Christmas tree lights, wondering if it's possible..

[mustluvcatz]

to resize the lighting effect? I think a mini working tree would be awesome. The lights aren't part of the mesh.

If it's not possible, is there a working mini tree anywhere? If it possible, how?

[leesester]

I don't have a Sims Christmas tree, but are the lights effects in the cres? Depending on how EA/Maxis did it you could try moving the effects slots.

[Honeywell]

Did you look at the lights at all yet, MLC? I was playing around with the lighted reindeer to create white lights for bushes and the lighting effect could be changed with a simple texture recolor--similar to the way you can change a candles flame just by changing the texture.

ETA:
I just looked at the tree and it is lit with an effect (which you already knew I guess :p ) but you can clone your tree from the reindeer for a really nice effect--you can probably even do a star that glows as a tree topper from the red nose. Sims can interact with the reindeer though (pet, kick and be electrocuted) so you might want or need to modify those bhavs. Another example of lighting effects from textures was done at Sims Design Avenue with their community lot signs (http://www.sims2.simsdesignavenue.net/EN/avenue.php) (absolutely gorgeous signs with poly counts to match +15k). Click on the SETS link and you can download them by themselves without the lots if you want to take a look at how they did the textures (cloned from candles if I remember correctly) if you want your tree to have moving or blinking lights.

G'luck with your tree and I hope my edited response was more help then my previous one!

[leesester]

I MUST HAVE A LIGHTED REINDEER

um. Sorry. Do carry on.

[Honeywell]

I MUST HAVE A LIGHTED REINDEER Don't do that! I was all ready to send you a reindeer but then I looked at your profile and saw you already have the holiday pack. :giggler:

[leesester]

I DONT...its a lie. I HAD IT - I just have all the games ticked still.

[Honeywell]

Now you tell me. :faceslap: You are a very confusing fish--who has mail.

[leesester]

/me looks sorry and goes to update games list on profile....

AND BACK TO OUR REGULAR PROGRAMMING ...

The topic of this post = Mini Christmas trees

(sorry MLC)

[mustluvcatz]

Hmmmm..hijacked by a fish. :cry:

:rofl:

All I could do with the light effects in the CRES is move them. Which I did. So I've got this extremely cute little tree..sitting in it's newly reduced footprint with it's cute tiny shadow. And, when it's turned on- it's got lights floating in the air all around it! It actually looks kind of neat, but it's not the look I was going for!

Quaternion, rotation, euler rotation. I haz no idea what those are for- changing something there might work? Should I play around and blow up my computer? (The reindeer idea has it's merits but I wanted to slave this mini tree to the game tree...maybe.)

[Honeywell]

I can't see how you can do anything with the effects to make them work for your mini tree. You can change the position of an effect through the cres like Lee described, replace the effect with an existing effect (http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=145518), delete the effect entirely or do a default replacement texture edit.

So since you can't use an effect for you tree lights the only options left are through the material/texture edits like with the candles/reindeer or by creating an actual light. Creating a light might be better because then you can turn it off and on but I'm not sure how much room there is to edit the light patterns and colors so even that might not be an option but it's something you can look into.

[mustluvcatz]

Well bummer! It seems like it'd be much easier to just create a new light. That's pretty much what I expected. Which is why there are a couple meshes just waiting to have their GMDC's extracted that should work. Editing the light patterns and color is something I CAN do.

That doesn't mean I'll give up on it though. Learning new stuffs is fun- so I'll just do my tree the one way and keep a copy to play around with. The best thing about giving up right now? The tree can be base game!

[mustluvcatz]

I think I'm giving up on this idea for now. I really wanted to have this ready to upload here before Christmas. But I had to do a restore and reinstall everything. I didn't lose any files (yay!), but I did lose a week working on this. :( I haven't given up on it permanently though!