at the image in PhotoShop I thought I changed the angle but it's not set at what I thought it was..lol) I also deleted the gray background you had.

Also, I didn't use pixelhates mesh- since I don't have all my downloads back yet I don't have any omsp's. So I used Jope's mesh, which is shiftable. But what I did would (should!) work for pixelhate's mesh or any other mesh.

[lucy kemnitzer]

Does it work like that on every color of wall? If so, it's really, really close to what I had in mind (my vision was a bit less dark, but I wouldn't cavil about it). That's got the dimensionality I had in mind. I'm wondering what emboss>smooth>down translates to in paintshop. I also wonder if the failure of my other attempts had anything todo with the corrupted mesh I was using . . .

I'll find out later tonight, maybe. Thanks so much for working with me!

[mustluvcatz]

You're welcome. :) And yes, it looks/works like that on every wall. My example is dark because I wanted it to look like that. Since I did that I've played with the settings and made it much more subtle.
Before I post anything else, I'll wait and see what you come up with now- since it turned out the mesh was corrupted. If you still can't get it to work right, we'll see how well a PhotoShop .psd works with Paintshop. ;)

[lucy kemnitzer]

No results yet -- I'm having game crash problems. When I solve those, I'll see what I managed to do!

[mustluvcatz]

Hope you stop the crashing. :) And I can't wait to see if you did it!

[lucy kemnitzer]

I've gotten far enough to be pretty sure it's only the one lot that crashes the game. (Naturally, the lot I was using to preview the poster recolors). It's weird -- I had a lot that was crashing the game before, bulldozed it, and built a new one, which soon started crashing the game. But other lots in the same neighborhood don't. I tried the game without downloads and it behaved the same. Anyway, I've decided not to rebuild in that spot. But I spent all my simming time the last couple of days dealing with this, and I still haven't been able to check on the things. Tomorrow!

[lucy kemnitzer]

Well, I see improvement, but the poster is still not as transparent as I want it. I think I may do well to try a less-detailed object and see how it goes. It definitely looks better on some colors than others. I'd really like it to show the color of the wall right through, so that it doesn't look like the carved part has been rtreated any differently from the rest of the wall. (The earlier version is on an orange wall, with a green border on it).

http://i31.tinypic.com/a4pvnp.jpg

[mustluvcatz]

Would you like to see if you can use the .psd I made? I really wish I knew how to use Paintshop so I could be more help with it.

If you want the .psd, let me know and I'll edit this post to attach it- you'll have to play with the lightness/darkness a bit to get it exactly the way you want it..hopefully the transparency and effects will stay the way they are.

edit: I seem to have lost the .psd I had, so I opened up the .png I had, added a textured background so you can see what it looks like..and saved it as a .psd. The bad part about that is that you can't adjust the effects (emboss and shadow) but you CAN play with the opacity, lightness, darkness, etc. If you try it out in game, be sure to remove the background first.
I'll try to recreate what I originally had if this doesn't work for you. :)

[lucy kemnitzer]

I would love to play with your .psd! Thank you!

I've got it, but it will be tonight or a couple of days before I can get back to simming. Thank you!

[Gwenke33]

As you did not mention finding it, here is Aelflaed's excellent tutorial on how to make stuff shiftable. Apart from wall deco, I've done it on all sort of stuff, like pillows and bedcovers, as well as lights. http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=316879
Be aware that if you shift things lower than their original position, they will become darker, so if that's a problem, it's best to set their initial position low.

[lucy kemnitzer]

Thank you, Gwenke! I had not found this.

I had not been back to the thread yet because I was trying to fix my game. I don't think I have fixed it yet, but it didn't crash last time I played, so -- anyway I have a picture to show proof of concept.

http://i35.tinypic.com/nti6s.png

Image on the left is the most successful one, after mustluvcatz' processing in Photoshop and further processing by me in Paintshop: image on the right is a previous iteration of the same image: images in the middle are earlier failures.

I think I have a way forward. I think, for one, I'm going to deal with simpler images than the ones in my photo file. I had already been hand-drawing them, using the photos for reference only, so there's no real change in method. Just a lot more abstraction.

[mustluvcatz]

I like it. :) It looks carved into the wall, which is the look you were going for, right? If you decide not to keep and use that one, do you mind if I use it/the one I did? (Don't know for what, really- but it looks neat on some of the walls I use.)

Something I'm wondering here: Can you make your own brushes in Paintshop? If you can it might be easier to do that. Once you use a brush, you can do just about anything to the image. At least you can in PhotoShop. I make brushes quite a bit just to get a plain image that I can fiddle around with. I didn't think of doing that with your image though, lol. The image(s) in the middle of your pic might work out quite well that way.

[lucy kemnitzer]

I will probably use the image, but if it doesn't bother you that we both use it, it doesn't bother me! I'm pretty sure we'd end up going different directions with it.Honestly, if I ever make anything that anybody else thinks is nice enough to do something with, I feel really tickled.

I just recently read how to make my own brushes in Paintshop, but I was really bewildered as to how it could possibly be of any use to me. How is it better than simply copying an image onto a layer in a new file?

My current plan for the sunflower image (or whatever the original carving was meant to be) is to redraw it simpler and with no shading at all, and then go through the various steps we've discussed at length in the thread. I've given up the idea of using bump maps with it for the time being, though I still really suspect it would be tremendously more awesome that way!

[mustluvcatz]

I'll get into PhotoShop soonish (or in the morning) and show you what can be done with a brush. You can also look at my window recolors- literally recolors of my windows!- to get an idea. Most, if not all, of the recolors were made with brushes (some that I made) that I used effects on. The white, etched ones especially. Bevels, shadows.. it really changed the way the original image looked. What I did should work for what you're trying to do, too.

Totally useless information- there were about 10 spelling mistakes in the above. Must be bedtime, lol.