So, I'm working on a project consisting of a skin tone, CAS bottom, and an accessory. The two main problems are that 1) I cant get the colors of the CAS bottom and the accessory to match the skin tone and 2) the CAS bottom and accessory are very shiny in game. As far as the shiny problem goes, I have replace the speculars on both items with an all black .dds file with an all black alpha. Anyone have any tips for either of these issue it would be much appreciated. Thanks.

First off (and this is for both clothing and accessories), you do NOT want to make a specular map all black. This is like the highlights of your creation and now the game doesn't know where to shine it on, which means, shine. If you want a dark specular map, just make it as dark as possible but like you still can see the clothing if you look good at it. A specular map doesn't have a Alpha map, so you need to save it as a DXT1 - no alpha. Else this will cause a shiny look as well. For clothing also need to make a bump map (now if you work with TSRW, you see this isn't possible when it comes to searching for a bump map on accessories.) To make a bump map, look at this tutorial I made: http://greenplumbboblover.tumblr.co...-for-the-sims-3

A last issue that could fix the shine, is the fact that the neck and (since we're also talking about a bottom) the feet aren't connected correctly, which means, normals problems- shine problems. So to fix that, I've showed it in my video tutorial, this also work the same way for whatever ages, but make sure your reference body IS from that same age. So say you have made a child mesh, you need to have a child body reference to fix the seams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLE...utu.be&t=17m41s

Let me know if you still have some trouble with shine on the CAS parts!

Sorry it took so long to reply back. I'm still having issues with the item, however, I have scrapped the particular mesh and restarted the project with a mesh I like better. This also means new UV map, base texture etc. I learned a lot from your tutorials and will use that knowledge accordingly. Hopefully all will go well but I'm still wondering about matching cas colors to skintones, primarily custom tones like red grey or blue. Thanks for your help so far.

I'm glad to hear that! But I'm not really sure what you mean with CAS colors to skintones. Do you mean you have a custom body mesh? And that you can recolour it like you would with a CAS part?

No. I made a grayscale skin tone and I made the clothing item's basetexture and preset color the exact shade of grey as the light part of the skin tone but they show up slightly differently in game. I want the clothing color to match/blend seamlessly with the skin tone so that it all appears to be one rather than a clothing item placed on the body. The entire project is to make the sim appear like a particular type of animal and the clothing item is a custom shape, not just a new style of pants, so I cant simply make it semitransparent. Sorry to be so vague but I don't want to ruin the surprise before its finished and uploaded.

So, if anyone is following this thred, I ended up frankensteining the mesh to fix the shine problem but could not figure out the color matching one. The closest I could get was to play with the color wheel in create a style in CAS. The project I was working on is now available here on mts. It is the sharkmaid set.