I thought I take the plunge and try to mesh for the sims 3.

I know how to uvmap for sims 2 but sims 3 seems to be different.
I did some test chairs (all deleted now) and noticed that the wood pattern on the frame didn't look right.
If I use a horizontal wood pattern, the backrest of the chair looks fine, but the legs don't.
The wood frame is mapped to the red on the map.
How do I get the backrest to have a horizontal wood pattern and the legs a vertical one?

I believe it has to do with the uvmap, I must've mapped it wrong, but I don't know how else to do it.
If this question has been answered somewhere already, please could you direct me to the thread.


Any hints would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

I am not really into object meshing but i did view one or two similar threads..
And ofcourse..i cant find them...

Ah, there's the expert :D
Orange can tell you, no doubt!

To get one part of your chair to have the pattern going in one direction while the other part of your chair has the pattern going in a different direction you need to turn one or the other of the parts of your chair on the map.

EA's ChairDiningModerate has the pattern set-up you describe (it's back and legs share a pattern that goes in different directions on the chair in the game) so if you wanted you could clone that, export it's MLOD1 and an IMG from it, apply the IMG as a material to the chair in Milkshape, open the Texture Coodinator Editor and see how EA accomplished that as an example.

It isn't that you're mapping wrong per se...it's just that mapping for Sims 3 is different than what you're used to because of how it applies patterns to your object for you in-game rather than using the texture you supplied for it when you created the object.

Lol Base...you know a lot more about it than I do I'm sure

I thought this had something to do with editing some files in the package itself, srry.

Dee,
Orange is right, rotating a meshpart 90 degrees will do the job.
Remember that you do not need to map em within a particular uvmap size as patterns will continue endlessly.

OM, I don't know Milkshape very well, I use UVmapper Pro.

Base, I understand what you're saying...except for the last sentence.
What do you mean by that?

Thanks for the help.

When in Milkshape you normally select your meshgroups and assigne a material to it.
That material could be a pattern wich has a size of 1024x1024(by default)
You often try to fit your meshparts within that size but with patterns you can place them outside the uvmap also.
Altho its not visible when viewing the uvmap the same pattern will continue even outside the map your viewing....
Dont know if that makes any sence, my english aint the best...

"patterns will continue endlessly" means that the patterns themselves (materials – wood, fabric etc) are repeating like wallpaper. From what I've seen they always seem to be 256x256px per tile – you're going to see that once you export a preset material from a package and look at that. If you have a 256x256px map, it'll use one tile of that material, if you have a 512x512px map it'll use four tiles (four times the same pattern, repeated) and so on. See this list http://www.modthesims.info/wiki.php...rce/StringTable for how to change the tiling in your object if you need to.

You can change the map size, but that also means that your multiplier texture (ambient shadows) will have to be bigger which results in a bigger file. And if you scale down the material it might look odd next to other objects in game which use the same material but on a larger scale. So don't do it unless you have a very good reason (like when your object is actually a lot larger than the one it's cloned from); pretty much any chair should fit onto a 256x256 map I think. Comparing wth EA maps helps to make things the right scale so they will match other objects in game (I believe EA use a scale of one tile = 256x256 = one square meter in most cases).

Re. the mapping direction, you can think of the parts on your map as pieces of paper that you cut out from a sheet and glue onto your object – when the sheet has vertical stripes and you want to make a rectangle on the object that also has vertical stripes, you need to cut it out the right way around.


Base1980, have you tried mapping things off the map for TS3? I thought everything had to be within 0 and 1 or it would error out? (so I never attempted it)

Base,
I understand what you're saying, nothing wrong with your English, but I use UVmapper and have no clue about Milkshape in that regard.

Plasticbox,
thank you for explaining this for me in detail, now I know what I did wrong.

Thank you everyone for your help, I appreciate it very much.

plasticbox, i used it alot on sims 2(with glass parts and such) but haven't tried it with sims 3.
figured it would be similar....