iCad
26th May 2011, 6:49 PM
Or not-so-glorious, as the case may be. :) I have an is-this-acceptable kind of question for the mod-like peoples. :)
I'm working on what is turning into a massive roof-making project because I'm a) tired of the Maxis roofs, b) stupidly obsessive, and c) people have repeatedly requested roofs of me because I guess I'm becoming known as a creator/recolorer of architectural stuff. Now, simply tweaking and recoloring the Maxis roofs is easy, but I'm working on making some entirely new and realistic and not-bump-mapped (because my video card can't handle bump maps, as far as I can tell) patterns. So, this required me to figure out how roofs are constructed from the main texture image. (And let me tell you, I'm an expert on that now. I can tell you where every square millimeter of that sucker goes on a finished roof of a given type. :lol: )
But anyway, first on my list was metal panel roofing, of the type that is prevalent on houses around where I live because snow slides off of it easily. I came up with one in which the pattern is perfectly realistic, which is in fact "borrowed" from the roof of my neighbor's house, which he graciously allowed me to climb up on and take pics of a few days ago. (I risk life and limb for my Sims creations! :lol: ) I made them in 15 real-world metal roofing colors, and they look really, really nice...on gabled roofs. On hipped roofs...not so good. (And I'm not even bothering to try to make them look good on cone/dome/octagonal roofs because nothing with a strong vertical orientation will "map" very well on those. Not even Maxis's vertical textures do.) Anyway, here's what I mean. Here's the roofing on gable and gable-shed roofs:
http://i654.photobucket.com/albums/uu261/icads_sims/roof1.jpg
Nice, eh? It's because to build a gabled roof, the game uses a whopping 4 (out of 25) pieces of the overall main texture image, so they're easy and simple.
But here's the problem with hipped roofs (and its various mansard and shed-hip friends), which in different and more complex shapes employ most of the 25 pieces of the texture image:
http://i654.photobucket.com/albums/uu261/icads_sims/roof2.jpg
I upped the brightness/contrast on the pic to make the issue more noticeable. Lovely, eh? Now, after much forensic analysis involving bizarrely-shaped testing roofs and obsessively numbering tiny bits of the texture image painted in a rainbow of horribly neon colors, I now know why it does that. It's because when the game builds hipped roofs it flips over blocks of the texture image to build the bits along the edges of the hip. You can see the four flipped "blocks" in the above pics. Now, it makes sense to do this. It saves space in the texture image. At first glance, I thought this would be no problem to fix. Just flip over that bit of the texture image to counteract the game's flipping, right? Wrong. Because then I noticed that the same bit of the texture image is used not-flipped, too. Crap. Now, on heavily patterned roofs like the rustic wood shingles that I'm also working on or on horizontally-oriented patterns like the asphalt shingles I'm working on, this is not-at-all/barely noticeable except up realllllllllly close. But on something with a strong-but-simple vertical pattern like this that while tiling perfectly does not "evenly" repeat...It's glaring, obviously. And I don't think it's fixable, at least not for the image I'm working with without entirely changing its look, which I don't want to do. Believe me, I've tried to fix it. I stayed up way past my bedtime two days in a row trying. :lol:
Now, for my purposes, I can live with this. For the most part, I build with gabled and gable-shed roofs because I like the simple and "clean" look of them better. So this is not a huge issue for my own personal use. However, I would like to share these roofs since there are so few new custom roofs (as opposed to simple Maxis recolors) out there, and I have gotten quite a number of requests for roofs in general. So, if I were to clearly demonstrate with pics and such this roof's weaknesses and also tell potential downloaders that these will definitely look crappy on hipped roofs, would that be acceptable for MTS purposes? If not, that's totally cool; I'm thinking about setting up a Sims journal type of thing, and I'll just put these there. I've got other roofs in the works for which this is not an issue or that look good despite it due to heavy patterning which I'll put on MTS when they're ready. I'd just like to know in advance before I go about setting up a download for these particular roofs whether or not they would be at all acceptable with the proper warnings and such in place. So, any input in that vein would be most appreciated. :)
