OK so I made my first dress ever.... well first time ever making clothing for TS3.
I made it with TSR Workshop and it looked great in there, but when I loaded it in game it kinda got very glossy and color distorted....

Any help?

The gloss is a combination of two things. Firstly, everything looks like wax in CAS. Take the sim in-game, and see what the dress looks like there - it'll be better, trust me. If it's still too shiny in-game, then make the specular texture darker.

What do you mean by colour distorted?

OK I will try loading it in game... but theres no way to "gloss" it down in CAS?
And by color distortion I meant:



I took a shot in game and have another question, If I may. Sorry for all this, just new to making CC for TS3.
The old V line of the dress I used is showing, and the jewels (which I thought I deleted) show up under the breast.

Did you change the normalmap?
You find it in the mesh tab under materials(you have to update all detail meshes)
The option make it empty doesn't work!)
I always import a blanc normalmap( extracted from a pair of shoes)

The glossy is prolly a dds format issue, check if your dds files are saved in the correct format

That's interesting, re the colour thing. Could you post your textures - base/multipler, mask, and overlay?

The jewels are on the bumpmap, so you'll have to replace that. The gaps on the V look like funny mapping - do they change colour along with the sim's skintone?

Darkening the specular will make things less shiny both in-game and in CAS, but things will always be shinier than normal in CAS.

base/multiplier=DXT5interpolatedalpha
mask= either dxt1noalpha or dxt5interpolatedalpha(4 recolour stuff uses the dxt5)
spec= is dxt1noalpha
normalmap= dxt5_nm

@Blooms Sorry I don't know what a normalmap is. :/ I am still learning these words haha. Sorry. Can you explain?
I clicked on the Mesh tab and theres materials there, but I don't know what you mean about extracting a blank one from shoes. Do i make a new projects of shoes and just extract that normalmap within there and import it where the jewels are?

@whiterider I do not have an overlay, should I? The guide I read didn't mention to put anything there! But my mask and multiplier are attached in a zip below .... I don't know much about the specular much so I will have to look that up.

The normalmap is the bumpmap - Bloom and I were talking about the same thing. Are you using CTU or TSRW? How you change the bumpmap depends on which tool you use.

Your mask is, um, well pretty much missing the point . The mask should be red, yellow and pink (or red, green and blue) - I think you're seeing those colour distortions because the game is seeing the lighter sections as blue, and the darker ones as blue-and-red, so it mixes the first and second channels. Have a read of this: Sims 3:Basic Mask Editing^wiki.

I am currently using TSRW. I thought I made my colors red, blue, and green. Maybe I didn't? O.o I will have to read up on that. Thanks for the link.
Also I was wondering how do I import a custom mesh from a wavefront object? I can't seem to find a tutorial explaining this. :/

Edit: I sent you the wrong file and called it mask. I understand how to mask. Sorry about sending you the wrong thing. >_< it is attached below.

You can't use OBJ for Sims 3 meshes, especially not clothing meshes - OBJ doesn't support bone assignments, so you end up with meshes that crash the game (unless you spend days fixing them by hand); and you also can't use OBJ to transfer meshes between 3D programs, for the same reason - you really don't want to have to fix a boneless clothing mesh by hand, though with objects, accessories, shoes etc. it's a doable job, since their animations are much much simpler, so they use fewer bones. Use MS3D format to save your works-in-progress, then SIMGEOM (CTU/S3PE) or WSO (TSRW, so presumably the one you'll use) for the finished thing.

Ok - that mask is better, but it's still not quite right: if you look at the channels (should be an option in the same place as Layers in whatever graphics editor you use), you'll see that the channels have grey bits in them; they should be black and white.
Assuming you're painting the channels using colours, rather than editing them directly in black and white, then for blue, you need to be using 0R/0G/255B (pure blue) or 0R/255G/255B (pure turquoise) (I'm not sure when/whether/how it makes a difference which of those you use) - right now you're using 0R/240G/255B. The green should be 0R/255G/0B, right now it's 0R/255G/19B; that won't make much difference, for the green, unless you use very contrasting colours ingame, but it's still worth fixing. The red needs to be 255R/0G/0B - it's currently 219R/25G/25B. If you've no idea what I've just said (I wouldn't blame you, I barely know sometimes...), look at the attached pic - it shows the full colour version first, then each individual colour's channel: pure colours on the left (using pure blue rather than pure turquoise, because turquoise hurts my brain), your colours on the right: you can see that pure colours create completely black and white channels. Having blueish-green and greeny-blue and greeny-bluey-red will confuse the hell out of TS3.

You don't need to save the mask as DXT5 when the alpha channel is blank - try DXT1 no alpha.

I've no idea how to change bumpmaps in TSRW, so I'll leave that for Bloom to answer!

Start a new project for shoes and go to its mesh tab, click the materials and click the normalmap.
Check if its a small size, then its prolly a blanc one, export that one and import it the same way in your custom dress wrk file,
Import this texture in every material tab for each detail mesh you find there.
You also have to option to make it blanc, i had some problems with it myself but it this might work also as long as you do this for every detail mesh!

Whiterider explained the mask texture editing, each layer(channel) represents a recolor.
Check if the original dress has 3 or 4 recolors, if it has 3 recolors use the setup described as above and save it as dxt1noalpha.
If it has 4 recolors you need a extra layer called alpha 1 wich you can edit as the 4th recolor channel

Importing a OBJ file in TSRW is no longer possible with the newer versions but if they manage to get their bonetool working it might be possible in feature TSRW releases

Hi Chod3994!

Take a look here. I think it will help you with the normalmap.

Make blank uses a stock red DXT3 image with a blank alpha - works for overlays and that's about it, everything else it screws up because, well, your spec or bump isn't meant to be red.