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Test Subject
Original Poster
#1 Old 12th Nov 2016 at 4:27 PM
Default New recolor texture is "rainbow spewy"
I wish I knew a better description for my problem... I've tried searching texture distortion, etc. to no avail. But this seems like a simple issue so here's hoping there's a simple fix.

I've made a clone of the Instant Meal can. I started with this cereal tutorial and then this tutorial by Numenor to increase the texture size.

My recolor functions just fine in-game, but the texture is only just visible behind a mess of rainbow-colored static. In the Creatures community we call this kind of problem "rainbow spew", and it is a setting/format issue. I don't know exactly what causes it in TS2 or how to fix it.

Originally I thought exporting from GIMP was causing the problem, that I had some setting wrong there. I couldn't find anything online that explained how to avoid it happening, so I re-exported the texture from the original Instant Meal and pasted my version over it in Paint to prevent any setting mishaps that could have resulted from using GIMP. But the issue still persists. Paint is my usual fallback for texture problems... I don't know what else to try. How can I fix this?
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Née whiterider
retired moderator
#2 Old 12th Nov 2016 at 9:00 PM
I've never heard of this happening before; could you attach a screenshot?

What I lack in decorum, I make up for with an absence of tact.
Test Subject
Original Poster
#3 Old 12th Nov 2016 at 9:23 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Nysha
I've never heard of this happening before; could you attach a screenshot?


Here's a comparison of the original texture (top left), my texture (bottom left), and what it looks like in-game (right). I know my version doesn't quite match how the object is texture mapped... I can fix that later. But you can still see how the opening at the top is appearing on the side of the can, instead of where it's supposed to. And the color issue like I described.

I thought for a little while that this might be because I changed the size of the texture, even though I (thought I) did everything Numenor said. But when I tried shrinking it back to 64x64 and testing that in-game, the whole can looked all-black. I don't even know how to interpret that. :\
Lab Assistant
#4 Old 13th Nov 2016 at 7:54 PM
Just a wild guess: is it possible your texture is in a wrong format (either the image itself having a number of bits not suported by SimPe; or it not being set to DXT1/3/5 in the package) ?

I'm http://crispsandkerosene.tumblr.com/ on tumblr, admittedly not very active on MTS.
Test Subject
Original Poster
#5 Old 13th Nov 2016 at 10:24 PM
That seems very possible.

I tried going over the steps Numenor describes, again, just to see what would happen. Got the error message: "Unable to read beyond the end of the stream." This happened regardless of whether I chose DXT1 or DXT3. (I assume DXT1 would be the correct choice, since the image has no transparency.) I'm not sure I ever got that error message before... but I do now.

So I tried replacing the texture with a smaller version... again... to see if using the same dimensions as the original Instant Meal texture would help. And I did not get the error message that time! And when I tested it in game... no more spew! So it looks like the file's dimensions are the problem.

Then again... the whole reason I was importing the texture Numenor's way was because I wanted to use a larger one. I've re-read the instructions twice on how to do this, but as far as I can tell, I did everything correctly. 0.o
Me? Sarcastic? Never.
staff: administrator
#6 Old 13th Nov 2016 at 10:46 PM
Test Subject
Original Poster
#7 Old 14th Nov 2016 at 12:36 AM
That's what it was!
I had no idea that would be an issue. Strange how many little details go into making a working texture. I had tried 640x640px, then when I decided that was a little too hi-res I scaled it down to 320x320px. Scaling it to 512x512px solved the problem, now I have a great detailed texture and no spew.

Thank you all so much for your help! This was my first cloned object as opposed to just another recolor, and I'm so happy that it looks right. :D
Lab Assistant
#8 Old 14th Nov 2016 at 6:23 PM
Oh, of course that was it! I've had this problem myself in the past, actually.

Anyways, for future reference: like HL said, valid texture sizes go by power of 2, such as 64x64, 512x512, 1024x1024, etc. You can also 'combine' two of those values, so 512x1024.

The texture is cute, btw. "Servo juice" is a neat idea

I'm http://crispsandkerosene.tumblr.com/ on tumblr, admittedly not very active on MTS.
Test Subject
Original Poster
#9 Old 15th Nov 2016 at 4:11 AM
Thank you! You can see the final de-spewed version here, if you're curious: http://ghostfishe.net/sims2/download/?i=16

That's great to know about combining values; a lot of objects seem to have square textures so I might not have realized that on my own, but it makes sense.
I've saved a list of working numbers now, just to make sure I'll remember this in the future. Very relieved that it's fixed and working now. Thank you again!
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