I'm working on what is turning into a massive roof-making project because I'm a) tired of the Maxis roofs, b) stupidly obsessive, and c) people have repeatedly requested roofs of me because I guess I'm becoming known as a creator/recolorer of architectural stuff. Now, simply tweaking and recoloring the Maxis roofs is easy, but I'm working on making some entirely new and realistic and not-bump-mapped (because my video card can't handle bump maps, as far as I can tell) patterns. So, this required me to figure out how roofs are constructed from the main texture image. (And let me tell you, I'm an expert on that now. I can tell you where every square millimeter of that sucker goes on a finished roof of a given type. :lol: )
But anyway, first on my list was metal panel roofing, of the type that is prevalent on houses around where I live because snow slides off of it easily. I came up with one in which the pattern is perfectly realistic, which is in fact "borrowed" from the roof of my neighbor's house, which he graciously allowed me to climb up on and take pics of a few days ago. (I risk life and limb for my Sims creations! :lol: ) I made them in 15 real-world metal roofing colors, and they look really, really nice...on gabled roofs. On hipped roofs...not so good. (And I'm not even bothering to try to make them look good on cone/dome/octagonal roofs because nothing with a strong vertical orientation will "map" very well on those. Not even Maxis's vertical textures do.) Anyway, here's what I mean. Here's the roofing on gable and gable-shed roofs:
http://i654.photobucket.com/albums/uu261/icads_sims/roof1.jpg
Nice, eh? It's because to build a gabled roof, the game uses a whopping 4 (out of 25) pieces of the overall main texture image, so they're easy and simple.
But here's the problem with hipped roofs (and its various mansard and shed-hip friends), which in different and more complex shapes employ most of the 25 pieces of the texture image:
http://i654.photobucket.com/albums/uu261/icads_sims/roof2.jpg
I upped the brightness/contrast on the pic to make the issue more noticeable. Lovely, eh? Now, after much forensic analysis involving bizarrely-shaped testing roofs and obsessively numbering tiny bits of the texture image painted in a rainbow of horribly neon colors, I now know why it does that. It's because when the game builds hipped roofs it flips over blocks of the texture image to build the bits along the edges of the hip. You can see the four flipped "blocks" in the above pics. Now, it makes sense to do this. It saves space in the texture image. At first glance, I thought this would be no problem to fix. Just flip over that bit of the texture image to counteract the game's flipping, right? Wrong. Because then I noticed that the same bit of the texture image is used not-flipped, too. Crap. Now, on heavily patterned roofs like the rustic wood shingles that I'm also working on or on horizontally-oriented patterns like the asphalt shingles I'm working on, this is not-at-all/barely noticeable except up realllllllllly close. But on something with a strong-but-simple vertical pattern like this that while tiling perfectly does not "evenly" repeat...It's glaring, obviously. And I don't think it's fixable, at least not for the image I'm working with without entirely changing its look, which I don't want to do. Believe me, I've tried to fix it. I stayed up way past my bedtime two days in a row trying. :lol:
Now, for my purposes, I can live with this. For the most part, I build with gabled and gable-shed roofs because I like the simple and "clean" look of them better. So this is not a huge issue for my own personal use. However, I would like to share these roofs since there are so few new custom roofs (as opposed to simple Maxis recolors) out there, and I have gotten quite a number of requests for roofs in general. So, if I were to clearly demonstrate with pics and such this roof's weaknesses and also tell potential downloaders that these will definitely look crappy on hipped roofs, would that be acceptable for MTS purposes? If not, that's totally cool; I'm thinking about setting up a Sims journal type of thing, and I'll just put these there. I've got other roofs in the works for which this is not an issue or that look good despite it due to heavy patterning which I'll put on MTS when they're ready. I'd just like to know in advance before I go about setting up a download for these particular roofs whether or not they would be at all acceptable with the proper warnings and such in place. So, any input in that vein would be most appreciated. :)